Agricultural innovation and political change in north India: The Lok Dal in Uttar Pradesh

This article examines the basis of the success of the Lok Dal in electoral politics in Uttar Pradesh in relation to a wide range of indicators of agricultural innovation and change. It argues that the Lok Dal, through its political practice and electoral strategy, was able to create and sustain an electoral following across the state which subsumed many potentially divisive identities and interests and that the party is better understood as one which created and articulated new aspirations and interests rather than one simply mobilising traditional identities. It goes on to examine how events after the mid‐1980s produced circumstances which inhibited the further consolidation of the Lok Dal and led to major changes in the party political system in Uttar Pradesh.     

Public administration in the cross-hairs of evidence-based policy and authentic engagement: School closures in Ontario

Education policy affects communities across Canada. Changes in demographics, enrolment patterns, and pressures on education budgets have put school closures on the political agenda in many provinces. Implementing these policies is increasingly contested and conflict-ridden. Public administrators are at the cross-hairs of implementing evidence-based policies, based on authentic stakeholder input and engagement. This article examines two cases of school closure policy implementation in Ontario to illustrate the tension between these two important dimensions of public administration and challenges that must be overcome in this and other policy areas where evidence and engagement are increasingly important.     

Workplace violence in Hong Kong, China: nature, impact, and preparedness

This article reports a survey of workplace violence in Hong Kong. A sizable number of the 1,198 organizations that were questioned reported that they had experienced such violence over the 2 years preceding the study, but the problem was not prevalent. In both the private and government sectors, nonphysical violence happened more frequently than physical violence, and there was a reported lack of preparedness of many organizations to deal with the violence. Compared with private organizations, government organizations experienced more coworker and customer violence, but more private than government organizations believed that workplace violence caused the loss of key employees and clients. Correlation analysis found that a subculture of workplace violence appears to emerge over time, such that the more customer violence is experienced, the more is coworker violence, and the more the nonphysical violence, the more the physical violence. These findings are discussed with reference to international findings.     

State sovereign standing: often overlooked, but not forgotten

Critics of Virginia's challenge to the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act have asserted that Virginia lacked standing to even raise the issue. Such criticism is inconsistent with foundational understandings of the role of states in providing a check on federal power and with the modern standing jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, especially as reflected in the Court's decisions regarding a state's sovereign interest in defending its code of laws. This Article demonstrates that, as a matter of constitutional design and history, as well as under relevant precedents, Virginia clearly had and has standing to bring its challenge.