Bureaucrats in the Social Policy Process: Administrative Policy Entrepreneurs and the Case of Working Nation

Much of the contemporary literature on Australian social policy tends to focus on broad environmental and institutional variables and to downplay the importance of the social policy decision-making process and its participants. Yet the study of specific cases in social policy-making reveals that senior administrators often have a significant impact on the direction of social policy reform. The income support reforms adopted as part of the fomer Federal Labor government's Working Nation package illustrate the potential for bureaucrats to influence the direction of change. Senior administrative officers within the former Commonwealth Department of Social Security played a crucial role in promoting reforms which increased the generosity of the means test on unemployment payments. These bureaucrats behaved as policy entrepreneurs and worked in a strategic manner to garner support for and reduce opposition to their proposals within the decision-making process.     

Misappropriation of Institutions: Some Lessons from the Environmental Dimension of the NAFTA Investor-State Dispute Settlement Process

Trade regimes at all levels have confronted the dual challenge of rapidly expanding foreign direct investment, and the vigorous growth of international environmental regimes. Attempts to develop a global investment regime have encountered resistance, not least from environmental interests. At the same time, regional trade regimes have sought to address both the environmental and the investment agenda but in a very different manner. This article looks at problems encountered with the investor-state dispute settlement process established by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The institutional dimension of this process is largely drawn from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and existing international institutions for commercial arbitration. The article traces some of the difficulties encountered in attempting to use institutions designed for a specific purpose and implemented in one organizational context, to achieve a different purpose in another organizational context. It discusses the problems that arise when institutions appropriate for settling commercial disputes between private actors are used as the basis for balancing private interests and public goods, the environment in particular. It highlights the importance of a more developed understanding of the interplay between institutions and organizations at the international level so as to avoid undesired outcomes.     

Protesting via the Null Ballot: An Assessment of the Decision to Cast an Invalid Vote in Latin America

Rates of invalid voting in Latin America are among the highest in the world. Yet, scholars have not reached an agreement about whether these votes are driven by voter protest and, if so, what voters are protesting. Understanding whether these high invalid vote rates signify anti-democratic tendencies is particularly relevant given recent recessions in democratic quality across the region. This paper presents a theoretical framework and empirical tests using individual level data from 14 Latin American countries to show that invalid voting in presidential contests is used by individuals, particularly those high in knowledge, to protest poor government performance. However, invalid voting is not, on balance, an anti-system behavior. While political alienation differentially predicts invalid voting in countries with mandatory vote laws, the link between performance assessments and self-reported invalid voting is consistent across various contextual features that scholars link to invalid voting behavior.     

The Phenomenon of Death

Daniel Callahan’s essay raises big and important questions about how the biotechnological project to extend life and defeat aging may bring many undesirable consequences. At worst, it will usher in a new age of extended debility, with able minds trapped for decades in enfeebled bodies or able bodies lingering for decades with enfeebled minds. At best, our future success at extending vigorous life will create serious disruptions of the social order. But the essay fails to illuminate, more fully, the nature of death as a human problem, or to establish the basis for setting limits on the worst excesses of the bio-immortality project.

One of the Boys? Gender Similarities and Differences in Human Capital among Senior Civil Servants in Denmark

Studies have shown how women are underrepresented in senior executive positions in public and private organizations. Equal representation matters both for reasons of performance and legitimacy, and, to understand the mechanisms behind the glass ceiling, we explore if the women making it to the top of the Danish civil service differ from the men who do so. We want to understand if senior executive positions require something different of women than men. Using a dataset consisting of the entire career trajectory of all senior civil servants in Denmark, we find that, on numerous human capital dimensions, the women and men making it to the top are quite similar, for example, in terms of tenure and educational level. However, we find on the one hand that men are more often employed in the most prestigious departments and, at the same time, it seems that men with a profile deviating from the norm are more likely to make it to the top than women. This may indicate that the most prestigious positions – also in terms of early-career positions – are less accessible to women, and that women are less willing to apply for jobs outside their usual domain, or that those responsible for recruitment are less willing to take a chance on a woman with a slightly unorthodox profile. Hence, our study indicates that greater interest should be paid to the dynamics keeping women at lower levels of the hierarchy and possibly to encourage them to apply for top positions.     

The Changing Faces of Contemporary Tourism

Tourism, a domain of considerable importance in the contemporary world, has long been overlooked by social scientists, but has recently become a field attracting a growing body of research. In sociology, the relation between tourism and modernity at first constituted the issue of principal interest, the discourse focusing on the extent to which modern Western tourists seek authentic experiences on their trip. The article discusses the changes in the terms of the discourse, contingent upon the growing similarity of the world in the wake of globalization, the emergence of the “post-tourist,” and the diversification in the composition of tourists, with the growth in the number of travelers from non-Western countries. The question of the limits of the future expansion of the tourist system is raised in conclusion.

Why can't Europe save itself? A note on a structural failure

Europe's Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has been struck by one financial crisis after another. Yes despite many bold new initiatives, instability and uncertainty persist. Why can't Europe save itself? The answer, this chapter argues, lies in a structural failure. EMU lacks a credible mechanism to cope with the threat of imbalances within the group – a framework to manage the European region's internal payments problems. The challenge was foreseen from the beginning. How could a regional monetary union manage the risk of fiscal imbalances among its members? Europe might have turned to the USA for inspiration. For analytical purposes, the USA too can be considered as a regional monetary union comparable to EMU, facing the same fundamental challenge. America's solution was to create a permanent ‘transfer union’, featuring more or less automatic flows of funds through the federal budget at the centre. But European policy-makers chose otherwise, for reasons that go to the very heart of their ongoing integration project. EMU is a league of sovereign states, each determined to retain for itself as many rights and privileges as possible. In such a structure, a permanent transfer union never had a chance; and since no adequate substitute has yet been found, Europe is forced to pay a high price in terms of instability and lost growth.