Assessing international aid for local governance in the Western Balkans

This article investigates the impact of international efforts to cultivate effective and authoritative local governing institutions in the Western Balkans, a prime testing ground for democratization aid to post-war states. It explores three hypotheses, each of which argues that a particular approach of international actors toward domestic officials best improves the quality of local governance. The study's gathering of interview and survey data from field-based actors enables it to evaluate local government reforms' impact on domestic communities. This investigation arrives at three findings. First, in the view of Western Balkan peoples, local governance reforms do not produce benefits when they are either imposed or ignored by international authorities. Secondly, reforms produce benefits for local communities when they are designed to meet domestic concerns. More specifically, reforms valued by local communities are designed in ways that respond to domestic, rather than international, concepts of good local governance that emphasize socioeconomic aspects and produce tangible benefits. Well designed reforms also include significant aid targeting local governance that is coupled with the promise of a larger political settlement that is attractive to powerful domestic elites and contingent on clearly articulated local governance reforms. Thirdly, such aid best characterises European Union efforts only in Macedonia.     

Diversionary Despots? Comparing Autocracies' Propensities to Use and to Benefit from Military Force

This article adds to recent research that has begun to systematically analyze the varied conflict propensities of autocracies. Using political incentive theory, we develop hypotheses on the diversionary proclivities of three distinct types of autocratic regimes that contradict conventional wisdom and the findings of recent empirical studies. To provide a full rendering of autocracies' diversionary tendencies, we test our hypotheses with Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) models that capture reciprocal relationships among external military force and four of its potential domestic causes from 1950 to 2005. Although our results provide only partial support for political incentive theory, they demonstrate the utility of using properly identified reciprocal models and of analyzing refined conceptualizations of autocratic regimes. We find that certain types of autocracies are more prone to use diversionary force and to benefit from it than others.     

The Class of 96: A Biographical Analysis of New Government Members of the Australian House of Representatives

The 1996 federal election brought thirty-six new government members into the House of Representatives. The size of the "Class of 96" provides an opportunity for a comparison of biographical characteristics, looking for common experiences and backgrounds, as well as for an exploration of similarities and differences with previous cohorts of Coalition MPs. This examination will suggest that, in biographical terms, the "Class of 96" represents a significant new development in Australian politics. Further, a detailed analysis of the first speeches of the members of the "Class of 96" provides a window into the minds of those who have sought and achieved office on behalf of the Liberal and National parties after thirteen years in the political wilderness.     

Quality assurance and hospital structure: how the physician-hospital relationship affects quality measures

Mr. Spaeth writes about the relationship between hospital administration and the physician, and how that relationship affects the quality of medical care delivered to the patient. The article focuses on the differences between the employment structure in an academic teaching hospital, and the open, independent contractor medical staff typical of a traditionally smaller community hospitals. The individual traits and nuances of these structures and how they can be distinguished from one another create dynamic differences in the approach for quality care. Peer review, credentialing, and management of adverse outcomes are just a few of the ways in which hospitals continue to strive to provide higher quality care, but the way these methods are implemented and performed in different hospital structures are dramatically different, yielding distinct results. Mr. Spaeth argues that the challenges faced by community hospitals in their effort to provide higher quality care and eliminate medical error are exacerbated because of their unique structure and the particular relationship physicians share with the hospital and its administration.     

Making local government work better: How local and internationally sponsored institutions interact to influence performance in Bosnia‐Herzegovina

Why has international investment into reforming local governance in post‐conflict societies produced mixed results? Drawing on new institutionalism, the authors expect reform outcomes, even of comprehensive assistance, to be shaped by the interaction between new and old rules, an interaction mediated by local elites. This expectation is explored in three pairs of comparable municipalities in Bosnia‐Herzegovina. Using data collected through field research and an original index of local government performance, we find that most municipalities achieved incremental improvements in performance between 2005 and 2010. Differences can be explained by the varying endurance of old informal rules that antagonistically coexist with and undermine internationally proposed rules, as well as by the varying strength of local opponents of reform. The implication is that more effective promotion of local government performance requires more attention to and a long‐term approach to minimizing the constraints posed by informal rules and local actors opposed to reform.     

Democracy and Diversionary Military Intervention: Reassessing Regime Type and the Diversionary Hypothesis

This article concentrates on two limitations in the literature on diversionary force. First is the common assumption that major powers are the only actors capable of diversion. Second is the narrow conceptualization of regime type prevalent in the literature. Instead of dichotomizing regimes, we distinguish mature democracies and autocracies from consolidating variants of these regimes. We draw hypotheses from the institutional approach and test them with time series cross-section negative binomial first-order autoregressive process estimates of 140 countries from 1950 to 1996. We find that not all democracies and not all autocracies divert. Mature democracies, consolidating autocracies, and transitional polities are the only regime types prone to this type of force. Our results suggest that the diversionary literature would benefit from more discriminating operationalizations of regime type and by looking beyond major powers to the actions of less powerful states.