Relational Leadership,Storytelling, and Narratives: Practices of Local Government Chief Executives

This article examines the storytelling and narrative practices of an elite group of public administrators in the United Kingdom: local government chief executives. The authors do so through the lens of relationality, exploring the collective dimensions of leadership. The focus on leadership and stories embraces the narrative turn in public administration scholarship. It responds to calls for research examining the distinctive settings of everyday leadership action. The contribution to theory is a qualitative understanding of the relational ways in which stories and narratives are used in the practices of public administration leaders. The article analyzes four ways in which such leadership is accomplished: inviting an emotional connection and commitment to public service, making sense of organizational realities, provoking reflections on practices and assumptions, and managing relations with politicians. The authors offer an appreciation of how relational leadership influence can be generated by expressive narratives and storytelling rather than stemming from bureaucratic authority.     

A comprehensive approach to providing services to survivors of sexual and gender-based violence in Democratic Republic of Congo: addressing more than physical trauma

ABSTRACT

The eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is impacted by a prolonged conflict and humanitarian crisis. Sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) affects an estimated 39.7% of women and 23.6% of men in the region, and is associated with serious medical, psychological, and socio-economic outcomes for survivors and communities. IMA World Health, a faith-based non-profit organisation, implements a USAID-funded project, Ushindi, which is a collaborative effort with three national NGOs and one technical partner in response to SGBV in eastern DRC. The consortium provides a comprehensive package of services to SGBV survivors, focusing on medical, emotional, psychological, legal, and socio-economic needs.     

London as text: Eighteenth‐century women writers and reading the city

Moral convention required that the eighteenth‐century English novelist express disapproval of the opportunities London afforded women for mobility, deception, and independence. Women novelists of the period, however, subverted this code by depicting urbanized heroines who gain forbidden knowledge about male and female sexuality and social roles, and are thus able to manipulate convention rather than merely following it. Examination of five novels of the period — two by men, three by women — demonstrates that male and female novelists, while allegedly working within the same moral framework, generated vastly different moral texts out of the complex semiotic of the London environment. As the novel gained in respectability, women novelists’ use of the London convention became on the surface more conventional, and their heroines’ attitudes toward urban mores more disapproving, but subversive alternative behaviors are still depicted in late eighteenth‐century novels.     

On the political economy of state highway expenditures: Some evidence of the relative performance of alternative public choice models

This paper explores the extent to which the public demand for roads and/or power of special interest groups determines road expenditures at the state level using an extension of the methodology developed in Congleton and Shughart (1990). Reduced form models of median voter demand, special interest group equilibria, and a combined model are estimated using cross-sectional state data from the United States. We generally find support for the hypothesis that voting matters. The pure median voter models have a better fit than the pure special interest group models. Moreover, in our combined model, we find that variables from the median-voter model can not be dropped without significantly reducing the combined model's fit.     

Redistributive politics: A theory of taxation for an incumbent in a democracy

In order to maximize votes, incumbent politicians design and implement redistributional programs. These programs benefit some voters at the expense of others. In the simple two group (or tax payers and beneficiaries) case we identify the nature of vote maximizing transfer policies. This model's basic approach is shown to hold for multiple group models as well. Strategic implications for the organizers of sub groups of the population (or group leaders) are developed. Other extensions of the model are discussed. qu]Where the budget is clever is in its detail. Each little measure is designed to hurt (but not too much) people who are not politically important, while tossing a bone to people who are. You can see this in a host of different ways.     

Understanding Ripple Effects: The Cross–National Adoption of Policy Instruments for Bureaucratic Accountability

This article examines different explanations for the cross–national diffusion of three recent innovations in bureaucratic accountability—the institution of the ombudsman, freedom of information legislation and data protection (information privacy) law. The first two explanations are based on the assumption that these innovations are by–products of modernization, either the growth of the state or democratization. The third assumes that policy is shaped through processes of international communication. A combination of methodologies is employed to conclude that while the growth of government and liberal democratic values are necessary conditions for the adoption of all three policy instruments, they are not sufficient conditions. The pattern of adoption observed is best explained by examining how evidence about these respective policies flows from adopting states to non–adopters. In the case of the ombudsman, this process can be characterized as one of lesson–drawing; for freedom of information, evidence is used for legitimation purposes; for data protection, the diffusion is attributable to harmonization through international organizations. Policy transfer is hence a multi–faceted concept that embraces a number of distinct processes of transnational learning and communication.