Issue Redefinition, Venue Change and Radical Agricultural Policy Reforms in Sweden and New Zealand

This paper compares radical agricultural policy reforms in Sweden and New Zealand in the 1980s and 1990s to establish which factors bring about such types of policy reforms. Ruling out a number of alternative explanations for reform found in the public policy and political economy literature, we focus on the role of reform strategies. We show that the redefinition of agricultural policy – from a matter of finding the balance between budgetary costs and farmers' income to considering agricultural policy as part of macroeconomic policies – was important, particularly in Sweden. Change of policy venue is the other reform strategy identified, which was crucial to the successful introduction of the reform. In both countries, ministers of finance deliberately shifted agricultural policymaking to arenas in which they were able to control the reform process.     

Risk management for targeting customs controls in developing countries: a risky venture for revenue performance?

Customs authorities in developing countries are often reluctant to forget systematic inspections for fear of risking revenue loss. Such physical inspections however, impede rather than facilitate trade. Control selectivity is therefore a key issue in customs administration reform. This paper shows how a sophisticated risk management method can facilitate trade by automatically and rationally selecting transactions, with the end result of actually enhancing revenue performance. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Money,Mortgages, and the Conquest of America

In colonial America, land acquired new liquidity when it became liable for debts. Though English property law maintained a firm distinction between land and chattel for centuries, in the American colonies, the boundary between the categories of real and personal property began to disintegrate. There, the novelty of easy foreclosure and consequent easy alienation of land made it possible for colonists to obtain credit, using land as a security. However, scholars have neglected the first instances in which a newly unconstrained practice of mortgage foreclosure appeared—the transactions through which colonists acquired land from indigenous people in the first place. In this article, I explore these early transactions for land, which took place across fundamental differences between colonists’ and native communities’ conceptions of money, land, and exchange itself. I describe how difference and dependence propelled the growth of the early American contact economy to make land into real estate, or the fungible commodity on the speculative market that it remains today.     

Contesting Legality in Authoritarian Contexts: Food Safety,Rule of Law and China's Networked Public Sphere

Since the introduction of the Internet, China's networked public sphere has become a critical site in which various actors compete to shape public opinion and promote or forestall legal and political change. This paper examines how members of an online public, the Tianya Forum, conceptualized and discussed law in relation to a specific event, the 2008 Sanlu milk scandal. Whereas previous studies suggest the Chinese state effectively controls citizens' legal consciousness via propaganda, this analysis shows that the construction of legality by the Tianya public was not a top‐down process, but a complex negotiation involving multiple parties. The Chinese state had to compete with lawyers and outspoken media to frame and interpret the scandal for the Tianya public and it was not always successful in doing so. Data show further how the online public framed the food safety incident as indicative of fundamental problems rooted in China's political regime and critiqued the state's instrumental use of law.     

Canadian prime ministers in the house of commons: Patterns of intervention

This paper explores the parliamentary activity of six Canadian prime ministers from St Laurent to Mulroney. Employing Hansard, each parliamentary utterance by a prime minister from 1949 to 1993 has been coded into one of four categories: answers to questions, speeches delivered, statements made and other interventions. Voting records have also been coded. Employing this database, the analysis compares and contrasts the prime ministers in terms of their political personalities and explores the overall scope and character of prime‐ministerial activism in the House throughout the past 40 years. Canadian profiles are compared with already existing British data in order to test generalisations concerning the diminishing presence of prime ministers in parliaments in Canada and Britain.