A Tale as Old as (Devolved) Time? Sewel,Stormont and the Legislative Consent Convention

Interparliamentary relations do not attract much in the way of public or even academic attention. However, they are an aspect of parliamentary life in which there has been a series of experiments by select committees in the House of Commons. While one of the more prominent examples of such experimentation was the international grand committee on Big Data, Privacy and Democracy spearheaded by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, this article will look at another example of select committee-led interparliamentary relations, namely the ‘joint inquiry’ conducted by the House of Commons Defence Committee and the Assemblée nationale’s Standing Committee on National Defence into Future Cruise and Anti-Ship Missiles in 2018. This article, written by an official involved in the inquiry, offers the first reflections on the experience of this joint inquiry, demonstrates how the model undertaken for the inquiry differed from the approaches taken by other select committees involved in interparliamentary working, and explores whether it might offer a blueprint for future joint inquiries.     

What Motivates the Gatekeepers? Explaining Governing Party Preferences on Immigration

Most scholarship on immigration politics is made up of isolated case studies or cross‐disciplinary work that does not build on existing political science theory. This study attempts to remedy this shortcoming in three ways: (1) we derive theories from the growing body of immigration literature, to hypothesize about why political parties would be more or less open to immigration; (2) we link these theories to the broader political science literature on parties and institutions; and (3) we construct a data set on the determinants of immigration politics, covering 18 developed countries from 1987 to 1999. Our primary hypothesis is that political institutions shape immigration politics by facilitating or constraining majoritarian sentiment (which is generally opposed to liberalizing immigration). Our analysis finds that in political systems where majoritarianism is constrained by institutional “checks,” governing parties support immigration more strongly, even when controlling for a broad range of alternative explanations.     

Herbert the Cabbie

<正>Taxi drivers in Xi’an tend to fall into one of two categories: the nice ones and the nasty ones. The majority of drivers belong to the first group     

Anarchy, State, and Dystopia: Venezuelan Economic Institutions before the Advent of Oil

This article studies the evolution of Venezuelan economic institutions before the emergence of oil exploitation in 1920. We argue that, by 1920, Venezuela had developed a highly centralised state and a professionalised military. These two institutions ensured that growing oil revenues would strengthen the state structure and protected Venezuela from the resource-conflict trap into which many oil-abundant countries have fallen. We also argue that the failure to develop institutions that could mediate between sectoral demands and the state, the subordination of property rights to political imperatives and the political dominance of the commercial-financial elite conditioned the nation's response to the post-1920 influx of oil revenues.     

Critical commentary on “Who Are the Palestinian Suicide Bombers?”

This article provides a critical commentary to Shaul Kimhi and Shemuel Even's research on Palestinian suicide bombers presented in this issue. The main focus is on the problems with definitional distinction between the motivations of suicide versus “ordinary” terrorists and the method of determining a suicide bomber's primary motive for critical commentary     

INFORMATION‐SHARING AND CONFIDENTIALITY IN SOCIAL POLICY: REGULATING MULTI‐AGENCY WORKING

In recent years, there has been growing concern in the UK that local services aimed at risky or vulnerable people are ineffective, because of agencies’ persistent failure to share information about their clients. Despite considerable national policy effort to encourage better information‐sharing, previous research indicates that there are many cases where information is still not shared when it should be, or where it is shared when it should not be, with potentially devastating results. This article uses data from the largest empirical study of local information‐sharing yet undertaken to examine four policy sectors where multi‐agency working has come to the fore. It shows that variations in their information‐sharing and confidentiality practices can be explained by neo‐Durkheimian institutional theory and uses insights from this theory to argue that current policy tools, which emphasize formal regulation, are unlikely to lead to consistent and acceptable outcomes, not least because of unresolved conflicts in values and aims.     

DEVELOPING AND UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL CHANGE IN HM CUSTOMS AND EXCISE: THERE IS MORE TO DANCING THAN KNOWING THE NEXT STEPS

Increasingly, what was formerly known as public administration is turning itself into management, while management itself is fast becoming synonymous with the management of change. These two directions meet in government calls to change the culture of the civil service, and are to be found most clearly in the Financial Management Initiative (1982), and its successor, the Next Steps (1988). While each stresses a different aspect, the core policy idea which runs through them is one of improving performance by delegating power and responsibility down the hierarchy closer to the point of delivery. In this way the bureaucratic giants which comprise the various central government departments are transformed into more adroit organizations, to the extent that it becomes appropriate to talk of giants learning to dance (Kanter 1989). This article, through a discussion of 'experiments in change' conducted in one of the largest central government giants, HM Customs and Excise, argues that teaching giants to learn to dance is easier said than done. The main focus of the article is on what giants may need to learn in order that they can become more attuned to change and it concludes with the proposition that change in central government cannot be understood or be properly managed without an appreciation of the changing context of change itself.