“I Won't Back Down?” Complexity and Courage in Government Executive Decision Making

Senior government executives make many difficult decisions, but research suggests that individual cognitive limitations and the pathologies of “groupthink” impede their ability to make value‐maximizing choices. From this literature has emerged a normative model that Irving Janis calls “vigilant problem solving,” a process intended for the most complex decisions. To explore its use by senior public officials, the authors interviewed 20 heads of subcabinet‐level organizations in the U.S. federal government, asking how they made their most difficult decisions. The initial focus was on whether they employed a vigilant approach to making decisions that were informationally, technically, or politically complex. Most executives identified their single most‐difficult decision as one that required courage; they often made such courageous decisions after personal reflection and/or consultation with a small number of trusted advisors rather in ways that could be described as vigilant. The different approaches for making complex decisions, compared with those involving courage, are discussed and a contingency model of effective executive decision making is proposed that requires leaders (and their advisors) to be “ambidextrous” in their approach.     

Dissonance on the Brexit Menu: What does Britain Want to Eat?

This article focusses on the future of food in the UK in the context of Brexit. It examines the claims and promises made by Brexiteers before the referendum and juxtaposes these with the approach pursued by the Conservative‐led government since. The article argues that there is a clear dissonance between the two. This dissonance is the result of two important factors. First, the government is stuck in a non‐decision‐making mode, making it unable to pursue clear policies. Second, the food claims and promises made by Brexiteers are in opposition to what the vast majority of the public, food experts, farmers and food businesses want. Through exploring these two factors, and the Brexiteers’ claims and promises, the article explains what leaving the EU might mean for the future of food in the UK.     

Only When We Agree! How Value Congruence Moderates the Impact of Goal‐Oriented Leadership on Public Service Motivation

Questions of how and when managers can motivate the workforce of public organizations are fundamental for scholars and practitioners alike. A dominant assertion is that goal‐oriented leadership strategies, such as transformational leadership, foster public service motivation (PSM). However, existing studies rely on designs that are vulnerable to endogeneity and rarely investigate the scope conditions of the leadership‐PSM relationship. Combining a field experiment with 364 managers and surveys of their 3,470 employees, the authors show that transformational leadership and transactional leadership, when induced experimentally, do not have the claimed positive effect on PSM. In fact, the results indicate that goal‐oriented leadership can have demotivating effects when employee and organizational values are incongruent. Public managers should therefore carefully assess existing levels of value (in)congruence before implementing goal‐oriented leadership strategies, and—in case of value conflicts—seek to align perceptions of the desirable among members of the organization.     

Censors Get Smart: Evidence from Psiphon in Iran

Information controls are actions intended to deny, disrupt, monitor, or secure information for political ends. They can be implemented using a wide variety of technical and nontechnical means. Political contests over the control of information are heightened around important events, such as major anniversaries, armed conflicts, protests, and elections. In this paper, we offer a comparative case study of online censorship of the circumvention tool Psiphon during the Iranian elections in 2016 and 2013, drawing on unique access to analytics data from Psiphon. We find that the Iranian regime developed its censorship approach in two ways, deploying blocking that was more targeted and strategically timed in the more recent case. Evidence suggests that the regime relaxed censorship of Psiphon during the official campaign period for the 2016 election. The apparent objective of this new approach was to control access to information while minimizing the political consequences of doing so.     

The world revolution of our time: a review and update

In 1935 Harold D. Lasswell introduced constructs of the world revolution to improve the rational selection of topics and timing for policy research. This article reviews and updates his construct of the skill revolution arising from the differentiation of specialized environments in modern society, including three variants: the garrison-state construct, the permanent revolution of modernizing intellectuals, and the unspeakable revolution. Among transformations of the skill revolution facilitated by the growing interdependence of modern society, or globalization, are contending fundamentalist and cosmopolitan revolutions. A Gnostic revolution of declining faith in Western civilization is also possible. This article concludes with a preferential construct tracing a possible sequence of events leading toward a world order of peace, welfare and social justice.

Some Children See Him...: Political Participation and the Black Christ

This paper explores the role that membership in a politicized church and believing in a black Christ have on the political mobilization and participation of African Americans. Using data from the 1993–94 National Black Politics Study (NBPS), the authors conclude that imagining a black Christ is a radicalizing force on political participation. Hearing politicizing messages in a place of worship and believing that Christ is black appears to shift African Americans from relatively conservative or traditional forms of political participation, such as contacting officials, to more non-traditional political protest. Further, it appears that imagining a black Christ is distinct from other aspects of a racial belief system and while it has political implications, it clearly has religious roots that separate it from other racial beliefs.

Quality and quantity in constitutional interpretation: the quest for analytic essentials in law

Henry Manne wrote about many topics central to the law-and-economics canon but also over a period of more than a decade later in life worked on a theory of constitutional interpretation, producing a paper and lectures on this subject. His goal was to use insights from economics to improve constitutional analysis, in particular seeking to ground constitutional interpretation in quantitative assessments he hoped would be both true to the primary goal of constitution-makers and capable of providing guidance to judges in ways less subject to the pull of political preferences. Despite his concerns with controlling constitutional interpretation in practice, the instincts Manne brought to this endeavor ran more to matters of theory than to its implementation by judges, identifying important propositions for interpretation but failing (by his own admission) to produce a test that fulfilled his aspirations. The strengths and weaknesses of this work provide an intriguing contrast with writings from Antonin Scalia, the American jurist and scholar whose approaches to both constitutional and statutory interpretation had a profound impact on jurisprudence over the past three decades. Like Manne, Scalia highly valued more determinate methods of analysis and was deeply concerned with the architecture of constitutional creation and effectuation. His focus, however, was more on the practical question of what happens when a particular sort of official has the power to implement a highly indeterminate test and what test best constrains interpretation in ways faithful to the interpretive task. Those goals undergird Scalia’s commitments to textualism and originalism. Manne’s and Scalia’s approaches to constitutional interpretation are instructive on the purposes served by analytical tools in disparate settings. In particular, they offer contrasting and complementary visions, providing insights about the domains of law-and-economics, legal analysis, practical judgment, and perspective.