Why Do States Commission the Truth? Political Considerations in the Establishment of African Truth and Reconciliation Commissions

Although the use of truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) has grown considerably over the last 3 decades, there is still much that we do not know concerning the choice and the structuring of TRCs. While the literature has focused primarily on the effects of TRCs, we examine the domestic and the international factors influencing the choice of a commission in sub-Saharan Africa from 1974 to 2003 using pooled cross-sectional time series. We find that states which adopted a TRC prior to South Africa were generally repressive centralized regimes which used the truth commission as political cover. However, since South Africa’s TRC, democratizing states have been more likely to adopt a truth commission as a form of transitional justice.

Who Creams? Explaining the Classroom Cream-Skimming Behavior of School Teachers from a Street-Level Bureaucracy Perspective

ABSTRACT:

Ideas as to how and why individuals resort to creaming are generated primarily by a few qualitative studies and have, to our knowledge, not been tested quantitatively. This article aims to fill this gap and explains the classroom cream-skimming behavior of school teachers in Denmark, defined as prioritizing the teaching of academically promising students. Drawing on the street-level bureaucracy literature, it tests the following propositions: (1) creaming is directly related to an inadequacy of resources, and this relationship is moderated by the breadth of parental involvement in their children’s education; (2) creaming is weakly related to the presence of bureaucratic success criteria; and (3) creaming is directly related to the level of parental involvement in and satisfaction with their children’s education. These are tested using data from a 2011 survey of Danish and mathematics teachers in public and private schools across Denmark, and a class-fixed-effects design. Overall, the findings provide varying support for these propositions.     

Do School Report Cards Produce Accountability Through the Ballot Box?

Public education has been transformed by the widespread adoption of accountability systems that involve the dissemination of school district performance information. Using data from Ohio, we examine if elections serve as one channel through which these accountability systems might lead to improvements in educational quality. We find little evidence that poor performance on widely disseminated state and federal indicators has an impact on school board turnover, the vote share of sitting school board members, or superintendent tenure, suggesting that the dissemination of district performance information puts little (if any) electoral pressure on elected officials to improve student achievement.     

Industrial Relations and the Limits of the State: Can a Left Labour Government Resurrect Comprehensive Sectoral Collective Bargaining and Restore Trade Union Power?

Since 2017 the British Labour Party has proposed mandatory sectoral collective bargaining (SCB) as a comprehensive strategy to rebuild the trade union voice across the entire economy. The intellectual roots lie in the Institute of Employment Rights’ (IER) Manifesto for Labour Law (2016). First, this article explains the core IER approach, questioning its feasibility given current low levels of union membership and bargaining coverage and whether it would produce the stable and productive economy promised. Second, the article develops four social science objections to this state-driven approach centred on industrial relations history; political sociology; economics; and political philosophy. The conclusion argues that while stronger voluntary trade unions could help, it is neither practicable nor desirable for the state to impose a trade union, single-channel approach to employee voice. Instead, a ‘mixed economy of voice’ is proposed, perhaps including statutory works councils, which speaks directly to all employees—union and non-union—and wins broader political, employer and public support.     

Candidates or Districts? Reevaluating the Role of Race in Voter Turnout

Leading theories of race and participation posit that minority voters are mobilized by co‐ethnic candidates. However, past studies are unable to disentangle candidate effects from factors associated with the places from which candidates emerge. I reevaluate the links between candidate race, district composition, and turnout by leveraging a nationwide database of over 185 million individual registration records, including estimates for the race of every voter. Combining these records with detailed information about 3,000 recent congressional primary and general election candidates, I find that minority turnout is not higher in districts with minority candidates, after accounting for the relative size of the ethnic group within a district. Instead, Black and Latino citizens are more likely to vote in both primary and general elections as their share of the population increases, regardless of candidate race.     

Show Who the Money? Teacher Sorting Patterns and Performance Pay across U.S. School Districts

Pay for performance (PFP) remains one of the most controversial policy debates in the New Public Management reform era. Skepticism about PFP in the public sector is often grounded in theories of public service motivation that suggest a misalignment between PFP's focus on extrinsic market‐based pay incentives and intrinsically motivated government workers. Frequently missing from this analysis, however, is any consideration for whether PFP leads to positive “sorting” effects on the composition of a government agency's workforce through attraction, selection, and attrition processes. Using data from two waves of the Schools and Staffing Survey, the authors examine whether PFP influences the sorting patterns of K–12 public schoolteachers across U.S. school districts. Findings show that, on average, school districts that adopted PFP secured new teacher hires who had graduated from colleges and universities with average SAT scores that were about 30 points higher than the new teacher cohorts hired by districts that did not adopt PFP.     

Do the Japanese Have a Sense of Humor?

