Meritocracy Is a Good Thing

Political meritocracy is the idea that a political system is dcsigned with the aim of selecting political leaders with above average ability to make morally informed political judgments.Political meritocracy has been largely eclipsed from political theorizing in the modern world,but there are three important reasons for reviving and reinterpreting this political ideal,particularly in a Chinese context.First,political meritocracy has been,and continues to be,central to Chinese political culture.Second,democracy is a flawed political system and meritocracy can help to remedy some of its flaws.Third,the Communist Party of China (CPC) itself has become a more meritocratic organization over the last three decades or so.     

Research use capacity in provincial governments

Despite advances in research‐informed public policy, research remains underutilized in government. To develop a firmer understanding of governmental capacity to use research in decision making, we investigate Canadian provincial ministries overseeing education, higher education, and science and technology. The findings from semi‐structured interviews indicate that capacity to generate and access research is limited. However, we find evidence of a recent change in which provincial agencies sought to bolster capacity with research use strategies and by leveraging relationships with researchers. Leaders’ support for well‐coordinated research use initiatives also seems critical to instilling a culture of research‐informed decision making in government agencies.     

Conflict "Ripeness" Revisited: The South African and Israeli/Palestinian Cases

Negotiation Journal -     

Paul Hirst’s encounters with Economy and Society

Abstract

This article examines the construction of the homo economicus in Argentina in the context of the last military dictatorship (1976–83). While the worldviews of the military and neo-liberal economists of the time were very different, their common concern for distortions in economic and political life made them translatable. These economists provided a new economic identity that would be in tune with monetarist theory, replace ‘distorting’ collective identities and allow individuals to be governed from a distance. I argue that the homo economicus was performed through two sets of tools: consumer campaigns and the financial press. However, individuals did not always behave as expected. The contradictions of neo-liberalism, between its liberalism and its quest to create self-regulating spheres through active government intervention, led to the financial crisis of 1980. Economists later blamed the crash on the irresponsibility of market actors and expressed doubt regarding the self-regulating model they had promoted. In the conclusion, the legacy of the attempt to perform the homo economicus is assessed.     

Popularity,polarization, and political budget cycles

A vast literature has established that governments may abuse policy instruments in order to enhance their popularity and thus their probability of reelection, resulting in political budget cycles. Yet do popular governments have the same incentives to boost their popularity through pre-electoral expansions as unpopular governments? The existing empirical evidence, which to this date is entirely country-specific, produces mixed messages. Some studies find a simple linear relationship between popularity and the magnitude of political budget cycles and some find a non-linear relationship, peaking at the point where the race for office is tight. This article presents a simple theoretical model, which suggests that party polarization may be the key mediator reconciling these alternative findings.