Party dualities: Where does political Islam go now?

One of the unusual features of the recent emergence of moderate Sunni Islamist political parties onto the formal political scene in the Arab world as a result of the Arab Awakening is that they nearly always emerge as elements in political dualities. Thus the party – a political movement – is wedded to a social movement and, sometimes, to a trade union as well. In addition, the social movement usually predates its parallel political movement. Furthermore, this structural duality seems to be confined to the Sunni world and often seems to be associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. The question then is precisely why this dual structure has been generalized within the political arena now colonized by moderate Sunni political Islam; is it a consequence of formal legal constraints upon such movements or does it respond to their internal dynamics? A further question raises the issue of why these dualities are not replicated within the Shi’a context or amongst secular political movements. And, finally, have they been paralleled amongst political movements arising from different religious traditions and what are the likely outcomes?     

Epistemic Community or Tower of Babel? Theoretical Diffusion in Public Administration

This article takes a comparative look at the development of the public administration discipline in three countries: Australia, Brazil and Canada. The nature of the international public administration academic community is assessed through content analysis of articles in the Australian Journal of Public Administration (AJPA), Revista de Administração Pública (RAP), and Canadian Public Administration (CPA). The method is based on that used by existing United States (US) research, allowing for comparison with that national context. The focus is on the diffusion of theoretical approaches between these national contexts, assessing whether the international public administration discipline better approximates an epistemic community, in which theoretical approaches move seamlessly between the national contexts; or a ‘Tower of Babel’, in which the different national contexts remain largely isolated.     

Does foreign aid distort incentives and hurt growth? Theory and evidence from 75 aid-recipient countries

Foreign aid transfers can distort individual incentives, and hence hurt growth, by encouraging rent seeking as opposed to productive activities. We construct a model of a growing small open economy that distinguishes two effects from foreign transfers: (i) a direct positive effect, as higher transfers allow the financing of infrastructure; (ii) an indirect negative effect, as higher transfers induce rent-seeking competition by self-interested individuals. In this framework, the growth impact of aid is examined jointly with the determination of rent-seeking behavior. We test the main predictions of the model for a cross-section of 75 aid-recipient countries. There is evidence that aid has a direct positive effect on growth, which is however significantly mitigated by the adverse indirect effects of associated rent-seeking activities. This is especially the case in recipient countries with relatively large public sectors.