Letter from North Haven … Or What the President Should Do Next

Letter from North Haven is an essay on American national identity that shows the depth of small town mentalities in American life—no matter that that life is mainly urban and industrial. We move from Chicago School sociology to the Catcher in the Rye; from Bob Dylan to Steven Spielberg; from Jacksonian Democracy to the Tea Party movement. The essay ends by using the example of politics in North Haven, Maine, to call upon the President to revive his campaign by explaining America's problems in the plain style and tangible context of small town USA.     

Does Institutional Structure Effect Public Health Expenditures?

This paper explores supply‐side costs and institutional structure in a shared authority state public health system. It is found that in a shared governance public health system, intermediary district structure influences the movement of limited resources to serve populations and persons most in need. This early empirical test suggests that policy making and public administration concerning public health expenditures in a shared governance system are in a practical sense local, but decisions made at the intermediary level by regional district administration are an important influence on local public health expenditures.     

How Can Deliberative Democracy Get a Grip?

One of the most exciting innovations within ‘practical democratic theory’ in recent years has been the emergence of deliberative democracy, as a theoretically refined ideal with by now some well‐honed mechanisms for its implementation on a small scale. Its greatest remaining challenge is to figure out some way to connect those highly controlled, small‐scale deliberative exercises to the ‘main game’, politically. I sketch some limited and indirect ways in which that might happen in national politics, before going on to propose a more novel way in which such deliberative events might be used literally to make international law of a certain sort.     

A War on ‘Risk’? British Government and the National Security Strategy

This article explores the United Kingdom's National Security Strategy (NSS) since 2008, considering what the NSS discloses about how contemporary Whitehall conceptualises ‘risks’ to Britain. It contends that rather than being a strategy in the Clausewitzian sense, the NSS represents a political exercise in risk management. In addressing a range of quite different problems, the NSS suggests that those in Whitehall now conceive their role as being to shield the citizen from any conceivable threat to their safety, wellbeing, and even emotional security. Yet this constitutes a highly expansive vision, and elevates the state's provision of public goods to a potentially unmanageable level.     

Why Do Governments Delegate Authority to Quasi‐Autonomous Agencies? The Case of Independent Administrative Authorities in France

In recent years, there has been a considerable degree of delegation from governments to quasi‐autonomous agencies. Various reasons have been put forward to explain why governments decide to delegate authority in this way. Some reasons are based on a transaction‐cost approach, such as credible commitments. Other reasons are more contextual. For instance, governments may be responding to a process of cross‐national policy transfer. In the literature on delegation some hypotheses have already been tested. Specifically, evidence has been found suggesting that governments create agencies to commit credibly to particular policy choices. However, other hypotheses, particularly ones based on contextual explanations, have proved much more difficult to operationalize. This article aims to help fill this gap. It does so by focusing on the creation of Independent Administrative Authorities in France. Does the qualitative evidence in this particular case corroborate the quantitative studies that have been undertaken elsewhere?