Enhancing Community Leadership Negotiation Skills to Build Civic Capacity

Most intra‐ and interorganizational decision making entails negotiations, and even naturally talented negotiators can improve with training. Executive trainings for managers and leadership programs for publicly elected officials, public managers, and nongovernmental organizations frequently include negotiation modules. These efforts, however, have yet to reach community leaders who also need to develop their negotiation skills. We propose that members of disadvantaged low‐income communities who lack educational and economic opportunities, and are less able to advocate for their own interest, need to build and strengthen their civic capacity, including their negotiation skills, to become more effective parties to decisions affecting them. While many professionals and executives have access to training, such opportunities are less accessible to the leaders of these disadvantaged communities. Although such leaders draw from their own heuristic knowledge, skills, and abilities, they could also benefit from sharpening their negotiation skills. We propose that the multidimensional understanding of their community that members accumulate through direct experience is indispensable, nontransferable to outsiders, and not teachable through in‐class activities. Leaders with the ability to leverage knowledge and assets to connect effectively to community insiders as well as to outside people, institutions, and resources, however, possess some specific inherent personality traits as well an understanding of social structures, strategies, and agency, which can be taught and learned. Such skills as how to conduct negotiations around the table and away from it and how to identify community members who can help and how to rally them are also teachable. The cases were chosen to illustrate the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) that make these leaders effective in and beyond their communities. We highlight those KSAs that we think are teachable in the framework of a negotiation module in community leadership training to enhance civic capacity for community betterment.     

Turkey’s Public Administration Today: An Overview and Appraisal

ABSTRACT

This study overviews and appraises Turkey’s contemporary public administration system. Its prominent characterizing features are discussed, with an emphasis on both the achievements and problem areas. Turkey has a long history of strong traditional bureaucratic practices and culture, from which its contemporary public administration system has emerged since the Republic was established almost a century ago. Despite its many achievements, public administration has its problems, generally the product of conflicts between tradition and modernity. Due emphasis should, however, be given to addressing the challenges of its over-politicization, strengthening governance practices, enhancing the human factor, and instituting further modern administrative reforms.     

视频侦查中多摄像头下嫌疑目标同一的概率研究

目的视频侦查中的时空轨迹信息是很多案件侦破的关键,但在证据准备和法庭质证阶段,如何使用这些信息目前并没有方法依据。本文针对视频侦查中轨迹信息的证据转化问题,开展理论分析,建立概率方法。方法结合视频侦查的典型过程,定义了摄像头下人物的人体、衣着和交通工具等特征;对不同的特征根据其出现的可能性进行针对性的概率估计以得到概率上限,对多摄像头下嫌疑人作案和逃窜过程的概率进行表示;基于图模型构造贝叶斯网络对轨迹追踪问题进行建模,并对模型利用贝叶斯网络特性进行求解,以得到似然比结果。结果结合视频侦查场景给出了问题中似然比的公式和近似计算方法。1)通过分解提出时段、时序和方向假设建立了一种时空特征概率模型分析方法;2)提出了视频图像中衣服、人体、交通工具特征的概率分析思路框架;3)得到了假设条件下的似然比结果;4)给出了假设条件对概率计算的影响,讨论了实际应用中后验比估计的方法及方法的使用限制因素。结论本文建立的理论分析方法首次为视频追踪结果的证据应用提供量化参考模型,从概率的角度解释了视频轨迹追踪结果为什么可以成为证据,有助于提升视频追踪证据的证明力:基于视频中能观察到的常见的十二个特征(体态、上衣颜色、上衣纹理、上衣款式、裤子款式、裤子颜色、鞋子款式、鞋子颜色、头发长度、摩托车款式、摩托车颜色、摩托车行李箱样式)的条件,对于具有相同特征的目标依次出现在三个摄像头下(摄像头之间没有分叉路口)的案例,计算得到的似然比(第一个摄像头下的目标与第三个摄像头下的目标为同一目标和不同目标条件下,出现给定特征的可能性之比)下限超过10;量级。     

The Freedom of Seduction

For most of human history, the other half of the species, women, were on the sidelines. Now they are central actors in all our societies as we negotiate the fraught transition from male‐dominated tradition to modernity and beyond. In this section we hear the voices of powerful women who in their own lives are making this historic shift.     

Research Note: Former Extremist Interviews Current Extremist: Self-Disclosure and Emotional Engagement in Terrorism Studies

Abstract

In this article I describe how recognizing elements from my own extremist past made me emotional while interviewing a jailed terrorist about his motivations for joining Islamic State. I relate how this mood led me to an uncontrolled self-disclosure and recount how he agreed to elaborate on his motivations for joining IS, despite initial reluctance to talk about them. Then, I present some considerations on whether research in which emotional attachment is involved can produce critical scientific knowledge. The basic aim of the article is to develop methods, concepts and means to contribute to research on the motivations of terrorists.     

Parenthood and social policy preferences: A gender and time sensitive examination

Attitudes towards social spending and the welfare state have been characterised by one of the longest standing and widest gender gaps. Past research suggests that parenthood deepens this divide further. Yet, the exact relationship between parenthood and support for social policies – and the gendered nature of this process – has been difficult to establish because it can vary across welfare policy areas and the age of the children, which past studies, relying on cross-sectional data, has found difficult to unravel. Using panel data from the Swiss Household Panel, we examine individual level changes in fathers’ and mothers’ views towards specific welfare state policies. We find that individuals’ support for social spending fluctuates at different stages of parenthood, and that mothers’ demands differ from fathers’ in relation to care related but not in terms of educational spending. This implies that parents are not a homogeneous group that parties could target with uniform electoral pledges. As a result, building widespread electoral support for expanding a broad range of social investment policies is likely to be challenging in a context where, first and foremost, self-interest appears to drive (or depress) individuals’ support for specific welfare state policies.     

Institutional constraints on cabinet formation: Veto points and party system dynamics

Research on government formation in parliamentary democracies has presented contradicting evidence on the role of political veto institutions and parliamentary polarization on the formation of cabinet types. Institutional rules may either provide significant leeway for political parties or seriously constrain them when forming sustainable coalitions. In contrast to previous studies we argue that the effect of political institutions is conditional on the degree of polarization in parliament. We test our hypotheses using original data on 842 cabinet formations in 33 advanced democracies between 1945–2018. In line with previous research, we find that the institutional rules have a pronounced effect on the type of cabinet formed, but that institutional rules moderate the effect of party system polarization. Thus, our findings provide important new insights on cabinet formation which are particularly relevant for today's increasingly polarized parliaments.