Decentralization and Democratic Instability: The Case of Costa Rica

This article examines the consequences of the decentralization process that is under way in Costa Rica and which may undermine, rather than bolster, democracy in that country. I first outline three key contextual variables relating to the reform process: existing sociopolitical realities (constructing local legitimacy), the dynamics of the reform process (bottom-up versus top-down), and the timing or sequencing of the proposed reforms (what is being decentralized and when). Though I focus here on Costa Rica, these three variables are generally applicable in any case of decentralization. After considering these contextual factors, I evaluate the likelihood of four negative side effects arising from the ongoing decentralization process: party-system fragmentation, reinforced or mutated clientelism, intermunicipal conflict and polarization, and local government instability. Early evidence suggests that some of these effects, particularly party-system fragmentation and municipal instability, have begun to manifest themselves.     

Lifecycle changes and the activation of habitual voting: The case of Costa Rica

Under circumstances of substantial turnout reductions, the development of electoral habits may constitute a key factor to attenuate or even revert such tendency in the long term. Using a unique dataset I examine the extent to which age and lifecycle changes mediate the effects of prior turnout (habituation) on future electoral behavior. Three findings are highlighted. First, age and turnout_t-1 reinforce each other and boost turnout to higher rates. Second, even under favorable circumstances, residential mobility still can disrupt individuals' voting patterns, regardless of whether their behavior was already habituated. Finally, habitual voting is activated by the time individuals participate in their fourth election, and the sooner they cast their first vote.     

Ministerial careers and the nature of parliamentary government: the cases of Austria and Belgium

Abstract. The characteristics of parliamentary government vary markedly from one Western European country to another. Although we still do not know in detail the nature and amplitude of these variations, they are sufficiently manifest to warrant close examination. One way in which these variations can be assessed is through the analysis of the career patterns of ministers. These are interesting both in themselves and because they provide information about the nature of the decision-making process: for instance, ministers who stay in office for very short periods are less likely to be involved in collective decisions than ministers who stay in office for a decade or more. Differences are particularly marked among ministerial career patterns in the Austrian and Belgian cabinets. Not only do Austrian ministers stay in office longer: they tend to come to office only once and then remain in the same post; they often do not come to the government by the parliamentary route, many coming from the civil service, industry, or interest groups. In all these respects, Belgian ministers have opposite characteristics. Thus it does seem that while both governments are ostensibly parliamentary, the Austrian government tends to be managerial, while the Belgian government is parliamentary and more truly 'political'.     

Factors that impede and facilitate management careers of women in the Malaysian civil service

Female and male managers of the Malaysian civil service were surveyed in an attempt to elucidate the factors that have facilitated and hindered their careers. The emphasis in this article is on career differences between women and men. Many of the conditions which inhibit the careers of female managers elsewhere in the world were also reported by those sampled. Family requirements and resulting role conflict were evident. Many women have not married. There was some evidence of sexual harassment. There is a suggestion that women may suffer from low self-esteem and attribute their career progress primarily to luck. On the positive side, and despite a government policy that has resulted in more public resources for higher education being awarded to men than to women, women managers have achieved career success. This is largely because of the socioeconomic status of their parents and the apparent willingness of parents to educate female offspring who were not necessarily the first-born.     

Rationality and the political business cycle: The case of local government

The empirical results which have been reported support the hypotheses' implied by the model of rational political behavior set out in Section 2. In pre-election periods, local government development expenditures deviate significantly from their normal levels. The extent of deviation is approximately 20%.Consistent with the predictions of this model, it is found that incumbents not seeking re-election deviated far more in their pre-election discretionary budget expenditure than incumbents seeking re-election. The expenditure gap between the two types of incumbents is large and statistically significant. Incumbents not seeking re-election exhibit a deviation equivalent to 47% of the development budget, while those seeking re-election exhibit a 12% deviation.     

Competitiveness concerns in Hong Kong: business fears and government incomprehension

Much of the analysis of the anti-globalization movement that has emerged in the last five years has focused on the degree to which the Internet has played a crucial role in contemporary social movements. It is commonly argued that the Internet helps create ‘virtual communities’ that use the medium to exchange information, coordinate activities, and build and extend political support. Much of the commentary on the web as a means of political mobilization for social movements stresses the degree to which the Internet compresses both space and time, accelerating the exchange of information among whomever has access to this technology. Equally important in this view is the deterritorialized nature of on-line protest and the diminution in importance of ‘place’ in current anti-globalization campaigns. Certainly this argument features prominently in analyses of the campaign against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in 1997-98 and the protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Seattle in November and December 1999. Our examination of the antiglobalization movement in Australia however leads us to a different conclusion: that while the Internet does indeed compress time, it compresses space in a different, and indeed quite variable, way. We examine the way in which Australians protested against the MAI and against the WTO meetings in Seattle, and show the differences in the nature of protest in each case. In the MAI case, the protests were well-organized and national in scope, with the Internet playing an important role in organizing the movement. By contrast, in the case of the WTO, the movement was minor and relatively marginal, with the Internet playing little discernible role in galvanizing protest. We conclude that crucial to an understanding of the differences was the considerable difference in the importance of ‘place’ in each case.     

