Towards an evidence-based approach to communicating uncertainty in intelligence analysis

Intelligence products have a degree of uncertainty associated with them. This is typically expressed using linguistic probabilities (e.g., ‘likely’), and some organizations have adopted standardized lexicons for communicating uncertainty. This paper empirically shows that intelligence analysts use a wide heterogeneity of language to communicate uncertainty. This does not include all of the phrases in standardized lexicons used by the intelligence community. In addition, analysts may use some phrases differently to that advocated. Miscommunication of uncertainty can have deleterious effects on decision-making, and so standardization of uncertainty communication should be evidence-based. This paper discusses ways in which such evidence can be generated.     

For the Want of a Nail: The Interaction of Managerial Capacity and Human Resource Management on Organizational Performance

Human resource management and managerial capacity are well documented in the public management literature as integral management functions. The field has devoted attention to the importance of human resources, but it has yet to consider whether human resource management interacts with capacity in attaining organizational outcomes. Using a large‐N, multiyear data set of public organizations, this article seeks to rectify this gap in the literature. The findings validate scholarly arguments on the importance of public organizations’ need to manage human resources and capacity effectively, identifying just the right combination for performance gains. Empirical results encourage practitioners to consider the ways in which human resource management and capacity work together to influence performance but sometimes undermine each other in counterintuitive ways.     

Job Choice and Performance: Revisiting Core Assumptions about Public Service Motivation

Although there has been considerable enthusiasm for public service motivation (PSM) research in recent years, two of PSM's fundamental assumptions have been relatively untested: its impacts on job choice and on job performance. Using panel data from two different studies, we offer stronger observational tests of these core assumptions. The findings provide mixed evidence. When testing PSM's effect on employment choice, we find that PSM measured during a law student's first year predicts the sector in which they are employed after graduation three years later. In a separate study investigating PSM's effect on job performance, we find that government employee PSM does not predict employee absenteeism or supervisor assessments of their in-role and extra-role performance. Our findings support recent calls for a more nuanced theory and analyses of PSM to help better understand its implications for recruiting, retaining, and motivating the workforce used to provide public goods and services.     

NGOs invite attention: From the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to the Human Rights Council

This article first reviews and compares Human Rights Council and University Period Review (HRC/UPR) research published during and shortly after the institution-building period (2006–2009) to more recent work (2010–2014) to identify patterns of scholarly interest in NGO roles and behavior at the HRC/UPR. It divides research into that which either “ignores” NGOs or offers “indirect” attention, “direct” attention, or “foregrounds” NGO activity, concluding that NGOs are surprisingly underexamined, given remarkable new participatory opportunities in the HRC/UPR and the centrality of NGO information provision to the success of the new body. Empirical analysis of NGO statements from the CHR to the HRC indicates sharply increasing NGO participation, particularly among domestic, regional, and Southern NGOs. The increased volume and changing characteristics of participating NGOs may have important effects on the HRC/UPR and should also encourage further analysis.     

Advocacy Coalitions in Ontario Land Use Policy Development

In 2005, the Ontario government passed the Places to Grow Act and the Greenbelt Act, both major changes in land use policy designed to preserve greenspaces and combat urban sprawl in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, Canada's largest conurbation. This article examines the actors, actor beliefs, and inter‐actor alliances in the southern Ontario land use policy subsystem from the perspective of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). Specifically, this paper undertakes an empirical examination of the ACF's Belief Homophily Hypothesis, which holds that inter‐actor alliances form on the basis of shared policy‐relevant beliefs, creating advocacy coalitions. The analysis finds strong evidence of three advocacy coalitions in the policy subsystem—an agricultural coalition, an environmentalist coalition, and a developers' coalition—as predicted by the hypothesis. However, it also finds equally strong evidence of a cross‐coalition coordination network of peak organizations, something not predicted by the Belief Homophily Hypothesis, and in need of explanation within the ACF.     

UN Peace Operations and Conflicting Legitimacies

ABSTRACT

Analyses of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping increasingly consider legitimacy a key factor for success, conceiving of it as a resource that operations should seek and use in the pursuit of their goals. However, these analyses rarely break down legitimacy by source. Because the UN is an organization with multiple identities and duties however, different legitimacy sources – in particular output and procedural legitimacy – and the UN’s corresponding legitimation practices come into conflict in the context of peacekeeping. Drawing on a range of examples and the specific case of the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC), this article argues that looking at different legitimacy sources and linking them to the institutional identity of the UN is thus critical, and it shows how the UN’s contradictory legitimation practices can reduce overall legitimacy perceptions.     

Generalized Social Trust and International Dispute Settlement

What determines the success of a peaceful settlement attempt of a border dispute? In order to fully understand why decision makers choose to put an end to an ongoing conflict, it is necessary to consider the social trust levels of the general populations in both states. International conflict settlement requires public support at the domestic level. If a state’s general population perceives the potential dangers of a settlement as too severe, the conclusion of a peace agreement will be difficult. We argue that high levels of social trust allow citizens (1) to favor more conciliatory foreign policies and (2) to be more optimistic about the future behavior of other states. In democratic settings, these public attitudes serve as powerful constraints for decision makers. As a result, high aggregate levels of social trust should be directly related to concession-granting behavior by democracies as well as effective dispute settlement among jointly democratic dyads. We test these expectations with a new aggregate-level measure of social trust and find mixed support for our hypotheses: While trust does not influence the behavior of challenger states, it does have strong effects on democratic target states and jointly democratic dyads.     

Centers of Gravity: Regional Powers,Democracy, and Trade

Classic studies on hegemonic stability and power transition suggest that concentration of capabilities favoring a single state can promote economic cooperation and discourage militarized conflict. However, tests of these arguments have been primarily limited to examining temporal variation in global capability distributions and corresponding levels of system-wide cooperation; few have examined the impact of capability concentration at the region level. In this article, we contend that concentration of regional military capabilities corresponds to lower trade costs for states throughout a region and to an incentive for weaker states to de-prioritize expenditure on the military, freeing resources that can be used to promote trade. As a result, this condition promotes higher levels of trade, particularly within the region. We also argue that democratic regional powers are better able to foster confidence in the sustainability of cooperation; thus, the trade-enhancing impact of concentrated regional capabilities is stronger when the predominant state is more democratic. We find evidence in support of our expectations in statistical models examining state trade between 1960 and 2007.