Organising citizenship at Local 890's Citizenship Project: unleashing innovation through an affiliate organisation

This article considers the problems of organisational survival, innovation, and inter‐organisational partnerships for unions and for immigrant community‐based organisations. The analysis focuses on the Citizenship Project, a project for assisting and organising Mexican immigrants, launched in 1995 by Teamsters Local 890 in response to the assault on immigrant rights in California. It concludes that new community‐based partner organisations sponsored by existing unions can be one effective response to these problems if the participants establish and sustain an appropriate balance of autonomy and accountability. The article also traces the development of a radical and expansive notion of citizenship by the Citizenship Project, and a related set of methods that integrate organising with service delivery, labelled ‘citizenship work’. It recommends that non‐profit tax‐exempt support centres be established at labour centres, labour councils, and international unions in order to lower the costs of such innovation for local unions.     

Electoral and Political Changes: the Impact on Political Bureaucratic Relationships in Scottish Local Government

This paper explores a fundamental issue in public administration: the political bureaucratic relationship or political administrative interface. Much of the research and writing hitherto has been at central government level; and while important work on local government exists, relatively little exists on local government. The paper makes an important contribution to the field by researching aspects of the political administrative interface in the context of significant electoral and political changes in Scottish local government, which introduced single transferable voting and multi member wards. The research found an increase in intensity of senior bureaucrats' political management roles, a greater bureaucratisation of political and policy roles, increased scrutiny yet mixed findings about democratic processes. The approach and findings open up the research field and the paper concludes by suggesting some areas of future research potential.     

On the Ideological Foundations of Supreme Court Legitimacy in the American Public

Conventional wisdom says that individuals’ ideological preferences do not influence Supreme Court legitimacy orientations. Most work is based on the assumption that the contemporary Court is objectively conservative in its policymaking, meaning that ideological disagreement should come from liberals and agreement from conservatives. Our nuanced look at the Court's policymaking suggests rational bases for perceiving the Court's contemporary policymaking as conservative, moderate, and even liberal. We argue that subjective ideological disagreement—incongruence between one's ideological preferences and one's perception of the Court's ideological tenor—must be accounted for when explaining legitimacy. Analysis of a national survey shows that subjective ideological disagreement exhibits a potent, deleterious impact on legitimacy. Ideology exhibits sensible connections to legitimacy depending on how people perceive the Court's ideological tenor. Results from a survey experiment support our posited mechanism. Our work has implications for the public's view of the Court as a “political” institution.     

Environment,security and regionalism in the Asia-Pacific: is environmental security a useful concept?

From the very beginning the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been occupied with the task of finding common solutions to common security problems. To a large degree, one may say that security questions have been a driving force for continued regional integration in Southeast Asia. In the future questions of environmental security may be playing the same role. The states around the South China Sea are to a large degree interdependent when it comes to questions of the human environment. They are interdependent to the degree that if they fail to find common solutions to environmental problems they may end up in violent conflict against each other. In general, environmental interdependence is both a source of conflict and a potential for international integration. The direction of the development, i.e. whether it leads to conflict or not, is to a large degree a question of how the decision-makers perceive the situation. This paper addresses the usefulness of the concept ‘environmental security’ in relation to political perception of environmental interdependence in Southeast Asia. If the political actors address serious environmental problems as security matters they are more likely to put them at the top of the agenda and deal with them in satisfactory manners, i.e. to cooperate and find solutions that are acceptable to all parties involved.     

Transitions through Out-of-Keeping Acts

Within a negotiation, when an act by one party is out-of-keeping with the previous moves and underlying logic of the interaction, the act and those that follow hold the potential for creating a transition to a new logic of interaction. In this paper, we investigate the presence and role of seven distinct types of transitions resulting from out-of-keeping acts across ten complex legal negotiations. The data reveal that a critical feature differentiating across the types is the abruptness/gradualness of the transition. We explore the combination of relational, informational, and procedural acts comprising the transitions and find that all three components are present across transitions, but in different proportions and orders. Understanding the role of out-of-keeping acts in negotiations facilitates a more complete picture of the microprocesses involved in the creation of critical moments in negotiations.     

Representative Government and Network Governance – In Need of 'Co-governance': Lessons from Local Decision Making on Public Schools in Denmark

The article argues for the importance of reconciling the institutions of representative government and network governance by means of a combined structure of 'co-governance', and the need for elected politicians in a role as co-governing guardians of democracy in network governance. Based on an examination of two different cases of interactive governance within the field of school reform at the local level in Denmark, some lessons are drawn as to an appropriate new role for elected politicians in a structure of co-governance.     

Back‐pedalling in Iraq: lessons unlearned

This article analyses which of the major lessons learned from previous experiences in nation building have been applied or ignored in Iraq. It focuses on the first six months of the post‐combat period, a time frame generally recognised as being critical for laying the foundations for a stable and democratic future. A review of previous cases points to six lessons that, in fact, have been unlearned, and only two that have been realised in this initial phase in Iraq.     

Loan only credit default swaps the story so far

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. Key points

• The market for Loan Only Credit Default Swaps (LCDS)is expected to develop rapidly, but the market documentationfor this product is proving to be a difficult issue as a resultof differing views by users of the product and divergent approachesbetween the US and European markets.
• The International Swapsand Derivatives Association, Inc. (ISDA) has, on 4 May 2007,released a long-awaited revised draft of the European LCDS.The finalization of this draft is not far off, but certain importantissues are yet to be finalized.
• Rather than speculate on theoutcome of such discussions, this article looks at the developmentof the European LCDS market, the motivation and needs of itsparticipants and takes stock of the European documentation beforeit underwent the recent almost year-long consultation process.It therefore compares the European LCDS of May 2006 againstthe US LCDS of June 2006 (ignoring . . . [Full Text of this Article]