Analyzing the Contracting-Out of Government Services: Relevant Cost-Benefit Considerations

This article reviews various approaches to analyzing the contracting-out decision and distills a set of cost/benefit considerations which each analysis must address in order to properly ascertain whether there is any advantage to contracting out as compared to performing the work in-house. The author describes an approach to analyzing the contracting-out decision that begins with an unambiguous, comprehensive statement of service goals to facilitate the measurement of outcomes and is followed by an examination of the other considerations on the cost side of the equation which are basic to the proper measurement of all direct costs, indirect costs, and social costs.     

Teenage kicks: Urban narratives of dissent not deviance

This article utilises contemporary social and cultural theory in an interrogation of the ideological construction of activities nominated as social problems. Specifically the article analyses the events of computer hacking, joyriding and raving, activities which are prevalent within youth culture. These activities have been subjected to criminal sanction and regulation and therefore bought within an arena of (governmental) surveillance. This article assesses these events not within the paradigms of criminology and deviancy but as examples of an affirmative cultural politics operative through the technologies of inversion and appropriation which are in excess. These subcultural events assume the status of resistant practices not in terms of ideology but rather in terms of alternative narratives of dissensus representing possible moments of community.     

Economic self-interest and the vote: Evidence and meaning

The issue of personal economic self-interest — people responding politically to changes in their financial well-being — has been a central focus in the economic voting literature. In a recent article, Kramer (1983) contended that people may be acting in a personally self-interested manner despite findings to the contrary from survey research analyses. In another article, Sears and Lau (1983) argued that findings of economic self-interest from survey data may be artifactual and that self-interested behavior may be even weaker than previously thought. In this paper I review the literature on economic self-interest and attempt to determine to what extent people do act on the basis of their financial well-being and under what conditions this is most likely.     

Controlling the Police in Buenos Aires: A Case Study of Horizontal and Social Accountability

The article analyses the interaction between various forms of accountability on the basis of a case study of responses to the Federal Police of Argentina's practice of framing innocent victims. The failure of classic agencies of balance to establish accountability was compensated in this case by the creation of an ad hoc agency of oversight, an investigative commission established by the Attorney General, that interacted with social agents of accountability. The analysis points to the ambivalent role of the media in both supporting and exposing illegal police practices and shows that the cooperation between the commission and social actors was crucial to its success.     

Broadening the peace dividend

He has served as Senior Fellow at the National Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament.