Law Enforcement Fusion Centers: Cultivating an Information Sharing Environment while Safeguarding Privacy

The national network of fusion centers, of which there are currently 78 nationwide, was created in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and continue to play an integral role in contemporary law enforcement. Their mission, put simply, is to facilitate information sharing across disparate agencies and organizations. Despite a significant presence within the law enforcement landscape, fusion centers have received relatively minimal scholarly attention. This limited literature alludes to operational challenges and public concerns that inhibit fusion center effectiveness. More specifically, little information is known about how fusion centers develop relationships with external partners as well as institute mechanisms to safeguard against violations of individual privacy. The present research employs a combination of national survey data and three in-depth case studies of fusion centers in Florida, Nevada, and Michigan to provide initial answers to these questions. Implications for improved policy and practice are discussed.     

Attentiveness to television news and opinion change in the fall 1992 presidential campaign

This paper examines the extent to which attention to television news impacted affective evaluations of presidential candidates during the last two months of the 1992 campaign. Our analyses show that attentiveness to campaign news significantly influenced evaluations in a manner consistent with the tone of news coverage for each candidate. We disaggregate the data by party and ideology, however, and discover this effect to be conditional, depending critically on the character and intensity of political predispositions. Throughout the paper we emphasize the interplay between political predispositions and the valence of network coverage, underscoring the contingent effect of media messages. We conclude with a brief discussion of our results and stress the importance of partisan reinforcement, which we found was a major consequence of news media reception during the fall 1992 campaign.     

The Gnomes of Washington: Four Myths of the 1976 IMF Crisis

The IMF settlement of December 1976 looms large in popular and partisan views of the politics of the 1970s. It is argued here that conventional academic wisdom has come to embody several misleading myths about its impact on economic policy. Evidence is presented to challenge four such myths which suggest that the IMF forced the Labour government to launch an attack on public spending, introduce cash limits to control public spending, introduce monetary targets and abandon the pursuit of full employment through demand management.
Although the language of the [IMF] negotiations reflected the arcane terms of international finance… the decisions required of the British Government were profoundly political… behind the technical financial decisions lay fundamental differences over the appropriate balance between the private and public sectors, the priority between capital accumulation and social welfare, the relative weight to be given to incentives and equality… What was at issue was the future shape of the political economy of Great Britain.¹     

Lobbying in the 21st century

This paper suggests that the nature of activism is changing to take account of the shifts in political and economic conditions. It further goes on to consider that as a result of these emerging trends we have witnessed a generational shift in how governments, businesses, interest groups and citizens will interact. It is possible to place the issues and questions that this new environment raises under a number of broad headings—Democracy and Dissent, Government and Parliament, Media, and Lobbying –each of which the paper deals with in turn. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications.     

Going privately: partnership and outsourcing in UK public services

Public private partnerships provide an important illustration of the way the traditional role of government as employer and service provider is being transformed. While policy–makers argue that the growing role of the private sector is not driven by ideological thinking – that, in fact, both public and private sector organizations can benefit from working together in partnership relations – in practice it is the norms and rules of private sector management that underpin reforms. This paper assesses evidence from two detailed case studies of partnerships and demonstrates, first, that there is little evidence of mutual gains from partnership arrangements and, second, that because of an imbalance of power between public and private sector partners, any gains achieved are not distributed equitably. These results suggest that current reforms need to be refocused around building on the distinctive qualities of services provision in the public sector, rather than expanding the private sector world of markets and contracts.