Gouvernance hybride des parkings publics à Lubumbashi : quand la fiscalité informelle supporte la fiscalité formelle

“Hybrid governance” appears today as an emerging research current that focuses on the role of non-state institutions and actors to strengthen state institutions that lack legitimacy and capacity in developing countries. By examining the interactions between private and public actors involved in the governance of public motor parks in Lubumbashi, the second city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this article demonstrates that informal taxation can be a decisive support for the perception of an official parking tax.     

A Minor Player in the Global Game

The U.S.Department of Treasury’s decision to postpone its mid-April report labeling China a "currency manipulator" was all but expected.Beijing Review reporters Chen Wen and Liu Yunyun     

How Transparent are EU ‘Comitology’ Committees in Practice?

Much of the debate on transparency is normative in nature: more transparency is ‘good’ from the perspective of democratic accountability. After all, without information on what decisions are being taken and by whom, it will not be possible for various accountability forums to hold actors to account. This article goes beyond the rhetoric on the need for more transparency in the political system of the EU and examines, in practice as a matter of empirical research, how much transparency there really is. It also goes beyond a purely legal approach to access to information that depends upon the active participation of citizens and others in challenging refusals by specific institutions to grant access to specific documents. We are interested rather in the question as to what extent the institutions are systematically and pro‐actively providing access to their documents via the internet. We focus on the Register of Comitology of the European Commission as a relatively limited case study and, within this context, limit ourselves further to a study of all the documents published in the latest year for which a benchmark was available—2005. Are all comitology documents that exist in fact made available through this public register?     

Analysing Parliamentary Debate with Computer Assistance

The analysis of parliamentary debates is at the confluence of a number of developments in political science. What light can automated and semi‐automated techniques throw on such analysis? In this paper we compare two such approaches, one semi‐automated (Hamlet) and the other fully automated (Alceste). We use both approaches to identify the prominent themes in debate and to assess how far speakers who favour different positions adopt a distinct pattern of discourse. We seek to assess how far the two approaches yield convergent or divergent analyses. Selecting a second reading debate from the UK House of Commons on a private member's bill on abortion in July 1966, we are able to show similarities of analysis despite the detailed differences between the two approaches. In particular, the analysis in Hamlet al.lows identification of the extent to which individual speakers employ one type of vocabulary rather than another. Alceste is able to provide a statistical basis for the different classes of vocabulary that occur in the debate. However, the two programs rest upon quite different assumptions about the relationship between syntax and meaning, with implications for the practice of political science.     

Policymaking and policy analysis in Latin America—A return journey

This paper reviews and updates the conceptual approaches of the author's Journeys Towards Progress (1963). It focuses first on distinctions explaining differences in the path of policymaking and in its effectiveness. Distinctions are made between pressing and autonomously chosen policy problems, between privileged problems and neglected ones that must manage to “ride the coattails” of the former to receive attention, and between policy tasks that are tackled with more motivation than understanding and those with the opposite characteristic. Addressing then similarities in experience with policymaking, the paper first comments on fracasomania (the failure complex) and on the incapacity ever to be surprised at both consequences and determinants of under-development. Indirect and unanticipated effects of policies are illustrated through a Colombian example. A Concluding Lament suggests that the watch for side-effects must be unusually wide-angled in today's Latin America.