A Comparative Assessment of Elite Policy Recruits in Canada

Recent case studies and large-N survey evidence has confirmed long-suspected shortages of public sector “policy capacity”. Studies have found that government policy workers in various jurisdictions differ considerably with respect to types of policy work they undertake, and have identified uneven capacity for policy workers to access and apply technical and scientific knowledge to public issues. This suggests considerable difficulties for government’s ability to meet contemporary policy and governance challenges. Despite growing attention to these matters, studies have not examined the “elite” policy workers many governments recruit to address these capacity shortages. Using an established survey instrument, this study of two Canadian recruitment programs provides the first comparative analysis of elite policy recruits, as policy workers. Three research questions anchor the study: (1) What is the profile of these actors? (2) What types of policy work do “elite” policy analysts actually engage in? (3) How does their policy work compare by recruitment program? The article provides fresh comparative data on the nature of elite policy work and policy analytical capacity, but, more importantly, a crucial baseline for future comparative study of how elite recruitment may facilitate “supply-side” capacity gains expected from recruitment programs.     

Innovation and Alliances

Explanations for national success in science and technology typically focus on domestic institutions and policies. However, that line of research has yet to identify any particular set of institutions or policies that explain variation in national innovation rates across cases or over time. This article offers new evidence that the problem with domestic institutions approaches stems from their failure to consider international security factors. Specifically, this article finds a positive effect for U.S. security alliances on innovation. This finding is robust across different specifications and periods of analysis. While countries that ally militarily with the United States are found to realize benefits in economy‐wide, indigenous innovation, such an effect is not observed in military technologies. This suggests that alliances may substitute for being on the frontier in military technologies. Therefore, this article contributes not just to debates over S&T competitiveness, but also to alliance formation.     

How Does Violence Threaten the State? Four Narratives on Piracy

Violence characterized by similar actions, actor motivations, group structures, or level of damage still poses qualitatively distinct genera of threats to states. For instance, “terrorism” can threaten a particular state, be used by a state, or threaten the entire state system. Building on the threat construction literature, this study argues that threat is best understood through narratives on the relationship between violence and the boundary-producing practices that construct the state. Four ideal-typical basic narratives on this relationship are produced—entrant, resource, revisionist, and criminal. Each narrative is then demonstrated by looking at how it was used in a historical case of piracy. The action (piracy as raiding at sea) is held constant while the threat in each varies with the narrative. Understanding how threat is narratively constructed can help us to understand particular historical episodes of violence and state responses to them.     

Buyer Beware: How Market Structure Affects Contracting and Company Performance in the Private Military Industry

Private military and security companies are integral components of the defense and intelligence operations of some of the world's most powerful states. Despite the increasingly pivotal role of contractors, analysts have yet to develop theories explaining when governments should outsource national security responsibilities or what conditions cause private defense markets to function efficiently. This inquiry addresses this gap in the literature by demonstrating that varying market structures—that is, the quantity of firms providing similar services and the number and purchasing power of those buying these services—have significant effects on costs, oversight, and company performance in the private defense industry. A principal–agent framework is developed to explain variation in the performance of firms in different markets across the industry. Evaluation of three private defense markets yields the surprising conclusion that monopsony, rather than a competitive market, is the ideal structure for governments outsourcing aspects of national defense.     

Reporting beyond the pale: UK news discourse on drones in Pakistan

This article on drone strikes in Pakistan offers a distinctive empirical case study for critical scholarship of counterterrorism. By asking how cosmopolitanism has developed through UK news discourse, it also provides a constructivist contribution to the literature on drones. I argue that UK news discourse is not cosmopolitan because it focuses on risk and places the Other beyond comprehension. US–UK networked counterterrorism operations have complicated accountability, and while a drive for certainty promoted more scrutiny of policy, news media outlets, academics and activists turned to statistical and visual genres of communication that have inhibited understanding of the Other.     

Remittances and Happiness of Migrants and Their Home Households: Evidence Using Matched Samples

This paper explores how remittances influence happiness among migrants and their households of origin. It is based on a novel data set of matched samples of Bangladeshi migrant households (living in the UK and Malaysia) and their origin families in Bangladesh. Empirical findings suggest that remittances play a significant role in stimulating migrants’ happiness. We also find that the households of origin’s life satisfaction not only depends on receiving remittances from the emigrants, but also other factors such as number of migrants from the household living abroad and the migrants’ country of destination.