Although the Japanese appear humorless in the eyes of the Westerners, we have a long tradition of presenting humor in various forms. This paper demonstrates one of the most famous examples of Japanese humor called “Chojyu-giga,” a set of scrolls depicting animated animals frolicking. It is a parody drawn around the 12^th century and is said to be a root of Japanese comics termed “manga.”     

Do the Joneses Help You Keep Up? A Natural Experiment in Exposure to Nonpoor Neighbors

This study capitalizes on a natural experiment in Montgomery County, Maryland, where low-income applicant families are randomly assigned to public housing that is either (a) clustered within seven public housing developments or (b) scattered into market-rate subdivisions via the county's inclusionary zoning policy. Through a survey of 453 public housing residents, we find that adults who lived in scattered public housing reported a lower proportion of low-socioeconomic status (SES) social ties generally and a lower proportion of low-SES neighbors specifically in their social networks. They also counted more high-SES individuals in their social networks, and this effect was related to the amount of time they lived in the neighborhood. Living in scattered public housing had no adverse effect on feelings of neighborhood belonging or satisfaction. The socioeconomic composition of respondents' social networks was associated with two health outcomes for respondents (smoking and depression) and modestly associated with respondents' household income.     

How Restricted is the Job Mobility of Skilled Temporary Work Visa Holders?

Using the National Survey of College Graduates, we investigate the job mobility of skilled workers holding U.S. temporary visas. Such workers either have legal restrictions on their ability to change employers or may be reluctant to leave an employer who has sponsored them for permanent residence. We find that the voluntary job‐changing rate is similar for temporary work visa holders and natives with similar characteristics, but that it spikes when temporary work visa holders obtain permanent residence. The spike magnitude implies mobility is reduced during the application period by about 20 percent, alleviating concerns that employers exercise strong monopsony power.     

Do More Options Always Benefit the Users of Public Services? An Experimental Study of School Choice,Performance, and Satisfaction

Recent years have seen an increase in choice of provider in many public services, including education. Proponents of provider choice suggest that it increases users' satisfaction. However, insights from the psychology of choice overload suggest that too much choice can be detrimental. The authors use a survey experiment to investigate the effect of provider choice on parents' satisfaction with schools (under performance declines and increases). The findings show that choice increases satisfaction and perceptions of fairness of the process compared with no choice. However, consistent with choice overload, increasing the number of options does not boost satisfaction. The findings have important implications for satisfaction as a measure of performance, because user satisfaction seems not to be independent of choice processes. This suggests lessons for designing delivery systems: although facilitating minimal user choice is preferable to having no choice, further increasing delivery options may not increase users' satisfaction.     

Do impact fees raise the price of existing housing?

Abstract

This article uses 1991–2000 data on single‐family housing sales from King County, WA, to provide new evidence relating to the effects of impact fees on housing prices. The hedonic regression method is used to examine the effects of these fees on existing housing as well as their differential effects on price as determined by housing quality.

Impact fees raise existing home prices by about 83 percent of the amount of the fee. The increase is 103 percent for high‐quality homes and is not statistically significant for low‐quality homes. The owners of high‐quality homes realize capital gains from impact fees. However, such fees do not raise the price of low‐quality homes. To the extent that low‐quality housing is more likely to be owned by low‐ and moderate‐income households, which are often composed of racial and ethnic minorities, this finding has significant policy implications for the supporters of impact fees.     

Extreme Pessimists? Expected Socioeconomic Downward Mobility and the Political Attitudes of Young Adults

Political Behavior - In recent decades, and especially since the economic crisis, young people have been finding it more difficult to maintain or exceed the living standards of their parents. As a...     

Do Belgian parties undermine the democratic chain of delegation?

The Belgian party-archy violates the ideal-type chain of parliamentary delegation in many ways, insofar as political parties play a predominant role at each stage. They channel the delegation of power from voters to MPs, from Parliament to the cabinet, from the collective cabinet to individual ministers, and from ministers to their civil servants. Hence, they can be considered the effective principals in the polity, and many actors of the parliamentary chain of delegation, such as MPs, ministers, and civil servants have been reduced to mere party agents. The extreme fragmentation of the Belgian party system in combination with its increasing need for multilevel coordination have further enhanced the position of political parties in the Belgian polity. Yet, at the same time (since the early 1990s), Belgium has also witnessed a gradual decline in the informal system of partitocratic delegation and clientelistic excesses, thereby giving back part of their autonomy to some formal agents, such as the cabinet, top civil servants and some MPs. Still, one can wonder whether these corrections are sufficient to counter the strong outburst of public dissatisfaction with the way parties have run the country in past decades.     

Do more flexible lists increase the take-up of preference voting?

