Why Information? Choosing Committee Informativeness in U.S. State Legislatures

Using a new dataset drawn from American state legislatures, I modeled the informativeness of legislative committees as a choice over institutions. I found higher informativeness to be associated with better preparedness for information transfer, morepartisan chambers, and higher demand for information combined with greater incentives to control committee assignments. These associations shed light on congressional committee informativeness. A simple model of committee informativeness can predict the informativeness of the U.S. House's committees.     

Why Solidarity Matters: The Political Strategy of Welfare Design

Reporting on our recent book, The Solidarity Society, this article explores the way in which the design of welfare programmes interacts with and shapes the underlying quality of social relations between members of society—and, through this, public attitudes to welfare. Given that sustaining generous welfare over long timescales requires the support of electorates, this ‘relational’ dimension of welfare policy is crucial for the long‐term strategy of tackling poverty and inequality. The article looks in particular at the ‘welfare dilemmas’ that can arise from tensions between targeting and universalism and between need and entitlement, where the distributional and relational elements of welfare policy work against one another. We conclude that entrenching a generous welfare settlement will require strong elements of both universalism and reciprocity in the design of welfare.     

NGO-state collaboration and the new policy agenda—the case of subsidized credit

This article is intended to contribute to debate over how development agencies should respond to what they perceive to be a new Washington-based policy agenda, and particularly with the question of whether collaboration with official agencies implementing that agenda may weaken more radical or alternative visions of development. The approach adopted is to locate these general arguments within a more narrowly defined policy arena—subsidization of credit. The second and third sections distinguish between a range of different points of view over credit subsidies within the World Bank and international NGOs, respectively. The fourth section then discusses opportunities and threats arising from NGO-donor collaboration, particularly co-finance agreements. The article also illustrates the need (a) to distinguish carefully between different elements of the new policy agenda, and (b) to analyse the diversity of views within development agencies as well as between them. © 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Being a Vegetarian

<正>Along with a couple of old schoolfriends,I made my first visit to China in 1997,backpacking through the spellbinding karst landscapes of Guangxi.For one reason or another it took me 10 years to return to China,this time to become a business English teacher in Hangzhou,Zhejiang Province.The author is a Briton living in Hangzhou A long with a couple of old school-friends,     

Unravelling Equality: The Impact of the United Kingdom's Spending Cuts on Women

This article examines a report on the likely impact of the spending cuts on women. The report, Unravelling Equality: A Human Rights and Equality Impact Assessment of the Spending Cuts on Women in Coventry, concludes that the public spending cuts will increase inequality between women and men. For some women the cuts may have serious negative effects on their human rights. The article argues that this report provides a blueprint for the kind of analysis which should be carried out all over the country to ensure that the impact of spending cuts on women is better understood and acted upon.     

Measuring portfolio salience in Eastern European parliamentary democracies

Abstract.  This article presents the results of an expert survey of 14 Eastern European countries on the subject of portfolio salience. Respondents provided ratings of the relative value of all ministerial portfolios in these countries over the years 1990–2002. The ratings are unique in the study of Eastern Europe and appear to possess the characteristics of comprehensiveness and reliability. Comparing the results with a similar survey of Western Europe indicates that individual portfolios are rated nearly identically in both regions. Some significant differences, however, emerge when we look separately at more advanced and less advanced Eastern European countries. Various suggestions are made for how scholars can use these new data in future work.