Does Familiarity Breed Contempt? The Impact of Information on Mass Attitudes toward Congress

Two features of citizen response to Congress can be taken as grounds for concern. First, Americans know relatively little about Congress, and especially about congressional procedures and policy output. Second, Congress typically emerges as the least respected political institution. Although these matters are troubling when viewed individually, more disturbing is the dilemma posed when knowledge and attitudes toward Congress are viewed in tandem. It appears that citizens who know Congress the best like Congress the least. Consequently, a sophisticated polity and a well-respected legislature seem fundamentally incompatible. This article seeks to resolve this dilemma, contending that there is nothing about knowledge per se that leads citizens to view Congress unfavorably. Rather, differences in knowledge levels alter the considerations citizens bring to bear when evaluating Congress, with the best-informed individuals constructing judgments on the basis of the most relevant Congress-specific criteria while less knowledgeable citizens employ readily available but more peripheral criteria.     

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.     

Unanimity, Discord, and the Communication of Public Opinion

This article is concerned with the political communication of opinion that occurs through networks of associated citizens. Its primary attention focuses on opinion variance within populations and networks and how such variance affects communication among and between individuals. Particularly in the context of ambiguous or infrequent communication, people may experience difficulty in forming judgments regarding the opinions of others. In such situations, environmental priors become useful devices for reaching these judgments, but a problem arises related to the utility of these environmental priors when discord rather than unanimity characterizes the contextual distribution of opinion. The article's argument is that dyadic discussions between two citizens are most enlightening, and environmental priors least enlightening, when surrounding opinion is marked by higher levels of disagreement. The analyses are based on data taken from the 1996 Indianapolis-St. Louis study .     

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.     

Developments in the Law: Garcetti v. Ceballos and the Workplace Freedom of Speech Rights of Public Employees

On May 30, 2006 the Supreme Court handed down a 5–4 decision in the case of Garcetti v. Ceballos, announcing that "when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, they are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline." Previously, the Court had held in Pickering v. Board of Education (1968) that the First Amendment's protection of freedom of speech generally prohibited public employers from firing or disciplining employees for speaking out on matters of "public concern." The Pickering decision established a two-part test that first required federal courts to determine whether the employee had spoken out on a matter of public concern and then whether the disruptive impact of the employee's statement justified the disciplinary action. This article argues that the Garcetti decision may deter many public employees from disclosing governmental inefficiency and misconduct and presenting dissenting viewpoints on matters of clear public concern. Consequently, the decision may make it more difficult for the leadership of public agencies to uncover inefficiency and misconduct.     

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.     

On the value of formal assessment of uncertainty in regulatory analysis

The US Office of Management and Budget introduced in 2003 a new requirement for the treatment of uncertainty in Regulatory Impact Analyses (RIAs) of proposed regulations, requiring agencies to carry out a formal quantitative uncertainty assessment regarding a regulation’s benefits and costs if either is expected to reach $1 billion annually. Despite previous use in other contexts, such formal assessments of uncertainty have rarely been employed in RIAs or other regulatory analyses. We describe how formal quantitative assessments of uncertainty – in particular, Monte Carlo analyses – can be conducted, we examine the challenges and limitations of such analyses in the context of RIAs, and we assess how the resulting information can affect the evaluation of regulations. For illustrative purposes, we compare Monte Carlo analysis with methods typically used in RIAs to evaluate uncertainty in the context of economic analyses carried out for the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Nonroad Diesel Rule, which became effective in 2004.     

Globalization and legal change: The “Americanization” of European law?

Intensified global economic competition, economic liberalization, and the rise of EU governance have led some observers to argue that there has been a trend toward the “Americanization” of the European “way of law.” This article addresses that contention, focusing on legal change in European member states. It first describes ways in which the American legal tradition has differed most sharply from the national legal systems of Western Europe (including Great Britain) and the political and economic factors that account for this “American legal distinctiveness.” Similar political and economic factors currently are at work in Europe, the article acknowledges, creating incentives for legal convergence. But it also argues that European legal culture and the political organization of European national states generate path‐dependent forces that impede European movement toward American ways of law, and it discusses six important differences between European and American law that remain entrenched and are unlikely to disappear.     

The economic significance of “insignificant” rules

We know relatively little about the economic effects of “insignificant” rules because they are not typically analyzed. Yet, these rules could be cumulatively important. We provide an economic analysis of one proposed rule to control hazardous air pollutants, which is not considered to be economically significant. This rule is of particular interest because it is one of the first in a long series of rules that Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will consider for limiting hazardous air pollutant emissions. Our analysis suggests that the proposed controls that EPA has considered are not likely to pass a benefit–cost test. We recommend that an agency base its decision to allocate additional resources to benefit–cost analysis on the expected value of the improved information. In addition, agencies should consider applying a rule of thumb that would specify a threshold level of risk reduction that needs to be achieved before some kinds of regulation are considered.     

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.