Governing beyond the Centre: A Critique of the Anglo-Governance School

One of the more intriguing theoretical discussions of recent years involves the concept of governance. There is now a substantial body of work concerning the way governance has affected the contribution of central government to the policy process. Possibly the most prominent and influential account of governance theory in British political science is offered by Rod Rhodes. His most recent writings have employed governance theory to explore the institutions, actors and processes of change within the core executive. His 'Anglo-governance' model has emerged as a prevalent and authoritative account of how new methods of governing have emerged in society. Significantly, it is maintained that a distinct shift has taken place in government, from a hierarchical organisation to a fragmented and decentralised entity that is heavily reliant on a range of complex and independent policy networks. There is undoubted evidence that government is a fractured institution that is dependent on state and non-state actors beyond the centre. This paper questions whether such features entail the emergence of a new form of governance. Central government is still highly resourced and has, at its disposal, a range of powers with which to retain influence over public sector agencies. Historical evidence also shows that the British polity has long been decentralised. Thus, it is difficult to see how recent developments have in any way transformed the capacities of the core executive. It seems that alternative ways of conceptualising the institutions, actors and processes of change in government are required. Recent efforts to develop 'organising perspectives', within the intellectual parameters of governance theory, offer a more 'conceptually cautious' treatment of the central state.     

The Persian Gulf War's impact on Americans' political information

Does war increase Americans' normally low levels of political information? Data from the Center for Political Studies' Political Consequences of War Study, which plumbed Americans' information about the Persian Gulf War, suggest it does, albeit slightly. Criticisms of mass public competence to influence foreign policy lose some of their sting, but there remain grounds for concern about the quality of public opinion. Old knowledge aids in the acquisition of new, and most people were too uninformed to benefit much from intensive media coverage of the Gulf crisis.     

Assessing the Risk of Future Psychological Abuse: Predicting the Accuracy of Battered Women’s Predictions

Building on a handful of studies demonstrating battered women’s accuracy in assessing their risk of being physically reabused, this study examined how accurately victims assess their risk of future psychological abuse. Participants’ ratings of the likelihood that their partner would engage in controlling/dominance behaviors or efforts to humiliate/degrade them in the coming year and their reports 18 months later of whether this had actually occurred were used to create a four category version of accuracy (true positive, false positive, true negative, false negative). Victims were more likely to be right than wrong in their assessments of risk; PTSD symptoms, the recency of physical violence, and the degree of stalking and psychological abuse in the relationship predicted membership in the four accuracy categories. These findings overlap considerably with those examining victim accuracy in predicting physical abuse and inform ongoing debates about the value of incorporating victims’ insights into risk assessment efforts.

Regulatory inspection and the changing legitimacy of health and safety

The regulation of conduct via law is a key mechanism through which broader social meanings are negotiated and expressed. The use of regulatory tools to bring about desired outcomes reflects existing social and political understandings of institutional legitimacy, the meanings attached to regulation, and the values it seeks to advance. But these contextual understandings are not static, and their evolution poses challenges for regulators, particularly when they reflect political framing processes. This paper shows how inspection has been reshaped as a tool within the United Kingdom's health and safety system by changes in the meanings attached to the concept of “risk‐based regulation.” While rates of inspection have fallen dramatically in recent years, the nature and quality of inspection have also been fundamentally reshaped via an increasingly procedural and economically rational “risk‐based” policy context. This has had consequences for the transformative and symbolic value of inspection as a tool of regulatory practice.     

Destabilizing Effects of Terrorism on Party System Stability

In democracies with stable party systems, voters can more easily trace policy decisions from parties and representatives within the government to specific policy outcomes. Consequently, party system stability (PSS) has been reportedly linked to a variety of factors including economic conditions, democratic performance, political institutions, and socioeconomic cleavages. While informative, these lessons offer precious little insight into other factors that can destabilize a party system. In this work, we surmise that terrorist attacks have important implications for two commonly used measures of PSS. The results of a pooled, cross-sectional time series analysis confirm our hypothesis: deadly attacks proximate to elections destabilize party systems, even when controlling for multiple standard controls. In addition, the level of democratic consolidation within states also influences the degree that fatal terrorist attacks affect party system stability. These findings are based on terrorism data collected from the Global Terrorism Database and from PSS data compiled by the authors.     

Experience of a financial reforms project in Bangladesh

This article reviews the efforts of the Government of Bangladesh aimed at reforming the public sector financial management system as part of overall public administration reforms through a technical assistance project jointly sponsored by the government and the Department for International Development, Government of the UK. It has evolved through initial setbacks into a highly successful project delivering tangible outputs over the last three years, with prospects for future extension until reforms are internalized and become self‐sustaining. Attempts have been made in this article to analyse and evaluate the underlying reasons for the problems in the first year of implementation as well as the factors that contributed to the recovery of the image of the project and its continuing successes in successive phases. The article highlights the lessons learned from the project in its bad as well as good times and suggests that this experience can be of great value to those undergoing the same type of reform experiment. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Lloyd George, Curzon and the Control of British Foreign Policy 1919-22

This article revises the accepted narrative about British foreign policy in the aftermath of the First World War, which portrays the Foreign Secretary and Foreign Office as subservient to a dynamic and interventionist Prime Minister inthe formulation of foreign policy. It argues that the relationship between Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon of Kedleston, was far more complex than that suggested by the historical consensus, shaped, in part, by David LloydGeorge's political opponents and Curzon's enemies. Comparisons are drawn between Curzon's influence over policy towards specific geographical areas, and between Curzon's experiences under Lloyd George and his eventual successors as Prime Minister, Andrew Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin.