China's Exceptionalism and the Challenges of Delivering Difference in Africa

This article explores the notion of ‘China's exceptionalism’ in Africa, a prominent feature in Beijing's current continental and bilateral engagement. ‘China's exceptionalism’ is understood as a normative modality of engagement that seeks to structure relations such that, though they may remain asymmetrical in economic content they are nonetheless characterised as equal in terms of recognition of economic gains and political standing (mutual respect and political equality). This article considers the burden that the central Chinese government has assumed through its self-construction and mobilisation of a position of exceptionalism and, concurrently, the imperatives that flow from such rhetorical claims of distinctiveness in terms of demonstrating and delivering difference as a means to sustain the unity and coherence of these rhetorical commitments.     

A General Empirical Law of Public Budgets: A Comparative Analysis

We examine regularities and differences in public budgeting in comparative perspective. Budgets quantify collective political decisions made in response to incoming information, the preferences of decision makers, and the institutions that structure how decisions are made. We first establish that the distribution of budget changes in many Western democracies follows a non-Gaussian distribution, the power function. This implies that budgets are highly incremental, yet occasionally are punctuated by large changes. This pattern holds regardless of the type of political system—parliamentary or presidential—and for level of government. By studying the power function's exponents we find systematic differences for budgetary increases versus decreases (the former are more punctuated) in most systems, and for levels of government (local governments are less punctuated). Finally, we show that differences among countries in the coefficients of the general budget law correspond to differences in formal institutional structures. While the general form of the law is probably dictated by the fundamental operations of human and organizational information processing, differences in the magnitudes of the law's basic parameters are country- and institution-specific .     

Citizen Trust in Civil Servants: A Cross-National Examination

How trusting of civil servants are citizens in North America and Europe? What individual-level and national-level attributes correlate with trust in civil servants? To answer these questions, data from national samples across 21 countries are taken from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 2006 Role of Government module and are analyzed by estimating multilevel binary logistic regression models. Trust is correlated with both subjective (at the individual-level) and objective (at the national-level) indicators of performance. The quality of institutions also matters as countries with lower levels of public sector corruption experience higher levels of trust in the civil service.