What Do Corporations Owe Citizens?

Institutional investors occupy an important location in the corporate governance system in countries with high shareholding, such as the US. As these are also countries where pensions are heavily invested in equities, the pension and corporate governance systems intersect, though they are usually analyzed separately. Institutional investors could play a more active role in corporate governance, but many if not most have not done so. Public pension funds are more proactive on corporate governance transparency issues than are the privately held funds, in part because the latter have some conflict of interest between those who own the parent firm and those who invest in the funds. Overall, institutional investors in the US have fewer powers over the managers than do the UK counterparts. Debates over SEC Rule 14a-8 which would give more power to IIs reflects the views and influence of competing lobbies on each side of the battleground among shareholders, managers, and employees over the cash flow of the firm, a battleground in which pension funds are increasingly important players.

What Do Bureaucrats Like Doing? Bureaucratic Preferences in Response to Institutional Reform

How do bureaucrats respond to administrative reform in relation to their overall administrative goals? The authors test the bureau‐shaping thesis, which holds that bureaucrats’ preferences for certain kinds of roles and tasks motivate their support for bureau reform. Drawing on attitudinal and behavioral data from a survey of English local government officials, the findings underscore how bureaucrats with different interests and motivations sort themselves into job types. Their preferences drive support for reform, which, in turn, strengthens the executive structure of English local government. Drawing on the literature on bureaucratic responses to institutional reform, the authors offer a more nuanced portrayal of bureaucratic preferences in line with the bureau‐shaping model. A key conclusion: political principals need improved empirical awareness of bureaucratic preferences when undertaking public institutional reforms.     

Intelligence Failures: What Are They Really and What Do We Do about Them?

Intelligence failures occur for more reasons than just sloppy tradecraft and are often attributable to decision-makers as well as to the intelligence community. Before exploring the subjective nature of intelligence failures, this article first discusses three foundational concepts underlying them: process vs. product, fact vs. judgment, and prediction. It then outlines major components of intelligence failures: accuracy, surprise, and the role of decision-makers, particularly unrealistic expectations and the use or non-use of intelligence. The article concludes with a discussion of what the intelligence community and decision-makers can do to deal with these three components.     

What Do Voters Want From Their Local MP?

This article summarises the findings from a study of what constituents want from their local Member of Parliament. 1 We make use of a survey technique known as conjoint analysis, wherein we present a national sample of British voters with profiles of hypothetical MPs who vary randomly in their characteristics, activities and behaviour. We find that voters like MPs who are independent from the party line and who do not focus exclusively on national policy work. MPs' gender and experience matter far less to constituents. Overall, voters want a Parliament made up of strong‐minded MPs who see their role as that of a constituency representative. This has important implications for parliamentary democracy in Britain.     

What Body Parts Do We Owe Each Other?

The American experience in organ transplantation illuminates the attitudes and practices that underlie the ongoing failure to establish a national health insurance system. In both spheres, the public makes a sharp divide between the well-being of intimates and the well-being of strangers. Private and public duties remain distinct; obligations recognized on a personal level do not expand public commitments. As a result, individuals must shift for themselves, whether they require an organ donor or a doctor. In the world of transplantation as in the world of health care more generally, we are all on our own.

What Can Performance Information Do to Legislators? A Budget‐Decision Experiment with Legislators

Studies on the influence of performance information on budgeting decisions have produced contradictory findings. This article offers a framework of the parliamentary context that links performance information to legislators’ budgeting decisions. The framework suggests that the impact on politicians’ allocations will differ depending on whether performance information is reflected in the budget proposal, whether the allocation issue concerns a politically difficult trade‐off for the decision maker, and whether information falls into a receptive partisan mind. The experimental study uses 57 actual legislators. The results show that the introduction of performance information into legislators’ deliberation process leads to stronger deviations from the status quo allocation. This difference occurs because performance information highlights more clearly the expected consequences of budgetary changes and allows for more pronounced reactions. More informed decisions, however, might make compromise among legislators more difficult because individual positions will become more polarized.     

How Honest Do Politicians Need to Be?

This article reports findings from a recent survey of citizens' attitudes towards standards in British public life. It provides further evidence that people hold their political leaders to high standards, yet are often disappointed by the reality, and suggests that many citizens tend to blame the practice and institutions of politics for making politicians less honest and trustworthy than they would ideally like. The article argues that reforms to the political system are needed to regain the confidence of the population, but that the manner in which the most recent round of ethics reforms in the House of Commons were introduced may lower the prospects of their achieving this goal.     

Public Engagement for Informing Science and Technology Policy: What Do We Know,What Do We Need to Know,and How Will We Get There?

