Studying North Korea through North Korean migrants: lessons from the field

This article examines the use of North Korean defectors’ accounts as a source of information for studying the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Information from defectors fills a vital knowledge gap and improves our understanding of North Korean politics, economics, and society. Witness accounts and interview data collected from people who were born in North Korea but have since left have been widely used by journalists, government agencies, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and academics. There are, however, serious methodological issues in collecting, organizing, and interpreting information derived from defectors’ accounts. Selection and demographic biases, power relations between researchers and interviewees, monetary incentives, and language barriers are among those issues. We propose focus group discussions and participatory observation as complementary methods of data collection to mitigate the shortfalls of relying on individual interviews.     

Regional Public Sector Organizations: A broader taxonomic classification to cross-pollinate empirical research

The present scholarship on cross-boundary organizations of local governments often splinters its focus and investigates narrow species of organizations with specific powers or unique policy domains. However, many organizations share common governance structures and mechanisms. Investigating these commonalities from a broader perspective permits stronger cross-pollination of knowledge and sharpens generalizable theories of governance and administration. In this article, I first provide easily and unambiguously measurable criteria capturing a genus I term Regional Public Sector Organizations (RPSOs). These criteria rely on a rescaled common definition of International Governmental Organizations (IGOs). In the United States, this broad genus includes many species of public authorities, regional councils, and policy-specific organizations. Terminology may differ in other nations, but the underlying idea sustains. The second contribution is five research questions largely inspired by IGO scholarship. Considering the parallels of RPSOs to IGOs can chart a rigorous, empirical path toward more coherent theoretical conversations on regional governance.     

Enhancing Precision and Clarity in the Study of Policy Narratives: An Analysis of Climate and Air Issues in Delhi,India

The study of policy narratives is challenged by inconsistencies and a need for more precise definitions and measurements. The goals of this article are to build precision and clarity in the study of policy narratives by developing a network‐based approach—the ego‐alter dyad—for coding characters and their interactions around a policy issue and then to illustrate this approach in the analysis of air and climate issues in Delhi, India. The empirical results show that (1) the same actors are often heroes and villains, (2) heroes and villains are associated with different actions but with similar victims or beneficiaries, (3) narrators differ in their propensity to tell hero‐heavy or villain‐heavy policy narratives, and (4) the proportion of hero‐heavy or villain‐heavy policy narratives changes over time and differs across subtopics. The article concludes with a research agenda for further theoretical and methodological advancement in studying policy narratives.     

The Complexity of Social Outcomes from Cooperative,Competitive, and Individualistic Reward Systems

Previous research on cooperative and competitive reward systems has investigated the relation between extreme cooperative and competitive conditions, along with an intermediate noninterdependent neutral condition, to numerous outcome variables. This study added two additional conditions to these three usual conditions, between the neutral midpoint and the cooperative or competitive extremes, to see if these intermediate conditions might be distinctive in the outcomes they produced. The study used 240 participants, divided into groups of three that played a board game under these five different reward conditions. Participants' attitudes toward self, others, and task were then assessed and analyzed along with objective measures of performance, measures of self-esteem, state and trait anxiety, and results coded from an autobiographical report in game-defined roles. Results indicated that the intermediate cooperative condition was distinctively different from the extreme cooperative condition in predicted ways, and that the intermediate competitive condition was distinctively different from the extreme competitive condition, but in unpredicted ways. The research also demonstrated that an individualistic condition, which had previously been thought to produce neither a cooperative nor competitive social orientation, in fact produced both, raising questions as to whether reward interdependence, as researchers have defined it, is really the cause of cooperation and competition.