PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS: ADDED VALUE BY ORGANIZATIONAL FORM OR MANAGEMENT?

The central idea of public private partnerships (PPPs) is that added value can be achieved from greater co‐operation between public and private actors. In general, the literature speaks of PPPs in which public and private actors develop a more or less sustainable co‐operation through which they realize products, services, or policies together, share risks, and develop an organizational form to arrange this. The assumption is that a higher degree of PPP leads to more and better outcomes because public and private actors combine their knowledge and resources. One can find a wide array of organizational forms in which this co‐operation is organized and the literature pays a great deal of attention to these forms. But is this organizational form really so important, or are the intensity and type of managerial strategies more important for the outcomes? Based on a large survey of individuals involved in Dutch environmental projects, we show that although the degree of PPP correlates positively with the outcomes of projects, this correlation disappears when we include in the analysis the number of managerial strategies employed. The organizational form does not have significant impact on outcomes and the conclusion we draw is that scholars and practitioners of public private partnerships should pay greater attention to the managerial efforts necessary to develop and implement PPPs.     

MARRIAGE,IN‐LAWS,AND CRIME: THE CASE OF DELINQUENT BROTHERS‐IN‐LAW*

With marriage comes in‐laws, and if the in‐laws include delinquent males, their delinquency could affect the prosocial effects of the given marriage. In this article, I focus on the effect of having a convicted brother‐in‐law as a general indicator of this broader phenomenon of family‐formation processes impairing the positive impact of marriage on crime desistance. I use registry data on all men from birth cohorts 1965–1975 in Denmark (N = 69,066) to show that when a man marries, his new family ties to delinquent brother(s)‐in‐law do indeed hinder his criminal desistance. The results that take into account the characteristics of husbands, wives, their shared family‐formation process, and the criminality of male family members suggest that 1) family dynamics tend to keep criminality within family networks and 2) influences from one's broader social network through marriage are important for the protective effects of marriage. Analyses of previous conviction, co‐offending between a man and his brother‐in‐law, as well as analyses of in‐laws who reside in close proximity confirm the two mentioned main findings. In all, the findings reported in this article add to our understanding of the processes by which families are tied, and how these family‐formation processes influence men's behavior.     

Political differentiation and the problem of dominance: Segmentation and hegemony

At first glance, one might view the political differentiation in the European Union as a reflection of the autonomy of its member states, signifying flexibility and the dispersion of democratic control. However, under conditions of complex interdependence and economic integration, political differentiation can undermine the fundamental conditions for democratic self‐rule. Political differentiation may cause dominance. It is argued in this article that we must move beyond Philip Pettit's conception of dominance as the capacity to interfere with others on an arbitrary basis, in order to properly identify the undemocratic consequences of differentiation. Political freedom is also a question of institutional provisions to co‐determine laws. From this vantage point, differentiation raises the spectre of dominance in the form of decisional exclusion and the pre‐emption of political autonomy. Drawing on a re‐conceptualisation of dominance, the effects of differentiation on the possibility of self‐rule are examined, and two systematic effects of political differentiation are identified. It is argued that segmentation is the systemic effect of differentiation in the vertical dimension of integration. Here, dominance occurs in the form of exclusion from decision‐making bodies and the denial of choice opportunities. In the external horizontal dimension, the systemic effect of differentiation is hegemony. Some states are vulnerable to arbitrary interference and the pre‐emption of public autonomy. The article discusses developments within the Eurozone as a case of segmentation and the statues of associated non‐members as a case of hegemony. With regard to the latter, we are faced with the phenomenon of self‐incurred dominance.     

Do terrorist attacks feed populist Eurosceptics? Evidence from two comparative quasi-experiments

Over recent years, Europe has experienced a series of Islamic terrorist attacks. In this article, conflicting theoretical expectations are derived on whether such attacks increase populist Euroscepticism in the form of anti-immigration, anti-refugee and anti-European Union sentiment. Empirically, plausible exogenous variation in the exposure to the 2016 Berlin attack is exploited in two nationally representative surveys covering multiple European countries. No evidence is found for a populist response to the terrorist attack in any of the surveyed countries. On the contrary, people in Germany became more positive towards the EU in the wake of the Berlin attack. Moreover, little evidence is found that ideology shaped the response to the attack. The findings suggest that terrorist attacks are not met by an immediate public populist response.     

THE MANAGEMENT OF CHANGE IN PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS: A LITERATURE REVIEW

This article presents a review of the recent literature on change management in public organizations and sets out to explore the extent to which this literature has responded to earlier critiques regarding the lack of (public) contextual factors. The review includes 133 articles published on this topic in the period from 2000 to 2010. The articles are analysed based on the themes of the context, content, process, outcome, and leadership of change. We identified whether the articles referred to different orders of change, as well as their methods and theory employed. Our findings concentrate on the lack of detail on change processes and outcomes and the gap between the common theories used to study change. We propose an agenda for the study of change management in public organizations that focuses on its complex nature by building theoretical bridges and performing more in‐depth empirical and comparative studies on change processes.     

THE IMPACT OF NETWORK MANAGEMENT ON OUTCOMES IN GOVERNANCE NETWORKS

There is a large amount of literature and research on network management strategies. However, only a limited portion of this literature examines the relationship between network management strategies and outcomes (for an exception, see Meier and O’Toole 2001 ). Most of the research focuses on managerial activity or networking rather than on the question of which types of strategies matter the most for outcomes of complex processes in networks. This paper attempts to address the question of whether managerial strategies matter for outcomes and also explores which types of strategies have an effect on outcomes. The research is based on a survey sent to respondents involved in environmental projects in The Netherlands. The findings show that the number of employed network management strategies has a strong effect on perceived outcomes. The few variations in the effect of four constructed types of network management strategies found include exploring content, connecting, arranging, and process agreements.     

Are Immigrants and Their Descendants Discriminated against in the Danish Criminal Justice System?

The study presents Danish data from 2000 showing disparities between persons with a Danish background and persons with a foreign background regarding their treatment in the criminal justice system. Persons with a foreign background are more likely to be arrested in relation to a charge, they are more likely to be remanded in custody without subsequently being convicted, and they are more likely not to be convicted when charged with an offence. Controlling for a number of factors regarding the suspect and the crime does not eliminate the disparities. A number of possible explanations are discussed.1 ¹The results of this study were presented at the Second European Society of Criminology Conference in Toledo in 2002. We are grateful to two anonymous referees for their valuable comments.      

Social Structure and Citizenship: Examining the Impacts of Social Setting,Network Heterogeneity,and Informational Variables on Political Participation

In this study, we develop a model of the interplay between sociostructural determinants of an individual's discussion behavior, such as the setting of primary discussion networks (work, church, and volunteer groups) and the nature of discussion (i.e., level of exposure to non-like-minded ideas), and individual-level outcomes, such as hard news media use, political knowledge, and participation in political processes. In doing so, we synthesize many of the different and sometimes competing models that political communication scholars have used to examine the link between more macroscopic sociological variables and the individual-level behaviors that political scientists often focus on. Data to test our theoretical model come from a national telephone survey conducted in October and November 2002. Our analysis showed that the social setting in which citizens discuss politics is an important antecedent of political participation. Discussion networks as part of volunteer groups, for example, indeed serve as important networks of recruitment. In other words, discussing politics frequently in this setting is positively and directly linked to political activity. The impact of conversational networks in church and work settings on participation, however, is only indirect. In fact, our data show that the impact of church and work networks on political participation is to a significant degree mediated by the different viewpoints that individuals are exposed to when they discuss politics in these settings.