State Attorneys General, Entrepreneurship, and Consumer Protection in the New Federalism

Although many scholars have acknowledged the important roleof states in regulatory enforcement, few have studied the decisionsof the state attorneys general to pursue particular multi-statelitigation actions. State attorneys general act as politicalentrepreneurs because they aggressively seek out market failuresin society to justify stronger regulation. Their motivationto serve the public comes from the fact that they are electedin 43 states and the office is often used as a springboard intohigher political office. A probit model analyzing the decisionto join seven high-profile multi-state enforcement actions thatlook place between 1996 and 1998 reveals that state citizenideology and the institutional structure of the office havethe strongest effects on the decision to join a case.     

On the Nature of Tolerance: Dichotomous or Continuous?*

The purpose of this article is to reconsider the claim made recently by Mondak and Sanders that political tolerance ought to be thought to be a dichotomous rather than continuous variable. Using data from both Russia and the United States, I demonstrate that those Mondak and Sanders regard as uniquely tolerant are most likely no more than people who were given insufficient opportunity to express their intolerance. Even if such a phenomenon of “absolute tolerance” exists (all ideas expressed in all ways are to be tolerated), it is sufficiently rare that few practical implications are indicated for those doing empirical work on political tolerance and intolerance. * I appreciate the valuable comments of Jeffcry Mondak on an earlier version of this paper.     

The Reform of Public Administration in Northern Ireland: From Principles to Practice

The system of public administration in Northern Ireland has, perhaps inevitably, been of secondary concern during 30 years of inter-communal sectarian strife. Faced with combating terrorism, successive United Kingdom governments would not consider reform of the province's local public administration, pending a resolution of the wider constitutional imbroglio. Consequently, much of the system atrophied, becoming progressively more cumbersome and ill-equipped to deal with the requirements of modern government. Moreover, to help minimise charges of sectarian discrimination, quangos provided many public services, compounding the 'democratic deficit' of Direct Rule. In 1998, the Belfast Agreement (also known as the Good Friday Agreement), offered a breakthrough in the search for a durable settlement that could command cross-community support. As part of subsequent devolved executive's Programme for Government, a Review of Public Administration (RPA) was launched to consider sub-regional governance arrangements with a view to enhancing democratic accountability and improving efficiency through streamlining the current arrangements. To that end, the RPA has been committed to adhering to clear principles on which any credible reform should be based. While devolution itself has proved fitful, the work of the RPA has continued apace. Although embarking on reforms within functioning devolution is ministers' preferred option, there is a determination to continue the reform process irrespective of the present impasse. This paper outlines the issues, values and concepts that might shape the principles for conducting a review before considering the particular context within Northern Ireland. It also considers the impediments to overhauling the present arrangements and speculates on the likely outcome.     

William Friedman's Bletchley park diary: A new source for the history of Anglo-American intelligence cooperation

The great American cryptologist William F. Friedman along with two other colleagues visited Bletchley Park and other British code-breaking facilities in the spring of 1943. A recently discovered diary that Friedman kept while in the UK gives a meticulous account of his activities during the mission. the diary sheds light on the role Friedman and his colleagues played in negotiating the 1943 Travis–Strong agreement between the United States and Great Britain and helps resolve problems with the dating of that agreement. The diary gives Friedman's mid-war assessment of the British codebreaking effort. The diary also gives a portrait of Friedman himself as none of his other writings do.     

Empowerment,Deliberative Development,and Local-Level Politics in Indonesia: Participatory Projects as a Source of Countervailing Power

The salience of the concept of “empowerment” has been deductively claimed more often than carefully defined or inductively assessed by development scholars and practitioners alike. We use evidence from a mixed methods examination of the Kecamatan (subdistrict) Development Project (KDP) in rural Indonesia, which we define here as development interventions that build marginalized groups’ capacity to engage local-level governing elites using routines of deliberative contestation. “Deliberative contestation” refers to marginalized groups’ practice of exercising associational autonomy in public forums using fairness-based arguments that challenge governing elites’ monopoly over public resource allocation decisions. Deliberative development interventions such as KDP possess a comparative advantage in building the capacity to engage because they actively provide open decision-making spaces, resources for argumentation (such as facilitators), and incentives to participate. They also promote peaceful resolutions to the conflicts they inevitably spark. In the KDP conflicts we analyze, marginalized groups used deliberative contestation to moderately but consistently shift local-level power relations in contexts with both low and high preexisting capacities for managing conflict. By contrast, marginalized groups in non-KDP development conflicts from comparable villages used “mobilizational contestation” to generate comparatively erratic shifts in power relations, shifts that depended greatly on the preexisting capacity for managing conflict.