Power,Policy and Co-ordination in Law Reform: a Civil Servant and Town Planning Law, 1929–1930

The process of turning policy into legislation has been the subject of intense debates with some emphasising 'pressure groups', some pointing to Members of Parliament and others stressing the importance of civil servants with their own strong beliefs. This article argues that a particular type of civil service role has not been explored: we need to look at the civil servant who co-ordinates the process of reform. He or she starts with no particular commitment but seeks to provide a framework for legislation which can respond to contrasting and, on some occasions, even mutually inconsistent ideas. Co-ordination is in itself a form of power, and its significance can be seen in the compromises and gaps which are often found in government legislation and which are frequently the product of the co-ordinating role with its search for some minimal level of agreement and 'workable' drafts. The case-study for this analysis of law-making is the strained attempt to reform planning law in the years 1929–1932 in such a way as to make the law an instrument for preserving the countryside and improving housing and city conditions. It was a major attempt at social engineering and highly contentious for contemporaries. It is the essence of this type of law-reform that it simultaneously changes past law and, because it is an administratively co-ordinated compromise, it also produces problems which demand further reform within a few years.     

Le juge constitutionnel,self-made man du bon usage des droits de l'homme

Sans résumé     

Reviews

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Harry Gelman, The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of Detente. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984, 268 pp. £9.95.

Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience. Politics and History Since 1917. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, xiii + 222 pp. £15.00.

Shugo Minagawa, Supreme Soviet Organs: Functions and Institutional Development of Federal and Republican Presidia and Standing Commissions, Nagoya: University of Nagoya Press, 1985, xxi + 346 pp., 5000 yen.

Pekka Sutela, Socialism, Planning and Optimality. A study in Soviet economic thought (Helsinki, The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters). Commentationes Scientiarum Socialium vol 25. 1984, 230 pp. No price.

Christopher T. Saunders, ed., East‐West Trade and Finance in the World Economy. London: Macmillan, 1985, ix + 338 pp., £30.00.

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Thomas F. Remington, Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia. Ideology and Industrial Organization, 1917–1921, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984, x + 222 pp., $19.95.

Teodor Shanin, Russia as a ‘Developing Society’: The Roots of Otherness: Russia's Turn of Century, Volume 1, Basingstoke and London, Macmillan, 1985, XVI + 268 pp., £27.50 h/c, £8.95 p/b.

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Postshelter adjustment of children from violent families

Few studies have examined the adjustment of battered women and their children after exiting domestic violence shelters. Participants were 62 women who had endured severe partner abuse, completed a shelter program with their children, and resided in the community for at least 6 months. Field interviews concerned mothers' and children's abuse histories and included measures of maternal depression, maternal trauma, and child behavior problems. Nearly all women had lived violence free since shelter exit. Child internalizing behaviors were associated with direct abuse, maternal depression, and shelter program. Externalizing behaviors were related to maternal depression and shelter program. Neither severity of interparental violence nor maternal trauma symptoms was related to child behavior problems. Mothers' family of-origin abuse predicted current satisfaction with child functioning, beyond the effects of maternal depression and child behavioral problems. Findings suggest a need for postshelter therapeutic services and further research addressing the adjustment of such families.     

Context and the Economic Vote: A Multilevel Analysis

Randy Stevenson Department of Political Science, Rice University, P.O. Box 1892, Houston, Texas 77251–1892 e-mail: rduch{at}uh.edu (corresponding author) e-mail: stevenso{at}ruf.rice.edu Voters use observed economic performance to infer the competenceof incumbent politicians. These economic perceptions enter thevoter's utility calculations modified by a weight that is minimizedwhen the variance in exogenous shocks to the economy is verylarge relative to the variance in economic outcomes associatedwith the competence of politicians. Cross-national variationsin the political and economic context systematically increaseor undermine the voter's ability to ascertain the competencyof incumbents. We test one hypothesis: As policy-making responsibilityis shared more equally among parties, economic evaluations willbe more important in the vote decision. We employ two multilevelmodeling procedures for estimating the contextual variationsin micro-level economic voting effects: a conventional pooledapproach and a two-stage procedure. We compare the multivariateresults of a pooled method with our two-stage estimation procedureand conclude that they are similar. Our empirical efforts usedata from 163 national surveys from 18 countries over a 22-yearperiod.     

Tocquevilles Plädoyer für eine neue politische Wissenschaft

Zusammenfassung Auch wenn Alexis de Tocqueville einen geringeren Einfluss auf das franz?sische Denken des 19. Jahrhunderts ausgeübt hat als Fran?ois Guizot oder Auguste Comte, so ist er uns dennoch n?her. Sein Werk stellt nicht nur einen Eckpfeiler der Ideengeschichte dar, es erm?glicht uns vielmehr ein besseres Verst?ndnis moderner Gesellschaften — insbesondere der franz?sischen. Seine gro?e Originalit?t, derer er sich vollkommen bewusst war, beruht zu gro?en eilen auf seiner Methodologie. Seine "neue politische Wissenschaft“ ist durch fünf Charakteristika ekennzeichnet: Erstens beruht sie auf dem Prinzip der Wertfreiheit; zweitens ist ihr Ziel die Erkl?rung der sozio-politischen Ph?nomene mit Hilfe einer allgemein-wissenschaftlichen Vorgehensweise; drittens schreibt sie der vergleichenden Vorgehensweise eine strategische Rolle zu; viertens sieht sie ihre Aufgabe in der Suche nach konditionalen Gesetzen, wobei diese als Resultate individueller Verhaltensweisen im Sinne Webers interpretiert werden und charakteristische gesellschaftliche Prozesse aufzeigen sollen; fünftens schlie?lich definiert sie den Begriff der „guten Theorie“ ausgehend von Kriterien, die in der Erkenntnistheorie auch noch heute allgemein anerkannt sind. Die Modernit?t der Tocqueville’schen Methodologie erkl?rt die St?rke seiner Analysen im zweitenBand von über die Demokratie in Amerika sowie in Der alte Staat und die Revolution, den beiden Werken, die hier vor allem Berücksichtigung finden werden. Seine Methodologie erlaubt es Tocqueville, kontinuierlich wirkende, grundlegende Tendenzen der modernen, insbesondere der franz?sischen Gesellschaft zu identifizieren. Daher rührt der Eindruck zeitloser Jugend, den Tocquevilles Werk vermittelt.

