Serving Clients When the Server Crashes: How Frontline Workers Cope with E‐Government Challenges

Implementing e‐government in the contemporary American state is challenging. E‐government places high technical demands on agencies and citizens in an environment of budget austerity and political polarization. Governments developing e‐government policies often mobilize frontline workers—also termed “street‐level bureaucrats”—to help citizens gain access to services. However, we know little about how frontline workers cope in these challenging circumstances. This article fills this gap by examining frontline workers implementing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Based on a qualitative analysis, the authors find that frontline workers “move toward clients” when coping with stress: they bend the rules, work overtime, and collaborate in order to help clients. They are less inclined to “move away” or “move against” clients, for instance, through rigid rule following and rationing. In other words, frontline workers try to serve clients, even “when the server crashes.” Frontline workers, then, can play a vital role in the successful implementation of e‐government policies.     

Government Selection and Executive Powers: Constitutional Design in Parliamentary Democracies

Provisions for a parliamentary investiture vote have become increasingly common in parliamentary democracies. This article shows that investiture provisions were largely introduced when new constitutions were written or old ones fundamentally redesigned. It also shows that the constitutions that endowed executives with strong legislative agenda powers also endowed parliaments with strong mechanisms to select the executive. It is argued that constitution makers’ decisions can be seen in principal–agent terms: strong investiture rules constitute an ex ante mechanism of parliamentary control – that is, a mechanism to minimise adverse selection and reduce the risk of agency loss by parliament. The findings have two broad implications: from a constitutional point of view, parliamentary systems do not rely exclusively on ex post control mechanisms such as the no confidence vote to minimise agency loss; parliamentarism, at least today and as much as presidentialism, is the product of conscious constitutional design and not evolutionary adaptation.     

Shaping Political Preferences: Information Effects in Political-Administrative Systems

Information is at the heart of politics. However, since information is always sent by someone who is more or less powerful, it is difficult to disentangle the effect of information from the power of the sender. Drawing on a standard model of attitude formation, we argue that presenting information can affect preferences of politicians regardless of the power of the sender. We test this proposition in a survey experiment with 1205 Danish local politicians in which the experimental groups were presented with varying levels of cost information but where sender remained constant. The experiment shows that even in a setting where the information is not disclosed by a powerful sender, information may have a stronger impact on political preferences than other well-known determinants such as committee and party affiliation. Our findings speak to learning theories, knowledge perspectives and the literature on the determinants of politicians’ preferences.     

Cernoises and Horrible Cernettes: a history of women at CERN 1954–2017

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) was founded in 1954 by a group of men seeking to explore the fundamental building blocks of our Universe. Since then, they and a host of international scholars have succeeded, exemplified by the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012 and numerous Nobel Prize awards. But running parallel to the ‘great men’ of high-energy physics, is the untold story of the women of CERN. The organisation is an elite institution, and can thus provide insight into why numbers of women remain low in all facets of its work (except professional administrative). This viewpoint explores the role of women at CERN, both scientists and non-scientists, drawing on archival research from the organisation’s collection in Geneva and interviews, providing an analysis of why gender diversity is still one of the puzzles left for this elite space to solve.     

A picturesque travelogue: Mary Wollstonecraft's “letters written during a short residence in Sweden,Norway, and Denmark”, 1796

The article presents a reading of Mary Wollstonecraft's “Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark”, dated 1796, in which the concept of the Picturesque is used as an analytical framework. The Picturesque is a contemporary British aesthetics concerned with how we look at landscape, and with the aestheticism of viewing. It is suggested that the Picturesque offers a new way of understanding Mary Wollstonecraft's position in‐between Enlightenment and Romanticism, Revolution and Restoration, authorship and journalism.     

Managerial incentives and access price regulation

Policy makers have identified the non-discrimination principle as a key instrument to regulate vertically integrated firms in control of upstream bottlenecks. It has been argued that the non-discrimination principle may create a level playing field, but at the expense of higher consumer prices. However, this rests on the assumption that the firms do not respond strategically to the regulation. We show that a non-discrimination requirement makes the vertically integrated firm behave more aggressively. Consequently, non-discrimination regulation rarely creates a level playing field. Neither does it necessarily increase end-user prices. Indeed, we show that end-user prices may fall.      

Denmark

European Journal of Political Research -     

Sectoral Opposition to Carbon Taxes in the EU – a Myopic Economic Approach

Over 10 years ago the EU Commission proposed a directive on carbon taxes, but faced so much domestic resistance that agreement was not reached until last year – and after it had been considerably watered down. The aim of this paper is to look into economic reasons for the political infeasibility of extensive carbon taxes. Since opposition is believed to arise prior to the policy implementation, the cost estimates have a myopic character compared with market estimates, in the sense that sectors are presumed to take into account their own substitution opportunities, but disregard changes in other sectors as well as the macroeconomic welfare gains from a tax regime. With this myopic approach, we estimate and compare costs of emissions cuts across sectors and across countries in the EU, showing how different sectors might have anticipated the impacts from an expected carbon tax. This focus illustrates that what seems to be cost-effective and to the best for the region on paper turned out too controversial to be politically feasible.