When Does Deliberation Begin? Internal Reflection versus Public Discussion in Deliberative Democracy

Political deliberation involves both internal reflection and public discussion. The former might be far more important than implied by deliberative democrats' heavy emphasis on the discursive component. Analysis of the deliberations of a citizen's jury on an Australian environmental issue shows jurors' attitudes changing more in response to the 'information' phase of the jury proceedings, involving a large degree of 'deliberation within', than during the formal 'discussion' phase. Various ways can be imagined for evoking internal reflection of that sort, even in mass-political settings.     

Voting May Be Habit-Forming: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

Habit is a frequently mentioned but understudied cause of political action. This article provides the first direct test of the hypothesis that casting a ballot in one election increases one's propensity to go to the polls in the future. A field experiment involving 25,200 registered voters was conducted prior to the November general election of 1998. Subjects were randomly assigned to treatment conditions in which they were urged to vote through direct mail or face-to-face canvassing. Compared to a control group that received no contact, the treatment groups were significantly more likely to vote in 1998. The treatment groups were also significantly more likely to vote in local elections held in November of 1999. After deriving a statistical estimator to isolate the effect of habit, we find that, ceteris paribus, voting in one election substantially increases the likelihood of voting in the future. Indeed, the influence of past voting exceeds the effects of age and education reported in previous studies.     

Ford Motor Company and the Firestone tyre recall

This paper was prepared as the basis for a class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation. It may be appropriate for public affairs, business and public policy, and/or crisis management courses at the undergraduate or graduate level. In conjunction with this case, it may be useful to use the framework for crisis management developed by Dr Ian I. Mitroff, the Harold Quinton Distinguished Professor of Business Policy at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. This best practice model is discussed in ‘Managing Crises Before They Happen’, which Mitroff published in 2001 with Gus Anagnos, Vice President of Comprehensive Crisis Management. This case leads the audience through the Ford–Firestone tyre crisis from 1997—when Ford began to learn of a problem with Firestone tyres on its popular Explorer sport‐utility vehicle—up until the summer of 2001, just after Ford recalled 13 million Firestone tyres and the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration cleared Ford of further investigation into potential defects in the Explorer. The case addresses potential causes of the tyre problem, how Ford handled the crisis from a corporate public affairs perspective and, tangentially, how Firestone handled the issue. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications     

The National Integrity System: assessing corruption and reform

This article builds on a Transparency International (TI)‐sponsored research study funded by the Dutch Government into the National Integrity System (NIS) in practice. The NIS is a framework approach developed by TI that proposes assessing corruption and reform holistically. The NIS not only looks at separate institutions or separate areas of activity or separate rules and practices, but also bases its perspective on institutional and other inter‐relationships, inter‐dependence and combined effectiveness. The study involved 18 countries, using in‐country researchers and an overview report. This article assesses the findings of the study to consider how the approach can work in practice, and what the approach can reveal about the causes and nature of corruption as well as the implications for reform. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.