The Evolution of Chinese Administrative Studies: Where Is the Field of Chinese Administrative Science Headed?

Is Public Administration (PA) as a field of study a basic science? If not, could PA generally and Chinese PA (CPA) in particular become a basic science or a design science? To address these questions, this essay reviews pertinent literature to underscore the major problems, basic deficiencies, and critical issues of CPA, and then reviews ongoing CPA research to shed light on its future development. Our review shows that PA lacks an intellectual core that defines the nature of public administration as a professional practice, and in turn, the nature of PA as an academic discipline. Further, while CPA bears the same deficiencies, it also suffers from three maladies, namely, reductionism, traditionalism, and conservatism, which together reinforce mediocrity. In view of all these issues and problems, where CPA is headed? Our literature review reports some ongoing research breakthroughs in CPA, including ontological confirmation of public administration nature and identification of necessary conditions for effective administrative results, which form a basis to suggest that CPA may become a basic science and design science.

     

Perils of development funding? The tale of EU Funds and grand corruption in Central and Eastern Europe

Given the unprecedented scale of intergovernmental development funding and the importance of institutional quality for human well‐being, it is imperative to precisely understand the impact of development funds on corruption. In Europe, European Union (EU) Funds provide a boost to public spending in recipient member states while introducing additional corruption controls. We investigate whether EU Funds increase high‐level corruption in the Czech Republic and Hungary in 2009–2012. We analyze newly collected data from over 100,000 public procurement contracts to develop objective corruption risk indicators and link them to agency level data in the public sector. Propensity score matching estimations suggest that EU funds increase corruption risk by up to 34 percent. The negative effects are largely attributable to overly formalistic compliance and EU Funds overriding domestic accountability mechanisms in public organizations entirely dependent on external funds. The policy implications are profound: governments should reduce barriers to market entry by lowering red tape and prevent excessive concentration of funds.     

Plus ça change: Electoral law reform and the 2008 Romanian parliamentary elections

Romania reformed the law governing its parliamentary elections between 2004 and 2008, shifting from a complex proportional representation system based on county-level party lists to a complex uninominal system in which each district for the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate elects one representative. The change in law emerged after more than a year of heated political controversies, including partisan and personal animosity between President Basescu and Prime Minister Tariceanu, a failed attempt at impeachment, a deadlocked special electoral commission, a failed popular referendum, an unfavorable constitutional court ruling, and a confusing final accord brokered under deadline. Qualitative comparison of the 2004 and 2008 laws reveals that the heralded reform merely added an additional layer of calculation to the previous electoral system. Quantitative analysis using counterfactual estimation reveals that the new law had absolutely zero effect on the partisan outcome. In the conclusion, we explore the implications of these findings for Romanian politics and the politics of electoral reform more generally.     

Reflections on Hofstadter’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">The American Political Tradition</Emphasis>

Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition (1948) depends for its reputation on the author’s rich historiographical heritage, including the progressive vision of Charles Beard, a somewhat detached and ironic vision of America also shared with his friend, C. Vann Woodward, and the literary and intellectual traditions of his own time, running from Marx to Mencken. Hofstadter by no means spared American icons such as Jefferson, TR, Wilson and FDR; even Lincoln was treated the gloves off rather than on. Hofstadter was often at his best with marginal and dissenting figures such as Wendell Phillips and John C. Calhoun, but he treated the mixing of religion and politics, along with America's celebration of itself with considerable. Finally, though The American Political Tradition still repays study, including close re-reading, it also demands to be historicized and understood in its own context.     

The Balance‐Sample Size Frontier in Matching Methods for Causal Inference

We propose a simplified approach to matching for causal inference that simultaneously optimizes balance (similarity between the treated and control groups) and matched sample size. Existing approaches either fix the matched sample size and maximize balance or fix balance and maximize sample size, leaving analysts to settle for suboptimal solutions or attempt manual optimization by iteratively tweaking their matching method and rechecking balance. To jointly maximize balance and sample size, we introduce the matching frontier, the set of matching solutions with maximum possible balance for each sample size. Rather than iterating, researchers can choose matching solutions from the frontier for analysis in one step. We derive fast algorithms that calculate the matching frontier for several commonly used balance metrics. We demonstrate this approach with analyses of the effect of sex on judging and job training programs that show how the methods we introduce can extract new knowledge from existing data sets.     

Reviews

Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment By Tim Etchells, 1999. New York: Routledge

Up Your Ass Written by Valerie Solanas, Directed and Presented by George Coates, Performance Works at P.S. 122, New York City, February 7–25th, 2001

Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera Edited by Mary Ann Smart. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

The Garden An installation by Paul McCarthy, Dietch Projects, New York City

39 MICROLECTURES: in proximity of performance by Matthew Goulish, London: Routledge, 2000     

Course and Severity of Maternal Depression: Associations with Family Functioning and Child Adjustment

Number of lifetime episodes, duration of current episode, and severity of maternal depression were investigated in relation to family functioning and child adjustment. Participants were the 151 mother–child pairs in the Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression (STAR*D) child multi-site study. Mothers were diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder; children (80 males and 71 females) ranged in age from 7 to 17 years. Measures of child adjustment included psychiatric diagnoses, internalizing and externalizing symptoms, and functional impairment. Measures of family functioning included family cohesion, expressiveness, conflict, organization, and household control; parenting measures assessed maternal acceptance and psychological control. Children of mothers with longer current depressive episodes were more likely to have internalizing and externalizing symptoms, with this association being moderated by child gender. Mothers with more lifetime depressive episodes were less likely to use appropriate control in their homes.

'This just isn't sustainable': precarious employment, stress and workers' health

This paper explores the impact of precarious employment relationships on health outcomes. It uses a novel framework, "Employment Strain" to describe the characteristics of different employment relationships and how they impact health outcomes. It uses interview data and comments provided on a survey to explore these issues. The paper begins by exploring if the health effects reported by mid-career individuals in precarious employment are different from those of younger and older workers. Finding limited evidence to support this hypothesis, the paper goes on to explore in detail the conditions under which precarious employment does increase stress and tension and impact health outcomes. It concludes that a combination of an individual's desire for more permanent employment, the expectation that permanent employment will be found, and the support individuals receive from various sources are critical to understanding the health effects of precarious employment.