This article examines social science relevant to public engagements and identifies the challenges to the goal of meaningful public input into science and technology policy. Specifically, when considering “which forms, features, and conditions of public engagement are optimal for what purposes, and why?” we find social science has not clarified matters. We offer a model to guide systematic research that defines and empirically connects variations in features and types of public engagement activities to specifically defined variations in effective processes and outcomes. The specification of models, as we have done, will guide policy makers, practitioners, and the public in determining what kinds of engagement techniques are optimal for what kinds of purposes. Our model is presented to start conversations and inspire research that in the future should help to ensure meaningful public participation that meets the promise of contributing thoughtful societal values and perspectives into governmental policies impacting science and technology research.     

How Do Interest Groups Seek Access to Committees?

Concerns that interest groups use their financial resources to distort the democratic process are long‐standing. Surprisingly, though, firms spend little money on political campaigns, and roughly 95% of publicly traded firms in the United States have never contributed to a political campaign. Do interest groups seek political access through their modest contributions, or are these contributions only a minor and forgettable part of the political process? In this article, we present comprehensive evidence that interest groups are extremely sophisticated in the way they make campaign contributions. We collect a new data set on U.S. state legislative committee assignments and legislator procedural powers from 1988 to 2014, merged with campaign finance data, in order to analyze over 440,000 candidate–committee observations across 99 legislatures. Using a series of difference‐in‐differences designs based on changes in individual legislators' positions in the legislature, we not only show that interest groups seek out committee members, but we also show that they value what we call indirect access. When a legislator gains procedural powers, interest groups reallocate considerable amounts of money to her. The results reveal how interest groups in a wide range of democratic settings seek to influence the policy process not only by seeking direct access to policy makers but by seeking indirect access to legislative procedure as well.     

What can deliberative mini-publics contribute to democratic systems?

Can deliberative mini-publics contribute to deepening the democratic dimensions of electoral democracies? The question is framed in this article using a problem-based approach to democratic theory–to count as democratic, political systems must accomplish three basic functions related to inclusion, communication and deliberation, and decision making. This approach is elaborated with an analysis of a real-world case: a deliberative mini-public with a citizens’ assembly design, focused on urban planning convened in Vancouver, Canada. This example was chosen because the context was one in which the city's legacy institutions of representative democracy had significant democratic deficits in all three areas, and the mini-public was a direct response to these deficits. It was found that Vancouver's deliberative mini-public helped policy makers, activists and affected residents move a stalemated planning process forward, and did do so in ways that improved the democratic performance of the political system. Depending on when and how they are sequenced into democratic processes, deliberative mini-publics can supplement existing legacy institutions and practices to deepen their democratic performance.     

Business Experts on Public Sector Boards: What Do They Contribute?

Although public management reforms around the world have given business experts an enhanced role in the governance of public sector organizations, the impact of this change is poorly understood. Drawing from the literature on board human capital as a theoretical framework and focusing on the case of hospital boards in the English National Health Service, this concern is addressed by investigating whether increasing the presence of individuals with business expertise has any significant relationship with organizational performance. The findings show that while business expertise appears to have no influence on service quality, it does have a positive effect on financial performance. However, this only applies to governing boards that are less experienced in terms of their collective tenure. The findings lend partial support to board capital theory but also show that in certain conditions generic business expertise can be a valuable asset for public sector organizations.     

What stock market returns to expect for the future?

In evaluating proposals for reforming Social Security that involve stock investments, the Office of the Chief Actuary (OCACT) has generally used a 7.0 percent real return for stocks. The 1994-96 Advisory Council specified that OCACT should use that return in making its 75-year projections of investment-based reform proposals. The assumed ultimate real return on Treasury bonds of 3.0 percent implies a long-run equity premium of 4.0 percent. There are two equity-premium concepts: the realized equity premium, which is measured by the actual rates of return; and the required equity premium, which investors expect to receive for being willing to hold available stocks and bonds. Over the past two centuries, the realized premium was 3.5 percent on average, but 5.2 percent for 1926 to 1998. Some critics argue that the 7.0 percent projected stock returns are too high. They base their arguments on recent developments in the capital market, the current high value of the stock market, and the expectation of slower economic growth. Increased use of mutual funds and the decline in their costs suggest a lower required premium, as does the rising fraction of the American public investing in stocks. The size of the decrease is limited, however, because the largest cost savings do not apply to the very wealthy and to large institutional investors, who hold a much larger share of the stock market's total value than do new investors. These trends suggest a lower equity premium for projections than the 5.2 percent of the past 75 years. Also, a declining required premium is likely to imply a temporary increase in the realized premium because a rising willingness to hold stocks tends to increase their price. Therefore, it would be a mistake during a transition period to extrapolate what may be a temporarily high realized return. In the standard (Solow) economic growth model, an assumption of slower long-run growth lowers the marginal product of capital if the savings rate is constant. But lower savings as growth slows should partially or fully offset that effect. The present high stock prices, together with projected slow economic growth, are not consistent with a 7.0 percent return. With a plausible level of adjusted dividends (dividends plus net share repurchases), the ratio of stock value to gross domestic product (GDP) would rise more than 20-fold over 75 years. Similarly, the steady-state Gordon formula--that stock returns equal the adjusted dividend yield plus the growth rate of stock prices (equal to that of GDP)--suggests a return of roughly 4.0 percent to 4.5 percent. Moreover, when relative stock values have been high, returns over the following decade have tended to be low. To eliminate the inconsistency posed by the assumed 7.0 percent return, one could assume higher GDP growth, a lower long-run stock return, or a lower short-run stock return with a 7.0 percent return on a lower base thereafter. For example, with an adjusted dividend yield of 2.5 percent to 3.0 percent, the market would have to decline about 35 percent to 45 percent in real terms over the next decade to reach steady state. In short, either the stock market is overvalued and requires a correction to justify a 7.0 percent return thereafter, or it is correctly valued and the long-run return is substantially lower than 7.0 percent (or some combination). This article argues that the "overvalued" view is more convincing, since the "correctly valued" hypothesis implies an implausibly small equity premium. Although OCACT could adopt a lower rate for the entire 75-year period, a better approach would be to assume lower returns over the next decade and a 7.0 percent return thereafter.     

