What Explains Agency Heads’ Length of Tenure? Testing Managerial Background,Performance, and Political Environment Effects

There are a number of influences on how long an agency head serves. The importance of particular influences, in turn, depends on the prospective destination of the agency head: elsewhere in the public sector, the private sector, or retirement. The authors estimate survival models of agency heads’ tenure using panel data on British central government executive agencies from 1989 to 2012. Findings suggest that chief executives of poorly performing agencies are encouraged to retire sooner. There is no evidence that a change in political control increases the risk of any form of exit, suggesting that political pressure to leave is not substantial for this type of official. Outsiders—agency heads recruited from outside central government—are relatively difficult to retain for a longer time, such that potential shortfalls in suitable managers caused by retirements in an aging workforce may be difficult to make up by appointing from this source.     

“From Terrorists to Peacekeepers”: The IRA's Disengagement and the Role of Community Networks

Utilizing interviews with former Irish Republican Army (IRA) members, Loyalists, and community workers, the article looks at how militants in Northern Ireland have helped to prevent terrorism and political violence (TPV) by adopting roles in the community. By using mobile phones, a network of former combatants emerged around interface areas in the late 1990s to contain trigger causes of terrorism, providing a unique role that the state could not. The structure of the network encouraged militant groups to follow the IRA's example to disengage—thus creating a domino effect—and the co-operation between senior militants has limited the opportunities for other groups to mobilize a campaign of terrorism.     

Gaming the system: Responses to dissatisfaction with public services beyond exit and voice

Citizens' responses to dissatisfaction with public services are often portrayed as following one of four distinct patterns, each consistent with current provision structures: exit, voice, loyalty or neglect (EVLN). Citizens may also initiate efforts to access public services through more subversive supply mechanisms. This study focuses on ‘gaming’ as an additional, understudied response pattern, within which individuals aim at improving the personal outcome of public service delivery by exploiting, manipulating or working around current rules and arrangements. Survey analysis of citizens' responses to dissatisfaction in Mexico indicates that gaming is indeed a distinct response, which is positively related to the unavailability of exit and, to some extent, to low trust in government. As a response pattern that encompasses behaviours inconsistent with current policy arrangements, gaming emphasizes the need to distinguish service improvement as a public good as opposed to a private good and further unfolds ‘grey areas’ in citizen–government relationships.     

Monopoly Money: Foreign Investment and Bribery in Vietnam,a Survey Experiment

Prevailing work argues that foreign investment reduces corruption, either by competing down monopoly rents or diffusing best practices of corporate governance. We argue that the mechanisms generating this relationship are not clear because the extant empirical work is too heavily drawn from aggregations of total foreign investment entering an economy. Alternatively, we suggest that openness to foreign investment has differential effects on corruption even within the same country and under the same domestic institutions over time. We argue that foreign firms use bribes to enter protected industries in search of rents, and therefore we expect variation in bribe propensity across sectors according to expected profitability. We test this effect using a list experiment embedded in three waves of a nationally representative survey of 20,000 foreign and domestic businesses in Vietnam, finding that the effect of economic openness on the probability to engage in bribes is conditional on policies that restrict investment.     

Towards a New Political Economy of Behavioral Public Policy

The dominant normative framework in behavioral public policy postulates paternalistic intervention to increase individual utility, epitomized by the so‐called nudge approach. In this article, an alternative political economy of behavioral public policy is proposed that sits within, or at least closely aside, the liberal economic tradition. In short, rather than impose utility maximization as the normative ideal, this framework proposes that policy makers provide an environment that is conducive to each person's own conception of a flourishing life, while at the same time regulating against behaviorally informed harms and for behaviorally induced, otherwise forgone, benefits.     

The Rise and Fall of Capital: Corporate Malaysia in Historical Perspective

This article argues that better informed insights into the benefits and repercussions of the form of development of East Asian economies could be obtained when the theoretical perspectives from two different bodies of literature are employed collectively. If the concepts from the discipline of political economy – specifically the body of literature dealing with the developmental state now commonly deployed in analyses of East Asian economies – are used in combination with concepts from the literature on business history based on the work of Alfred Chandler, the reasons for the rise and fall of major enterprises in East Asia can be better understood. A case study of enterprise and economic development in Malaysia is presented to substantiate this argument.     

Liberale Romandie,radikale Deutschschweiz? Kantonale Demokratien zwischen Repräsentation und Partizipation

Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht die weit verbreitete These, dass Deutschschweizer Kantone vor allem radikaldemokratische Merkmale aufweisen, während die lateinischen Kantone stärker liberal‐repräsentative Demokratieformen besitzen. Die empirische und mehrdimensionale Messung der Demokratiequalität in den Kantonen zeigt, dass die pauschale These der direktdemokratisch‐partizipatorischen Deutschschweizer Kantone auf der einen Seite und der repräsentativdemokratischen Stände der lateinischen Schweiz auf der anderen Seite der Komplexität der kantonalen Demokratien nicht gerecht wird. Als erklärungskräftige Alternative für die Positionen der Kantone auf den Achsen liberaler und radikaler Demokratien an der Schwelle des 21. Jahrhunderts erweist sich vielmehr die Stärke der liberalen und demokratischen Verfassungsbewegungen in den Kantonen Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts.