Teaching Students about the Vietnam War: The Case for Balance

This work examines how the American role in the Vietnam War has been portrayed in standard college- and university-level textbooks dealing with American foreign policy. It argues that this topic has been presented in a manner that leaves an incomplete understanding. This conclusion is based on scholarship that has been available for decades as well as much Cold War historiography that has appeared since 1975. I conclude that the distortions need to be addressed for several reasons. Their propagation produces bad scholarship, gratuitously alienates Americans from their institutions of government, and justifies anti-Americanism and authoritarianism elsewhere.     

Viewpoint: China and Space War

In January of 2007, China knocked one of its weather satellites out of orbit, and threw the international community into panic. Some figured the satellite-killer test was the harbinger of a future war in space that could cripple a technology-dependent United States military. This viewpoint examines the possibilities of a Chinese assault on American satellites.     

Space for stories: legislative narratives and the establishment of the US Space Force

Policy Sciences - In June 2018, President Trump directed the development of a sixth branch of the US Armed Forces—the Space Force—whose primary mission is to enhance the space...     

Bargaining and Fighting: The Impact of Regime Type on War Onset, Duration, and Outcomes

Recent research suggests that democracies have advantages and disadvantages in wars. Democracies are more likely to win the wars they initiate and the ones in which they are targeted. Wars initiated by democracies are also uniformly shorter and less costly than wars initiated by nondemocracies. However, democracies are also less likely to continue fighting and less likely to win as war drags on. Democracies are also particularly likely to be targeted. We present a bargaining model that reconciles these divergent findings. The model explains why democracies are more likely to win but are also more likely to settle and more likely to be targeted than other types of regimes. The model's explanation of these facts differs in important ways from existing explanations. The model also suggests several new hypotheses relating regime type to the terms of settlement and the onset of war .     

Advocacy and Innovation in Interagency Management: The Case of Centrelink

Two basic principles of public organization have been the strength of the functional principle as the basis for most central government organization and the direct control of the ministerial department over delivery of big‐budget social services. Both were challenged in the 1990s as the combined impact of new public management and customer service suggested new ways of handling these questions. One result was a new type of agency that combined the functional separation of delivery and purchaser–provider from new public management, but also horizontal integration of delivery. This creative design seemed to offer solutions to specific problems, but it also produced tensions with others arising from governance issues and the complexities entailed in the connections between specialization and coordination.     

The State-Local Nexus in Policy Innovation Diffusion: The Case of School Choice

Our knowledge of how policy innovations diffuse in federal systemscould be enhanced by paying greater attention to the behaviorof policy entrepreneurs. This study shows how policy entrepreneurshelped stimulate the diffusion of state school-choice plansby collecting and generating evidence of workability of thisinnovation. Importantly, these policy entrepreneurs have oftenused evidence from local experiments to promote state policychange. Thus, a state-local nexus exists in the diffusion schoolchoice. This analysis suggests that there is value in conceptualizingpolicy innovation diffusion a federal system as both a horizontal(that is, state to state) and a vertical (that is, state andlocal) phenomenon.     

Treating Outer Space Like a Place: A Case for Rejecting Other Domain Analogies

The creation and augmentation of the outer space governance regime during the twentieth century was guided by the use of analogies with other planetary domains. These analogies compare the “target” domain of outer space with various “source” domains, especially airspace, the seabed, the high seas, and Antarctica. These analogies, highlighted at different times to provide guidance on the regulation of existing and emerging space activities, shaped the fundamental principles and rules of the Outer Space Treaty. A survey of contemporary literature demonstrates that analogies continue to be used to structure thinking about outer space activities. This paper argues that such analogies are a misleading foundation for constructing a governance regime in outer space. They overlook essential and distinct features of outer space, and misguide the decisions of policymakers by influencing interest formation and problem definition. Six major features of the outer space environment are concealed by other-domain analogies, which helps explain why the use of analogies reduces the chances for effective governance. Scientific activity since the advent of the Space Age makes possible an alternative, non-analogic representation of outer space as a place, which has important implications for space governance.     

Voluntary Regulations and Innovation: The Case of ISO 14001

Governments enact environmental regulations to compel firms to internalize pollution externalities. Critics contend that regulations encourage technological lock‐ins and stifle innovation. Challenging this view, the Porter‐Linde hypothesis suggests that appropriately designed regulations can spur innovation because (1) pollution reflects resource waste; (2) regulations focus firms’ attention on waste; and (3) with regulation‐induced focus, firms are incentivized to innovate to reduce waste. This article explores the regulation–innovation linkage in the context of voluntary regulations. The authors focus on ISO 14001, the most widely adopted voluntary environmental program in the world. Examining a panel of 79 countries for the period 1996–2009, they find that country‐level ISO 14001 participation is a significant predictor of a country's environmental patent applications, a standard proxy for innovation activity. The policy implication is that public managers should consider voluntary regulation's second‐order effects on innovation, beyond their first‐order effects on pollution and regulatory compliance.     

