Gender,Race, and Intersectionality in Campaign Finance

Political Behavior - Campaign finance research has given greater attention to race and gender, but, due to data limitations, only separately. Using new data on the ethnoracial and gender...     

Question Hour Activity and Party Behaviour in India

Based on a unique data set of Indian legislators and their behaviour during Question Hour over a 30-year period (1980–2009), the paper establishes that there is a substantial gap in the volume of questions asked by legislators from national and subnational parties, even after accounting for party size and other covariates. Thus, despite increasing subnational party prominence in the electoral and executive arenas, national parties dominate activities to do with legislative oversight. The paper also explores mechanisms that may explain the difference in legislative activity between national and subnational party legislators.     

Islam,Militancy, and Politics in Pakistan: Insights From a National Sample

We use data from an innovative nationally representative survey of 6,000 Pakistanis in April 2009 to study beliefs about political Islam, Sharia, the legitimacy and efficacy of jihad, and attitudes towards specific militant organizations. These issues are at the forefront of U.S. policy towards Pakistan. Four results shed new light on the politics of militancy and Islamic identity in Pakistan. First, there is no relationship between measures of personal religiosity and the likelihood a respondent expresses highly sectarian sentiments. Second, militarized jihad is widely seen as legitimate in Pakistan but there are substantial regional differences in the acceptance of militarized jihad. Third, attitudes towards militant groups vary dramatically across groups, particularly when it comes to the efficacy of their actions. Fourth, while Pakistanis express massive levels of support for Sharia law, this is driven by its perceived connection with good governance, not by sympathy with the goals of militant groups claiming to implement it.     

The impact of no Child Left Behind on student achievement

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act compelled states to design school accountability systems based on annual student assessments. The effect of this federal legislation on the distribution of student achievement is a highly controversial but centrally important question. This study presents evidence on whether NCLB has influenced student achievement based on an analysis of state‐level panel data on student test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The impact of NCLB is identified using a comparative interrupted time series analysis that relies on comparisons of the test‐score changes across states that already had school accountability policies in place prior to NCLB and those that did not. Our results indicate that NCLB generated statistically significant increases in the average math performance of fourth graders (effect size 5 0.23 by 2007) as well as improvements at the lower and top percentiles. There is also evidence of improvements in eighth‐grade math achievement, particularly among traditionally low‐achieving groups and at the lower percentiles. However, we find no evidence that NCLB increased fourth‐grade reading achievement. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Tricking Posthumanism: From Deleuze to (Lacan) to Haraway

A lineage has been drawn between the immanent philosophy articulated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and the work of Donna Haraway, most notably by the nomadic feminist and immanentist Rosi Braidotti. However, while containing certain parallels via the process nature of their ontologies, upon further inspection, such an equivocation is unwarranted on the grounds that it fails to remain nuanced in distinguishing the precise ‘mechanism’ or midwife that gives birth to the continued proliferation of the flux of becoming. This disparity is exposed through the erection of a homology using Lacanian psychoanalysis that eases the passing from immanentism to Haraway by showing that the latter inscribes the obverse of L'Autre (the big Other) into the field of becoming unravelling privileged channels of desire. This results in an ingenuity that can never be pinned down by the signifier and, further, actively works to subvert it through ploy.     

“Good Deeds Aren’t Enough”: Point Four in Iran, 1949–1953

Iran enjoyed some of the earliest fruits and efforts of the Point Four programme, an initiative borne out of President Harry Truman’s 1949 inaugural address. Over the last decade, a robust literature on development theory and American foreign policy has emerged. That research reveals complex motivations and agendas. Point Four in Iran, specifically, offers a discrete, early picture of America’s broader effort to utilise technical assistance to elevate poor peoples’ standards of living and inoculate poor states from communist appeals. It is one of the landmark programmes during this genesis period. The Iranian government was amongst the first that the State Department approached to establish technical aid under this initiative, and, indeed, American aid to Iran continued into the 1970s. By mid-1953, however, larger and more direct aid absorbed this specific assistance and development effort to bolster the shah’s government, which gained secure power after an American Central Intelligence Agency and British intelligence—MI6—backed coup that same year. Scholars have argued that Truman’s foreign aid innovations reshaped United States foreign policy. The Point Four programme in Iran, however, also reveals the limits of that revolution.     

Due North? Do American Theories of Legislative Committees Apply to Canada?

Several theories of legislative organisation have been proposed to explain committee selection in American legislatures, but do these theories travel outside the United States? This paper tests whether these theories apply to data from the Canadian House of Commons. It was found that the distributive and partisan models of legislative organisation explain committee composition in Canada. In many cases, committees in the House of Commons are made up of preference outliers. As predicted by partisan models, it was also found that the governing party stacks committees with its members, but this is conditional upon the strength of the governing party.     

Agencification of Public Service Delivery in Nigeria： An Empirical Study of Selected Public Agencies in Lagos State

There have been efforts to establish agencies as part of a strategy to improve service delivery world-wide. In Nigeria, agencies have also been established at both the national and state levels. The Lagos State Government has also established various agencies to fulfill different government functions in the state. After many years, the activities of these agencies have improved the delivery of services to the people in Lagos State, but there is still much to be done. This is why this study examines agencification of public service delivery in Nigeria with reference to Lagos State. The study uses mixed methods and triangulated data to achieve the research objectives. Questionnaire was used to collect data from service users and departmental officials. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with key officials of the selected agencies. Key documents were also reviewed. The findings reveal： lack of human resources capacity, inadequate financial management skills, and poor management of service providers, and the environment of the people of Lagos State are not considered in the conception and the implementation of the service-delivery-driven agencies. The study therefore recommends that agencification of public service in Lagos State as conceived if properly implemented can contribute to effective public service delivery.