Electronic Funds and Benefits Transfers,E‐Government,and the Winter Commission

This article examines how electronic funds transfers and electronic benefit transfers have become integral components of digital government. These technologies have forwarded many of the principles of the Winter Commission, including the development of lean, responsive government. The greater efficiency and cost savings for the federal and most state governments have not been achieved without encountering and dealing with serious matters related to customer service, contracting, collaboration, management, and implementation. These issues arise in the normal daily use of electronic payment technologies, but they are magnified in crisis situations, as demonstrated by disaster relief operations during Hurricane Katrina.     

Whistleblowing as a new regulatory instrument in global governance: the case of tax evasion

Abstract

The cross-border impacts of whistleblowing recently have become far more visible and consequential, as evident with the ‘Paradise’ and ‘Panama Papers’ leaks, which exposed tax and other financial wrongdoings of prominent personalities around the world, leading to scandals, resignations and prosecutions. Despite its new prominence, whistleblowing often continues to be seen as a series of ad hoc chance acts. We argue instead that whistleblowing is an increasingly institutionalized regulatory tool that is enabled by an emergent ‘whistleblowing system’, with similarities to other new forms of informal global governance. Whistleblowing can be controversial, and we develop a framework for assessing whether any particular whistleblowing event and the system that enables it are in the public interest. We then apply this analysis to the case of global tax evasion. We conclude that a whistleblowing system can make important contributions to difficult cross-border regulatory challenges such as tax evasion, especially where other governance systems fail.     

Democracy in Britain: Retrospect and Prospect

The EU referendum has raised questions about the nature of democracy, which is not just majority rule. It is wrong to claim that direct democracy has now replaced representative democracy, as Parliament is required to answer all the questions that the referendum did not. The conduct of the referendum reflected the worst aspects of Britain's political culture of sterile adversarialism. Both left and right have shared assumptions about governing that have made it difficult to develop a culture of democratic citizenship. The political system still reflects its pre‐democratic origins (as in the survival of a House of Lords and the obsession with titles) and the role of money in politics represents a form of corruption. Institutional reforms depend for their success on the nurturing of a democratic culture, which is a task for many hands.     

Military Power and Food Security: A Cross-National Analysis of Less-Developed Countries, 1970–1990

Addressing the long-standing debate over the social impact of military power and recent discussions of military-induced famine, we conduct a panel analysis of aggregate food supply and child hunger rates in 75–79 less-developed countries (LDCs). Distinguishing between militarization , as the growth of military resources, and militarism , as the use of military force to handle political conflicts, we show that militarization is both beneficial and detrimental to food security, whereas militarism is consistently detrimental. Arms imports and associated increased military spending plus praetorianism and military repression reduce food security, whereas increased military participation and arms production boost food security. Increased food supply reduces child hunger and is largely confined to the more developed of the LDCs. These military power effects show net economic growth, which "trickles down" to improve food supply and reduce child hunger among the more developed LDCs, reflecting the growth of global economic inequality. Contrary to views that see militarization as a single unified process, use of armed force is not strongly rooted in either praetorianism or militarization.     

Political Consequences of the New Inequality

This article proposes agendas for teaching and research about shifting global patterns of equality and inequality, a very different agenda than was appropriate when the last undergraduate professor was president of ISA, almost forty years ago. Today, unlike in that Cold War world, formal democracy is flourishing, state power is diminishing, gender inequality has diminished, and income inequality has risen. Consequences of these new patterns that demand our attention as teachers and scholars include: (1) more frequent protracted social conflicts, (2) a newly politicized sphere of international public health, (3) the new global gender politics, (4) the new global politics of the super-rich, and (5) the new politics and ethics of the world's privileged, a group that includes most ISA members and most of our students. Our responsibilities as teachers have grown, in part, because popular media present a decreasingly coherent picture of each of these patterns; and that incoherence, itself, may help sustain global inequalities.     

Agriculture in and beyond the Haitian catastrophe

Although the devastation from Haiti’s 2010 earthquake was concentrated in Port-au-Prince, it had deep agrarian roots. This paper situates Haiti’s urban poverty in the chronic exploitation of the country’s peasant classes as a basis for assessing the competing contemporary visions for agricultural development. We argue that the post-earthquake reconstruction has fortified a neoliberal development that is incompatible with the aspirations of the Haitian peasantry. Given the interrelated power of domestic elites and international donors, and the proliferation of disconnected development projects, we conclude that any prospect for pro-poor development hinges on the growth and collaboration of peasant movements.     

Applying a Dynamic Performance Management Framework to Wicked Issues: How Coproduction Helps to Transform Young People’s Services in Surrey County Council,UK

ABSTRACT

This article explores how a dynamic performance management (DPM) approach can give policy makers a more integrated, time-related understanding of how to address wicked problems successfully. The article highlights how an outcome-based approach to solving wicked policy problems has to balance three very contrasting objectives of stakeholders in the policy making process – improving service quality, improving quality of life outcomes and improving conformity to the principles of public governance. Simultaneous achievement of these three objectives may not be feasible, as they may form an interactive dynamic system. However the balancing act between them may be achieved by the use of DPM. Policy insights from this novel approach are illustrated through a case study of a highly successful co-production intervention to help young people with multiple disadvantages in Surrey, UK. The implications of DPM are that policy development needs to accept the important roles of emergent strategy and learning mechanisms, rather than attempting ‘blueprint’ strategic planning and control mechanisms. Some expectations about the results may indeed be justifiable in particular policy systems, as clustering of quality of life outcomes and outcomes in the achievement of governance principles is likely, because behaviours are strongly inter-related. However, this clustering can never be taken for granted but must be tested in each specific policy context. Undertaking simulations with the model and recalibrating it through time, as experience builds up, may allow learning in relation to overcoming barriers to achieving outcomes in the system.     

The Future of Leadership in Public Universities: Is Shared Leadership the Answer?

Leadership of public universities has come under fire—from scandals, from funding, from students, from every direction. Top‐down leadership of institutions of higher education has been described as a “disease.” Shared governance—a mechanism of faculty representation in the leadership and decision‐making processes—a seeming alternative, has been described as “a recipe for paralysis.” In this article, the authors proffer shared leadership as a potential elixir for leading public institutions of higher learning, unleashing creative potential, focusing on pressing strategic imperatives, and enabling sustainable systems that leverage true talent to maximum effect. It is time to move beyond the moribund myth of top‐down heroic leadership and beyond the bureaucratic, political quagmire of the current state of affairs in shared governance. Is shared leadership the answer?