Putin,Erdogan and Orbán: Band of Brothers?

In 1990, right after the Berlin Wall fell, NPQ published our Spring edition, titled “The New World Disorder,” about the nationalistic chaos and up‐in‐theair sensibility of that fraught new historical moment. Nearly a quarter of a century later, the regime of globalization that had supplanted the Cold War world of blocs is itself coming apart at the seams. Even Henry Kissinger these days says “the world order is crumbling.” Will this New World Disorder 2.0 revert to a system of conflicting blocs, as during the Cold War, or will we be mature enough to save the interdependence of plural identities that is the foundation of a new global civilization? In this section our contributors offer their perspectives on what the future holds.     

Exploring the Deep Antecedent of Public Service Motivation

Contrarily to most studies of the antecedents of public service motivation (PSM) focusing on the proximal work environment or personal characteristics, we seek to explore plausibly important deep antecedents of PSM that lie in the formative years of a person’s upbringing. Using an online survey of public service professionals that asked detailed background questions, we find that three deep antecedents are associated with lower overall PSM and its constitutive elements: growing up in a religious family, growing up in a family with a conservative point of view, and (surprisingly) being raised by a parent who served in the military.     

POLICY IMPLEMENTATION IN AN AFRICAN STATE: AN EXTENSION OF KINGDON'S MULTIPLE‐STREAMS APPROACH

Kingdon's multiple‐streams framework, which emerged in the mid‐1980s, today forms one of the indispensable analytical frameworks for understanding public policy agenda‐setting. However, it is only in the context of wealthy countries that this approach has been validated for setting the agenda of national and international policies. This article reports the results of empirical research in an African state studying the transferability of a threefold theoretical innovation. The question under consideration is whether the multiple‐streams framework is useful for examining public policy implementation at the local level and in the context of a low income country. The research findings confirm the premise that the multiple‐streams framework can be extended and can lead to the formulation of several theoretical propositions.     

Millions of Small Battles: The Peronist Resistance in Argentina

This article studies the working‐class clandestine political organisation known as the Peronist resistance. Created after Argentine President Juan Perón was overthrown in 1955, the resistance movement was much more than a reaction to the limitations imposed on the organisation of unions. It signalled the birth of a new paradigm of political and cultural resistance firmly anchored in the household and the neighbourhood. Looking into the cultural dimensions of violence, the study shows how violence functioned as a creative force, producing transformations in political agency and cultural practices that reached into the Peronist household and shaped mourning rituals and the politics of martyrdom.     

Factors Associated with Co-occurrence of Spousal and Parental Violence: Quebec Population Study

Although the occurrence of both spousal and parental violence within the same family has been documented, there are scarcely any data on this phenomenon for Quebec and Canada. In analyzing the data from the 2004 Quebec survey on family violence in the lives of children, conducted with a population sample of 3,148 mothers, this study pursued two goals: to determine what differences exist between three groups in which family violence occurs (spousal violence, parental violence and co-occurrence of the two) and to better document the factors related to the different types of family violence by developing an explanatory model. Ecological analyses revealed major differences between these three groups in every aspect examined. Our findings support the hypothesis that families in which spousal and parental violence co-occur are not qualitatively different from those families in which only spousal or only parental violence occurs, but that they differ in the severity of the cases reported.     

POLICY DESIGN FOR LEGITIMACY: EXPERT KNOWLEDGE,CITIZENS, TIME AND INCLUSION IN THE UNITED KINGDOM’S BIOTECHNOLOGY SECTOR

More than ever, policy designers need to take legitimacy deficits seriously. To do so, they increasingly involve citizens in policy design processes and draw from a wider range of expertise. Where should they stop in terms of inclusiveness to citizens and expertise and for how long should they allow citizens and experts to be persuasive? These are the questions addressed in this article. Policy design legitimacy, the article argues, can be related to variations in designers and politicians’ inclination to resort to output‐oriented (expertise‐based) versus input‐oriented (citizen‐centred) design processes. Input‐oriented processes have a higher potential in terms of legitimacy deficit reduction than output‐oriented processes, but they take longer, notably because they require the involvement of large numbers of people. In contrast, output‐oriented processes have a slightly lower legitimacy potential, but can produce it faster. These propositions are illustrated by two policy design narratives drawn from the United Kingdom’s biotechnology sector.     

The Empty Heaven of Democracy

Going through a protracted period of transition since the end of the Cold War, the world order in the making is neither what was nor what it is yet to become. It is in “the middle of the future.” To get our bearings in this uncertain transition, we explore the two grand post‐Cold War narratives—“The End of History” as posited by Francis Fukuyama and “The Clash of Civilizations” posited by the late Samuel Huntington. Mikhail Gorbachev looks back at his policies that brought the old order to collapse. The British philosopher John Gray critiques the supposed “universality” of liberalism and, with Homi Bhabha, sees a world of hybrid identities and localized cultures. The Singaporean theorist Kishore Mahbubani peels away the “veneer” of Western dominance. Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel laureate, assesses whether democratic India or autocratic China is better at building “human capacity” in their societies.     

Some Considerations Regarding the Persistence of the Economic Elite in Mexico in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

This article presents an analysis of some of the most important works on the persistence of the economic elite in Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century. The study seeks to answer the following question: How did the formation and character of the Mexican economic elites change during this period? It examines the effect of events such as the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) and the agrarian reform programmes, as well as political instability and institutional uncertainty, on the persistence or weakening of the landowning and industrial elite who had consolidated their power during the Porfiriato period (1876–1911).     

INFLUENCE AND SELECTION PROCESSES IN WEAPON CARRYING DURING ADOLESCENCE: THE ROLES OF STATUS,AGGRESSION, AND VULNERABILITY*

The role of peers in weapon carrying (guns, knives, and other weapons) inside and outside the school was examined in this study. Data stem from a longitudinal study of a high-risk sample of male students (7th to 10th grade; N = 167) from predominantly Hispanic low-socio-economic-status schools in the United States. Longitudinal social-network models were used to test whether similarity in weapon carrying among friends results from peer influence or selection. From a goal-framing approach, we argue that weapon carrying might function as a status symbol in friendship networks and, consequently, be subject to peer influence. The findings indicate that weapon carrying is indeed a result of peer influence. The role of status effects was supported by findings that weapon carrying increased the number of friendship nominations received by peers and reduced the number of given nominations. In addition, peer-reported aggressiveness predicted weapon carrying 1 year later. These findings suggest that adolescent weapon carrying emerges from a complex interplay between the attraction of weapon carriers for affiliation, peer influence in friendship networks, and individual aggression.