Political actors,linkages and interactions: Democratic consolidation in Southern Europe

While it is assumed that the new regimes in Spain, Greece and Portugal are fully liberal democratic, the question of their consolidation remains to be assessed. Although this raises problems about the nature of that process, focusing on the role of political parties provides a crucial means for determining the extent to which democratic consolidation has been achieved so far and for identifying any problems here. This is done by constructing a comparative approach based on three relationships: parties with the state; inter‐party relationships; and, parties with society. In applying this approach to the three cases, it is hypothesised that regime consolidation may well proceed at variable paces at the different levels.     

Managerial Experience and Organizational Performance: A 15‐Year Panel Study of Local Assessors

The proposition that managerial experience improves performance is an empirical claim, yet panel studies with long time dimensions exploring the relationship are uncommon. This article investigates the impact of managerial experience on organizational performance using a 15‐year panel of local property assessors in Washington State from 1999 to 2013. Each additional year of experience improves assessment quality as measured by the coefficient of dispersion by three‐tenths of a percent. However, although the relationship is statistically significant, the size of the effect is quite small, with administrative practices and the environment surrounding the assessment task being stronger predictors of assessment performance.     

The Daily Show: Discursive Integration and the Reinvention of Political Journalism

The boundaries between news and entertainment, and between public affairs and pop culture, have become difficult if not impossible to discern. At the intersection of those borders sits The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a hybrid blend of comedy, news, and political conversation that is difficult to pigeon hole. Although the program often is dismissed as being “fake” news, its significance for political communication may run much deeper. This study first locates The Daily Show within an emerging media environment defined by the forces of technological multiplication, economic consolidation, and discursive integration, a landscape in which “real” news is becoming increasingly harder to identify or define. It then offers an interpretive reading of the program that understands the show not as “fake news,” but as an experiment in journalism. It argues that the show uses techniques drawn from genres of news, comedy, and television talk to revive a journalism of critical inquiry and advance a model of deliberative democracy. Given the increasing popularity of the program, this essay concludes that The Daily Show has much to teach us about the possibilities of political journalism in the 21st century.     

Justice,Sustainability, and Integrated Management: Concluding Thoughts

Social Justice Research -     

Regulatory Failure and the Collapse of Japan's Home Mortgage Lending Industry: A Legal and Economic Analysis

This article analyzes the dynamics of contemporary cooperation and conflict in Japanese financial regulation through the prism of the "jusen problem," the collapse of Japan's home mortgage lending industry in the 1990s. The jusen problem is one of the most striking examples of regulatory failure, strategic interest group bargaining, and large-scale dispute resolution in Japanese history.     

Book reviews

M.B. Hayne, The French Foreign Office and the Origins of the First World War 1898-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) £35. ISBN 019-820270-9.

Keith Hamilton, Bertie of Thame: Edwardian Ambassador (Woodbridge/Suffolk: Boydell Press 1990 (= Royal Historical Society Studies in History, No. 60)), ix + 436 pp. ISBN 0-86193-217X. £35.

Anita Inder Singh, The Limits of British Influence: South Asia and the Anglo-American Relationship, 1947-56 (Pinter, 1993) pp. 309. £45.

Robert H. Ferrell (ed.), Truman in the White House: The Diary of Eben A. Ayers (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991) $37.50. ISBN 0-8262-0790-1.

Robert Pearce (ed.), Patrick Gordon Walker: Political Diaries 1932-1971 (London: The Historians Press, 1991) £20. ISBN 1-872273-05 X.

Richard J. Aldrich (ed.), British Strategy and the Cold War, 1945-51 (London: Routledge, 1992) £40. ISBN 0-415-07851-2.

Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe's Name. Germany and the Divided Continent (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993) £25. ISBN 0-224-02054-4.