Measuring the Financial Position of Municipalities: Numbers Do Not Speak for Themselves

There are several challenges facing someone who wants to know if a city's revenue structure is fair and reasonable. There are few generally accepted standards to use as benchmarks of financial condition, and there is no generally accepted methodology to assess relative financial position. This article reviews literature on financial position and condition, and then develops a methodological approach that creates a cohort of similar cities for benchmarking financial position, and then forming a basis for assessing financial condition. Based on a study of the financial position of a medium-sized city, the article offers lessons for practitioners and scholars.     

Theorizing Implementation of Public Management Policy Reforms: A Case Study of Strategic Planning and Programming in the European Commission

As a measure to rectify the European Commission's "management deficit," the institution's authorities decided to introduce new forms of commission-wide strategic planning and programming in 2000. Drawing on semistructured interviews with Commission officials, this article tracks the key turning points, trajectories, and outcomes of events within the implementation stage of this part of the Commission managerial reform. As an instrumental case study, the article begins to theorize the process of implementing public management policy change. Major conceptual issues addressed include how reform decisions serve to activate the social mechanism of actor certification and how actor conduct amplifies such certification. Actor certification provides a link from reform choices to organizational change. In this respect and others, the research argument contrasts and integrates social theory mind-sets deriving from institutionalism and social interactionism (processualism) in line with research trends in historical sociology, organization science, and public management.     

Organizational learning in non-governmental organizations: What have we learned?

Learning is considered to be an essential component of organizational effectiveness in all sectors—private, public and non-governmental. All NGOs aspire to be ‘learning organizations’, yet few have reflected systematically on the success in this regard. This article summarizes the experience to date of international NGOs that have prioritized learning as an objective, drawing out areas of both success and failure, and reflecting on whether there are any features that distinguish learning in NGOs from learning in other types of organization. A simple typology and set of tests of NGO-learning are presented, along with a series of challenges for the future. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Public Admin. Dev. Vol. 17 : 235–250 (1997). No. of Figures: 0. No. of Tables: 0. No. of Refs: 48     

The Goal Is to Join the Belt and Road—— Interview with Luis Diego Monsalve,Colombian Ambassador to China

ON April 12,a new batch of 500,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine developed by Chinese phar-maceutical company Sinovac arrived in Bogotá,the capital city of Colombia.On March 20,fol-lowing the arrival of a prior batch of vaccines,Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed the Colombian people in a video message,which is taken as a special gesture.In a conversation with China Today,Colombian Ambassador to China Luis Diego Monsalve reflected upon this ges-ture,and also emphasized Colombia's objective to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).He expects that Presi-dent Iván Duque will be able to visit China in November.     

The effects of populism as a social identity frame on persuasion and mobilisation: Evidence from a 15-country experiment

This article investigates the impact of populist messages on issue agreement and readiness for action in 15 countries (N = 7,286). Specifically, populist communicators rely on persuasive strategies by which social group cues become more salient and affect people's judgment of and political engagement with political issues. This strategy is called ‘populist identity framing’ because the ordinary people as the in-group is portrayed as being threatened by various out-groups. By blaming political elites for societal or economic problems harming ordinary people, populist communicators engage in anti-elitist identity framing. Another strategy is to blame immigrants for social problems – that is, exclusionist identity framing. Finally, right-wing political actors combine both cues and depict an even more threatening situation of the ordinary people as the in-group. Based on social identity theory, an experimental study in 15 European countries shows that most notably the anti-elitist identity frame has the potential to persuade voters. Additionally, relative deprivation makes recipients more susceptible to the mobilising impact of the populist identity frames.     

The Place of Sociology in the Study of Political Communication

Robert K. Merton's Mass Persuasion (1946) and related 1940s communications research represent a body of work that repays those who read it carefully today. Merton charted a world that became our own, one marked by the interplay of mass media, celebrity, and “public images” that traversed cultures of entertainment, moral life, and politics. In this essay, I read Mass Persuasion through a later Merton article discussing the role of reading and rereading classic texts in the human sciences. After extending Merton's arguments about the functions of predecessor texts, I amplify aspects of Mass Persuasion that remain instructive within political communication and related fields today.