Once Upon a Time in Volcán, Costa Rica: Integrating Values into Watershed Management and Poverty Alleviation

The purposes of this article are twofold. One is to make recommendations on a possible course of action for a small town in Costa Rica. The other is to examine the relationship between policy and values, in search of a method of integrating values into policy decisions that can be more broadly applied. The method uses narratives to define common values and science and economics to apply these values most efficiently. The process of defining values through narratives uses a relation‐based organizing framework through which trust can be built and empowerment attained.     

Power groups,interests and interest groups in consolidated and transitional democracies: comparing Uruguay and Costa Rica with Paraguay and Haiti

Drawing on a representative sample of four countries, this article compares two related aspects of interest group activity across Latin America. First, it identifies the elements that determine the level of interest group system development and types of group activity across the region; and second it provides insights into the relationship of the level of institutionalization of a group system to the extent of the consolidation of democracy. The representative sample is composed of Uruguay and Costa Rica in comparison with Paraguay and Haiti. These are four countries with small populations that cover the spectrum of levels of socioeconomic and political development across Latin America, from Uruguay, one of the most developed, to Haiti one of the least developed. The article argues that across a spectrum of group development in Latin America, advanced systems have more or less integrated characteristics, whereas less developed ones manifest a dual or bifurcated group activity. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Grounding transnational business governance: A political-strategic perspective on government responses in the Global South

Recent scholarship on transnational business governance has begun to examine public-private interactions and the active role of governments. We make two key contributions that integrate and expand this literature. First, in juxtaposition to functionalist accounts, we foreground the fundamentally political and often contentious character of these interactions. As private transnational governance schemes and standards “hit the ground,” private-public interactions, we argue, are embedded in national political arenas and tied to domestic distributional struggles among competing regulatory coalitions. Building upon multiple empirical streams of research, we develop a political-strategic framework that maps the diversity of Southern government responses (substitute, adopt, repurpose, replace, or reject) to transnational private governance. Our framework shows that government responses are a function of both strategic fit with domestic industrial capabilities and structures, and strength of developmental state capacity. Second, our proposed framework adopts the vantage point of Global South governments and industries, particularly how development challenges and strategic options within global value chains affect their understanding of, and responses to, transnational schemes and standards. This is an important corrective to a Northern bias in the private governance literature.     

Disentangling governance: a synoptic view of regulation by government, business and civil society

Governance became a catch-all concept for various forms of steering by state and non-state actors. While it pays tribute to the complexities of steering in poly-centred, globalised societies, its fuzziness makes it difficult to oversee who actually steers whom and with what means. By focussing mainly on actor constellations, the article disentangles governance into seven basic types of regulation, four of them representing public policies with varying degrees of government involvement and three depending solely on civil society (civil regulation), on businesses (industry or business self-regulation) or on both (civil co-regulation). Although each of the seven types is well known and extensively researched, they are rarely joined in a synoptic view, making it difficult to grasp the totality of contemporary governance. After introducing the seven basic types of regulation and co-regulation, the article addresses the interactions between them and it adds the widely used concepts of hybrid regulation and meta-governance in distinct ways. The synoptic view provided here helps to comprehend how governmental deregulation has been accompanied by soft governmental regulation as well as “societal re-regulation”. The concluding discussion emphasises that this “regulatory reconfiguration” is the cumulative product of countless, more or less spontaneous initiatives that coincide with forceful global trends. It also stresses that the various forms of regulation by civil society and business actors are not simply alternatives or complements to but often key prerequisites for effective public policies. Although the essentials of the typology developed here can be applied universally to a variety of policy issues, I focus it on how businesses are steered towards sustainable development and Corporate Social Responsibility.     

