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.     

Competing Principals, Political Institutions, and Party Unity in Legislative Voting

Almost all legislators are subordinate to party leadership within their assemblies. Institutional factors shape whether, and to what degree, legislators are also subject to pressure from other principals whose demands may conflict with those of party leaders. This article presents a set of hypotheses on the nature of competing pressures driven by formal political institutions and tests the hypotheses against a new dataset of legislative votes from across 19 different countries. Voting unity is lower where legislators are elected under rules that provide for intraparty competition than where party lists are closed, marginally lower in federal than unitary systems, and the effects on party unity of being in government differ in parliamentary versus presidential systems. In the former, governing parties are more unified than the opposition, win more, and suffer fewer losses due to disunity. In systems with elected presidents, governing parties experience no such boosts in floor unity, and their legislative losses are more apt to result from cross-voting.     

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.     

Putting the Resource-Based View of Strategy and Distinctive Competencies to Work in Public Organizations

A key to the success of public organizations is their ability to identify and build capacity, particularly their distinctive competencies, in order to produce the greatest value for key stakeholders. This article grounds this proposition in the resource-based view of organizations and presents a method for identifying and making use of distinctive competencies in the form of a "livelihood scheme"—a business model appropriate for the public sector—that links distinctive competencies to organizational aspirations and goals. The case of a major public sector training and consultancy unit that is part of the United Kingdom's National Health Service is used as illustration. A number of conclusions are offered in the form of a set of propositions tied to the resource-based view and related research issues. The results contribute to both public strategic management theory and practice.     

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.