The dynamics of presidential support during international conflict situations: The Iranian hostage crisis

Public opinion data concerning President Carter's handling of the Iranian hostage crisis are used to analyze (1) the factors that facilitate support for the President's handling of international conflict situations, and (2) the factors that influence the persistence of such support. Analysis reveals that support for the President's performance is enhanced if one holds a favorable personal image of the President, if one's own policy preferences are congruent with the President's actions, and if one belongs to the President's party. Over time, the impact of these factors grows, reflecting the fact that those who hold unfavorable images of the President, who disagree with the policies he is pursuing, and who belong to the opposition party fall out of the support coalition at an unusually high rate.     

Strengthening rural development management through international assistance projects

The importance of project management is well recognized and the favoured approach to improving management is to discard classroom based, technical transfer models of management development and develop training of direct relevance to field responsibilities. This article highlights the importance of recognizing in aid assisted projects that development projects serve some bureaucratic interests and hurt others with the consequence that projects need to be designed so as to maximize those interests which support its goals. The article is built around a case study of an Agricultural Management Development project in Ghana, begun in 1975 and appraised by a team led by the author in 1979. The appraisal revealed considerable achievements but also focused on facets where there were significant difficulties. These difficulties can be understood and explained in terms of the bureaucratic political interests in the Ministry of Agriculture which stood to lose from the development project, and the author indicates how the project itself could have been assisted by adding to it incentives which made the success of the project attractive to additional bureaucratic interests.     

Symposium on public management teform in New Zealand:: Reflections on the international public management network/victoria university workshop

The genesis of the workshop on public management reform in New Zealand, held in Wellington on March 10, 2000, was an invitation from the International Public Management Network to the Graduate School of Business and Government Management at Victoria University to organize and co-host a one-day event in Wellington following the Network’s Sydney 2000 Conference. Approximately sixty people attended the workshop. The majority of attendees were senior public servants in the New Zealand government. In addition, there was a representation of academics from New Zealand and Network members who came on from the IPMN conference in Sydney at Macquarie Graduate School of Management March 4–6.The mix of speakers was strongly weighted towards practitioners, as is reflected in the articles in this symposium. The three central agency contributions are all from officials who have a reputation for thinking creatively and critically about the future of New Zealand public management, Derek Gill, Andrew Kibblewhite and Anne Neale. Graham Scott kindly agreed to provide the keynote address. Robert Gregory, a well-known critic of the New Zealand reforms, was the sole academic voice in this small chorus of practitioners. Gregory would be the last to claim that he is “representative” of anyone’s opinion other than his own.     

Cooperative rent-seeking

The paper introduces a concept of “efficiency set” in the context of group decisions and analyses its properties. If the set contains a single element, then the Borda rule finds it. Otherwise, the group needs a value function to choose from the efficient alternatives. Two value functions, with considerations for the number of participants who are badly affected by the choice, have been discussed. It turns out that the consistency axiom of group choice imposes a constraint, on the form of the value function, with questionable normative significance.     

国际关系主体生长和国际政治的转变

国际关系主体可分为国家行为体和非国家行为体.国际关系主体随着国际政治的发展而朝多元化方向发展,并对国际政治产生深刻的影响.特别是非国家行为体的增生,冲击了传统的国际政治理念,促进了国际政治向合作参与型、制度化方向发展.     

‘How we think they think’: thought styles in the management of international aid

Aid administration is characterised by high moral objectives and often frustratingly low achievements. This article explores the idea that the problem lies not in inadequate policy or instruments as such but in the thinking processes that emerge within policy circles, at delivery levels within aid administration and at the interface between donor and recipient, to which the trade likes to apply the notion of ‘partnership’. Cultural Theory identifies three distinct and often contradictory ways of thinking that reflect individualist, group and hierarchical value premises. It is adopted here to explore how these types of thinking apply within aid administration, finding that the policy process is a surprisingly ‘groupie’ kind of activity, emphasising the sharing of values and understandings within donor circles. Delivery agents (donor field offices) by contrast are under hierarchical pressure to turn the outcomes into packaged deliverables, whether the ‘good’ is packageable or not. Supported by NPM orthodoxies, these agents seek control through linear programming and performance monitoring. A third contradiction is revealed when the donor attempts to bring such packages into a partnership relationship with recipient governments. Partnership is about sharing and dealing. But what the recipient is offered is a package with Henry Ford type characteristics: ‘any colour you like (social aspiration), as long as it is black (PRSP formula)’. The article is biased; from the perspective of a consultant caught in the middle; but if there is truth in the findings it might just open the door to new styles of aid relationship and novel delivery vehicles. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optimal team and individual decision rules in uncertain dichotomous situations

In this paper, we consider the problem of determining the optimalteam decision rules in uncertain, binary (dichotomous) choice situations. We show that the Relative (Receiver) Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve plays a pivotal role in characterizing these rules. Specifically, the problem of finding the optimal aggregation rule involves finding a set ofcoupled operating points on the individual ROCs. Introducing the concept of a team ROC curve, we extend the method of characterizing decision capabilities of an individual decisionmaker (DM) to a team of DMs. Given the operating points of the individual DMs on their ROC curves, we show that the best aggregation rule is a likelihood ratio test. When the individual opinions are conditionally independent, the aggregation rule is a weighted majority rule, but with different asymmetric weights for the yes and no decisions. We show that the widely studied weighted majority rule with symmetric weights is a special case of the asymmetric weighted majority rule, wherein the competence level of each DM corresponds to the intersection of the main diagonal and the DM's ROC curve. Finally, we demonstrate that the performance of the team can be improved by jointly optimizing the aggregation rule and the individual decision rules, the latter possibly requiring a shift from the isolated (non-team) optimal operating point of each DM.Research supported by NSF grant #IRI-8902755 and ONR contract #N0014-90-J-1753.     

