Referendums in the Third World

Since the early 1960s many Third World countries have been attracted to referendums, with the earliest being held in Uruguay in 1917, Iraq in 1921 and Chile in 1925. Butler and Ranney(1978) identified referendums in Third World nations up to 1978, yet analysis of the political process and patterns of these referendums is lacking in the political science literature. It is the purpose of this paper to identify some of the patterns and processes common to African, Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern referendums. The paper will examine briefly the Western democratic referendums, excluding the experience of Switzerland and Australia where referendums are an integral part of the constitutional and political process. Secondly, the general and regional Third World patterns will be examined. Thirdly, referendums in nine countries will be described; lastly, the paper will conclude with the identification of the common patterns and processes of Third World referendums. In this paper we are concerned with post- independence national level referendums; although, many referendums have been conducted on a subnational level and prior to independence.     

Executive agencies in Tanzania: liberalization and Third World debt

The purchase of an expensive, debt‐financed aircraft tracking system by one of Tanzania's newly created executive agencies suggests that recent bureaucratic restructuring and liberalization in Tanzania could possibly undermine the good use of international debt management schemes for poverty alleviation. Moreover, it raises a question about the uses (and misuses), in countries where governance capacities are weak, of new public management models of organization. This article explores Tanzania's donor‐funded executive agency programme, as one part of its wider civil service reforms. Drawing on empirical research, it examines the power structures and interdependencies between Ministers, departments and NPM style semi‐autonomous agencies and the potential for rent‐seeking behaviour and perverse outcomes. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

构建科学合理的社会政策——“第三条道路”社会福利观的启示

"第三条道路"社会福利观是处理"老左派"与"新右派"福利争论的理念创新,它力图摆脱"左与右"两派对某些基本福利概念之间非此即彼的攻讦。改革开放30多年,伴随着经济社会发展,我国社会转型引发了诸多社会问题。尽管党和政府高度重视民生事业,但以解决民生问题为己任的社会政策仍有很多不足。我国的社会政策履行时代使命需不断改革创新,走出一条科学合理的中国特色社会政策之路。     

Social Security and Third World Poverty: The Challenge to Policymakers

Although social security emerged in the industrial countries as a mechanism for alleviating and preventing poverty, it has had a negligible impact on the problem of poverty in the developing countries. Because of the high incidence of poverty in the Third World and the need for effective interventions, conventional social security policies should be critically reexamined. Reviewing previous attempts to formulate social security policies that focus on the poor, this paper challenges policymakers to identify innovative social security programs that address the poverty problem directly.     

Bureaucracy as an issue in Third World management: An African case study

Organizational theory has been of surprisingly limited value in illuminating the problems of public sector management in the Third World. One reason for this is the ideal-typical bias of most studies of Third World management. This has led to an emphasis on assumed optimal performance criteria to the detriment of an understanding of how Third World organizations actually perform. The case of public sector administration in Liberia is used to illustrate this theme. The major role of administrative incorporation in the stabilization of the Liberian State is established, and consideration given to the ways in which the span of administrative employment and the extent of its popular impact were maximized through the elaboration of an idiosyncratic bureaucratic ideology. Central features of the Liberian bureaucracy are discussedthe over-definition of its external boundary; the weakness of its internal boundaries; the relative insignificance of specialized expert knowledge to bureaucratic roles; and the idiosyncratic nature of the bureaucratic career. While Weberian standards did not apply in the Liberian instance, it cannot be assumed that the latter was therefore a ‘failed bureaucracy’; for the Liberian administration was arguably effective in relation to certain goals, even if these were not ones which would have applied in the ideal-typical case. These goals were essentially political and must be understood in relation to political constraints, rather thanas is often suggested in studies of Third World managementas ‘cultural’ phenomena. Attempts to improve public sector managerial performance in the Third World need to give as much attention to operational issues as to conventional targets.     

