The lessons of privatization

Privatization policies have swept the world and helped restructure economic activity. Although there are clear benefits to privatization initiatives, many attempts have been rejected. Unfortunately, most policy research has ignored this fact. Research on privatization has mostly focused on programs that have been accepted, and not those that have been rejected. This study, however, breaks new ground by examining the microeconomic, macroeconomic, and political factors that shaped both types of privatization outcomes. This work, based on the book, The Logic of Privatization: The Case of Telecommunications in the Southern Cone of Latin America, suggests that the implementation of privatization policies hinges on the ability and capacity of the political leadership to control the bargaining process during the divestiture of state-owned companies. Failure to control the process may expand the conflict beyond the scope of the original participants and result in its rejection. This study statistically examines the economic and political data of sixteen attempts to privatize telephone companies around the world between 1981 and 1993. The findings suggested that microeconomic factors were not very significant in determining the privatization outcomes: however, macroeconomic factors were found to be slightly more important. The political factors, nonetheless, proved to be the most important variables in explaining the different outcomes. These findings were supported by the statistical results.     

Die kleine Novelle zur Anpassung des BNatSchG an das europäische Recht

Zusammenfassung Durch Urteil vom 10. Januar 2006 hat der Europ?ische Gerichtshof die Umsetzung der Vogelschutz-Richtlinie (V-RL) und der FFH-Richtlinie (FFH-RL) beanstandet, insbesondere der Projektbegriff der FFH-Vertr?glichkeitsprüfung sowie bestimmte Freistellungen von den artenschutzrechtlichen Verboten wurden als europarechtswidrig verworfen. Die Korrektur dieser M?ngel ist durch die sog. kleine Novelle des Bundesnaturschutzgesetzes erfolgt. Nachfolgend werden die ?nderungen des Artenschutzrechts sowie die Auswirkungen der Aufhebung des Projektbegriffs vorgestellt.     

Portugal's administrative elite: Social origins and political attitudes

The primary purpose of the research reported in this paper was to determine if the purge of high‐level civil servants associated with the Salazar‐Caetano dictatorship carried out after the Portuguese Revolution of 25 April 1974 was actually effective in changing the social origins and political attitudes of individuals composing this elite group. Using an abbreviated version of a questionnaire developed at the University of Michigan to study administrative elites in Western Europe, data on careers and political attitudes were gathered. Statistical analyses of these data revealed, inter alia, that there has been some, but not overwhelming, change in recruitment patterns of high‐level civil servants and some change toward greater tolerance for democratic politics and less elitism.     

Bureaucratic expertise,overconfidence, and policy choice

Classic theory on bureaucracy suggests that one primary source of bureaucratic power in public administration and the policy‐making process derives from bureaucratic issue‐specific expertise. Studies in psychology and behavioral economics suggest that experienced experts tend to be overconfident in estimating their expertise, but few researchers have examined whether experienced bureaucrats are prone to overconfidence and, if so, how overconfidence may correlate with their policy choice. Drawing on past theoretical and empirical literature, this study is the first to investigate these questions by using survey data collected from 579 officials in various agencies related to climate change mitigation and adaptation. Our analyses demonstrate that (a) the level of issue‐specific expertise perceived by individual bureaucrats is positively associated with their work experience/job relevance to climate change, (b) more experienced bureaucrats tend to be more overconfident in assessing their expertise, and (c) overconfidence, independently of sociodemographic characteristics, attitudinal factors and political ideology, correlates positively with bureaucrats’ risk‐taking policy choices.     

Candidate Valence and Ideological Positions in U.S. House Elections

We examine the relationship between the valence qualities of candidates and the ideological positions they take in U.S. House elections based on a study of the 2006 midterm elections. Our design enables us to distinguish between campaign and character dimensions of candidate valence and to place candidates and districts on the same ideological scale. Incumbents with a personal‐character advantage are closer ideologically to their district preferences, while disadvantaged challengers take more extreme policy positions. Contrary to conventional wisdom, challengers can reap electoral rewards by taking more extreme positions relative to their districts. We explore a possible mechanism for this extremism effect by demonstrating that challengers closer to the extreme received greater financial contributions, which enhanced their chances of victory. Our results bear on theories of representation that include policy and valence, although the interactions between these two dimensions may be complex and counterintuitive.     

Organising Response to Extreme Emergencies: The Victorian Bushfires of 2009

How can people and organisations best respond to emergency events that are significantly beyond the boundaries of what they had generally anticipated, expected, prepared for – or even imagined? What forms of organisations are likely to be best able to cope with such events – and what procedures and practices will aid in their ability to do so? Obviously, extreme events – events that are in scope or scale or type beyond the range of our ordinary experience and expectations – by definition will occur only relatively rarely (and very rarely to any given emergency organisation). Nonetheless, when they do occur they tend to be of defining importance to the people and institutions that are thrust into them and that must find their way through them. September 11, 2001 in Manhattan and at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia; the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004; Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast of the United States (US) in 2005; major earthquakes like the ones in Pakistan in 2005, Wenchuan in 2008, Haiti in 2010, Chile in 2010, and Christchurch in 2010 – these and other catastrophic events catapult people and response agencies into a new, unfamiliar, and largely unexplored dimension.