‘They are not my people’: Barack Obama on lobbying and lobbyists

This article traces the development of Barack Obama's sometimes ambiguous and sometimes antithetical attitudes and relationship to lobbyists. During his childhood in Indonesia, his stepfther was a lobbyist for a US oil company. Obama engaged himself in what many would consider to be lobbying in his career as a ‘community activist’ in Chicago. As an Illinois state senator, he befriended lobbyists and enjoyed poker and basketball games with them, in addition to raising about two thirds of his campaign finance from big business, unions, and political action committees. In the US Senate, Obama involved in ethics reforms that curbed the influence of lobbyists. His presidential campaign rhetoric was hard‐hitting, often decrying the irresponsibility of lobbyists while he had a number of lobbyists in key positions in his campaign team. On his first full day in office, President Obama signed an executive order restricting lobbyists from working in his administration. He later banned registered lobbyists from having personal meeting with officials about economic stimulus projects. Both these pledges have, however, had unforeseen or unwelcome consequences. More recently, Obama decided to ban lobbyists from membership of federal advisory panels but continues to meet frequently with favored lobbyists and corporate executives behind closed doors. The article questions whether Obama's history in this area adds up to a coherent or principled track record or whether it simply relates a series of inconsistent and political decisions. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Legal Mobilization and Analogical Legal Framing: Feminist Litigators’ Use of Race–Gender Analogies

We investigate how cause lawyers articulate their demands in court. We do so by examining feminist legal briefs submitted in US Supreme Court cases from 1970 to the present, specifically focusing on the use of race–gender analogical legal framing. We explore the frequency and trends in the use of such arguments as well as the forms these arguments take, including how race–gender analogies parallel frame bridging and transformation. Additionally, we also investigate why activists choose to deploy race–gender analogies in their legal framing and discern that different political, legal, and social contexts can produce different uses of the race–gender analogy.     

Measuring Disparity in Government Procurement: Problems with Using Census Data in Estimating Availability

The Supreme Court's ruling in City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson (1989) has restricted the use of government procurement assistance programs for minorities and women without the prerequisite support of a disparity study. Recently, an increasing number of disparity studies have been rejected by the courts as "junk science" and the related programs have been ruled unconstitutional. A central issue in these cases has been the approach used to estimate the availability of minority and women firms. Data from the Economic Census are commonly used as the basis for these availability estimates. However, there are significant problems and limitations with the Census data relative to the Croson guideline that the availability of women and minority firms should reflect the number of qualified, willing, and able firms. Given the number and difficulty of the required adjustments to the Census data, it is unlikely that these data will provide availability estimates that are accurate enough to allow for valid statistical tests of an inference of discriminatory exclusion. If minimizing court challenges is a goal of the public administrator who is responsible for the program, then the recommendation here is that a primary source of availability data should be considered. Furthermore, the information system needed to support the women and minority assistance programs should be designed and installed prior to initiating the program.     

Targeting the Motivated? Ethnicity and the Pre‐emptive Use of Government Repression

Research on government repression often focuses on the comparison between states over time and provides little insight about the targets of repression within a state. This article unpacks government repression against different ethnic groups. It argues that non‐democratic governments use pre‐emptive and targeted repression against ethnic groups that are discriminated, strong, or have a history of protest or rebellion in order to prevent future ethnic rebellions. For democratic governments, on the other hand, the cost of pre‐emptive repression is too high. The article tests this argument in a quantitative analysis of government‐group dyads. It finds at least partial support for some implications of the argument: Autocratic governments use more repression than democracies against discriminated groups, but only when they are also weak, and against groups with a history of protest. There is little evidence that regimes of either type respond to previous violent mobilization or group strength with repression.     

抗击经济衰退：象和龙

由美国引发的经济危机已经席卷全球,无论是西方发达国家和地区如日本、欧盟,还是发展中国家如印度、中国,都已笼罩在全球经济衰退的阴影中。本文探讨作为正在崛起的亚洲大国——印度和中国,应采取怎样的措施遏制全球经济危机对本国经济造成更严重的伤害,以及印中两国如何借鉴对方在应对经济危机过程中采取的有效政策以尽快重新走上经济发展的正轨。     

Key challenges in Malawi’s paprika supply chain: new insights into contract farming

Contract farming is a vital tool for linking small-scale farmers with modern supply chains. This study explored challenges resulting from contracting in the paprika supply chain in Malawi. The study used focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and email correspondence with 100 supply chain participants. The identified challenges include: inadequate input provision via the contract, a lack of opportunities to bargain and participate in contract design, and side-selling. While the contract secured the outlet for paprika, it failed to provide a reliable paprika supply for the contracting company. Thus, Malawi’s case analyses the potential of contract farming to champion the development of vulnerable economies.     

Diffusion of Corporate Risk‐Management Characteristics: Perspectives of Chief Audit Executives through a Survey Approach

This study examines how corporate risk‐management characteristics in Australian public universities have diffused under an environment of conflicting management cultures. The findings reveal that corporate risk‐management characteristics have diffused in a pluralist form to satisfy stakeholders of different management approaches across its governance levels as opposed to a unilateral form aligned to the corporate approach. The accepted practice of this adapted version challenges the existing notion that the adoption of corporate control processes in the public sector is problematic, and provides insights into the emergence of a hybrid control process to address the needs of multiple stakeholders. These findings have policy implications for defining a new hybrid governance‐control paradigm for the public sector as an alternative to the corporate‐influenced control paradigm, and provide avenues for further research to confirm the phenomenon with other corporate control processes, public‐sector entities, and if so its impact on effective governance.     

The political advantage of a volatile market: the relationship between Presidential popularity and the ‘investor fear gauge’

• The Chicago Board Options Exchange's (CBOE) Volatility Index (VIX) is the premier established benchmark of near‐term market volatility. It is also referred to as the ‘investor fear gauge’ because it provides a consistent measure of market turmoil. We examine the VIX as it relates to Presidential popularity as indicated by the Gallup Organization's ongoing poll of US Presidential approval ratings. Our analysis indicates that the expected volatility of the market is highly related to Presidential approval. We then examine the strength and implications of this relationship in order to further establish the link between the economy and Presidential approval.

Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Color of Devolution: Race, Federalism, and the Politics of Social Control

In this article, we seek to advance scholarship on the origins and consequences of policy devolution by analyzing state decisions to give local authorities control over welfare policy. The first part of our analysis explores the political forces that systematically influence state decisions to cede policy control to lower-level jurisdictions. In this context, we propose a general Racial Classification Model of how race influences social policy choice. Our findings support this model as well as social control perspectives on welfare provision. Building on these results, we then show how modest but consistent racial effects on policy choices concatenate to produce large disparities in the overall policy regimes that racial groups encounter in the federal system. The empirical findings illuminate the fundamental role that federalism plays in the production of contemporary racial disparities and in the recent turn toward neoliberal and paternalist policies in American poverty governance.