Serving Clients When the Server Crashes: How Frontline Workers Cope with E‐Government Challenges

Implementing e‐government in the contemporary American state is challenging. E‐government places high technical demands on agencies and citizens in an environment of budget austerity and political polarization. Governments developing e‐government policies often mobilize frontline workers—also termed “street‐level bureaucrats”—to help citizens gain access to services. However, we know little about how frontline workers cope in these challenging circumstances. This article fills this gap by examining frontline workers implementing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Based on a qualitative analysis, the authors find that frontline workers “move toward clients” when coping with stress: they bend the rules, work overtime, and collaborate in order to help clients. They are less inclined to “move away” or “move against” clients, for instance, through rigid rule following and rationing. In other words, frontline workers try to serve clients, even “when the server crashes.” Frontline workers, then, can play a vital role in the successful implementation of e‐government policies.     

The Policy Sciences and the Unmasking Turn of Mind1

To unmask an idea is to disarm it by claiming that it has been advanced in the service of unacknowledged motives, bypassing the question of whether the idea is true or false. Most of us engage in the occasional unmasking of policy arguments. But unmasking becomes problematic when it is a “turn of mind,” a standard tool applied to a wide range of arguments, as in the work of policy writers Deborah Stone and William Riker. This article argues that the unmasking turn of mind misunderstands the world of policy and politics, and poses risks to a society's practice of deliberation on policy matters. Guidelines for responsible unmasking are proposed.     

Articulating the Nexus of Politics and Law: War in Iraq and the Practice within Two Legal Systems

Does law rule foreign affairs in the democratic state? Basically, one might expect that democratic executives operate on the ground of what is called the Rechtsstaat, and that in a political system with checks and balances operations—especially those eventually dropping out of that ground—are subject to judicial review. However, legal systems are more often than not willing to abstain from a legal governance of its countries' foreign policy—because of "political reasons." Moreover, democracies obviously vary according to their legal operations. At least in the area of foreign affairs, the relationship of democracy and law does not take up a necessary character. Facing this contingency, the article engages in the discursive construction of a politics and law nexus in the course of the operations of two legal systems, in the United States and Germany. For that reason, it will proceed by deconstructing two legal decisions related to the war in Iraq. Building upon the premise that legal practices are intertwined into a larger web of (legal) text, the article argues that the possibility of a judicial abstention in cases bearing reference to foreign policy issues depends on meaning produced in the course of the signification and positioning of discursive elements like "politics" and "law." Thus, speaking law is a politico-legal practice.     

Causing harm: Criminal law

This paper offers two related things. First, a theory of singular causal statements attributing causal responsibility for a particular harm to a particular agent based on the conjunction of a positive condition (necessitation) and a negative condition (avoidability) which captures the notions of sufficiency and necessity in intuitive ideas about agent causation better than traditional conditio sine qua non based theories. Second, a theory of representation of causal issues in the law. The conceptual framework is that of Game Trees and Games in Extensive Form. Causal conditions are defined set-theoretically over Game Trees; causal issues and fundamental distinctions (dependent versus independent intervening causes, foreseeability or not of harm etc.) arising in legal cases are accommodated by the device of a probability distribution over the game-tree representation of cases.This theory of causing harm, or agent causation is presented in greater detail in L. Aqvist & P Mullock, Causing Harm: a logico-legal study (forthcoming, de Gruyter, Berlin) dealing primarily with causation in tort law.