Performance Standards and Evaluation

The benefits of performance monitoring for public services are identified as greater transparency of objectives and accountability for results. This article considers recent experience in developing standards to evaluate efficiency and effectiveness of public services. In broad terms this is being done through performance information which is a much more encompassing concept than standards or indicators. Such information is an element of an accountability framework that provides greater management autonomy and flexibility and extends to the private sector which is increasingly providing, or involved with the provision of, public services.     

Re-reading ELIZA: Human–machine Interaction as Cognitive Sense-ability

ABSTRACT

This article re-reads ELIZA, the famous computer program of early artificial intelligence created by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966 to test the possibility of intelligent interaction between humans and machines through language. Given newly emerging intelligent gadgets such as smart-home assistants that operate through natural language, I argue firstly for the timeliness of this program and explore the ways in which ELIZA stimulated debates concerning whether it could be considered an interlocutor for humans or a failure in exactly this regard. Secondly, I develop a feminist technoecological account of interaction at the ELIZA/user interface. In so doing, I seek to challenge the dualisms between body/mind, rationality/affectivity, and subject/object, thereby avoiding a reductionist perspective that calls into question the human subject as an autonomous agent.     

Locating Supreme Court Opinions in Doctrine Space

We develop a scaling model to estimate U.S. Supreme Court opinion locations and justice ideal points along a common spatial dimension using data derived from the citations between opinions. Citations from new opinions to precedent opinions usually apply and endorse the doctrine of the precedent opinion; however, sometimes they implicitly or explicitly dispute the precedent opinion. We collect original datasets classifying citations from search and seizure and freedom of religion opinions written between 1953 and 2006 into these different types and develop a model relating the similarity of the doctrine embodied in the citing and cited opinions to the relative probability of these different types of citations. The resulting spatial estimates of opinion location are used to evaluate theories of Supreme Court bargaining and opinion writing. We find empirical support for theoretical models that predict the majority opinion will fall at the ideal point of the median member of the majority coalition. Given the centrality of theories of judicial policymaking to various substantive problems in political science, the method of scaling opinions developed in this article can facilitate a range of future research.     

Ethnic differentials: Sri Lanka,Malaysia, and Israel

Studies in Comparative International Development -