Never Change a Winning Policy? Public Sector Performance and Politicians' Preferences for Reforms

Despite the increasing stress on performance in public sector organizations, there is still little empirical evidence on whether—and if so, how—politicians respond to performance information. This article addresses this research gap by linking registry statistics on school performance in Norway's 428 municipalities with data from an information experiment embedded in a survey of local politicians. Findings show that school performance bears only a weak relationship to politicians' preferences for resource‐related reforms, but it strongly affects preferences for governance‐related reforms, indicating the importance of accounting for heterogeneity across alternative types of (school) reforms. Moreover, local politicians are, on average, well informed about school performance. This reflects the force of local inhabitants' high information level on politicians' accountability.     

What to Do Here? What to Do There? The Effect of Change in Organization Size on Public Management

For a long time, researchers have been interested in the consequences of creating larger public organizations. The outcomes of changes in the size of public organizations have been relatively widely studied; however, much less is known about the internal processes through which these outcomes are actually achieved. This article explores whether changes in organizational size affect public management. As endogeneity is an inherent problem when studying outcomes of organizational size, we apply a quasi-experimental design in order to establish the causal linkage between size and different elements of public management. We use unique survey data collected before and after a large reform that changed the size of most Danish municipalities. The results suggest that public management related to daily operations is generic and not affected by size, whereas public management related to overall tasks such as creating a vision, servicing the mayor, and maintaining external relations is positively affected by size changes.     

Between Integration and Freedom: School Segregation in Critical Perspective

In the Danish case, school segregation is recognized as a crisis of society, but it is also a crisis in the deeper sense that central actors disagree about in what sense it is a crisis. This raises the general questions: In what sense is school segregation a problem? What exactly is the crisis? Though these are partly normative questions, in Scandinavian contexts we can interpret them in light of the internal value‐commitments of society. Accepting this premise allows us to build on the empirically informed and philosophically rigorous work of Elizabeth Anderson according to which segregation should be viewed in light of the imperative of social integration. The demand for citizens’ equal participation in the main institutions of society is, according to her, already entailed immanently if a society is broadly commitment to democracy. Finding this immanent democratic approach to be insufficient considering widespread concerns with respecting parental freedom, this article discusses the more value‐integrative approach found in the political philosophical work of Hegel. According to this approach, our value‐commitments to both social integration and individual freedom can be integrated if central public institutions reflect a complex structure of recognition. On the basis of both of these two steps, the article suggests ways of understanding and tackling the crisis of school segregation in a Scandinavian setting.     

Partisan Influence on Immigration: The Case of Norway

Do governments decide the size of immigration? This article analyses partisan impact on refugee immigration to Norway. The first part maps party positions on refugee immigration and demonstrates that the views of Norwegian parties are far from consensual. The second part tests whether the number of refugees admitted has been affected by changes of government by way of a panel analysis covering the period 1985–2005 and 143 sending countries. Controlling for other determinants of immigration both in receiving and sending countries, the analysis suggests that that the number of refugees admitted to Norway has been significantly lower during Conservative rule. Among parties with government experience, the Conservative Party also has adopted the most restrictive stand in its manifestoes. No significant differences between Labour Party and centre governments were found, even though the centre parties express more liberal preferences.     

Bite mark lesions in human skin

Bite marks in human skin may be found to have been so forcefully made that the skin surface has been disrupted; the marks have become skin lesions. In the following, a case is reported in which such lesions were found on the back of a victim of assault. The dental examiners found it necessary to arrange for a series of simulated bites to be made in order to obtain adequate material for comparison.     

Sequencing strategy of mitochondrial HV1 and HV2 DNA with length heteroplasmy

We describe a method to obtain reliable mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences downstream of the homopolymeric stretches with length heteroplasmy in the sequencing direction. The method is based on the use of junction primers that bind to a part of the homopolymeric stretch and the first 2-4 bases downstream of the homopolymeric region. This junction primer method gave clear and unambiguous results using samples from 21 individuals with length heteroplasmy in the hypervariable regions HV1, HV2 or both. The method is of special value for forensic casework, because sequencing of both strands of an mtDNA region is preferable in order to reduce ambiguities in sequence determination.     

The Group of 77 in the international climate negotiations: recent developments and future directions

First, we describe and analyze the main set of G77 positions in the climate negotiations and the dynamics behind the emergence of these positions. While it is puzzling that the G77 has managed to maintain itself as a group in spite of internal differences along variables as prosperity, emissions and vulnerability to climate change, we claim that a core element behind this cohesion is that these countries share domestic governance problems as much as poverty and economic underdevelopment. Second, we discuss how recent trends of economic and political development in the third world influence the climate policy strategies of the G77 group in the future. The main factor here is the economicand social progress in states like China, India and Brazil, which separates them from the poorer and less powerful G77 states. Increasing heterogeneity along variables like governance, growth, and importance for the international economy is creating an increasing drive among the most successful G77 states towards bilateral agreements with industrialised powers. We do not foresee a departure from traditional G77 positions and membership by these states in the official climate negotiations or a departure from the Kyoto process, but an increasing reliance on bilateral agreements with industrialized countries that link considerations for energy security and the environment. The ability to gain these advantages without commitments may make these states less interested in adopting commitments for the post-Kyoto period. This is unfortunate for the LDCs and the AOSIS groups within the G77, who probably are most vulnerable to climate change.