Ideology and campaign activity at three levels of government

This article examines the relationship between self-designated political ideology, opinions on twenty-one issues, and campaign activity at local, state, and national levels. The samples examined include delegates to the 1984 Party Conventions in eleven states. Generally, the findings indicate that ideology and issue position are most strongly associated with activity in national campaigns. Among Democrats liberalism is associated with national activity, whereas among Republicans those who are conservative are most active in national campaigns. Some important intraparty differences are found between local campaign activists and national activists. For example, among Democrats local campaign activists are much more conservative than national activists on several issues.     

Claiming rights in exile: women’s insurgent citizenship practices in the Thai-Myanmar borderlands

ABSTRACT

This paper examines insurgent citizenship practices employed by activists in the exiled Burmese women’s movement from the 1990s and onwards. Consisting of political exiles, refugees and ethnic insurgents, this movement has successfully used the transnational, transitory space of the borderlands to constitute its participants as political subjects with legitimate claims to rights, citizenship and leadership. Drawing on interviews, this analysis interrogates women’s activism through the lens of insurgent citizenship practices. Thus, how have Burmese women’s activists claimed rights and lived citizenship in exile? Three main strategies are examined: firstly, women activists have positioned themselves as political actors and authorities through involvement in governance and humanitarian aid delivery in refugee camps. Secondly, they have claimed rights and political subjectivity through engagement with international norms, networks and arenas. Thirdly, they have claimed citizenship and political influence in oppositional nation-making projects through engaging with and negotiating ethno-nationalist armed struggles. The analysis highlights the multifaceted nature of women’s insurgent citizenship practices, showing how they navigate multiple marginalized subject positions, direct their rights claims towards multiple governing authorities, and enact multiple political communities.     

农民专业合作社的内部人控制问题研究

内部人控制问题是当前制约农民专业合作社发展壮大的重要因素。内部人控制问题产生的主要根源在于:不完善的产权与股份制度、稀缺的融资与资本运营能力、剩余索取权与控制权不对等、现代农业生产体系的本质要求、以亲缘关系为基础的农户行为选择的机会主义倾向、外部介入不当等。因此,必须有针对性地创新融资与分配制度,完善选择性激励与监督机制,培育合作专用性生产要素,减少行政介入,建立循环性扶持机制。     

当前我国乡镇政府的去留问题探究

镇政府是一级与人民群众联系最紧密的基层国家政权，在我国的政治经济生活中发挥着重要作用。在对待乡镇政府改革这一问题上，学术界对乡镇政府这一层级去留问题争论颇多，但都不能解决根本问题。在保留乡镇行政层级建制的前提下切实建设服务型乡镇政府是目前解决农村问题的一个切实可行的办法。     

Teaching and assessing leadership courses at the John F. Kennedy school of government

The development of leadership courses aimed at usefulness in practice requires new theory and pedagogy, as well as a hard look at assessing course effectiveness: How useful do students find the course materials for analyzing their past professional experience? How relevant and effective do students find the courses for understanding and intervening into politics and organizations after rejoining professional life? A summary is provided of the setting, theory, and methods for these courses, as well as the results of a survey of students after they had resumed their careers. The authors conclude with a brief discussion of the risks involved in teaching leadership.     

Policy positions and jobs in the government

Abstract.  This article conducts a theoretical and empirical analysis of the allocation of the full set of jobs – both cabinet and junior ministers – in the Prodi Government that formed after the Italian election of 1996. We first discuss theoretical arguments linking forecasts of government policy to the policy positions of both cabinet and junior ministers. We then estimate the policy positions of cabinet and junior ministers appointed to the Prodi cabinet, applying a new technique for computerized content analysis to the collected legislative speeches of each minister during the 1996–1997 parliamentary session. Having considered the face validity of these results, we then use them to explore to observable implications of the various theoretical approaches. We conclude that, in this case, there does appear to be systematic evidence linking both the allocation of government jobs and the evolution of spending patterns between departments to the policy positions of senior politicians.     

Territorial government reforms at the time of financial crisis: the dawn of metropolitan cities in Italy

On 1 January 2015 a new institution, the metropolitan city, took its place among the Italian territorial authorities. Despite its incorporation in the Italian Constitution since 2001, the metropolitan city become a reality only when the national government carried out a process of reform and transformation of Italian territorial government by transforming 10 large cities into metropolitan cities and depriving other intermediate governments (regions and provinces) of their fundamental competences. This article critically reviews the activation of metropolitan cities and the reshuffle of Italian territorial authorities. It stresses the way in which this reform marks the shift towards a new phase of Italian regionalism, which is dominated both by a dynamic of recentralizing intergovernmental relations and by the resulting loss for provincial and regional governments.