Explaining judicial reform outcomes in new democracies: The importance of authoritarian legalism in Argentina,Brazil, and Chile

Recent judicial reforms after democratic transition have been substantial and relatively successful in Chile, but much less so in Argentina and Brazil. This article traces this variation in outcomes to the legal strategies of the prior authoritarian regimes. The Brazilian military regime of 1964–1985 was gradualist in its approach to the law, and had a high degree of civilian-military consensus in the legal sphere. It was not highly repressive in its deployment of lethal violence, and this combination of factors contributed to a gradualist and consensual transition in which judicial reform was not placed high on the political agenda. The Argentine case of military rule between 1976 and 1983 was almost the opposite. The military sidestepped and even attacked the judiciary, engaging in almost entirely extrajudicial violence. This generated a “backlash” reform movement after the transition to democracy that was mostly retrospective and only partially successful. In Chile, in contrast, the military engineered a radical break with previous legality, engaged in violent repression, but made considerable efforts to reconstruct a judicial order. It was in the aftermath of this situation that reformers were able to push through a prospective and relatively successful judicial reform. This article's findings suggest that judicial reform may be more likely to succeed where the prior authoritarian regime was both repressive and legalistic, as in Chile, Poland, and South Africa, than where high degrees of repression were applied largely extrajudicially, as in Argentina, Cambodia, and Guatemala, or where the authoritarian regime was legalistic but not highly repressive, as in Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines.     

Bureaucracy,Network, or Enterprise? Comparing Models of Governance in Australia,Britain, the Netherlands,and New Zealand

Theories of democratic government traditionally have relied on a model of organization in which officials act impartially, accept clear lines of accountability and supervision, and define their day–to–day activities through rules, procedures, and confined discretion. In the past 10 years, however, a serious challenge to this ideal has been mounted by critics and reformers who favor market, network, or "mixed–economy" models. We assess the extent to which these new models have influenced the work orientations of frontline staff using three alternative service types—corporate, market, and network—to that proposed by the traditional, procedural model of public bureaucracy. Using surveys of frontline officials in four countries where the revolution in ideas has been accompanied by a revolution in methods for organizing government services, we measure the degree to which the new models are operating as service–delivery norms. A new corporate–market hybrid (called "enterprise governance") and a new network type have become significant models for the organization of frontline work in public programs.     

A Question of Morality: Artists' Values and Public Funding for the Arts

In 1989, the combination of art, religion, homosexuality, ana¹ public dollars set off an explosive two-year battle and a decade of skirmishes over funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. To promote artistic freedom and to avoid political controversy, federal arts policy delegates specific funding decisions to private donors and arts professionals. In an era of morality politics—hot-button issues driven by deeply held beliefs rather than by expertise—that strategy no longer works. Artists, donors, and arts audiences diverge widely from the rest of the American public in their attitudes toward religion, sexual morality, and civil liberties, as General Social Survey data show. Delegating funding decisions to them has naturally led to some subsidies of art offensive to important segments of the population.     

White Australia,Settler Nationalism and Aboriginal Assimilation*

This article examines policies of Aboriginal assimilation between the 1930s and the 1960s, highlights how different forms of settler nationalism shaped understandings of the Aboriginal future, and explores the impact of the shift from biological notions of Australian nationhood (white Australia) to culturalist understandings of national cohesion and belonging. Assimilation policies were underpinned by racist assumptions and settler nationalist imperatives. Aborigines of mixed descent were a special focus for governments and others concerned with Aboriginal welfare, “uplift” and assimilation. This is most evident in the discourse of biological absorption of the 1930s, but lived on in notions of cultural assimilation after the Second World War. One of the ongoing motivations for assimilation drew upon the nationalist message within “white Australia”: the need to avoid the development of ethnic or cultural difference within the nation‐state. The article highlights an ideological split among the advocates of individual assimilation and group assimilation, and uses the writings of Sir Paul Hasluck and A. P. Elkin to illustrate these two views.     

Bureaucrats–Enterprise Negotiation in China's Enterprise Reform at the Local Level: case studies in Guangzhou

This article explores the implementation of SOE reform in China at the local level, using case studies in Guangzhou as illustration. It is argued that local government spearheads a reform agenda that puts locally-defined state objectives first, not necessarily favouring enterprise restructuring. A full-fledged negotiation model does not exist in SOE reforms because all enterprises are controlled by the state and have to comply with top-down policies and orders. Government-enterprise relations and the degree of entrepreneurial power depend largely on the economic strength of the enterprise, with the boomers getting a good economic bargain while the laggards fail to gain sympathy from government. Enterprise workers are largely at the mercy of restructuring decisions that come from bargaining and at times collusion between managers and local bureaucrats.