The international rule of law

ABSTRACT

The rule of law is a moral ideal that protects distinctive legal values such as generality, equality before the law, the independence of courts, and due process rights. I argue that one of the main goals of an international rule of the law is the protection of individual and state autonomy from the arbitrary interference of international institutions, and that the best way to codify this protection is through constitutional rules restraining the reach of international law into the internal affairs of a state. State autonomy does not have any intrinsic value or moral status of its own. Its value is derivative, resulting from the role it plays as the most efficient means of protecting autonomy for individuals and groups. Therefore, the goal of protecting state autonomy form the encroachment of international law will have to be constrained by, and balanced against the more fundamental goal of an international rule of law, the protection of the autonomy of individual persons, best realized through the entrenchment of basic human rights.     

Game tree analysis of international crises

Conflicts among nations can often be understood as games in which players (nations) possessing strategies (the sets of actions they may take) face alternative consequences (loss or gain of territory or prestige) determined by their choices of action. Amenable to this type of analysis is the recent Falkland Islands crisis involving Argentina and Great Britain. The events in this case provide an illustration of the way “three-stage, two-person sequential game tree models” can explain the outcome of a crisis situation, whether the parties involved possess perfect information regarding the likely actions of their opponents or are subject to misperceptions about them. When misperceptions occur, the effects can be severely detrimental to both players. Under certain conditions a single misperception by a player of an opponent's preferences can lead to conflict even though both players would have preferred another outcome, one that would in fact have resulted if the error in perception had not occurred. Thus, the outcome of such a “game” is highly sensitive not only to the players' actual preferences but to mutual perceptions of those preferences.     

善意、合作的"他者"——中华民族精神对民族主义的超越

"他者"是西方民族主义的政治话语,是凝聚"我们"的狭隘想象.在崇尚"天下主义"的传统中国,"他者"是善意的、可教化的、不带有种族歧视的认同.中国"天下主义"精神孕育不出西方式的民族主义,只是由于帝国主义的近代侵略才被迫产生出救亡图存的民族主义.当代中国在国际社会的影响日益加强,继续推动中华民族精神时民族主义的超越.对现代化、全球化的发展意义重大.     

Cooperative lobbying and endogenous trade policy

This paper considers trade policies in a small open economy in which two influential interest groups lobby the government. Since competitive lobbying leads to excessive rent-seeking expenditures, the lobbies have an incentive to cooperate. The outcome of cooperative lobbying is characterized in terms of lobbying and bargaining power of the two groups. Two important results are derived. First, if the power of competing interest groups is balanced, then cooperation leads to free trade. Second, if it is unbalanced, cooperation may, on the contrary, increase protection.     

Food in China's international relations

Abstract Food is a tireless referent in international relations studies about China and its ties with the rest of the world. This paper addresses two contemporary issues. First, why is China so sensitive about grain self-sufficiency? Second, why does there seem to be a lack of effective dialogue between epistemic communities in China and outside over China's overseas agricultural activities? The first part of the paper reviews the development of China's agricultural sector and underlines the importance of China's contribution in stabilizing the world food markets. Next, it explores the ideational sources of Chinese food insecurity, in spite of its success in attaining high levels of self-sufficiency in grain. The third part of the paper reviews the evolution of China's overseas agricultural activities and analyzes the factors that contribute to a mismatch of understanding about the political implications therein. The paper concludes by proposing a couple of conceptual road maps for securitizing food as a referent in debates about China's security environment and Chinese international relations.     

Reconciling China with international order

Abstract

The debate about Western policies towards China ('containment’ versus ‘engagement') is intellectually and politically misleading. At issue is not so much the policy blueprint but the ability of Western countries to design and implement coherent and consistent policies towards China, and to coordinate those policies between themselves. This ability has been affected by a trend towards the ‘domestication’ of foreign policies — a trend which is particularly marked in the case of the United States, but clearly visible in France, the UK and Germany as well. If the capacity to design, implement and coordinate effective China policies is to be regained, the problems will have to be recognized and addressed.     

论农民专业合作社的治理结构

我国目前合作社实践生动活泼,形式多样,但是由于没有提供统一的规范,其治理结构杂乱无序.<农民专业合作社法>的颁布为合作社提供了治理结构的合法模武,并使合作社与其他组织,如集体经济组织、公司区别开来.治理结构主要包括成员大会、理事会和监事会三个机构,是合作社独特性的显示.