Crises and continuities in development theory and administration: First and Third World perspectives

‘Development Administration’ as an academic discipline originated in the West and has been dominated by Western thought. This article traces the development of the discipline and outlines its Western theoretical foundations and assumptions. The failure of Development Administration to solve the problems of the Third World is outlined, and the ‘indigenization of underdevelopment’ is discussed. New challenges to the discipline, that have been previously seen as ‘heretical’, are presented as alternatives to Western models that have proven their ineffectiveness. China, Guinea-Bissau, India, Tanzania and Libya are used as examples of countries attempting alternative routes to development and development administration. The article stresses the need for open examination of non-traditional models that may provide valuable clues in the struggle for a viable developmental strategy. It concludes by suggesting four major issues around which a new conceptualization can be built: accountable development administration, the role of values, the emergence of fundamentalist ideologies, and the challenges posed by the Third Development Decade.     

Rule and policy spaces and economic progress: Lessons for Third World countries

Despite greater rates of capital accumulation, per capita growth rates among Third World nations (particularly, Africa) are much lower than among the advanced, capitalist nations. In this paper I examine the critical roles of the rule space and policy on economic growth. Empirically, nations with poor institutions and policies grow at about a fifth of the rate of nations with good institutions and policies.     

Republicanism, Freedom from Domination, and the Cambridge Contextual Historians

Philip Pettit, in Republicanism: a Theory of Freedom and Government (1997), draws on the historiography of classical republicanism developed by the Cambridge Contextual Historians, John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, to set up a programme for the recovery of the Roman Republican notion of freedom, as freedom from domination. But it is my purpose to show that classical republicanism, as a theory of institutional complexity and balanced government, could not, and did not, lay exclusive claim to freedom from domination as a defining value. Positive freedom was a concept ubiquitous in Roman Law and promulgated in Natural Law as a universal human right. And it was just the ubiquitousness of this right to freedom, honoured more often in the breach than the observance, which prompted the scorn of early modern proto-feminists like Mary Astell and her contemporary, Judith Drake. The division of society into public and private spheres, which liberalism entrenched, precisely allowed democrats in the public sphere full rein as tyrants in the domestic sphere of the family, as these women were perspicacious enough to observe. When republicanism is defined in exclusively normative terms the rich institutional contextualism drops away, leaving no room for the issues it was designed to address: the problematic relation between values and institutions that lies at the heart of individual freedoms.     

社会保障中的行政权力控制

政府干预是现代社会保障制度发展的必然选择,但在社会保障领域,赋予政府积极作为以改善民生的职责时,行政权力对个人、社会的不当干预以及政府对社会财富的不合理分配成为可能,对这一领域行政权力的控制也就成为行政法的一个重要内容.社会保障中的行政权力控制包括对行政立法权的控制、制度创设权的限制、以及行政自由裁量权的控制.     

International capital mobility and Third World development: Compatible marriage or troubled relationship?

The current surge of foreign capital to the Third World resembles that of the 1970s. The channels are now different but the extra-regional flows are again predominantly to Latin America followed by East Asia. Many of the Latin American countries whose overborrowing brought on the 1980s debt crisis are again overborrowing to compensate for low savings rates and other structural flaws, putting their balance of payments at increasing risk. The likelihood that this time they can handle the rising debt servicing and impending slowing of the inflows sans prolonged crisis or a major retreat from their market liberalization policies is not very high, whereas the East Asian countries appear once more structurally capable of riding out the repercussions from an international financial market pullback.     

论统治视角中的官僚制

官僚制理论是由马克斯·韦伯提出并作出了深入研究的问题。在韦伯之前 ,虽然也有人对这个问题作出研究 ,但只是在他这里 ,官僚制理论才第一次作为一个系统的理论而存在。在韦伯之后 ,官僚制的问题是 2 0世纪学术思想研究中最为引人注目的问题 ,几乎所有 2 0世纪著名的思想家们都对这个问题发表过意见。但是 ,所有谈到这个问题的人 ,无论是持肯定的态度还是采用批判的眼光 ,基本上都是对官僚制作出了统治的理解。这就是官僚制理论和实践出现全面危机的根源。当前 ,一场全球性的行政改革运动正在进行 ,要想真正有所建树 ,当务之急是走出统治的视角