A Policy Delphi study in the socialist Middle East

The Delphi Method has been applied to a wide variety of predictive and consensus building problems in the West. It has achieved mixed success in its ‘native’ environment. This paper reports on the successful use of the Delphi by an interdisciplinary, international team of English-speaking consultants in an Arabic-speaking country, politically dominated by a centralist regime. In the sixth year of the Iran-Iraq war, a group of international consultants proceeded with the development of a master plan for the development of the City of Baghdad, the Greater Baghdad Area and Central Iraq. Work on the plan had begun in 1982 but had been slowed by the war and its effect on the Iraqi economy, a lack of consensus on the part of the Iraqi government and a substantial degree of uncertainty in the government's confidence in the consulting team's perceptions. An accelerated form of the Delphi was structured and applied over a period of three weeks, employing high ranking members of the Iraqi technocracy. The results indicated a good degree of consensus on a number of material issues. The consultants obtained a clearer picture of the client's desires, and the client was left with greater confidence in the consultant's perceptions of the planning problems and solutions. There was a notable reduction in the level of uncertainty and disagreement among both Iraqi and expatriate members of the planning team. Finally, there was an increased acceptance of the resulting master plan due to the demonstrable participation of senior government officials in its formulation and the credibility they attached to the process of the Delphi. At the time of writing, the plan has been accepted by the government of Iraq.     

The reform of academic tenure in the United Kingdom

In this paper, we examine the reform of academic tenure in the United Kingdom (UK) after the 1988 Education Reform Act.¹ We test the hypothesis that softening tenure encourages incumbent academics to consolidate their hold on academic life [ Carmichael (1988)]. We also assess the economic significance of the English and American case law on tenure, because an understanding of the legal aspects of tenure is required to identify the possible effects of tenure reform. The years after passage of the Act provide an interesting natural experiment, as the broad effect of the legislation was to soften, though not to remove, tenure in British universities. ² We can find support for the Carmichael hypothesis prereform but do not believe that the Act caused incumbent academics to consolidate their hold on senior posts after the reform.Tenure implies that the holder of a post cannot be removed from it except for good cause, usually based on gross moral turpitude or gross incompetence. Such removal is historically characterized by a costly procedure governed by organizational statutes, as shown in Hines v. Birkbeck College.³ In the United Kingdom, academic tenure has been associated with open-ended contracts of employment and often had a particularly hard form before 1988. In the United States, where it has often been possible to dismiss academics for financial reasons by abolishing whole departments, tenure has taken a softer form (although often harder to obtain) and can still be held to exist even when an employment contract is of a fixed term as long as it is renewable. ⁴ The details of universities’ tenure statutes have always varied between institutions, in both the United Kingdom and United States, which is often overlooked.

Abstract

“Before 1988, could your university make academics redundant by giving notice and paying statutory redundancy pay, or was it extremely hard to sack academics—having to buy them out or use arguments based on gross moral turpitude or incompetence?”     

Policy Networks and Policy Learning UK Economic Policy in the 1960s and 1970s

Policy networks are advanced as an alternative to the Westminster model of the UK polity but the theory lacks an internal dynamic and has typological problems. This article applies Peter Hall's (1993) concept of 'social learning' to policy networks and maps the networks found in two case studies of British economic policy making: Hall's own study of the shift from Keynesianism to monetarism in the 1970s and the author's research on the advent of 'Keynesian-plus' in the early 1960s. The article advances three main propositions. Firstly, that integrating the concept of social learning can dynamize the policy network model. Secondly, the case studies suggest that different network configurations are associated with different orders of policy change but that Hall's definition of 'third order change' may be too restrictive. Thirdly, policy networks can be much more complex and fluid then is generally claimed, sometimes becoming so extensive that they might be termed a 'meta-network'.     

The need for protection and punishment in victims of violent and nonviolent crime in the Netherlands: The effect of relational distance

A crime victim’s relationship to the offender is widely recognized as an important variable in the study of victims and the criminal justice system. However, studies concerning comparisons of the needs of victims at various relational distances to the offender are lacking. The authors studied how the victim’s need for protection and punishment correlated to the victim’s relational distance to the offender. The authors distinguished more than the usual two victim-offender relationships (known vs. stranger offender), so that the needs of victims at intermediate relational distance (offender is known to the victim, but not an intimate) to the offender might become visible. A total of 370 victims were interviewed about their reasons for reporting the crime. Respondents were divided into three groups: small (intimates), intermediate (nonintimates), and large (strangers) relational distance. While controlling for gender of the victim and type of crime, the needs of victims were found to vary with the relational distance to the offender.     

The Dynamics of Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Understanding the Domestic Security Dilemma

This article argues that the concept of the “domestic security dilemma” can help us to better understand public opposition to government counterterrorism policies. It examines the concept of the “security dilemma” in international relations theory and argues that this concept can also be applied to the analysis of domestic security politics. The article explains that when the government takes actions intended to make people safer from terrorist threats, it often has the unintended consequence of heightening concerns about government oppression. Thus, counterterrorism represents a “domestic security dilemma”—a situation where security tradeoffs have consistently undermined anticipated security gains.     

WASPI's Is (Mostly) a Campaign for Inequality

Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) has mounted a vociferous campaign for full compensation to be given to ‘1950s women’ who, it argues, have suffered severe financial hardship as a result of the rise in their state pension age from age 60. That campaign has gained significant political traction, with much sympathy expressed for the plight of those affected and acceptance (most notably by the Scottish National Party and the Labour Party) that some form of compensation is urgently needed. But WASPI fails to acknowledge the rise in the state pension age's roots in the fight for women's equality, disregards the fact that the problems experienced by this cohort as they near retirement are faced by both women and men and glosses over the fact that the increase in pension age above 65 applies to both genders equally. Its campaign obscures deeper and more important issues in old‐age income replacement.     

Bad Piano? Bad Music? A Response to Comments on Lowe and Pemberton,The Official History of the British Civil Service,Volume II: 1982–1997

The reforms made to the civil service during the premierships of Margaret Thatcher and John Major were unparalleled in scope in peacetime. Undertaken in the name of efficiency and better management, they served to Balkanise the service, shrink the number of civil servants, subordinate them to the will of ministers, and effectively privatise a swathe of public services. Their legacy, however, was a relatively weak centre struggling to cope with a fragmented and extremely complex governmental machine, an overly managerialist senior civil service sometimes side‐lined from policy making, and a system lacking slack as a consequence of the quest for ‘efficiency’ and dependent on private contractors of sometimes dubious worth. Over the past five years that legacy left the country poorly placed to triumph over the challenges of Brexit and then of Covid‐19.