Getting to Sweden,Part II: Breaking with Corruption in the Nineteenth Century

Issues about corruption and other forms of ‘bad government’ have become central in large parts of the social sciences. An unresolved question, however, is how countries can solve the issue of systemic corruption. In this article, based on Elinor Ostrom's theory of common pool resource appropriation, a new theoretical model for explaining this type of institutional change is developed. Sweden during the nineteenth century is used as an illustration of the model by showing how the country made a transition from being largely patrimonial, nepotistic and corrupt to a modern, Weberian, efficient and impartial state structure. Building upon a companion article about the importance of losing a war as a precondition for breaking systematic corruption, this article stresses the importance of three additional factors in Sweden: previous changes in courts and the legal system; recognition of the problem by the main contemporary political actors as shown in debates in the Diet; and the new liberal ideology that made an important impact on the Swedish political scene during this period.     

Brownfield redevelopment and affordable housing: A case study of New Jersey

Abstract

A total of 779 New Jersey residents were surveyed to determine the number of people who during the next five years would be willing to move to housing built on brownfield sites that have been remediated to the extent that they pose no plausible brownfield‐related health risk to residents.

Fourteen percent of the respondents said they would be willing to move to and live in housing built on cleaned‐up brownfields. These respondents were disproportionately relatively poor and young and resided in apartments and cities, especially cities where the city government was actively promoting brownfields. These respondents also did not like their current neighborhoods, did not feel threatened by the idea of living on a cleaned‐up brownfield site, and trusted experts to advise them on the health risks involved.     

How does organizational task matter for the reputation of public agencies?

The study of organizational task for understanding how organizations behave and evolve has been one of the classic topics in organization theory and public administration. Reputation scholarship has appeared as a promising perspective to understand internal and external organizational dynamics. Reputation scholars, too, emphasize the critical importance of task. Despite this recognition, the literature is characterized by a lack of theorization, and large-scale comparative analyses on how task characteristics are related to reputational dynamics. This study aims to address these concerns, relying on an extensive longitudinal dataset on the media reputation of 40 agencies in two countries to explain organizations' likelihood of attracting reputational threats (both in general and targeting specific reputational dimensions) through different task characteristics. Our main finding is that as agencies perform tasks of a more coercive and authoritative nature (regulatory tasks and, to a lesser extent, redistributive tasks), they are more likely to attract reputational threats (both in general and to all dimensions).