Towards secure quadratic voting

We provide an overview of some of the security issues involved in securely implementing Lalley and Weyl’s “Quadratic Voting” (Lalley and Weyl, Quadratic voting, 2016), and suggest some possible implementation architectures. Our proposals blend end-to-end verifiable voting methods with anonymous payments. We also consider new refund rules for quadratic voting, such as a “lottery” method.     

习近平主席访韩和韩中关系的新里程碑

2014年7月3日习近平主席对韩国进行了国事访问。通过这次在东北亚安全环境急剧变化的情况下进行的访韩,韩中两国建立了"成熟的"战略合作伙伴关系。在这次访韩中,习主席首次提出了韩中关系的"四个坚持"原则。以此为基础,为了在外交和安全领域中实现韩中关系的实质性成熟,双方决定将各种战略对话和高层会谈机制化;在经济领域中决定年内尽早完成韩中自由贸易协定谈判,建立包括金融在内的高度经济合作框架。此外,在加强两国未来青年领导人的交流和搞活公共外交合作等人文交流方面也取得了重大成果。另外,在外交安全领域也给我们留下了韩国和中国为了追求共同利益需要进一步加强相互理解的课题。尤其是从韩国和中国的外交均处于发展之中,以及朝鲜半岛问题正在中美关系和东北亚国际关系这个更大的框架内运作这一点出发,两国都需要发展更加灵活、更为积极的韩中关系。     

How Do Performance Gaps Affect Improvement in Organizational Performance? Exploring the Mediating Roles of Proactive Activities

Abstract

According to the extensive literature on performance gaps, the various reference points of the problem identification process affect the managerial decisions of public managers. In this article, we propose a theory about the public management decision-making processes based on the roles of proactive behaviors, specifically regarding how identifying such problems (performance gaps) leads to performance improvement. Using panel data from Korea covering 2005–2014, this analysis provides support for our assertion that not all reference points are equally important to public managers’ proactive responses; however, we find evidence supporting the importance of perceiving the external reference point of problem identification as a significant precedent for successful organizational performance. Our results also indicate that practitioners need to become involved in greater feedback processes when searching for proactive solutions that remedy poor organizational performance. This suggests that the creation of diverse and sophisticated performance feedback systems can strengthen public managers’ abilities to find solutions for organizations. Ultimately, the findings enhance our understanding of the relationship between performance gaps and performance improvement by examining the role of public managers’ proactive behaviors.     

Stakeholder framing,communicative interaction,and policy legitimacy: anti-smoking policy in South Korea

Policy Sciences - Since the emergence of the argumentative turn in critical policy studies, increasing attention has been paid to the crucial role played by language, context, and communicative...     

What Makes Students Engaged in Learning? A Time-Use Study of Within- and Between-Individual Predictors of Emotional Engagement in Low-Performing High Schools

Adolescents’ emotional engagement plays a critical role in promoting their academic performance as well as overall psychological wellbeing. As a part of a 3-year longitudinal study, this study drew upon self-determination theory to examine three psychological predictors of emotional engagement within specific learning contexts. Ninety-four, low socioeconomic status (SES), ninth grade students (49% male; 32 Blacks, 30 Whites, and 32 Latinos) rated the perceived fulfillment of their autonomy, competence, and relatedness needs and their emotional engagement in learning settings at multiple time points over a 1-week period. Hierarchical linear modeling showed that the students’ ratings of their psychological-need fulfillment and of their emotional engagement fluctuated over time and across contexts. After accounting for student gender, race/ethnicity, and prior achievement, we found that the fulfillment of each type of psychological need in a particular learning context was related to emotional engagement in that context (i.e., within-student level). The fulfillment of students’ need for autonomy also was related to their emotional engagement at the aggregated level (i.e., between-student level). These findings illustrate how the psychological affordances of particular learning settings are associated with emotional engagement within and between students from low SES backgrounds.     

Size Matters: Toward a Contingency Theory of Diversity Effects on Performance

Abstract

This study examines the diversity-performance link by focusing on two types of diversity—gender and functional—in the context of governing boards of 24 quasi-government agencies in Korea over 16?years (2000–2015). Although public management scholarship contains evidence regarding the importance of diversity in public organizations, there is little consensus on what constitutes diversity and how it affects public sector performance. This study expands the scope of dialogues by highlighting multidimensional characteristics of diversity and the contingent nature of diversity effects. Multiplicative interaction models confirm that there are distinctive effects of different types of diversity on performance, and the relationship is moderated by the size of the group to which minorities belong. While the effect of board gender diversity is limited in our data, the effect of having a female chief executive is positively significant with decreasing marginal effect as the number of board members increases. On the other hand, the relationship of functional diversity in the boardroom to agency performance is negative, while the negative marginal effect decreases and becomes positive when board size rises above a critical number.     

Overcoming the Barriers to Cooperation: Intergovernmental Service Agreements

Interlocal cooperation through service‐sharing agreements has a long history, but its use has increased in popularity during the last 20 years. The decisions of local government units to collaborate through intergovernmental service agreements are best understood as a two‐stage process. The first stage, in which communities decide whether to consider interlocal cooperation, involves the nature of the immediate problem faced plus specific demands for performance and efficiency gains that can result from service cooperation. In the second stage, communities confront a question of institutional supply, and hence must overcome inherent bargaining and collective action issues in order to forge interlocal agreements. Heckman probit estimates of such complex relationships using data drawn from a 2003 ICMA survey suggest strong support for this model. The authors conclude by discussing the role of network relationships among local actors for reducing transaction costs and facilitating intergovernmental collaboration.