Recovery Risk and Labor Costs in Public–Private Partnerships: Contractual Choice in the US Water Industry

We use an ordered logistic model to empirically examine the factors that explain varying degrees of private involvement in the US water sector through public–private partnerships. Our estimates suggest that a variety of factors help explain greater private participation in this sector. We find that the risk to private participants regarding cost recovery is an important driver of private participation. The relative cost of labour is also a key factor in determining the degree of private involvement in the contract choice. When public wages are high relative to private wages, private participation is viewed as a source of cost savings. We thus find two main drivers of greater private involvement: one encouraging private participation by reducing risk, and another encouraging government to seek out private participation in lowering costs.     

Reviews and commentary

The (a)ble, (b)rave, and “c” of sis

Anthony Cave Brown: The Secret Life of Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, Spymaster to Winston Churchill Macmillan, New York, 1987, 830 p., $25.00.

Sentries in the Senate

William S. Cohen and George J. Mitchell: Men of Zeal: A Candid Inside Story of the Iran‐Contra Hearings Viking Press, New York, 1988, 350 p., $19.95.

Disappointing Stalin: Cold War Compromises

Christopher Simpson: Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effect on the Cold War Weidenfeld &; Nicolson, New York, 1988, 290 p., $19.95.

Flaws in the Perfect Book on Technowar

James William Gibson: The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam The Atlantic Monthly Press, Boston, Mass., 1986, 523 p., $24.95.     

The changing nature of the transatlantic link: U.S. approaches and implications for Central and Eastern Europe

This article examines the changing security, economic and diplomatic components of the transatlantic link, with a particular focus on Washington's approach and implications for Central and Eastern Europe. The United States continues to play an essential role as security underwriter in the region, but the military dimension of the transatlantic relationship is transforming and will result in greater burdens on Europeans. Economic links between the U.S. and Central Europe are developing more strongly than generally understood, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is likely to drive both political and economic ties. Unconventional gas developments are enhancing U.S. engagement in European energy markets. Finally, the U.S. remains keen to engage its European partners on a broad agenda of global and regional issues and retains its own interests in working particularly with Central and Eastern European countries to lend stability to ‘wider Europe’.     

Identifying Urban Flashpoints: A Delphi-Derived Model for Scoring Cities’ Vulnerability to Large-Scale Unrest

Although great strides have been made toward forecasting state-level instability, little progress has been made toward the prediction of outbreaks of urban unrest. This article presents a method for the assessment of cities’ vulnerability to large-scale urban unrest. Forty-five factors correlated with urban unrest are identified and weighted by an expert panel. Based on expert elicitation through an iterative Delphi exercise, the explicitly methodological discussion describes both the process and the resulting assessment framework. Results include a tool that will allow users to rank cities on their vulnerability to large-scale urban unrest.     

The Lebanese Hizballah and Israeli Counterterrorism

This article examines Israel's attempts to weaken and defeat the Lebanese Hizballah. It reviews Hizballah's rise after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Hizballah's successful effort to force Israeli forces to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000, the 2006 war, and Israeli attempts to deter Hizballah. The article argues that Israel has largely failed to defeat Hizballah militarily and politically. Israel's experience offers lessons for how terrorist groups learn, the effectiveness of terrorist attrition strategies against casualty-sensitivity states, the difficulties in coercing terrorist groups, and the importance of an information strategy. Finally, Israel's clash with Hizballah indicates the importance of thinking of groups that are large and multi-faceted from a counterinsurgency paradigm.     

Curious Victory: Explaining Israel's Suppression of the Second Intifada

The article examines Israel's successes and failures during the Second Intifada. It argues that Israel's advances came from an effective counterterrorism campaign involving a mix of military operations, defensive measures, and in particular improved intelligence gathering. Domestic resilience also proved strong in the face of a brutal terrorism campaign. Yet long-term victory remains elusive for Israel. Deterrence, always difficult against terrorist groups, is growing harder for Israel. Hamas's control of Gaza, and the mistrust and hatred sown during the Second Intifada, have hindered a political deal between Israel and moderate Palestinians. Much of what went into successful counterterrorism, notably the security barrier and the aggressive campaign of raids and arrests, does not jibe with most visions of what peace would look like and makes a deal harder to achieve. To make a peace deal work, Israeli counterterrorism must change, with measures including relocating parts of the security barrier, bolstering moderate Palestinian politicians, and working with, as opposed to undermining, Palestinian security forces in the West Bank.     

An Autopsy of the Iraq Debacle: Policy Failure or Bridge Too Far?

This article examines whether the outbreak of an insurgency after the U.S. invasion of Iraq was an avoidable policy failure or whether the structural conditions surrounding the occupation made such an outbreak inevitable. Several U.S. policy mistakes, in particular the deployment of too few troops, a lack of comprehensive political and military planning for the occupation, disbanding the Iraqi military, the failure to establish a government in waiting, and overly aggressive de-Baathification, greatly exacerbated rather than ameliorated the various structural problems. More fundamentally, structure and policy choices interacted at all levels to explain the Iraq failure. The unavoidable conditions that coalition forces encountered in Iraq—a divided society devastated by years of war, sanctions, and misrule—and the political context in the United States made the challenge for successful policy execution difficult. This structure constrained and delimited the options open to U.S. policy makers but, even within those narrow limits, the United States made many bad choices that further diminished the chances of success.

A particularly important series of policy mistakes occurred well in advance of the buildup to war itself. The orientation of the U.S. armed forces away from counterinsurgency, the failure to establish a political settlement before invasion, and other controllable policy choices in the prewar period all led to enormous difficulties during the occupation itself. Thus, by the time of the invasion, these policy choices had become almost like structural constraints and the failures had a snowballing effect, making policy corrections far more difficult.     

Overreporting Voting: Campaign Media,Public Mood,and the Vote

This study used regional telephone survey data collected after the 1996 U.S. presidential election to examine how two possibly important affective variables public mood and political cynicism predict actual as compared with self-reported voting. Public mood, a construct introduced by Rahn, Kroeger, and Kite (1996) to suggest how affective processes may play a role in political behavior, is shown to have two distinct but positively correlated dimensions, one positive and one negative. After demographic variables were controlled, perceived media usefulness predicted positive mood about the presidential election, which in turn predicted self-reported voting. Negative campaign attitude predicted negative mood, which, in turn, influenced actual but not self-reported voting. Political cynicism, although correlated with both positive and negative public mood, predicted neither measure of voting. The bifurcation of influence of negative and positive public mood about elections may explain why researchers have often shown positive affect to influence voting (as measured by self-report), and why political consultants have continued to rely on negative campaigning and the reported increases in negative feelings it engenders in voters to influence actual votes.     

QUESTIONING SEQUENCES IN CANADIAN POLICE INTERVIEWS: CONSTRUCTING AND CONFIRMING THE COURSE OF EVENTS?

A content analysis of 19 Canadian police interviews with adult witnesses revealed that several of the interviewing strategies used by officers ran counter to the recommendations in the literature. Specifically, interviewers interrupted the witness more than was necessary, rarely employed any cognitive techniques to enhance memory recall and asked far more closed than open-ended questions. Further, in terms of the sequencing of questions, a pattern emerged across interviews that suggested that officers first “help” the witness construct the event and then, through a rapid sequence of “yes/no” questions, seek to confirm the account. We argue that this pattern of questioning may suggest that officers are pursuing an assumed version of events and that exploring interviews from a sequencing perspective may prove beneficial in identifying possible biased versions of events.