In many preferential-list proportional representation systems, voting for a candidate is voluntary. Previous studies suggest a positive relationship between the impact of preference votes on seat allocation and how often they are used. However, existing work uses indirect measures on the right-hand side or suffers from the reverse causality problem. Focusing on electoral reform, this study argues that a change in rules affects the extent of personal voting if it alters the beliefs about which types of seat allocation are possible. These types are captured using a new trichotomous measure of list flexibility. The anticipated changes to seat allocation induced by a reform in Sweden allow us to carry out an over-time analysis with appropriate counterfactuals. The results show that moderate increases in list flexibility lead to more preference voting, whereas strong increases cause a drop. Additional analyses suggest that the unexpected decrease results from local parties adjusting their candidate selection strategies.     

Do Surveys Provide Representative or Whimsical Assessments of the Economy?

We argue that survey responses to economic evaluation questionsexhibit instability and can be affected by fairly trivial changesin questionnaire wording. Our analyses make three empiricalcontributions to this area of survey research. First, we demonstratethat within the course of the interview there is considerableinstability in economic evaluations. Second, one source of thisinstability is cues regarding economic performance, such asthose provided by the media. We find that respondents can bepersuaded to change their economic evaluations if they receivecontradictory cues. Finally, we demonstrate that question placementcan affect economic evaluations. More specifically, we demonstratethat proximity to political questions can contaminate economicevaluations. If economic evaluations closely follow politicalpreference questions, respondents have a tendency to give economicresponses that are "consistent" with their political responses.Our empirical analysis is based on economic evaluations of respondentsto the Hungarian Markets and Democracy Survey administered duringDecember 1997.     

Is Charter School Competition in California Improving the Performance of Traditional Public Schools?

A premise of charter school initiatives has been that these schools have direct benefits for the students attending them and indirect benefits for other students by creating competition for traditional public schools to improve their performance. This study uses a two-pronged approach to assess whether California charter schools are having indirect effects on students in traditional public schools. First, we examine how traditional public school principals react to the introduction of charter schools. Second, we assess whether competition from nearby charters is affecting student achievement outcomes for students that remain in traditional public schools. The survey results show that traditional public school principals felt little competitive pressure from charters. Similarly, the student achievement analysis shows that charter competition was not improving the performance of traditional public schools. These results suggest that California charter schools are having little effect on the climate of traditional public schools.     

Did Jamie Oliver Really Put School Dinners on the Agenda? An Examination of the Role of the Media in Policy Making

Healthy eating is high on the government's agenda in current times and to all intents and purposes the media appears to have played a crucial role in putting it there. While media focus is no doubt intense and playing a vital role in public education (take Jamie Oliver's 2005 Channel 4 documentary, ‘School dinners’, for example), the question that lies at the heart of this article, is whether the media has led the government agenda on healthy eating and school dinners as appears to be the case. A close examination of the evidence suggests otherwise: government policy was already well set before the media began to show a concerted interest and hence its influence on policy‐making is more limited than might be expected. Rather than setting agendas per se, the media's role has been to refine and energise existing policy areas and to facilitate implementation.     

Do Carrots Work? Examining the Effectiveness of EPA's Compliance Assistance Program

The role of compliance assistance in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's overall enforcement strategy has been quite variable over the past decade and a half, increasing in prominence under the Bush administration and now slated for significantly reduced funding under the Obama administration. While theoretical models and anecdotal evidence suggest that compliance assistance should play some role in a comprehensive enforcement strategy, to date there has been relatively little empirical evidence on the actual effectiveness of existing compliance assistance programs. To help inform the debate over the appropriate use of compliance assistance, this paper uses data on hazardous waste generators nationwide to assess the effect of federal compliance assistance programs in improving compliance with hazardous waste regulations. The paper also conducts a direct empirical analysis of the relationship between traditional enforcement tools and compliance assistance. The results show that federal compliance assistance efforts do increase compliance, but the evidence does not suggest any consistent relationship between traditional enforcement and compliance assistance. Also, while states do not appear to substitute federal compliance assistance for traditional enforcement, state compliance assistance programs do appear to decrease the likelihood of inspections among the smallest hazardous waste generators.     

The (dis)continuation of Scottish nationalism? A discursive comparison of the Scottish National Party and National Collective

The Scottish independence referendum in 2014 was propelled by the Scottish National Party (SNP), but the referendum also saw the emergence of a plethora of pro-independence groups. One of the most prominent was National Collective (NC), a cultural movement emphasizing the empowerment of the younger electorate. NC has been described as part of a radical pro-independence movement, heralding the end of the nationalist hegemony and the arrival of a new post-nationalist politics in Scotland. This article investigates that claim from a political discourse perspective by analysing interviews conducted with NC and SNP representatives. The analysis of the interview data is framed by Gorski’s conception of nationalism as discourse and mobilization, and the ideological presentation of these two organizations are analysed by drawing on Freeden’s morphological approach. The findings suggest a great degree of discursive overlap between NC and the SNP but wide divergences in terms of imagined recipient scope.