Political Control for China's State‐Owned Enterprises: Lessons from America's Experience with Hybrid Organizations

China's reform of state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) is intended to liberate the companies from bureaucratic control that hinders their management. Discussions of SOE reform, however, downplay the policy consequences. Can SOEs be “free” to succeed economically while some political control is maintained? Surprisingly, American experience with hybrid organizations—government‐created companies that straddle the line between public and private—offers some precedent for managing the balance between political control and enterprise independence. Three strategies are derived for China. First, welfare functions must be stripped from SOEs and replaced by policy objectives compatible with commercial purposes. Second, reducing financial dependence on SOEs will remove a barrier to rational control. Third, and most importantly, a robust regulatory framework for control must be developed as a substitute for the weakened administrative linkages. The emerging control infrastructure rooted in state asset commissions is likely to prove ineffective for its blurring of ownership, administration, and regulation.     

Structure of State‐Level Tax and Expenditure Limits

While much consideration has been given to the approval process, base classification, and codification of tax and expenditure limits (or TELs), these factors tell us nothing about how they actually work. This study focuses exclusively on the technical elements of these limits and finds how states estimate their limits have over time eroded their potency. More specifically, if a state resets or rebases its limit annually by using actual revenues or expenditures for the preceding year, the limit will trend closely with actual revenues or expenditures, effectively restricting growth in spending as prescribed by law. However, if the law requires a state to estimate its limit using the appropriation limit for the preceding year instead of actual revenues or expenditures, that is, without rebasing, the limit will reflect cumulative changes to the base when it was first approved. Over time, the TEL cap is significantly above the states revenues or expenditures as it remains unaffected by the state's underlying fiscal and economic environment.     

State‐Funded College Scholarships: General Definitions and Characteristics

State‐funded scholarship programs are transforming the way citizens and policymakers think about higher education. Advocates see these programs as a remedy to problems facing the state workforce such as “brain drain” and “unequal opportunity” for a sound education. Opponents see low retention rates and the number of already‐privileged students receiving benefits as signs that these programs are not reaching their maximum potential. This article traces the development of state‐funded college scholarships from earlier need‐based programs to current merit‐based programs and outlines current debates on policy effectiveness. Currently, 14 states have a state‐funded scholarship program. Differences between programs revolve around the political and economic circumstances of each state.     

Predicting and Interpolating State‐Level Polls Using Twitter Textual Data

Spatially or temporally dense polling remains both difficult and expensive using existing survey methods. In response, there have been increasing efforts to approximate various survey measures using social media, but most of these approaches remain methodologically flawed. To remedy these flaws, this article combines 1,200 state‐level polls during the 2012 presidential campaign with over 100 million state‐located political tweets; models the polls as a function of the Twitter text using a new linear regularization feature‐selection method; and shows via out‐of‐sample testing that when properly modeled, the Twitter‐based measures track and to some degree predict opinion polls, and can be extended to unpolled states and potentially substate regions and subday timescales. An examination of the most predictive textual features reveals the topics and events associated with opinion shifts, sheds light on more general theories of partisan difference in attention and information processing, and may be of use for real‐time campaign strategy.     

State‐level predictors of food insecurity among households with children

This article examines interstate variation in household food security. Using hierarchical modeling, we identify several kinds of state characteristics that appear linked to household food security: the availability and accessibility of federal nutrition assistance programs, policies affecting economic wellbeing of low income families, and states' economic and social characteristics. These dimensions comprise what we refer to as the state food security infrastructure. We find that a strong food security infrastructure is particularly beneficial to families who are economically vulnerable yet have incomes above the poverty line. Almost all of the observed interstate differences in food security can be explained by crossstate differences in demographic and contextual characteristics. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

完善非公有制企业产权制度和经营管理制度

我国的非公有制企业存在着产权不清、一股独大等问题 ,由此带来了资本、决策管理、风险承担的三集中及经营管理制度中的一系列问题 ,影响了非公有制企业做大做强。非公有制企业要发展壮大 ,就要改变产权不清、一股独大的问题 ;建立科学的经营管理体制 ;实施科学的企业发展战略。     

