Human Capital and Administrative Burden: The Role of Cognitive Resources in Citizen-State Interactions

One means by which the state reinforces inequality is by imposing administrative burdens that loom larger for citizens with lower levels of human capital. Integrating insights from various disciplines, this article focuses on one aspect of human capital: cognitive resources. The authors outline a model that explains how burdens and cognitive resources, especially executive functioning, interrelate. The article then presents illustrative examples, highlighting three common life factors—scarcity, health problems, and age-related cognitive decline. These factors create a human capital catch-22, increasing people's likelihood of needing state assistance while simultaneously undermining the cognitive resources required to negotiate the burdens they encounter while seeking such assistance. The result is to reduce access to state benefits and increase inequality. The article concludes by calling for scholars of behavioral public administration and public administration more generally to incorporate more attention to human capital into their research.     

The coronavirus crisis—crisis communication,meaning-making,and reputation management

Abstract

This article addresses the Norwegian government’s meaning-making, crises communication and reputation management during the Corona pandemic crisis. It argues that reputation management can be seen as a combination of governance capacity and legitimacy reflected in a well performing crisis communication and meaning-making. Under the slogan “working together” the government emphasized the need for a supportive and cohesive culture in order to to balance efforts at increasing governance capacity as well as governance legitimacy, through shaping a common understanding and broad consensus on what the crisis was about and what needed to be done to deal with it. A main lesson learned from the Norwegian case is that the effectiveness of the government in controlling the pandemic was enhanced by successful meaning-making and communication with the public, and to the high level of citizens’ trust in government.     

Debating Food Security Policy in Two Different Ideational Settings: A Comparison of Australia and Norway

Food security has emerged as a relatively new policy issue in agricultural policy making in developed countries. This policy problem is addressed within an institutional landscape in which agricultural ideas and institutions are well‐established. In this article, food security policy making in Australia and Norway is compared. In Australia, agricultural normalism (agricultural markets and production are considered to be similar to those of other economic sectors) has been dominant since the mid‐1980s, while Norwegian agricultural policy making has been dominated by agricultural exceptionalism (agriculture is considered a unique economic sector with special market and production conditions). It is demonstrated in the article how these two opposing institutionalised ideational foundations have influenced the nature of the food security debate in the two countries. In Australia, the debate emphasises the positive role of the market and trade in providing global food security. In Norway, the debate highlights the need to regulate market forces and restrict trade in order to allow countries to develop their own agricultural sectors.     

The Finnish Citizens’ Initiative: Towards Inclusive Agenda‐setting?

This article examines whether the Citizens' Initiative (CI) in Finland has enhanced inclusion in processes of political agenda‐setting. Democratic innovations such as CIs have been proposed as a solution to the challenges facing Western democracies. CIs are expected to increase political inclusion by allowing citizens to set the political agenda and by mobilising otherwise marginalised or passive citizens. However, the empirical evidence on this proposition remains scarce. This study examines the impact of the CI in Finland on political inclusion. It relies on the Civic Voluntarism Model (CVM) to determine whether the CI mobilises citizens who otherwise tend to be less involved in political matters and thereby enhances inclusiveness. The data come from the Finnish National Election Study 2015 (FNES2015), which is a cross‐sectional representative survey conducted in the wake of the national parliamentary elections in April 2015. Logistic regression models are used in the article to examine the relative importance of socioeconomic resources and civic skills, psychological political engagement and recruitment networks. The results show that while users have many of the familiar traits of political activists, the CI also activates marginalised groups. Most importantly, young citizens are likely to support CIs and the Internet constitutes a central recruitment network. In this sense, the CI has helped increase democratic inclusiveness.     

Job Choice and Performance: Revisiting Core Assumptions about Public Service Motivation

Although there has been considerable enthusiasm for public service motivation (PSM) research in recent years, two of PSM's fundamental assumptions have been relatively untested: its impacts on job choice and on job performance. Using panel data from two different studies, we offer stronger observational tests of these core assumptions. The findings provide mixed evidence. When testing PSM's effect on employment choice, we find that PSM measured during a law student's first year predicts the sector in which they are employed after graduation three years later. In a separate study investigating PSM's effect on job performance, we find that government employee PSM does not predict employee absenteeism or supervisor assessments of their in-role and extra-role performance. Our findings support recent calls for a more nuanced theory and analyses of PSM to help better understand its implications for recruiting, retaining, and motivating the workforce used to provide public goods and services.     

The collapse of the fisheries sector in Kyrgyzstan: An analysis of its roots and its prospects for revival

The disintegration of the Soviet Union had profound economic and social effects on many of the newly independent transition economies. Nowhere was this more so than in the fisheries sector – with one of the biggest production shortfalls occurring in Kyrgyzstan, following the collapse of lake capture and pond-culture production. In 2005, aggregate landings were just 48 tonnes – barely 3 per cent of the catch level recorded in 1989. This article has two objectives. First it analyses the extent to which the dissolution of the Soviet Union can explain the collapse of the fisheries sector in Kyrgyzstan. Second, in the light of these findings, it considers what practical steps, if any, might be taken to revitalize the sector.     

Passport to Parenthood: Reproductive Pathways In and Out of Denmark

Denmark has become a destination for single women, lesbians, and heterosexual couples wanting donated sperm. At the moment, women from Sweden, Norway, Germany, Italy, and the UK travel to Denmark. Simultaneously, waiting lists for donated eggs and age restrictions are prime motivations for infertile Danish women and heterosexual couples to leave Denmark and travel to Spain, the Czech Republic, the Ukraine, and Greece for egg donation. Informed by Donna Haraway’s notion of “the apparatus of bodily production”, Marcia Inhorn’s development of “reproductive flows”, and the use of Adele Clarke’s “situational analysis”, this paper explores the question: How do global reproductive pathways in and out of Denmark emerge when fertility travellers narrate, negotiate, and cross national borders to go through fertility treatment? Methodologically, we use a multi-sited and multi-modal approach centring on interviews with fertility travellers moving to and from Denmark in combination with ethnographic observations carried out in Danish and Spanish fertility clinics and an analysis of legal regulations. The paper concludes by discussing how the concept of reproductive pathways helps to theorize transnational movements of bodies and contributes to feminist scholarship on transnational reproductive travel.     

Adolescents’ Engagement in Ethnic Harassment: Prejudiced Beliefs in Social Networks and Classroom Ethnic Diversity

Research on ethnic victimization to date has done little to identify the reasons why adolescents victimize their peers due to their ethnic background. To address this limitation, we examined: (1) the extent to which prejudiced attitudes within adolescents’ close and larger social networks determine their engagement in ethnic harassment, and (2) the extent to which classroom ethnic diversity plays a role in any such link. Our sample included 902 Swedish adolescents (M _age ?=?14.40, SD?=?.95; 50.3% girls). We found that Swedish adolescents who held negative attitudes toward immigrants or who were surrounded by prejudiced peers were more likely to be involved in ethnic harassment, particularly in classrooms with high ethnic diversity. Adolescents in classrooms with a high anti-immigrant climate were more likely to harass their immigrant peers. These findings suggest that prejudiced beliefs in youth social networks put young people at risk of engaging in ethnic harassment, particularly in ethnically diverse classrooms.