Caught in the Act: The Smoking Gun View of Ministerial Responsibility

While any discussion of ministerial responsibility must in part focus on ministerial resignations, finding out when ministers resign is only the tip of the iceberg. A full assessment of ministerial responsibility would look at the relations between ministers and their senior bureaucrats, as discussed in Bill Blick’s article. It would look at the impact of managerialism on ministerial accountability, especially in the light of privatisation and contracting out. It would assess the impact of other mechanisms of accountability, including the senate. The subject of this article must always be put into a broader context. This article concentrates on ministerial resignations drawing on evidence from Britain, Canada, the federal government in Australia and the government of New South Wales. When do ministers resign?     

Mapping Patterns of Support for Privatization in the Mass Public: The Case of Michigan

This article examines public attitudes about using for-profit firms or nonprofit organizations to deliver public services in Michigan. Using survey data, it shows how the public reacts to the privatization of various state and local government services. It then considers some dimensions of attitudes toward privatization. Finally, it estimates models that predict support for privatization based upon a range of characteristics of respondents to our survey.     

The Making of chancellor Merkel

As a woman and an East German, Angela Merkel beat long political odds to become chancellor of Germany in November 2005. In addition, she overcame her party's poor electoral performance, out-manoeuvring political rivals in negotiations for a ‘grand coalition’. Merkel's rise to power can be divided into three phases. Like many other female political leaders of her generation in Germany, she was initially apolitical. She only became politically active during the dying days of the German Democratic Republic. The second phase was her apparently unremarkable political ascent as ‘Kohl's Mädchen’ (girl), when she had little independent standing of her own. The final phase began when a major finance scandal propelled her to the top of party ranks. She benefited from a gendered stereotype as a Trümmerfrau who could rebuild the conservative's moral standing out of the affair's ruins. But her continued success had much to do with successful political learning of how to turn critics' attacks against themselves.     

Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of the Roosevelt Corollary

There is a broad consensus about the ways in which public opinion and domestic politics influenced American foreign policy during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. Historians generally concur that the American public was ignorant about and uninterested in international politics. They also agree that the president’s perception of public sentiment and his reading of the political landscape played essentially negative roles; that is, they were constraints at the point of implementation, rather than factors that shaped the substance of his policy, and were unquestionably a hindrance. Taking a fresh look at the origins of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine raises questions about this interpretation. Roosevelt believed that Americans were passionately opposed to the blockade of Venezuela by European Powers in late 1902 and early 1903 and viewed it as a threat to the Monroe Doctrine. This perception and Roosevelt’s 1904 presidential campaign therefore significantly affected the timing and content of the Roosevelt Corollary.