A short history of studying incremental institutional change: Does Explaining Institutional Change provide any new explanations?

Kathleen Thelen is one of the leading scholars studying incremental institutional change. In her early works from the 1990s, she introduced the conceptualization of different modes of incremental change. These modes have central attention in her recent co-edited book with James Mahoney, Explaining Institutional Change (2010). Compared with Thelen's earlier work, this book provides clearer definitions, addresses the explanatory factors of institutional change, and discusses the patterns and sequences of gradual institutional change. The theory presented by Mahoney and Thelen, however, seems overambitious and subject to a need to be overly crisp and clear.     

Does organizational adaptation really matter? How mission change affects the survival of U.S. federal independent agencies, 1933–2011

Public administration scholars tend to take for granted that organizational adaptation is important. This common notion that public organizations must adapt to stay alive has not been put to the test in the field of public administration, however. Intriguingly, organization ecologists find that adaptation does not matter and might even be counterproductive for individual organizations. They argue that the absence of adaptation—which they refer to as structural inertia—actually enhances the likelihood of survival. But organization ecologists focus mostly on nonpublic organizations. This prompts the question whether adaptation in public organizations really matters. In this article, we test these contrasting claims (while controlling for design features) on a population of U.S. federal independent public agencies (n = 142). Our findings suggest a subtle narrative. We conclude that proactive adaptation increases termination hazards. But inertia does not seem to significantly enhance survival chances.     

TAIWAN'S GROWING SECURITY VULNERABILITY: FROM CHEN SHUI-BIAN TO MA YING-JIU

Taiwan-China relations have experienced a remarkable détente since KMT candidate and cross-strait moderate Ma Ying-Jiu was elected president on Formosa in 2008. Yet despite the rapprochement and its concomitant reduction of military tensions across the Taiwan Strait, the island's security position vis-à-vis China has been in steady decline since the early 2000s. Ma's expectation that closer economic and diplomatic ties with Beijing will result in greater international space for Taiwan have so far not yet been realised. On the contrary, deeper connections with the mainland seem to but accelerate the growth of Taiwan's security vulnerability.     

Changing household patterns of young couples in low- and middle-income countries

While young couples in Western societies generally form a new household, in low-income societies new unions are often incorporated into existing households. However, there is a growing tendency in the nuclearization of households as intergenerational co-residence is undermined by growing wage labour opportunities that provide incentives for rural–urban migration and because small nuclear families adapt better to urban societies characterized by high geographic and social mobility. The objective of this paper is therefore to jointly study for a selection of low- to middle-income countries the socioeconomic and demographic conditions of women aged 15–34 and their partners in relation to their household patterns with particular interest in the comparison of nuclear and extended households. The analysis will mainly rely on data from the Integrated Public Use of Microdata Series International database (https://international.ipums.org/international/) from which census samples for the last two or latest available census rounds for 18 countries have been extracted. Results showed that women being of older age (within the 15–34 range) and at the same time having attained at least primary school education, having a husband who does not work in the primary sector and who is neither much older nor much younger were all associated with living in a nuclear household. However, individual factors explained only a small part of the overall variation in the household arrangements of young couples, suggesting that differences between countries in these dimensions do not explain much of the difference in household structure. Rather, societal indicators like economic development and the average age at marriage – that were significant in our models – may explain better the overall slow transition towards the nuclear family.     

Transboundary water interaction II: the influence of ‘soft’ power

This paper seeks to broaden the analysis of transboundary water interaction, by examining and interpreting the influence of ‘soft’ power therein. The ‘soft’ power of persuasion is understood to be exercised through discursive and to a lesser extent ideational means, and is interpreted in terms of compliance related to distributive (conflictual) or integrative (consensual) ends (after Scott (1994)). The focus is on inter-state water conflicts in hegemonic political contexts, where, it is found, the ‘first among equals’ has a greater ability to exploit ‘soft’ power and to determine the outcome. ‘Soft’ power is also seen to influence the choices states make or avoid in their transboundary water interaction, which explains in part how treaties intending to manage conflict may in fact delay or perpetuate it. For example, ‘soft’ power can be used by the basin hegemon to frame inequitable forms of cooperation in a cooperative light, such that unfair and ultimately unsustainable transboundary arrangements are replicated by the international donor community. Non-hegemonic riparian states also employ their capacity of ‘soft’ power, though may find themselves with little choice other than to comply with the arrangement established by the basin hegemon. The findings stress the importance of analysts questioning claims of interaction promoted as ‘cooperative’, and of examining the ‘soft’ power plays that underlie all transboundary water arrangements. Exemplification is provided through transboundary river basins and aquifers around the globe.     

The Effects of Pathological Gaming on Aggressive Behavior

Studies have shown that pathological involvement with computer or video games is related to excessive gaming binges and aggressive behavior. Our aims for this study were to longitudinally examine if pathological gaming leads to increasingly excessive gaming habits, and how pathological gaming may cause an increase in physical aggression. For this purpose, we conducted a two-wave panel study among 851 Dutch adolescents (49% female) of which 540 played games (30% female). Our analyses indicated that higher levels of pathological gaming predicted an increase in time spent playing games 6 months later. Time spent playing violent games specifically, and not just games per se, increased physical aggression. Furthermore, higher levels of pathological gaming, regardless of violent content, predicted an increase in physical aggression among boys. That this effect only applies to boys does not diminish its importance, because adolescent boys are generally the heaviest players of violent games and most susceptible to pathological involvement.     

Experimentation in policy design: insights from the building sector

The current article questions how experimentation in policy design plays out in practice. In particular, it is interested in understanding how the content and process of policy-design experiments affect their outcomes. The article does so by building on an original study into 31 real-world examples of experimentation in policy design in the building sector in Australia, the Netherlands, and the United States. All examples aim to improve the environmental sustainability of the building sector. The article finds that these 31 examples have attracted moderate to substantial numbers of participants (policy outcome HO.i), but have not achieved substantial numbers of buildings built or retrofitted with high levels of sustainability (policy outcome HO.ii). By carefully unpacking these policy designs into a number of key characteristics, it finds that this mismatch between the two outcomes may partly be explained by flawed policy-design processes. The article concludes with the main lessons learnt and provides some suggestions on how to improve experimentation in policy design.     

Progressiveness and the New Right: The Electoral Relevance of Culturally Progressive Values in the Netherlands

Whereas electoral support for new-rightist parties is often understood as driven by ethnocentric anti-immigrant sentiments, scholars have noted that new-rightist politicians have, surprisingly, stressed culturally progressive arguments in the last decade. Using recent Dutch survey data (N = 1,302) especially collected for this purpose, the article analyses the electoral relevance of three types of cultural progressiveness for voting for the new right and their relation to the well-documented anti-immigrant agenda. The analysis shows that neither moral progressiveness nor aversion to public interference of religious orthodoxy underlies the new-rightist vote. Support for freedom of speech proves relevant, but, in accordance with literature on the new right’s electoral strategy and with theorising on framing, this only leads towards the new right among those who are ethnocentric. These findings are discussed in the light of electoral competition, and questions for further research are formulated.