Costs and Efficiency of Quasi-Markets in Practice

The purpose of this article is to analyse the costs of introducing quasi-markets to the public sector in practice and to discuss if quasi-markets have been efficient when costs are added. Transaction costs, which will follow instead of hierarchy costs, are difficult to identify and therefore examine. In addition, costs will accrue from changing the mode of governance. The article concludes that creating quasi-markets produces some costs which reduce both technical and allocative efficiency, but what is most problematic is that those costs which are impossible to measure in practice are of greater significance.     

Science,security and spies

Abstract

The national research and development (R&D) base has in the post-cold war era gained increased importance in order to fill new security demands. There is a broadening of the search for security relevant science and technology involving more organizations and interests, scientific disciplines and nations. The question discussed in this article is if the premises of international, free and open R&D will be(come) compromised? Will we see more scientists, in their normal scientific activities, being accused of spying? The article suggests that such risks are not unrealistic to expect. Spy cases in less democratic countries could have consequences for scientists also in other countries. Outcomes depend on, among other things, the relative strengths of academic freedom and a political Identification Friend and Foe (IFF) component. United Nations and European Union resolutions restricting science education for students from Iran and North Korea in an attempt to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons illustrate a strong IFF component. Difficulties with regard to the implementation of these resolutions and other findings are presented in the final section of the article.     

Critical infrastructure protection and Russia's hybrid regime

The Russian policy on critical infrastructure protection was outlined in the early 2000s and has been consolidated in recent years as a part of the national security strategy. This policy is evolving against a background composed of an uneasy combination of factors: the degeneration of infrastructures critical for the country's economic and social development, and the de-legitimization of political institutions responsible for protecting ‘population’ and ‘territory’. The recent major catastrophes in Russia, the notorious forest fires in 2010 in particular, have become examples of political events that offer a point of reference for the current regime's failure to uphold its promises of ‘order and stability’.     

Deliberative Qualities of Generic News Frames: Assessing the Democratic Value of Strategic Game and Contestation Framing in Election Campaign Coverage

News frames are patterns of news construction journalists rely on to present information to their audiences. While much of the research on news frames has focused on their identification and effects, less work has investigated the specific contributions these different frames make to democratic life. Value judgments about distinct news frames are often not generated in a systematic fashion, not grounded in democratic theory, and/or not supported by empirical evidence. In this article, we address these problems by arguing for and extending normative assessment as a standard operating procedure to determine the democratic value of political communication phenomena. We demonstrate the usefulness of normative assessment by showing how two important generic news frames (politics as a strategic game and as a substantive contestation) contribute to a deliberative public discourse prior to a general election. Using data on television news coverage of the German federal election campaign in 2009, we investigate how these frames are related to the inclusiveness and civility of public discourse and the extent to which it features exchanges of substantive reasons for political positions. Results show that mediated democratic deliberation suffers consistently from strategic game framing, while contestation frames make ambivalent contributions. Implications for political communication scholarship as well as journalistic practice are discussed.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource(s): coding protocol used in content analysis.]     

Informal institutions,forms of state and democracy: the Turkish deep state

Democratization studies have proven that the main difference between autocracy and democracy is, counter-intuitively, not the basic regime structure, but rather, the function and validity of democratic formal institutions defined as rules and norms.1 For the institutionalist turn in democratization studies, see O'Donnell, ‘Delegative Democracy’; O'Donnell, ‘Another Institutionalization’; O'Donnell, ‘Polyarchies’; Lauth, ‘Informal Institutions’; Merkel and Croissant, ‘Formale und informale Institutionen’; Weyland, ‘Limitations’; Helmke and Levitsky, Informal Institutions. View all notes In ‘defective democracies’,2 Merkel, ‘Embedded and Defective’. View all notes or in the grey zone between authoritarian regimes and consolidated democracies, formal institutions disguise specific informal institutions which are usually ‘the actual rules that are being followed’.3 O'Donnell, ‘Illusions About Consolidation’, 10. View all notes Moreover, scholars have investigated the issue of stateness: ‘without a state, no modern democracy is possible’.4 Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition, 17. View all notes This article sheds light on this grey zone, particularly, on the type of state whose coercive state apparatus is autonomous. Its autonomy results primarily from the interplay between formal and informal institutions in post-transitional settings where ‘perverse institutionalization’5 Valenzuela, ‘Democratic Consolidation’, 62. View all notes creates and fosters undemocratic informal rules and/or enshrines them as formal codes. If the military autonomy reaches a threshold ranging from high to very high, constitutional institutions become Janus-faced and can enforce a sui generis repertoire of undemocratic informal institutions. Thus, the state exerts formal and informal ‘domination’,6 Weber, Economy and Society. View all notes Herrschaft in a Weberian sense. This modality of dual domination is what I call ‘deep state’.     

