“BORN BUREAUCRAT”: THOMAS CUDBERT HARINGTON1

So much has been written and said about the evil effects of patronage on the efficiency of the public service before the introduction of open competitive examinations, that it has become almost a truism that those appointed before the Northcote-Trevelyan recommendations came mainly from the ranks of the unambitious, the indolent and the incapable. Certainly the older method of recruitment produced more than a fair share of Tadpoles and Tite Barnacles. But it would be flying in the face of evidence to describe officials of this kind as making up the bulk of those recruited by this method. Politicians did not invariably use their patronage to gratify some supporter or to provide a safe haven for those unfit to face the competition of their contemporaries. Long before competitive examinations were instituted, Samuel Pepys, William Lowndes, James West, Edward Weston and James Stephen had demonstrated that even political jobbery could produce men who were not only conscientious and gifted administrators, but who also conducted themselves as if “the government of England was becoming a job to be done rather than an opportunity to be exploited”.     

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911: Social Change, Industrial Accidents, and the Evolution of CommonHSense Causality

This article is part of a larger study on the history of industrial safety law in the United States, one that places particular emphasis on the development of competing attributions of the causes of industrial injury as that development relates to changes in technology, political economy, and culture. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, long noted as a catalyst for Progressive Era factory reform, evorked a change in the legal culture's "common sense" of why and how industrial injuries took place. By focusing on and making tangible causal theories that had been in circulation for some time but never embodied successfully in the law, the Triangle fire destroyed long-standing ideological barriers to factory legislation. It thus played a significant role in laying the epistemological foundation of the modern regulatory state.     

Are Voters Better Informed When They Have a Larger Say in Politics? – Evidence for the European Union and Switzerland

Public choice theory takes citizens as rationally ignorantabout political issues, because the costs of being informedgreatly exceed the utility individuals derive from it. Thecosts of information (supply side) as well as the utility ofinformation (demand side), however, can vary substantiallydepending on the political system under which citizens live.Using survey data from the European Union and Switzerland, wepresent empirical evidence that citizens are politicallybetter informed when they have more extended politicalparticipation rights. The results corroborate theoreticalarguments and circumstantial evidence that voter informationshould be treated as endogenously determined by politicalinstitutions.     

How Universal is Behavior? A Four Country Comparison of Spite and Cooperation in Voluntary Contribution Mechanisms

This paper studies behavior in experimentswith a linear voluntary contributionsmechanism for public goods conducted inJapan, the Netherlands, Spain and the U.S.A.The same experimental design was used inthe four countries. Our `contributionfunction' design allows us to obtain a viewof subjects' behavior from twocomplementary points of view. It yieldsinformation about situations where, inpurely pecuniary terms, it is a dominantstrategy to contribute all the endowmentand about situations where it is a dominantstrategy to contribute nothing. Our resultsshow, first, that differences in behavioracross countries are minor. We find thatwhen people play `the same game' theybehave similarly. Second, for all fourcountries our data are inconsistent withthe explanation that subjects contributeonly out of confusion. A common cooperativemotivation is needed to explain the data.