The Importance of Trust in Government for Public Administration: The Case of Zoning

Many scholars argue that citizens with higher levels of political trust are more likely to grant bureaucratic discretion to public administrators than citizens with lower levels of trust. Trust, therefore, can relieve the tension between managerial flexibility and political accountability in the modern administrative state. Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence showing that trust is actually associated with citizens' willingness to cede policy-making power to government. This article tests theories about political trust and citizen competence using the case of zoning. Trust in local government is found to be an important predictor of support for zoning, but trust in state government and trust in national government have no effect. These findings suggest that trust affects policy choice and helps determine how much power citizens grant to local administrators.     

Preventing Local Government Fiscal Crises: Emerging Best Practices

What type of oversight should states exercise over local units in order to prevent fiscal crises? This article discusses a sequence of three best practices that some states use to prevent fiscal emergencies. They first monitor local government finances to predict fiscal distress. After detecting signs of fiscal distress, states actively assist local units in ameliorating the problem. Finally, assistance notwithstanding, if a situation becomes grave, states require local units to take strong remedial measures, including increasing taxes and reducing expenditures.     

The Politics of Bureaucracy and the failure of post-war reconstruction

Gordon Tullock’s The Politics of Bureaucracy must be considered one of the most important works on bureaucracy ever written. In this paper, I argue that Tullock’s analysis of bureaucracy is as relevant as ever. To support this claim, I focus on U.S.-led reconstruction efforts which attempt to export liberal democracy via military occupation. Bureaucratic organizations play a key role in these reconstruction efforts and as such, Tullock’s analysis is directly relevant. It is argued that Tullock’s study clarifies not just the limits of bureaucratic activity, but also the importance of spontaneous orders for coordinating activities outside those limits and generating the very institutional context in which liberal democracy can evolve and sustain. The main conclusion is that the nature of public bureaucracy constrains the ability of the United States to exogenously impose liberal democratic institutions in foreign countries for the very reasons Tullock emphasized long ago.     

How Americans Think About Trade: Reconciling Conflicts Among Money, Power, and Principles

Trade has again emerged as a controversial issue in America, yet we know little about the ideas that guide American thinking on these questions. By combining traditional survey methods with experimental manipulation of problem content, this study explores the ideational landscape among elite Americans and pays particular attention to how elite Americans combine their ideas about commerce with their ideas about national security and social justice. We find that most American leaders think like intuitive neoclassical economists and that only a minority think along intuitive neorealist or Rawlsian lines. Among the mass public, in contrast, a majority make judgments like intuitive neorealists and intuitive Rawlsians. Although elite respondents see international institutions as promising vehicles in principle, in practice they favor exploiting America's advantage in bilateral bargaining power over granting authority to the World Trade Organization. The distribution of these ideas in America is not arrayed neatly along traditional ideological divisions. To understand the ideational landscape, it is necessary to identify how distinctive mentaal models—mercantilist, neorealist, egalitarian, and neoclassical economic—sensitize or desensitize people to particular aspects of geopolitical problems, an approach we call cognitive interactionism.     

International NGOs and the challenge of modernity

The forces associated with economic globalisation and the apparent supremacy of market forces have unleashed a range of political and social processes that have served, and were indeed designed, to enrich and empower the few at the expense of the majority. These include phenomena such as the rise in armed conflict, threats to food security, the loss of livelihoods and traditional ways of life of millions of people worldwide, the commodification of social provision, assaults on national sovereignty, and the privatisation of citizenship. However, the author argues, the most significant impact of globalisation is the 'localisation' of social and political struggle, and the emergence of new forms of international solidarity. Many NGOs have too readily succumbed to the view that globalisation in its present form is inevitable and irreversible, and have accommodated to it by trading their essential values for technical professionalism, often imported from the private sector. However, if NGOs are to assume their place as part of a transformational movement for social justice, they must rediscover and foster the values of citizen participation and develop a genuine respect for diversity.     

The Muslim uprising in Ajara and the Stalinist revolution in the periphery

In 1929, local officials in the mountainous region of upper Ajara in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) pursued aggressive policies to force women to remove their veils and to close religious schools, provoking the Muslim peasant population to rebellion in one of the largest and most violent of such incidents in Soviet history. The central authorities in Moscow authorized the use of Red Army troops to suppress the uprising, but they also reversed the local initiatives and offered the peasants concessions. Based on Party and secret police files from the Georgian archives in Tbilisi and Batumi, this article will explore the ways in which local cadres interpreted regime policies in this Muslim region of Georgia, and the interaction of the center and periphery in dealing with national identity, Islam, gender, and everyday life in the early Soviet period.     

Can the global South take over the baton? What cosmopolitanism in ‘unlikely’ places means for future world order

As the West’s centrality fades, the global South may have a decisive influence in shaping future world order. Will that future see a retreat from globalisation to hard-edged particularisms? Or will the emerging post-Westphalian global society let the global South take over the baton of cosmopolitan institution building in its own way? This article draws on a multi-country survey of educated youth to find promising signs of imagined common ground with other countries. It suggests the flavours of cosmopolitan integration that the global South is likely to support in coming decades.