Robotic Bureaucracy: Administrative Burden and Red Tape in University Research

This Viewpoint essay examines university research administration and the use of software systems that automate university research grants and contract administration, including the automatic sending of emails for reporting and compliance purposes. These systems are described as “robotic bureaucracy.” The rise of regulations and their contribution to administrative burden on university research have led university administrators to increasingly rely on robotic bureaucracy to handle compliance. This article draws on the administrative burden, behavioral public administration, and electronic communications and management literatures, which are increasingly focused on the psychological and cognitive bases of behavior. These literatures suggest that the assumptions behind robotic bureaucracy ignore the extent to which these systems shift the burden of compliance from administrators to researchers.     

Keeping Up with the Souzas: Social Influence and Electoral Change in a Weak Party System,Brazil 2002–2006

Despite weak partisanship and considerable political change in the wake of the 2002 election, three‐quarters of Brazilian voters supported a presidential candidate in 2006 from the same party they had backed in 2002. This article assesses the factors causing both electoral stability and electoral change with a transition model, a model testing whether the effects of respondents' evaluative criteria depend on their initial vote choices. Social context—personal discussion networks, neighborhood influences, and the interactions of social networks and municipal context—is the major force promoting stability and change, while the impact of partisanship is limited to a small share of voters.     

Towards a global ‘child friendly’ juvenile justice?

The impact of globalisation on juvenile justice is increasingly conceptualised with reference to neo-liberal governance and the intensification of ‘new punitiveness’. Whatever the merits of such analyses, they have the effect of marginalising, if not completely overlooking, the extent to which international human rights instruments might serve to neutralise and/or mediate punitive currents. Indeed, it might be argued that the commitment – repeatedly expressed in official discourse – to both protect and promote the human rights of children in conflict with the law has itself come to comprise a discursive and tangible dimension of global child governance. Key signifiers of this phenomenon – at the global level – include a corpus of interrelated human rights conventions, standards, treaties and rules, formally adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, whilst at the European level authoritative rights-informed guidelines on ‘child friendly justice’, ratified by the Council of Europe, are similarly representative. Against this backdrop, this article seeks to investigate the degree to which individual nation states receive and respond to their human rights and ‘child friendly justice’ obligations. Whilst recognising the mediating capacities of formal human rights instruments, we aim to critically interrogate the relations between globalised rhetoric and localised reality; between the promise of international rights discourse on the one hand and the limitations of territorial jurisdictional implementation on the other.     

The Effect of Administrative Burden on Bureaucratic Perception of Policies: Evidence from Election Administration

This article argues that administrative burden—that is, an individual's experience of policy implementation as onerous—is an important consideration for administrators and influences their views on policy and governance options. The authors test this proposition in the policy area of election administration using a mixed‐method assessment of local election officials. They find that the perceived administrative burden of policies is associated with a preference to shift responsibilities to others, perceptions of greater flaws and lesser merit in policies that have created the burden (to the point that such judgments are demonstrably wrong), and opposition to related policy innovations.     

Sore Loser Laws and Congressional Polarization

To enhance explanations for party polarization in the U.S. Congress, we focus on an unappreciated legal structure known as the sore loser law. By restricting candidates who lose partisan primaries from subsequently appearing on the general election ballot as independents or as nominees of other parties, these laws give greater control over ballot access to the party bases, thus producing more extreme major party nominees. Using several different measures of candidate and legislator ideology, we find that sore loser laws account for as much as a tenth of the ideological divide between the major parties.     

Control,Historic Pitfalls,and the UK Nuclear Renaissance

In September 2015, the UK government announced that future taxpayers will underwrite the construction of two European-designed nuclear reactors at Hinkley Point in Somerset. Partly financed by Chinese utility companies, this announcement presents a fait accompli with little democratic input. Few, if any, historic lessons evident from previous attempts to manage its nuclear industry appear to have been learnt. This paper discusses the announcement with reference to the governance of the UK’s historic nuclear legacy—specifically dealing with control, stakeholder engagement, and transparency—and its implications for a nuclear renaissance.