Electronic identities – public or private

In the real world, we usually identify persons by their appearance, voice, and so on. If this is not sufficient, identity cards are used. In the virtual world the situation is different. The basic concepts of the internet provide for unique identification of devices, not of their users. Hence, some kind of identity management system is required, which can be provided either by the state or by the private sector. Official electronic identity schemes, such as the Austrian Citizen Card, are being established in more and more countries. The carrier media of the Citizen Card is a smart card but, since 2009, the mobile phone signature is offered as a more comfortable alternative. However, much more widespread than that are simple user accounts with passwords, one for each individual service. This system has significant flaws. A solution can be provided by the concept of identity federation: an ‘identity ecosystem’ can be established in which a user can choose among several identity providers, authorise them to identify him towards service providers, authorise attribute providers to provide particular qualified user information to a service provider, etc. In this paper the different concepts mentioned above are elaborated and their interrelations and legal difficulties are described.     

Police attitudes towards fellow officers' misconduct: the Swedish case and a comparison with the USA and Croatia

There is a long tradition of research into police integrity in the USA. Over the last few decades the focus of this research has shifted from regarding police misconduct as an individual problem to viewing it as an occupational/organisational one. Very little research has been conducted in this area in Scandinavia, however. This article presents findings from a Swedish questionnaire survey of levels of intolerance for corruption and other forms of misconduct within the Swedish police force. The study was conducted as part of an international project. Thirteen percent of Swedish police officers were included in the sample. Attitudes towards police misconduct are characterized by a high degree of consistency. The more seriously a behaviour is viewed, the more severely officers feel it should be sanctioned and the more willing police officers are to report it. Levels of intolerance towards theft are very high, whilst this intolerance is more moderate in relation to the use of excessive force, and is more or less non-existent when it comes to using a police car to ferry a fellow officer to work. At the same time, the patterns visible among the officers' responses are indicative of both ego-defence and of the existence of a code of silence. The article also compares the Swedish findings with responses from similar surveys conducted in the USA and Croatia. Differences between the circumstances in which the studies were conducted make comparisons between the different police forces difficult. The most conspicuous trend, however, is that different types of misconduct are ranked almost identically across the three countries.     

Preventive Policing and Security Plans: The Reception of New Crime Prevention Strategies in Three Finnish Cities

In Western countries today, security is seen predominantly as a problem of public places. This has given rise to a growing demand for new strategies of governing public places, the most popular of which are crime prevention, community policing (e.g., zero tolerance) and partnership. Their aim is to encourage the public sector, voluntary organizations and market actors to work more closely with the police in a local effort to create and maintain a safe living environment. This article looks at what kind of reception the new methods of governing public places have received in three Finnish cities (Helsinki, Lappeenranta, and Tampere) by reviewing their newly formulated security plans and programmes. The analysis of this document material makes use of the concept of moral regulation. The analysis focuses on the kind of local security problems that are identified in these security plans as targets of moral regulation; what kinds of techniques they propose for addressing and resolving these problems; and in what kind of crime prevention role they position the subjects of moral regulation (police officers and police partners) and the objects of moral regulation. The analysis shows that Helsinki aims to regulate the problems occurring in public places by emphasizing a neo­liberal ethos. Lappeenranta, on the other hand, walks a tight­rope in its security plan between communitarian and welfare state ambitions. Tampere, for its part, responds to the security threat in public places by adopting a neo­leftist stance (cf. the Third Way).