The National Interest and the Politics of Threat Exaggeration: The Blair Government's Case for War against Iraq

During the 2005 General Election the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, suggested that the invasion of Iraq was in 'the national interest'. Whether he knew it or not, this phrase has often referred to controversial decisions taken by governments, away from scrutiny and subject to criticism when made public, but which they believe are in the best interests of the British state.
The article summarises the consequences of the invasion in terms of the subsequent criticism and official inquiries before addressing the question of what is the national interest. The article then considers what exactly was the threat, and whether or not it was exaggerated, and what evidence is now emerging to indicate that the decision to invade was taken 'in the national interest'. It concludes that there was a decision to support the USA and that the threat was exaggerated to justify this decision.     

构建公共政策评估的关键绩效指标体系探析——以X市试行众创空间绩效考评制为例

在企业绩效管理中运用较为成熟的关键绩效指标(KPI)方法,具有战略导向型、动态性、精练性和可操作性等特征,使其成为能够应用到公共政策评估中的可行性方法。以X市试行众创空间绩效考评制为例,阐述公共政策关键绩效指标体系的构建方法,针对公共政策评估实践中KPI方法的不足之处,提出政策评估程序化、多层次有针对性地构建关键绩效指标体系和建立独立的政策评估机构等建议。     

Viewpoint: It is Time to Create a United States Air Force Space Corps

The United States (U.S.) has deepening dependence on space systems for economic prosperity, civil government administration, priority science and exploration programs, and national security while at the same time there is dramatic growth in competitive space capabilities and demonstrated threats to space systems globally. Despite this, the U.S. has not invested sufficient resources to meet National policy direction for capabilities to insure freedom of action in space, especially space situational awareness capabilities—the cornerstone of deterrence from space attacks. A principle reason for this shortfall is the historical absence of an organization accountable for securing the space domain like those of land, sea, and air. Using the analogy of the Army Air Corps, the author recommends creation of an autonomous Space Corps realized out of existing organizations within the USAF. The AF Space Corps would manage a separate space budget and all space professionals in organizing, training, and equipping national security space capabilities including those necessary to secure the space domain for peaceful use.     

University Technology Transfer and Manufacturing Innovation: The Case of Italy

This article analyzes the influence of universities on Italian firms' probability to innovate. Using firm‐level data, we focus on institutionalized technology transfer (TT) activities in universities, namely spin‐offs, patents, and research contracts. Results show that TT activities play a significant role in the probability to innovate by Italian manufacturing firms located in the same province as the university. Nevertheless, the effect is not uniform: the contribution of university TT activities to the probability of firms' innovating is concentrated in certain territorial areas (North‐East and Center) and sectors (science based and scale intensive) and among firms that are large.     

Punishing German Soldiers during the Cold War: The Case of Erich von Manstein

Bloxham examines the events and rhetoric surrounding the trial and premature release from custody of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. Von Manstein was convicted of involvement in atrocities on the Eastern Front, yet his story aroused the sympathy of many in Britain, including influential politicians, who believed the Wehrmacht to be innocent of the crimes of Nazism. His trial also fell squarely into a period, the onset of the Cold War, when Britain was attempting to restore relations with West Germany. Pressure both from the nascent West German elite and from within the Conservative government (re-elected in 1951) and its foreign diplomatic corps ensured that a series of dubious legal devices would be used to accelerate the liberation of von Manstein at a time of negotiations about a German contribution to a Western European army. Similar contrivances abetted the early release of another field marshal, Kesselring, and a senior general, Falkenhorst. The releases, and the obfuscations of the soldiers' war-time records that were an essential part of justifying the releases, constitute a substantial British contribution both to the undermining of the process of war crimes trials and to the rewriting of the Second World War.     

Implementing Open Innovation in the Public Sector: The Case of Challenge.gov

As part of the Open Government Initiative, the Barack Obama administration has called for new forms of collaboration with stakeholders to increase the innovativeness of public service delivery. Federal managers are employing a new policy instrument called Challenge.gov to implement open innovation concepts invented in the private sector to crowdsource solutions from previously untapped problem solvers and to leverage collective intelligence to tackle complex social and technical public management problems. The authors highlight the work conducted by the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies at the General Services Administration, the administrator of the Challenge.gov platform. Specifically, this Administrative Profile features the work of Tammi Marcoullier, program manager for Challenge.gov , and Karen Trebon, deputy program manager, and their role as change agents who mediate collaborative practices between policy makers and public agencies as they navigate the political and legal environments of their local agencies. The profile provides insights into the implementation process of crowdsourcing solutions for public management problems, as well as lessons learned for designing open innovation processes in the public sector.