A minimax procedure for electing committees

A new voting procedure for electing committees, called the minimax procedure, is described. Based on approval balloting, it chooses the committee that minimizes the maximum Hamming distance to voters’ ballots, where these ballots are weighted by their proximity to other voters’ ballots. This minimax outcome may be diametrically opposed to the outcome obtained by aggregating approval votes in the usual manner, which minimizes the sum of the Hamming distances and is called the minisum outcome. The manipulability of these procedures, and their applicability when election outcomes are restricted in various ways, are also investigated. The minimax procedure is applied to the 2003 Game Theory Society election of a council of 12 new members from a list of 24 candidates. By rendering outlying voters less influential and not antagonizing any voters too much, it arguably would have produced a committee more representative of the interests of all voters than the minisum committee that was elected.     

Transitional Justice and the Reform of History Education

Where does history education fit into transitional justice andhow can it contribute to the goals of transitional justice?The contemporary understanding of transitional justice has broadenedto encompass more than just prosecutions, reparations, preventingimpunity, and building rule of law. Transitional justice goalsnow extend to truth telling, restoring the dignity and preservingthe memory of victims, building peace, creating respect forhuman rights and democracy, and to reconciliation. Tools forachieving these goals now include truth commissions and commemorations.But this list has not until now included how the historicalnarrative of the group(s) involved in conflict must change asa part of transition; and education, while often invoked whenthe topic of ‘never again’ is raised, has been largelyabsent from the transitional justice discourse. Neither thelarger education system nor the teaching of history –both what is taught and how – has been considered by theinstitutions transitional justice has aimed to reform. Thisarticle considers why history education matters, what conditionscomplicate its reform and what recommendations can begin tobe offered with regard to the relationship between history educationand transitional justice.     

Use of Force

This issue of Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, isdevoted principally to the use of force, a topic that has dominatedacademic debate and preoccupied practitioners. For academics,the question is: what distinguishes police officers and theorganisations in which they operate from others, particularlythose growing legions of private security operatives, un-swornpolice auxiliaries, and sundry officials with law enforcementpowers? The orthodox answer is that the police enjoy a ‘monopolyof legitimate force’ over their fellow citizens (a viewthat has its origins in the pioneering work of Bittner, 1970).That orthodoxy has increasingly been criticised in the faceof the obvious fact that bouncers, store detectives, securityguards of all kinds, and many others also exercise ‘legitimateforce’ in ejecting drunken customers from pubs and clubs,apprehending shoplifters, and defending     

Present but Not Accounted For? Gender Differences in Civic Resource Acquisition

We investigate the sources of an important form of social inequality: the social processes by which men and women acquire participatory resources in organizations. In particular, we investigate the extent to which men and women acquire civic skills and are targets for political recruitment within churches. Integrating theory about social interaction within an organizational structure, we hypothesize that the ways in which women gain politically relevant resources from the church are simply different from those of men. Three factors explain the institutional treatment of women in churches: (1) women's political contributions are devalued; (2) women respond to social cues more than men do; (3) women respond to political cues from clergy—especially female clergy—whereas men do not. Our findings of gender differences in civic resource acquisition provide a more nuanced treatment of the mobilization process and have broad implications for the relationship between political difference and participatory democracy .     

The Capacities and Challenges of Faith-Based Human Service Organizations

This essay addresses four questions by comparing the management capacities and challenges of congregations, faith‐based organizations, and secular organizations that provide human services: (1) What role, if any, do congregations and faith‐based organizations currently play in the social service delivery system? (2) Are congregations interested in changing their role in the social service delivery system? (3) Compared to faith‐based and secular organizations, do congregations have the capacity to adapt to new roles in the social service delivery system? Finally, (4) compared to faith‐based and secular organizations, do congregations have similar service capacities and management challenges? The findings indicate that although more than half of congregations already provide some type of health or human services, they provide a narrower range of services, consider these services a lower priority, and seem to encounter more extensive management challenges than faith‐based and secular organizations.     

Civil Service Reform as National Security: The Homeland Security Act of 2002

The events of 9/11 have influenced policy making in public administration. The Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created the Department of Homeland Security, contained language that empowered the secretary of homeland security and the director of the Office of Personnel Management to establish a personnel management system outside the normal provisions of the federal civil service. Why did civil service reform succeed as part of this legislation when previous attempts at large‐scale reform had failed? A case analysis of the enactment of civil service reform in the Homeland Security Act points to theories of policy emergence and certain models of presidential and congressional policy making. In this case, civil service reform became associated with national security instead of management reform. An assessment of the rhetorical arguments used to frame this policy image offers a powerful explanation for the adoption of the personnel management reforms in the Homeland Security Act. This case has implications for understanding how policy makers might approach future management reform agendas.     

Public–Private Partnerships: An International Performance Review

Public–private partnerships are enjoying a global resurgence in popularity, but there is still much confusion around notions of partnership, what can be learned from our history with partnerships, and what is new about the partnership forms that are in vogue today. Looking at one particular family of public–private partnerships, the long-term infrastructure contract, this article argues that evaluations thus far point to contradictory results regarding their effectiveness. Despite their continuing popularity with governments, greater care is needed to strengthen future evaluations and conduct such assessments away from the policy cheerleaders.     

Democratization,International Knowledge Institutions,and Global Governance

The central problem of democracy has long been theorized as how to place appropriate constraints on the responsible exercise of power. Today, this problem is most acute in global governance. This article examines the rapid rise in the creation of international knowledge institutions, arguing that these institutions reflect a growing effort by nations and publics to assert democratic constraints on the on the global exercise of power through their ability to structure processes of reasoning and deliberation in global society. Specifically, the article argues for the need to attend carefully to processes of knowledge‐making in international institutions, including the roles of international institutions in setting standards for the exercise of reasoning, their contributions to the making of global kinds through their work in classifying and reclassifying the objects of international discourse, and through their roles in opening up and constraining participation in international deliberation. The article concludes that the construction and deployment of policy‐relevant knowledge are a significant source of power in their own right in global governance that need to be subject to their own democratic critique.     

Competition and Selection in Municipal Bond Sales: Evidence from Missouri

This article describes the results of an interest cost analysis of local government debt issuance in the State of Missouri. In Missouri the vast majority of municipal bonds are sold on a “no bid” basis. We discuss the theoretical arguments for and against competition and selection. Then we determine the degree to which cost differences exist while correcting for any potential selection bias. We use data on local government general obligation bonds sold from May 2004 to May 2005 provided by the Missouri State Auditor's office. We find that this substantial lack of competition imposes significant costs on Missouri governments.