Coercion versus Choice: Citizen Evaluations of Public Service Quality across Methods of Consumption

Treating all respondents to citizen satisfaction surveys as "customers" risks misinterpreting the findings and misguiding managerial decision making. Citizen evaluations of the quality of public services are likely to vary based on whether citizens have a direct or indirect relationship to the service. Furthermore, citizens are likely to rate services differently based on whether they consume the services as a result of coercion or choice, although the quality of the interaction shapes the impact of the type of interaction. Based on a series of empirical analyses, this paper demonstrates that recipients who have superior-quality interactions with providers are likely to report high ratings for elective services, whereas citizens who have poor-quality interactions are likely to report low ratings for coercive services. In this way, the quality of the interaction influences citizens' predispositions to rate services high or low based on whether they consume the service by choice or coercion.     

The Impact of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) Inflows on Economic Growth in Barbados: An Engle-Granger Approach

The purpose of this article is to look at the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows on economic growth in Barbados in the long and short run from 1979 to 2008 with the use of the Engle-Granger two-step procedure. The study shows that in the long run, a 1 percent increase in FDI inflows will expand economic growth by 0.10 percent while in the short run, the relationship between FDI and economic growth will be positive but almost flat. These results imply that any policy by Government aimed at boosting economic growth using FDI inflows will have to be considered for the long run since Government could not rely on FDI inflows in the short run.     

Laying the foundation for institutionalisation of democratic parliaments in the newly independent states: The case of Ukraine

This article examines the institutionalisation of the Ukrainian Parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, since the fall of the Soviet Union. The emergence of a popularly elected legislature in post‐Soviet Ukraine stands as a cornerstone in the development of a democratic regime. While the Verkhovna Rada is by no means a mature parliament, the foundation for future institutionalisation has been laid through the establishment of a representative political process, nascent political parties, a separation of powers between the executive and the legislature, and the policy‐making capacity of the Parliament.     

Understanding Transnational Policy Flows in Security and Justice

This article examines the contribution of scholarly work on ‘policy transfer’ and related concepts to our knowledge of how far, and in what ways, particular policy ‘models’ of security and justice travel across national boundaries, and what might explain this phenomenon. The article begins by summarizing the key findings of extant empirical studies of cross‐national policy movement in the fields of crime, security, and justice. It then considers the normative dimension to debates about policy transfer, observing that much of the literature adopts a pessimistic position about the problematic nature of international policy movement in security and justice, and discusses some of the reasons for such pessimism. The article then reflects on ways in which normative principles could be applied to considerations of prospective policy transfer, and the implications for the broader possibilities for ‘progressive’ policy transfer in relation to crime, security, and justice.     

Identifying,explaining, and targeting burglary ‘hot spots’

Conclusion The data-gathering and crime analysis part of the Task Force programme (while not yet completed) has generated some useful information about burglary in Cambridge which might inform a crime prevention strategy. The research has shown that residential burglary is not evenly distributed across Cambridge, but tends to be clustered in the northwest of the City. It has also shown that even in these high-burglary areas there are hot spots and cold spots of crime. These hot spots account for a relatively large proportion of all burglary.One factor contributing to the high burglary counts in the hot spot area is the high number of repeat burglaries, with as many as 35 percent of all burglaries recorded in the area being one of a repeat series of burglaries. Another factor which might have contributed to the high burglary counts was the abundance of access and escape routes of the kind identified in the environmental survey. Perhaps the most important factor which explains the high number of burglaries was the closeness of the area to the place of residence of known offenders. The hot spot site thus provides a local source of easy and rewarding opportunities for offenders who live in these areas.In the second stage of its work, the Cambridge Burglary Task Force will collate the information that has been collected in the first stage and devise appropriate intervention strategies. We aim to continue to monitor crime and criminals in the area and to evaluate the effectiveness the programmes implemented.     

A Bear in the Woods? Threat Framing and the Marketplace of Values

To many scholars, the Bush administration's ability to convince a majority of the public to favor war with Iraq represents a dangerous failure of the marketplace of ideas. A healthy marketplace, they argue, would have produced a more robust debate over the administration's justifications for war, revealing their weakness. In this paper I argue that these scholars have based their arguments on a poorly specified model of the marketplace of ideas and that Iraq does not represent a failure of the marketplace. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the strength of the marketplace lies not in its ability to move the nation toward truth via debate and deliberation, but in its tendency to divide the public into countervailing factions based on competing sets of values and competing frames of the issues at hand. I develop this argument first by elaborating a model of the “marketplace of values” and redefining threat inflation as a process of efforts to frame security issues for the public. I test my model first against public opinion data regarding American threat perceptions and then use it to explain the Bush administration's successes and failures in building and maintaining public support for the war in Iraq.