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Summary Tocqueville’s influence has been less pronounced than that of several of his contemporaries, e.g. Guizot or Auguste Comte, but he is closer to us: not only is he a great figure in the history of ideas, he provides us with tools and ideas which help us in understanding modern societies. His deep originality, of which he was fully aware, is to a large extent the consequence of his methodology. The “new science of politics” he developed is characterized by five features. 1) It rests upon the principle of value neutrality. It follows the objective of explaining social and political phenomena by procedures used by all sciences. 2) It gives central strategic value to comparative analysis. 3) It pays central attention to the discovery of conditional laws, i.e. “if A, then B”, and interprets these laws as being driven by understandable motivations and reasons on the part of indiindividual social actors. 4) It identifies typical social mechanisms and processes. 5) It defines implicitly the notion of “good theory” by the criteria accepted by modern epistemologists. The accuracy and validity of Tocqueville’s methodology is responsible for the force of his analyses in the second volume of Democracy in America and in The Old Regime and the Revolution, the two works more particularly taken into consideration here. Thanks to his methodology, he was able to identify a number of significant and important trends characterizing modern societies and the French society in particular. Hence the impression of eternal youth the reader easily experiences when reading his more than one and a half century old work.

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Résumé Bien qu’il ait eu moins d’influence sur la pensée fran?aise du 19^ème siècle que Fran?ois Guizot ou Auguste Comte, Tocqueville est aujourd’hui plus proche de nous. Son oeuvre ne constitue pas seulement un monument de l’histoire des idées, elle nous permet également de mieux comprendre les sociétés modernes — en particulier la société fran?aise. Sa grande originalité, dont il était parfaitement conscient, repose en grande partie sur sa méthode. Sa „nouvelle science politique“ présente cinq caractéristiques majeures: Premièrement, elle repose sur le principe de la neutralité axiologique; deuxièmement, elle a pour but d’expliquer les phénomènes socio- politiques par une démarche scientifique; troisièmement, elle accorde un r?le stratégique à la démarche comparative; quatrièmement, elle s’applique à rechercher des lois conditionnelles, qu’elle interprète comme la résultante des comportements individuels au sens de Weber et qui sont censées mettre en évidence des processus sociaux typiques; enfin, cinquièmement, elle définit le concept de la „bonne théorie“ sur la base de critères aujourd’hui encore largement admis en épistémologie. La modernité de la méthode tocquevillienne explique la force des analyses consignées dans le second volume de De la démocratie en Amérique et dans L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, les deux oeuvres qui retiendront ici plus particulièrement l’attention. Grace à sa méthode, Tocqueville est en mesure d’identifier des tendances durables et profondes de la société moderne, et notamment de la société fran?aise. C’est de là que provient l’impression d’éternelle jeunesse qui émane de son œuvre.

     

A: Reviews: general

REVEALING THE HOLY LAND: THE PHOTOGRAPHIC EXPLORATION OF PALESTINE. By Kathleen Stewart Howe. Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, 1997. 144pp. $US 60 (hb), $US 29.95 (pb).

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ISTITUZIONI DEL MONDO MUSULMANO. Giorgio Vercellin. (Biblioteca Studio, n. 27). Torino, Einaudi, 1996. 419 pp.+ vxx. 36,000 It lire.

THE FORBIDDEN MODERN: CIVILIZATION AND VEILING. By N?lüfer göle. (Critical Perspectives on Women and Gender). Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1996. 173 pp. $15.95.

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IRANIAN INTELLECTUALS AND THE WEST: THE TORMENTED TRIUMPH OF NATIVISM. By Mehrzad Boroujerdi. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996. 256 pp., incl appendix, glossary, bibliography and index.

DISCOVERING THE QUR'AN: A CONTEMPORARY APPROACH TO A VEILED TEXT. By Neal Robinson. London: SCM Press, 1996. 332pp., £16.95 (pb).

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CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE MIDDLE EAST (Volumes 1 and 2). Edited by Augustus Richard Norton. Leiden: E.J. Brill 1995–1996 Vol lx + 328pp, Vol 2 xvi + 353pp     

Testing for the Equality of Maximum-Likelihood Regression Coefficients Between Two Independent Equations

Consider the case where one obtains maximum-likelihood estimates of regression coefficients for the respective populations from which each of two large independent samples is drawn. A question sometimes asked about the results of such an analysis is whether there is a difference between a coefficient in one population, _a, and the same coefficient in another population, _b. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of two test statistics that have been used to address this problem. Our results suggest that one statistic produces valid conclusions, while the other fails.