TOWARDS A EUROPEAN NERVOUS SYSTEM: THE ROLE OF THE ECONOMIC UNION

This article introduces the European Nervous System, a system of interoperable, networked, trans-European telematics applications linking public administrations in the Community member states. The reasons for its development are described, and progress to date outlined. The article also touches on its funding and management structures, and seeks to draw out some of the issues involved in the development of the ENS and the lessons to be learnt.     

CENTRAL GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS AND THE POLICY PROCESS

Government departments are central organizations in the development of public policy. Yet there is very little literature on the political role of departments, their internal relationships and their relationships with other departments and other government actors and institutions. This article reviews the extant literature on government departments. It argues that much of the existing research has either focused on the role of the Prime Minister or it has been institutional and static, providing an analysis of the administration and organization of departments rather than political interactions. The article therefore provides an alternative research agenda which stresses the need to examine the relationships and networks that exist within and between departments and how departments react to events and interests in the outside world.     

SELECTIVE APPREHENSION: A POLICE STRATEGY FOR REPEAT OFFENDERS*

This study examines the effectiveness of the Repeat Offender Project (ROP), a specialized police unit in Washington, D.C. It documents how the ROP unit operated, what it cost, and how well it achieved its goal of “selecting, apprehending, and contributing to” the conviction of persons believed to be committing jive or more Part I offenses per week. A controlled experiment showed that the ROP substantially increased the likelihood of arrest for the persons it targeted. Quasi-experimental data indicated that ROP arrestees had longer and more serious histories of prior arrests than a comparison sample of arrestees of officers in other police units. The former arrestees were also more likely to be prosecuted and convicted on felony charges and more likely to be incarcerated. ROP officers’arrest productivity was cut in half; but this cost appears to have been offset by the greater seriousness of the current and prior offenses of its arrestees. The study concludes that the creation of selective apprehension units provides a promising new strategy for major urban police departments.     

Kosovo Defines the West

Kosovo is a proxy war with the Holocaust. As such, this war and its outcome will do much to define the West in the next century That it is a war in Europe, for Europe, sets it apart from all the other tragedies from Rwanda to Kashmir. Our collage of comment on this subject ranges from the secretary general of NATO to the leader of the Kosovars in Albania.     

Quality of government and regional competition: A spatial analysis of subnational regions in the European Union

Building on previous work on competition networks and governmental performance among British local governments, this article investigates the diffusion of government quality across subnational regions of Europe through strategic interaction with neighbouring regions or competitor regions more generally. The article demonstrates the presence of spatial interdependence using standard spatial regression models and controlling for common explanations of quality of government. In particular for regions with high levels of autonomy from the national government, there is clear adjustment in government quality to be seen in response to disparities with competitor regions. The article further investigates the intensity of this geographical effect separately in the north and south of Europe in order to estimate the potential for virtuous or vicious cycles of good governance in the two regions, respectively. It is found that while regions in the north develop relatively independently of each other but respond to competitive pressure across Europe, in the south regions demonstrate a higher level of local interdependence, increasing the possibility of virtuous cycles – but also of vicious ones.     

Climate politics in hard times: How local economic shocks influence MPs attention to climate change

Most countries struggle to implement CO₂ reducing policies. Implementation is politically difficult since it typically forces politicians to trade-off different concerns. The literature on how parties and members of parliament (MPs) handle these trade-offs is sparse. We use structural topic models to study how MPs in an oil dependent environment responded to a shock in the oil price that created spatially concentrated costs of climate policies. We leverage the rapid oil price drop between parliamentary sessions and MPs’ constituency adherence in a difference-in-differences framework to identify if MPs respond differently to variation in the salience of trade-offs. We find that MPs facing high political costs of climate policies tried to avoid environmental topics, while less affected MPs talked more about investments in green energy when the oil price declined. Our results suggest that the oil price bust created a ‘window of opportunity’ for advocates of the ‘ green shift’.