Participation for What? A Policy-motivated Approach to Political Activism

Normatively and intuitively, we conceive of political participation as an integral component of democratic policymaking. However, research on participation generally does not include policy considerations as part of individuals’ decisions to engage in activism. I offer an opportunity model of participation that begins to study how policy goals shape individual participation and how aggregate participation shapes policymaking. The central argument is that individuals’ policy goals allow them to recognize those moments when it is most efficient and/or effective to take action. Examining black participation from 1980 to 1994, I show that black Americans are more likely to participate when they face external threats, are embedded in social networks, and have greater access to policymakers. Most importantly, the recognition of these opportunities varies according to individuals’ resources. This research moves beyond the discussion of who participates to address the equally fundamental question: participation for what?     

What is language? A response to Philippe van Parijs

When we consider the issue of linguistic justice, we must define what we mean by language. Standardisation of languages is closely associated with the development of the nation state, and the de Saussurian conception of language as system is in concert with nationalism and its divisions. In the early twenty-first century, however, this view of the world as a mosaic of stable national monolingualisms is outdated. In a globalising world, much of the political, social and economic structure that is developing is transnational and patterns of contact, both real and virtual, have become extraordinarily complex. In the resulting communities of communication of this superdiverse world, much language practice is more function driven than in the recent past. New practices mean that we cannot consider questions of linguistic justice in this new world order using the linguistic toolkit of the old. The flows, exchanges and networks of globalisation present us with a new paradigm and we need to recalibrate concepts.     

What has the Brexit Process done to Scotch Whisky?

The United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union does not have any impact on Scotch whisky itself: Brexit or not, Scotch whisky is Scotch whisky. However, it features more prominently in the Brexit negotiations than, for example, beer. This is because Scotch whisky is a highly export‐oriented product which brings large economic benefits to the UK—particularly Scotland—and its brand is protected by the international regime of intellectual property rights protection, especially, by the geographical indications regime championed by the EU. Moreover, the Brexit negotiations have led to the resurfacing of another political issue which affects Scotch whisky: Scottish independence. As a strong territorial brand, the constitutional status of Scotland is highly relevant to Scotch whisky and the investigation into the impact of the Brexit process on Scotch whisky has highlighted the inter‐connectedness of various political issues.     

What About Disillusionment? Exploring the Pathways to Black Nationalism

Political scientists devote little attention to the attitudinal consequences of Blacks’ disillusionment with racial progress in America. This oversight undermines our understanding of the antecedents of support for the ideology of Black nationalism. I hypothesize that disillusionment and linked fate interact to influence Black nationalism: the stronger one’s disillusionment, the greater her adherence to this ideology, and the weaker the impact of her linked fate on her expression of nationalism. Analyses of the 1993–1994 National Black Politics Study and the 2004–2005 National Politics Study corroborate these expectations, indicating that disillusionment moderates the impact of linked fate on Black nationalism.     

Caveat Emptor: What Do We Know about Public Administration Evidence and How Do We Know It?

This article provides an overview of a new feature in Public Administration Review called Evidence in Public Administration. This feature was created to provide a space in which scholars and practitioners of public administration can meet to engage in a dialogue about evidence in public decision making. In this feature, we will shine a light on the evidence needed to make effective decisions and examinations of the evidence that currently exists for contemporary public sector efforts. We explicitly want to create a resource for both practitioners and scholars to consult when trying to find evidence on a particular topic and to know the limitations and parameters of that evidence. This article lays out the purpose, scope, and rationale for the feature, as well as a call to engage in this endeavor.