State‐targeted grievances and resources: Protest participation during economic downturns in Latin America

This article analyzes the determinants of protest participation in Latin America. Whereas most research emphasizes grievances over resources, or vice versa, this article explains protest participation as the interaction between individuals' state‐targeted grievances and material resources. I argue that grievances and availability of material resources interact and fuel protest among individuals whose income falls close to the middle of the income distribution, but not among the poor or the rich. Whereas the scarcity of resources mitigates the politicization of grievances among the poor, the relative abundance of resources and alternative channels of political influence produces the same effect among the rich. Analysis of survey data from Latin American democracies provides strong support for these arguments.     

France and the International Financial Crisis: The Legacy of State‐Led Finance

Despite the far‐reaching liberalization of the French banking system over the past quarter century, French banks suffered far less in the international financial crisis (2007–2009) than banks in the United Kingdom and Germany. However, the French system also suffered far more—at least in the first stages of the crisis—than the banking systems of Southern Europe. By several measures, French banks were world leaders in financial innovation, and the French banking system was highly exposed to international market movements. The limited impact of the crisis, however, owed to the specificities of French “market‐based banking.” Deliberate state action over the two decades prior to the crisis created a specific kind of banking system and encouraged forms of financial innovation, the unintentional consequence of which was the limited exposure to the securitization that caused the damage wrought during the financial crisis.     

External Actors,State‐Building,and Service Provision in Areas of Limited Statehood: Introduction

This article introduces the themes and arguments of the special issue. While virtually all polities enjoy uncontested international legal sovereignty, there are wide variations in statehood, that is, the monopoly over the means of violence and the ability of the state to make and implement policies. Areas of limited statehood are not, however, ungoverned spaces where anarchy and chaos prevail. The provision of collective goods and services is possible even under extremely adverse conditions of fragile or failed statehood. We specify the conditions under which external efforts at state‐building and service provision by state and nonstate actors can achieve their goals. We focus on the extent to which external actors enhance the capacity (statehood) of authority structures in weak states, or directly contribute to the provision of collective goods and services, such as public health, clean environment, social security, and infrastructure. We argue that three factors determine success: legitimacy, task complexity, and institutionalization, including the provision of adequate resources.     

State‐Building and the European Union's Fight against Corruption in the Southern Caucasus: Why Legitimacy Matters

This article asks under which conditions the state‐building efforts of external actors in areas of limited statehood are likely to be effective. We argue that the legitimacy of the specific norms promoted by external actors among local actors is crucial for their success in strengthening state capacities. International efforts need to resonate with prevalent social norms. To substantiate this argument, we focus on the European Union's (EU) anticorruption programs and their implementation in one of the most corrupt regions in the world, the Southern Caucasus. We show that legitimacy can explain why the EU's fight against corruption helped reduce corruption in Georgia but not in Armenia. In both countries, political elites could selectively use anticorruption programs as an instrument against political opponents, using enhanced state capacities to stabilize the incumbent regime. Only in Georgia, however, was the fight against corruption facilitated by sustained domestic mobilization for anticorruption policies that added pressure on political elites “from below.”     

Simulation and Managerial Decision Making:A Double‐Loop Learning Framework

Systems approaches present opportunities for public managers and policy makers to view policies and programs in a broader context. This article presents a framework to explain how simulation modeling promotes double‐loop learning in management teams by building and exploring collective mental models as well as by enhancing accuracy of the mental models. The authors discuss the types of problems that may benefit from simulation modeling and illustrate how double‐loop learning occurs in the process of dynamic hypothesis testing. Using a case from New York State's Division of Disability Determination, the article shows how simulation modeling built confidence in a management team's decision by providing the team with tools to share and examine multiple hypotheses about a declining trend in initial disability recipients in the state between 1998 and 2004.