Building collective action at crime hot spots: Findings from a randomized field experiment

Journal of Experimental Criminology - The study examined whether Assets Coming Together (ACT), a policing intervention directed at increasing collective action and collective efficacy at crime hot...     

An unwilling client: how Hosni Mubarak's Egypt defied the Bush administration's ‘freedom agenda’

When the George W Bush administration announced the ‘freedom agenda’ in the Middle East, officials claimed it marked a major break in United States (US) foreign policy. In 2005, the administration intensified efforts pressuring Egypt, a client state, to democratize. However, the US continued pursuing security cooperation with and providing military aid to Egypt. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak repelled US reform efforts by exploiting the normative inconsistency between democratization and security in the war on terror. This paper reviews Mubarak's ‘balking’ strategy (Stephen Walt, Taming American power, New York: WW Norton, 2005), including feigning compliance through nominal legal changes and counter-arguments to buy time until the inconsistencies in US policy came to a head. By 2006, the US had abandoned the freedom agenda and the Egyptian regime had embarked on a repression campaign. As I argue, the implications of the contradictions in US policy towards Egypt demonstrate that weaker client states may enjoy increased agency vis-à-vis a weakly committed patron hegemon.     

Does the Network Centrality of Government Actors Matter? Examining the Role of Government Organizations in Aquaculture Partnerships

The growth in the use of collaborative governance arrangements has been accompanied by burgeoning scholarship in the field of public affairs that seeks to understand the benefits of engaging diverse stakeholders in common venues. However, few scholars have formally assessed the role of government actors in facilitating outcomes for individual participants in such efforts. Moreover, little work on collaborative governance examines how individual incentives and barriers to collective action are formed within the nested nature of these contexts. We contribute to the study of collaborative governance by formally investigating how the relative centrality of government actors in collaborative policy‐making venues affects individual relationship building and learning for participants therein. We find that government actor centrality is positively associated with relationship building and learning. However, in testing two different conceptualizations of “centrality,” we find that the definition of this construct clearly matters.     

Economic and Ideological Corruptions of the Regulatory State

What accounts for the excesses of the regulatory state? Economists have shown that bad regulations are often due to “rent seeking” and “regulatory capture” and have provided compelling accounts of the incentives that drive these processes. However, there remain many unwarranted regulations, such as recent gun control measures, that cannot be explained by an economic rationale. Rather, it is essential to understand the distinctively ideological origins and functions of such regulations. This paper examines both the economic and ideological corruptions on the regulatory state, suggesting that those concerned with the growth of state power will have to address both of these phenomena.     

Orchestration and transnational climate governance

With multilateral efforts to mitigate climate change in gridlock, attention has turned to transnational climate governance initiatives, through which sub- and non-state actors seek to reduce greenhouse gases. These initiatives include networks of cities committed to lowering their carbon footprints, voluntary corporate reduction targets and disclosure processes, and many of the rules that govern carbon markets. The paper considers the role of “traditional” actors in world politics—states and intergovernmental organizations—in orchestrating such initiatives. This strategy accounts for nearly a third of transnational climate governance initiatives, we find, and upends the conventional dichotomy between “top down” and “bottom up” solutions to global collective action problems. We develop a theory to explain when states and intergovernmental organizations are likely to engage in orchestration, and we provide initial support for this theory with a new dataset of transnational climate governance initiatives and case studies of two of the most active orchestrators, the World Bank and the United Kingdom.