Recall in Germany: explaining the use of a local democratic innovation

While recall recently has gained slightly more attention from academia, the use of recall has hardly been under systematic scrutiny. Our study tackles this research gap and seeks to answer the following question: What combinations of conditions facilitate or constrain the use of local recall (in Germany)? It provides a qualitative comparative analysis of conditions of recall use in 11 German federal states. Building on theories of democratic innovations and previous studies on recall, we develop an analytic framework systematizing the conditions we include in our empirical analysis along three dimensions: institutional design, attitudinal context, and political context. While our article focuses on Germany, our analytic framework can be applied to study recall in other countries and on other levels, allowing for more systematic comparative research. Applying fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, our article provides a comprehensive picture explaining the use of recall. It shows that political and attitudinal conditions serve as an equally important explanation for recall use as the institutional design of recall does. Our article gives new insights considering the conditions for the use of direct democratic instruments.     

Evangelical Christian Discourse in South Korea on the LGBT: the Politics of Cross-Border Learning

The US political debate over LGBT rights and religious liberty is shaping a similar contest in South Korea (Korea). Stories of American Christians criminally fined for refusing to service same-sex weddings, or university students and faculty punished for expressing their conservative beliefs, are widely shared in Korea’s evangelical media. The victim narrative, prominent among American evangelicals, teaches their Korean brethren that the expansion of LGBT legal rights and social acceptance endangers religious liberties. The conclusion is that that they must politically mobilize to oppose LGBT demands in Korea, even though the local movement is nascent and weak. There is, however, a second, more complex narrative emerging from the United States. This is one of Christian empathy, including stories of gay Christians wrestling with their twin identities, and of heterosexual Christians providing love and support, rather than condemnation. The empathy narrative has limited visibility in current political debates, but it encourages personal dialogues between gays and non-gay Christians and is a consequential step to understanding and tolerance. Drawing on learning and emulation theories, and conducting an empirical study of evangelical media and gay/heterosexual evangelicals in Korea, we consider the effects of these two American narratives in Korea.     

Examining Relationships Between Legislative and Presidential Influences and Organizational Probity: Evidence from South Korean Central Government Agencies

In public management, few empirical studies have been conducted on the effects of the most influential political authorities—the legislature and the president—on government organizations, despite the theoretical and practical significance of these effects. This study tests the relationships between legislative and presidential influences and organizational probity in South Korean central government agencies, on the basis of political transaction-cost and principal–agent theories. We use three measures of legislative influence—inspectional influence (total annual days of legislative inspection), statutory influence (rules-to-laws ratio), and budgetary influence (ratio of reprogramming budget to total budget), and one measure of presidential influence (annual number of substantive meetings with the president). Then, these independent variables are linked to the organizational probity measure from audited archival data. The two-time-point panel data analysis reveals a positive link between legislative inspectional influence and probity but a negative relationship between the presidential influence measure and probity; the results support theoretical arguments for control over administrative agencies. Thus, the evidence suggests that governments should be cautious of implementing reforms that increase organizational or managerial autonomy.     

The Authority–Identity Relation: Symbolic References and Interpretative Authority in Postwar Kosovo

In postwar Kosovo, international and Kosovar political actors claiming authority in the democratization and statebuilding process lacked a long-standing ‘authoritative relation’ with each other and the citizenry. To analyse the structural conditions for the emergence of political authority, the article suggests applying the analytical framework of ‘interpretative authority’, which captures the relational character and simultaneity of authority generation by international and Kosovar actors. Given that Kosovo had unsecured symbolic conditions for authority – no commonly shared symbols of unity for all communities and no commonly agreed interpreter of symbols of unity – political actors were competing intensely for the identity and symbolizations of the ‘new’ Kosovo in their attempts to gain authority in various institutional opportunity structures. The competition over authority and the attempts to denationalize public communications made by the international administration, the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), led to the reimbursement of particularistic symbolic references of Kosovar actors, thereby keeping the unsecured symbolic conditions and the weakness of interpretative political authority in Kosovo stable.     

An effectiveness‐based evaluation of five state pre‐kindergarten programs

Since 1980, the number of state pre‐kindergarten (pre‐K) programs has more than doubled, with 38 states enrolling more than one million children in 2006 alone. This study evaluates how five state pre‐K programs affected children's receptive vocabulary, math, and print awareness skills. Taking advantage of states' strict enrollment policies determined by a child's date of birth, a regression‐discontinuity design was used to estimate effects in Michigan, New Jersey, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and West Virginia. For receptive vocabulary, only New Jersey and Oklahoma yielded significant standardized impacts, though two of the three other coefficients were in a direction indicating positive effects. For math, all the coefficients were positive but only Michigan and New Jersey yielded reliable results. The largest impacts were for print awareness, where all five coefficients were positive and four were reliable in Michigan, New Jersey, South Carolina, and West Virginia. The five states were not randomly selected and, on average, have higher quality program standards than non‐studied states, precluding formal extrapolation to the nation at large. However, our sample of states differed in many other ways, permitting the conclusion that state pre‐K programs can have positive effects on children's cognitive skills, though the magnitude of these effects varies by state and outcome. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Bargaining and Fighting: The Impact of Regime Type on War Onset, Duration, and Outcomes

Recent research suggests that democracies have advantages and disadvantages in wars. Democracies are more likely to win the wars they initiate and the ones in which they are targeted. Wars initiated by democracies are also uniformly shorter and less costly than wars initiated by nondemocracies. However, democracies are also less likely to continue fighting and less likely to win as war drags on. Democracies are also particularly likely to be targeted. We present a bargaining model that reconciles these divergent findings. The model explains why democracies are more likely to win but are also more likely to settle and more likely to be targeted than other types of regimes. The model's explanation of these facts differs in important ways from existing explanations. The model also suggests several new hypotheses relating regime type to the terms of settlement and the onset of war .     

Canada's voluntary ARET program: Limited success despite industry cosponsorship

The Accelerated Reduction/Elimination of Toxins (ARET) Challenge was a voluntary program initiated in 1994 by the Government of Canada. Unlike the U.S. 33/50 Program, ARET involved industry partners in negotiation and cosponsorship of the program, with the intention that early involvement would yield stronger commitment to voluntary reductions. We review the program's self‐reported success in delivering emissions reductions. For 17 ARET substances that were also covered by Canada's National Pollutant Release Inventory, we employ treatment effects regressions to control for self‐selection bias. We find evidence that ARET accelerated emission reductions in five cases, slowed reductions in two cases, and had no discernible effect in ten cases. Industry cosponsorship apparently did not have the intended effect and instead resulted in program features such as data confidentiality that significantly undermined the program's credibility. © 2007 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management