Car ownership and welfare‐to‐work

This study examines the role of car ownership in facilitating employment among recipients under the current welfare‐to‐work law. Because of a potential problem with simultaneity, the analysis uses predicted car ownership constructed from two instrumental variables, insurance premiums and population density for car ownership. The data come from a 1999–2000 survey of TANF recipients in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The empirical results show a significant independent contribution of car ownership on employment. The presence of an predicted ownership is associated with a 9 percentage point increase in the odds of being employed. Moreover, the results indicate that lowering insurance premiums by $100 can increase the odds of employment by 4 percentage points. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Interministerielle Netzwerke: Formale und informelle Koordinationsstrukturen bei der Vorbereitung der deutschen Verhandlungspositionen zur Regierungskonferenz 1996

How do German ministries manage the preparation of national negotiation positions for EU intergovernmental conference? After a survey of the debate on organizational deficits of the interministerial coordination in Germany, we are consulting decision- and organization-theoretic approaches in IR. Drawing on organizational economics we concretise and supplement these older frameworks. We conceive the management of a governmental organization as a specific aggregation of heterogeneous preferences and information. Applying social network analysis we take into account formal as well as informal aspects of coordination channels. The objective of this article is to make visible the complex structures and processes that constitute foreign policy making, and to provide a preliminary assessment of its efficiency.     

Über die Notwendigkeit und Bestimmung liberaler Bürgertugenden

Numerous sociological studies describe the status of contemporary liberal democracy as frightening. Taking up these investigations, this article asks for the pre-conditions of liberal democracy, particularly for their moral foundations. In contrast to the classic political theory of liberalism, these moral foundations are not assumed to be locked in the institutional order of the state, but in a certain morality of the citizens. The first target of the investigation is to proof that a moral quality of the citizens is a necessary prerequisite for the persistence of a liberal democracy. The second aim of the work is to show how these moral orientations (liberal virtues) should be shaped within each citizen. This is clarified by discussing three liberal thinkers (Charles Larmore, John Rawls, and Ralf Dahrendorf). The so distilled central liberal virtue is formulated as follows: The political convictions of the citizens must be justifiable for everybody, i.e. also to citizens with a different world view. Political convictions and values, which are expressed during the political process and which influence the voting-behaviour, should therefore not rely exclusively on one’s own set of moral values. The work closes with a discussion of the implications of this normative claim.     

Culture Wars,Secular Realignment,and the Gender Gap in Party Identification

Changes in the U.S. partisan balance over the past decade are often attributed to the enhanced political salience of cultural issues. Yet as white men have continued to become more Republican in recent years, white women increasingly identify with the Democrats. To the extent that cultural issues are influencing this partisan change, men and women must be responding differently to this cultural agenda. Using a pooled ANES data set from 1988 through 2000, I explore the extent to which cultural values are responsible for this gender realignment. Findings suggest that salient cultural issues influence the partisan choices of both men and women, however in somewhat different ways. For women, the issues themselves—reproductive rights, female equality, and legal protection for homosexuals—have become increasingly important determinants of party identification. For men, the influence of cultural conflict on partisanship is argued to be equally pervasive, albeit less direct.     

What to Do When Stakeholders Matter: The Case of Problem Formulation for the African American Men Project of Hennepin County, Minnesota

We propose a series of stakeholder analyses designed to help organizations—especially governments—think and act strategically during the process of problem formulation in order to advance the common good. Specifically, we argue that at least five sets of analyses are necessary, including the creation of (1) a power versus interest grid; (2) a stakeholder influence diagram; (3) bases of power–directions of interest diagrams; (4) a map for finding the common good and structuring a winning argument; and (5) diagrams indicating how to tap individual stakeholder interests to pursue the common good. What the analyses do is help to transform a seemingly "wicked problem"—for example, how to produce better outcomes for African American men aged 18–30—into something more tractable, and therefore amenable to collective action. In other words, stakeholder analysis can be used to link political rationality with technical rationality so that support can be mobilized for substantive progress.     

American Public Administration and Impacts of International Governance

Increasingly, public administration in the United States operates in a densely interconnected international system in which local decisions and actions may trigger global repercussions—and vice versa—and the fate of communities in one region is bound to the choices of decision makers elsewhere. Administrative actors have become enmeshed in a complicated, interwoven pattern of governance in ways that shape actions, issues, and opportunities for influencing administrative agencies at national, state, and local levels. These developments call for a critical reappraisal of our inherited notions of governance, management, and accountability. Terrorist tragedy and responses to it call attention to these themes, but they apply broadly across the spectrum of governance challenges. To demonstrate this point, we analyze some implications of transnational governance for the institutions and practices of U.S. public management, with particular attention to another subject: environmental policy and management. A conclusion is that the public administration community must adjust traditional practices to facilitate the effective management of the global processes that, in turn, reshape the world.     

The Danes and Europe: From EC 1972 to Euro 2000 – Elections, Referendums and Attitudes

Within Europe, the Danish electorate is the one that has most often expressed its opinion about the European Union in elections and in national referendums. Votes and attitudes are analysed for the five elections to the European Parliament between 1979 and 1999 and in the six referendums – from the first on membership of the EC in 1972 to the September 2000 referendum on acceptance of the euro, the European single currency. The article gives an overview of the development of Danish public opinion in relation to the European Union from 1960 to 2000, the turnouts at referendums, and the elections and results for the European Parliament. It is shown that since Denmark joined the EU, public opinion has fluctuated greatly, although the balance among Danish European Parliament members has remained stable. The reasons for the frequent use of referendums in Denmark and a thematic outline of the six referendums are put forward. The article concludes with a comprehensive analysis of public attitudes towards the referendum on the euro in 2000. It is shown that regional electoral patterns have vanished, but underlying attitudes are manifested in the public.