THE DHSS SOCIAL SECURITY REGIONAL ORGANIZATION — AN EXERCISE IN MANAGERIAL CHANGE

Government departments are under pressure to increase efficiency and effectiveness and to reduce staff numbers. The Rayner scrutiny programme is part of this pressure; and it has encouraged greater use of independent investigators and change catalysts within departments. This breed of internal critics often operate within, but at the limits of, official tolerance, like bureaucratic Philip Marlowes whose solutions may be accepted, but rarely with gratitude. Despite these developments external critics have continued to doubt the capacity for self-criticism and innovation within government. The popular television programme'Yes Minister' has encouraged such a view. This article describes one department's attempt at using internal change agents to review the handling of business and to implement major changes in an organization employing over 60,000 people. The exercise suggests that bureaucratic inertia can be overcome internally, although the change process is difficult and sometimes painful for those involved.     

The President as Institution Builder: The Reagan Case

Every president bestows upon his successors a "legacy" that will have an impact on both policy issues and institutional operations. Although attention is commonly focused on the president's role as a policymaker, he serves as an institution builder, as well, leaving a legacy that is manifested in long-term developments, in technical details of managing the job, and in patterns of interaction with other actors in the political environment. Reagan's institutional legacy has been the subject of intense debate and is addressed here in relation to five vantage points as they were employed during his eight years in office: personnel, structure, standard operating procedures, modes of exercising influence, and norms. These dimensions are examined in relation to the presidency, the bureaucracy, Congress, and the judiciary.
Reagan's departures in the selection and management of executive and judicial branch personnel were the most distinctive features of his legacy. Important changes were also made in the regulatory review and budgetary processes. Politicization and centralization, two long-term developments in the presidential office, gained renewed vigor, and Reagan elaborated a judicial strategy for achieving policy goals while refining the administrative strategy pioneered earlier by Nixon. Serious damage may well have been done to the norms of public service and justice under the rule of law. The framework introduced here promises to help scholars deal more systematically with the institutional impacts of both past and future presidents.     

Issue Accountability and the Mass Public

Under what conditions, if any, does the mass electorate hold congressional members accountable for their records on specific issues? We examine this question on the issue of crime, for which salience has varied substantially and opinion has favored Republicans, and the environment, for which salience has not varied much and voters have favored Democrats. Because different parametric specifications produce divergent findings, we utilize matching analysis in addition to ordinary least squares. The tests suggest that issue accountability exists even controlling for a member's overall record. However, such accountability depends crucially on issue salience and a member's partisan affiliation.     

CHINATOWN'S IMMIGRANT GANGS

The rise of Chinese youth gangs in urban centers in North America is a social phenomenon that has gained prominence in the past decade and a half. This study examines the characteristics and processes of four gangs operating in the Chinatown of Vancouver, Canada, over a three-year period (1975-1978). The gangs were composed entirely of teenaged immigrants recently arrived from Hong Kong who were engaged in a wide variety of antisocial and criminal behaviors. Three sociocultural antecendents are identified as important in the development of Chinese youth gangs: (1) the weakening among many Hong Kong immigrants of the traditional Chinese pattern of close parental guidance and supervision; (2) the resultant emergence of youth peer-groups who challenge parental authority and Chinese values; (3) the strong attraction of North American success symbols for gang members, and their perceived inability to achieve success through legitimate means because of difficulties in learning English.     

Political competitition and multiparty coalition governments

Abstract. Many previous theoretical analyses of multiparty coalition behaviour have been based either on a one-dimensional policy model or on a constant-sum game interpretation. For theoretical and empirical reasons this paper focusses on a competitive two-dimensional model. In this model parties are concerned with policy outcomes but choose party positions both with a view to electoral consequences and as a basis for coalition bargaining. The political heart is proposed as the set of possible coalition outcomes. The heart is either the core of the political game or is determined by a small number of party positions. Under certain conditions an equilibrium in the choice of party positions can be shown to exist. The model suggests that parties can be categorized as either strong or weak core parties, anti-core parties or peripheral parties. This categorization of parties implies a typology of party systems, which gives some theoretical foundation for the occurrence of minority, minimal winning and surplus coalitions in many of the European countries in the postwar period.     

Modeling the interaction of parties, activists and voters: Why is the political center so empty?

Abstract.  The formal stochastic model of voting should be the theoretical benchmark against which empirical models can be gauged. A standard result in the formal model is the 'mean voter theorem' stating that parties converge to the electoral center. Empirical analysis based on the vote-maximizing premise, however, invalidates this convergence result. We consider both empirical and formal models that incorporate exogeneous valence terms for the parties. Valence can be regarded as an electorally perceived attribute of each party leader that is independent of the policy position of the party. We show that the mean voter theorem is valid for empirical multinomial logit and probit models of a number of elections in the Netherlands and Britain. To account for the non-centrist policy positions of parties, we consider a more general formal model where valence is also affected by the behavior of party activists. The results suggest that non-convergent policy choice by party leaders can be understood as rational, vote-maximizing calculation by leaders in response to electoral and activist motivations.