Book Reviews

Four years after its formal establishment, the European External Action Service (EEAS) remains in a state of complex and overlapping areas of competence. There are interlocking layers of political and administrative governance, where the service has to interact with, and answer to, different national and intergovernmental political masters as well as supranational actors, notably the European Commission and the European Parliament. The formal political decision-making power with regard to the EU’s common foreign and security policy lies with the Council, whilst substantial competences, notably in the field of the European Neighbourhood (ENP) and trade policies, as well as development and cooperation, remain under the control of the European Commission. The EEAS’s autonomy and institutional orientation are both much debated and empirically unexplored. Based on quantitative and qualitative data, this article undertakes a behavioural analysis of EEAS decision-making. Empirical findings suggest that there are competing institutional logics at work among different groups of staff which affect their respective administrative decisional behaviour. Supranational recruits tend to be more community-minded, whereas officials with an intergovernmental background have a propensity to be more member state oriented.     

Diffusion of Compliance in the ‘Race towards Brussels?’ A Spatial Approach to EU Accession Conditionality

Previous studies identified several determinants that help explain candidate states’ compliance with EU accession conditionality. However, one influence has largely been neglected so far: states’ spatial dependency. Is it possible to observe diffusion to the extent that states’ interlinkages allow their compliance with the acquis communautaire to be assessed? Are candidate states more – or perhaps even less – likely to comply with EU law when other candidates do? The paper seeks to address these questions. By building on existing research on policy diffusion, it develops a theoretical framework for studying candidates’ compliance with EU law over the accession process according to their spatial dependence. The theoretical argument focuses on ‘competitive learning’ and is tested with quantitative data. The results suggest that candidates’ levels of compliance are indeed driven by spatial interlinkages; however, free riding seems more prevalent than enhanced compliance.     

Listening to the Government: How Information Shapes Responsibility Attributions

Assigning credit and blame in systems of multilevel government, such as federal states, requires information. This paper examines how voters respond to information about policy outcomes when attributing responsibility to multiple levels of government in a European context. Using an experimental design, we show that the responsibility attributions of British voters are affected by perceptual biases, notably their feelings about the government and the European Union (EU). But interestingly, we also find that voters, regardless of their predispositions, are only responsive to information they receive from their national government, whereas they ignore information provided by EU officials. These findings have implications not only for our understanding of attribution in systems of multiple levels of government, but also for how voters use information selectively depending on the credibility of the source.     

Saving virgins,saving the USA: heteronormative masculinities and the securitisation of trafficking discourse in mainstream narrative film

Sex trafficking has become a high-profile, celebrity endorsed issue, attracting much international attention. Accompanying this has been a proliferation of films, including full-length feature films, which address the topic and have done much to influence public perception of the issue. This paper analyses two of these films which were made for the mainstream US market: Trade and Taken. Both films present a conservative and heteronormative perspective revolving around middle-aged North American law enforcement officers rescuing innocent young girls. Hence, these films participate in the general securitisation of trafficking discourse in which the US has been a leader. In spite of their ostensible concern about the exploitation of women, these films present trafficking mostly as an occasion for the redemption and rehabilitation of the beleaguered white American male, appropriating the problem of trafficking in the service of a US-led neo-imperialism bolstered by masculinism and xenophobia, and implicitly problematising women's independence and justifying the control of their movements and sexuality.     

Quasi-Contractual Ministerial Steering of State Agencies: Its Intensity,Modes, and How Agency Characteristics Matter

ABSTRACT:

This article demonstrates the value of conceptualizing four ideal types when studying ministries’ contract steering of state agencies—relational, double-whammy, performance, and behavioral steering—each defined by its combination of input- and output-oriented steering. In the system under study—Norway—about half of all agencies are subjected to steering with a clear profile; the other half are not. The two profiles often dismissed or overlooked in existing research—relational and double-whammy steering—are most common. Thus, introducing a contract regime has not meant a clear shift from input to output control, as posited by some. Most agency characteristics under study—size, age, political salience, and tasks—have significant effects on the likelihood that an agency is subjected to one type of steering or another. Still, the analysis suggests that agency-level characteristics constrain ministerial choice about which steering to practice only to a limited extent.     

Decentralisation of regional development policies in the Netherlands ‐ A new type of state intervention?

During the past decade, regional development policies in the Netherlands have been dismantled. At the same time, economic development policies have been decentralised to regional and local government level. This has given rise to ‘local initiatives’ for implementing market‐oriented and market‐related development strategies. In the long run, decentralisation of economic policies results in a new type of regulation. It is not through administrative measures and public control that the state intervenes in economic development, but through indirect mechanisms to improve economic growth and innovation. The Keynesian model of regulation, based on far‐reaching intervention, is gradually being transformed into a more ‘modem’ model, characterised by flexible, fragmented, indirect and ‘invisible’ measures. The result is a fundamental change in the relationship between state and economy.     

Attempts at diversification: Mexico and Pacific Asia

This article aims to explain the development of Mexico's relations with Pacific Asia. Based on the historical background of Mexico's relations with Asia and on internal and international transformations, we identify the interests of Mexican political actors in Pacific Asia. We provide an overview of the existing political and economic relations between Mexico and Pacific Asia, demonstrating that the success of diversification has been very limited. By trying to explain the gap between the strategic goals and the existing relations we focus on the domestic politics in Mexico. We conclude that intra-elite conflicts had a negative effect on the diversification attempts, since those conflicts prevented Mexican policy-makers from establishing the institutional basis for successfully implementing their foreign policy goals.     

This other and other others

This paper offers an alternative understanding of the relationship between feminist ethics, time and otherness. Rather than suggesting a feminist ethics should simply be for ‘the other’, or that feminist ethics is always futural (dedicated to that which is not yet), the paper suggests that ethics involves responding to the particular other in a present that carries traces of the past, as well as opening up the future. It is through responding to particular others (where particularity is not understood as a characteristic of another, but as a mode of encounter) that we face and face up to ‘other others’. The relationship between ‘this other’ and ‘other others’ suggests an intimacy between the particular and the collective, between the face-to-face of an encounter and political economies, and between feminist ethics and politics. Indeed, the paper concludes by suggesting that the ethical and political imperatives of feminism are aligned precisely given that collectivity is an effect of the work that has to be done to get closer to this other and, with her, other others. This other and other others collect together in the making of a feminist ‘we’. Such a ‘we’ can be embraced only through a willingness to struggle with and for others who are faced in the present (a facing that is indebted to a past that cannot be left behind), and an openness to the future, as the promise and hope of what we might yet become.     

The size of human capital externalities: cross-country evidence

Human capital accumulation is usually held to generate positive externalities. However, the empirical evidence on human capital externalities has been scarce and inconclusive. The missing evidence appears to be caused by misleading comparisons between private and social rates of return, by incorrect interpretations of regression coefficients, or by an inappropriate level of aggregation. Our own estimates point to relatively robust empirical evidence for a human capital externality that is about twice as large as a benchmark estimate, which is derived from a standard parameterization of a simple growth model. We ponder a possible causal link from human capital to social capital in the context of alternative views of long run development and argue that the grand transition view (Paldam 2002) is compatible with the existence of a large human capital externality.