Reforming sacred institutions: the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Roman Catholic Church compared

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) are both conceptualized as sacred institutions, with many features of ideology/theology, hierocratic structure, and policy process in common. After periods of exclusion, they both also faced strong pressures to adapt to changes in the modern world, both internal and external, and to reduce status differentiation within the hierarchy and between the clergy/apparatchiki hierarchy and the laity/population. The present article compares and contrasts de-Stalinization under Khrushchev (1956–1964) with the results of Vatican II (1959–1965), and Gorbachev’s reforms (1985–1991) with the efforts of Pope Francis to reform the RCC (2013–present). The comparisons validate the explanatory power of the noted similarities between these sacred institutions, while also highlighting significant differences in structure, mission, and process, which explain why Pope Francis has adopted an incremental strategy for reform of the RCC, in contrast to Gorbachev’s revolutionary strategy for reforming the CPSU.     

Outsourcing Public Health Laboratory Services: A Blueprint for Determining Whether to Privatize and How

In a continuing effort to reform and reinvent the way public organizations do business, the outsourcing of services has become a popular tool, particularly as resource constraints limit options available to governments. All too often, the decision is made, for reasons of ideology or resource constraints, to outsource services without giving careful consideration to the impact of privatization on the core missions of an agency, or whether privatization, in fact, offers real cost savings. Purchasing tools designed for traditional commodity purchases are often grossly unsuited for making decisions on specialized technical services.
This article suggests a process for the evaluation of an option to outsource laboratory services. It suggests that, prior to contracting or privatizing services, the concerned agency should evaluate:
the impact on the agency's core mission
the availability, stability, and reliability of private sector service providers
the relative costs of internal and external (public or private sector) service providers
the potential impact on regulatory enforcement
the ability to monitor the performance of external providers
potential conflicts of interest
Based on this model, the ongoing internal evaluation of services offers public agencies management tools to obtain the best value for the taxpayer dollar, not only in terms of the raw cost per test, but also in managing the quality of the services.     

Veto Players and Institutional Analysis

The veto players theory can be used to analyze all political systems regardless of regime (presidential or parliamentary), party system (one-, two-, or multiparty), and type of parliament (unicameral or multicameral). This paper develops the veto players theory to account for a series of important political phenomena: the difference between majoritarian and supermajoritarian institutions; the importance of absenteeism, or of political marginalization; the importance of agenda control and referendums; the reasons for government stability (parliamentary systems) and regime stability (presidential systems); the reasons for independence of bureaucracies, and judicial independence. All these phenomena are analyzed in a coherent way, on the basis of the same framework. Empirical evidence from existing literature corroborating the theory is provided.     

MENTAL HEALTH CARE FOR OLDER PERSONS: NETWORKING AS A RESPONSE TO ORGANIZATIONAL CHALLENGES1

We use case study methodology to examine the degree of cooperation and coordination among organizations providing mental health care to older persons. Mail surveys and in‐depth interviews were employed to gather data from human service organizations in one relatively rural county of Upstate New York. We find that organizations that are older and provide larger numbers of services tend to have a higher degree of integration with other organizations. There is little evidence of formal coordination of services. Informal cooperation, at least on an ad hoc basis, is common, though. Older persons with chronic mental health problems are relatively well served by the system. Older persons whose mental health problems are associated with the aging process are not well served by the system. The growth of mental health managed care has increased competition among many organizations, further fragmenting a weakly integrated system.     

An Investigation of the Public Deficts and Government Spending Relationship: Evidence for Greece

This paper tests the validity of the Buchanan-Wagner hypothesis for Greece, that increases in public spending are the result of the tolerance of large deficits over the period 1961–1994. To test this hypothesis, three unit-root pretests, the Dickey-Fuller, Phillips-Perron and Kwiatkowski et al. and maximum likelihood estimation techniques of cointegrating vectors and a vector error-correction model are employed. A long-run relationship is found to exist among government spending, deficit, income,wages and adult population and the importance of short-run deviations are presented. The empirical evidence suggests that Buchanan and Wagner hypothesis, seems to find support for Greece in the long-run and the short-run. Further, productivity in the public sector is lower than in the private sector and the growth of income is not an important determinant of the increase in the relative size of public spending.     

The politics of affective citizenship: from Blair to Obama

Politicians have long mobilised emotion in order to gain voters' support. However, this article argues that the politics of affect is also implicated in how citizens' identities, rights and entitlements are constructed. Examples are drawn from the positions of UK, US, Canadian and Australian politicians, including Tony Blair, David Cameron, Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama. Emotions analysed include love, fear, anxiety, empathy and hope. The article argues for the importance of a concept of ‘affective citizenship’ which explores (a) which intimate emotional relationships between citizens are endorsed and recognised by governments in personal life and (b) how citizens are also encouraged to feel about others and themselves in broader, more public domains. It focuses on issues of sexuality, gender, race and religion, and argues that the politics of affect has major implications for determining who has full citizenship rights. The Global Financial Crisis has also seen the development of an ‘emotional regime’ in which issues of economic security are increasingly influencing constructions of citizenship.     

Sociology and international relations: legacies and prospects

While sociological concepts have often been implicitly used in International Relations (IR), recent years have seen a more explicit engagement between IR and Sociology. As with any such interdisciplinary assignation, there are both possibilities and challenges contained within this move: possibilities in terms of reducing IR's intellectual autism and opening the discipline towards potentially fertile terrain that was never, actually, that distant; challenges in that interdisciplinary raiding parties can often serve as pseudonyms for cannibalism, shallowness and dilettantism. This forum reviews the sociological turn in IR and interrogates it from a novel vantage point—how sociologists themselves approach IR concepts, debates and issues. Three sociological approaches—classical social theory, historical sociology and Foucauldian analysis—are critically deployed to illuminate IR concerns. In this way, the forum offers the possibility of (re)establishing exchanges between the two disciplines premised on a firmer grasp of social theory itself. The result is a potentially more fruitful sociological turn, one with significant benefits for IR as a whole.