Competing Principals, Political Institutions, and Party Unity in Legislative Voting

Almost all legislators are subordinate to party leadership within their assemblies. Institutional factors shape whether, and to what degree, legislators are also subject to pressure from other principals whose demands may conflict with those of party leaders. This article presents a set of hypotheses on the nature of competing pressures driven by formal political institutions and tests the hypotheses against a new dataset of legislative votes from across 19 different countries. Voting unity is lower where legislators are elected under rules that provide for intraparty competition than where party lists are closed, marginally lower in federal than unitary systems, and the effects on party unity of being in government differ in parliamentary versus presidential systems. In the former, governing parties are more unified than the opposition, win more, and suffer fewer losses due to disunity. In systems with elected presidents, governing parties experience no such boosts in floor unity, and their legislative losses are more apt to result from cross-voting.     

Electoral Competition, Participation, and Government Responsiveness in Mexico

In this article I test two competing visions about how democracy produces responsive government. Electoral theories of democracy posit that elected governments are responsive to public demands because citizens are able to sanction bad politicians and select good ones. Participatory theories attribute responsiveness to a citizenry's ability to articulate demands and pressure government through a wider range of political action. I test hypotheses derived from these two approaches, using an original dataset that combines electoral, socioeconomic, and public-financial indicators for Mexico's 2,400 municipalities, from 1989 to 2000. The data show that electoral competition has no effect on municipal government performance. But the results are consistent with the hypothesis that nonelectoral participation causes improved performance. Thus, I suggest that the quality of municipal government in Mexico depends on an engaged citizenry and cooperation between political leaders and their constituents, rather than the threat of electoral punishment. I recommend that scholars broaden the study of government responsiveness to account for participatory strategies of political influence and critically assess the claims of those who would promote elections as a cure-all for poor democratic performance.     

The Capacities and Challenges of Faith-Based Human Service Organizations

This essay addresses four questions by comparing the management capacities and challenges of congregations, faith‐based organizations, and secular organizations that provide human services: (1) What role, if any, do congregations and faith‐based organizations currently play in the social service delivery system? (2) Are congregations interested in changing their role in the social service delivery system? (3) Compared to faith‐based and secular organizations, do congregations have the capacity to adapt to new roles in the social service delivery system? Finally, (4) compared to faith‐based and secular organizations, do congregations have similar service capacities and management challenges? The findings indicate that although more than half of congregations already provide some type of health or human services, they provide a narrower range of services, consider these services a lower priority, and seem to encounter more extensive management challenges than faith‐based and secular organizations.     

Putting the Resource-Based View of Strategy and Distinctive Competencies to Work in Public Organizations

A key to the success of public organizations is their ability to identify and build capacity, particularly their distinctive competencies, in order to produce the greatest value for key stakeholders. This article grounds this proposition in the resource-based view of organizations and presents a method for identifying and making use of distinctive competencies in the form of a "livelihood scheme"—a business model appropriate for the public sector—that links distinctive competencies to organizational aspirations and goals. The case of a major public sector training and consultancy unit that is part of the United Kingdom's National Health Service is used as illustration. A number of conclusions are offered in the form of a set of propositions tied to the resource-based view and related research issues. The results contribute to both public strategic management theory and practice.     

Wie lässt sich Demokratie am besten messen? Zur Konzeptqualität von Demokratie-Indizes

This article proposes a new instrument for the assessment of the concept quality of democracy indices. We evaluate six famous democracy measurement datasets along our instrument’s requirements and show that the indices perform quite differently: The Index on Defect Democracy receives the best scores, whereas the Freedom House Index gets the worst. In addition, we provide some new insights as to general weaknesses of democracy measurement.