Street‐level bureaucrats,policy learning,and refugee resettlement: The case of Syrian refugees in Saskatoon,Canada

In late 2015 and early 2016, the Canadian government resettled 25,000 Syrian refugees within roughly a three‐month period. This initiative brought a much higher number of refugees to Canada than are usually accepted in that time frame and put pressure on the resettlement system. This article focuses on policy learning on the part of street‐level bureaucrats—employees of the organizations that do the work of resettling Government Assisted Refugees at the community level—and how they dealt with the pressure created by this situation. The findings indicate that the Syrian initiative exposed weaknesses in the existing system and created new obstacles with which street‐level bureaucrats working for Service Provider Organizations (SPOs) had to contend. Presented with an overwhelming strain on the system, street‐level bureaucrats at Saskatoon SPOs performed a real‐time evaluation of the system in which they work and devised solutions to issues as they arose.     

Public servants and politics: Developing political acuity in local government

A good relationship between council and senior staff is essential for the successful operation of the municipality. However, the academic treatment of the council-staff relationship has lagged real-world expectations. The purpose of this article is to extend the literature on council-staff relations by identifying the competencies associated with the concept of political acuity needed to maintain this good relationship.     

Gouvernance municipale et information: étude exploratoire sur l’utilisation optimale des données 311

This article presents exploratory research into the potential for using artificial intelligence to analyze information obtained through requests made to municipal non-emergency call centers/centres municipaux d’appels non urgents (CANU). The research identifies three possible uses of information from a CANU, either for internal management, service delivery or strategic decision-making. These uses of information are explored through the analysis of the City of Gatineau CANU. The results determine two sets of hypotheses to promote optimal use of the data collected using sophisticated digital tools. Research shows that CANUs could be information nodes dedicated to the processing, distribution and strategic analysis of information.     

Turf wars in government administration: Interdepartmental cooperation in the European Commission

One challenge for government administration is to reap the benefits of specialization while minimizing its negative side effects. In this article, I study the factors that motivate departments to contribute to the joint formulation of public policies. I derive testable hypotheses that discriminate between two competing motivations for interdepartmental cooperation. If department managers are concerned for the quality of public policy, I expect cooperation to be efficient. If, by contrast, departments compete for administrative turf, I expect cooperation to be inefficient and resources to be wasted. I test those hypotheses by studying all policy proposals adopted and published by the European Commission between 2015 and 2017—a total of approximately 4,000 cases. For politically salient proposals, I find that departments are more likely to contribute if they expect competing departments to become active, too. By contrast, the preparation of technical, non-salient proposals is left to the most specialized departments. Overall, my findings suggest that interdepartmental cooperation in the European Commission is significantly motivated by DGs' competition for administrative turf.     

Chic on Display

正Fashion is a way of life.Although it may be unique and based on cultural inclination,it is also a global language understood by all.Fashion can manifest itself in clothing,accessories,makeup,footwear and body posture,making it a diverse industry that is always relevant and dynamic.Being a fashion designer is all about telling a particular story through art,which I have been actively involved in for the past 10 years.     

Evaluating the forensic informativeness of mtDNA haplogroup H sub-typing on a Eurasian scale

The impact of phylogeographic information on mtDNA forensics has been limited to the quality control of published sequences and databases. In this work we use the information already available on Eurasian mtDNA phylogeography to guide the choice of coding-region SNPs for haplogroup H. This sub-typing is particularly important in forensics since, even when sequencing both HVRI and HVRII, the discriminating power is low in some Eurasian populations. We show that a small set (eight) of coding-region SNPs resolves a substantial proportion of the identical haplotypes, as defined by control-region variation alone. Moreover, this SNP set, while substantially increasing the discriminating efficiency in most Eurasian populations by roughly equal amounts, discloses population-specific profiles.     

Voting on public spending: Differences between public employees,transfer recipients,and private workers

Politicians who support higher public spending in the hope of gaining the support of transfer recipients, such as the aged, the unemployed, and those on welfare, have no reason to believe that the strategy will succeed; according to the evidence reviewed here, transfer recipients do not vote much differently on such issues from other voters. State and local employees have shown a clear preference for higher public spending, but their numbers are limited and the relative strength of their preference weak, so that their impact on voting outcomes has been only marginal.