Statesman to Statesman

Dear Readers,Forum is a column that provides a space for varying perspectives on contemporary Chinese society.We invite you to submit personal viewpoints on past and current topics(in either English or Chinese).yanwei@bjreview.com Please provide your name and address along with your comments     

Analysis of Factors of Overpricing in Public Procurement: A Study for Low-performing EU Countries

ABSTRACT

The paper deals with the issue of overpricing of public procurement in low-performing EU countries. It examines a uniquely large sample of public procurement in 11 Central and Eastern European countries. Hierarchical regression is used to analyze the factors that influence public contract. Our results indicate that institutional factors have a greater impact on overpricing than individual decisions by the contracting authority. Our analysis for low-performing EU countries provides interesting results and also draws attention to behavior that is not typical of the better established and more advanced EU countries. Our results are particularly important for public policy in each country, as they show the direction of regulatory action in the field of public procurement. The results introduce a debate on the appropriateness of “one size fits all” regulations within the EU.     

Breaking the glass ceiling,but facing a glass cliff? The role of organizational decline in women's representation in leadership positions in Dutch civil service organizations

Despite efforts to increase gender diversity and equality worldwide, women are still underrepresented in leadership positions in public bureaucracies. This article speaks to the debate on how organizational context, more specifically organizational decline, may influence gender representation in such leadership positions. Based on role congruity theory and glass cliff theory this article empirically examines whether and how excessive workforce reductions are associated with changes in the representation of women in leadership positions in Dutch civil service organizations. Panel analyses on administrative data show that women's representation in leadership positions varies over time, but is not significantly affected by excessive workforce reductions. Overall, the analyses do not provide evidence for a glass cliff for women in Dutch civil service organizations. Implications for theory and future research are discussed.     

Learning to de-escalate: evaluating the behavioural impact of Verbal Judo training on police constables

ABSTRACT

This article presents findings from an assessment of the immediate behavioural impact of the ‘Verbal Judo’ de-escalation training program, delivered to officers in a Canadian police service in 2017, and represents the first evaluation of Verbal Judo. The evaluation utilized systematic observations of officers in videotaped simulations, comparing a baseline group of officers to officers trained in Verbal Judo. The study found that five of 15 coded behaviours were impacted at a statistically significant level in the hypothesized direction, and these tended to be simpler behaviours encouraged by the training (such as identifying oneself or providing a reason for contact), while more complex behaviours (such as empathizing with the subject) were not impacted. The evaluation also found that likelihood of utilizing de-escalation skills decreased as an officer’s years of experience increased. The paper closes by outlining the implications of these findings for de-escalation training, and elaborates the main limitations of the study.     

You Can't Fix What You Don't Measure: How ALICE Can Help Rebuild the Middle Class

Seventy percent of Americans identify as middle class, but one in three middle‐income households do not earn enough to support their family at the most basic level, and four in five do not earn enough to afford a sustainable budget. This incongruity explains the increasing frustration of many workers. Yet official government measures do not capture this reality, and as a result, policy makers continue to create economic policies that perpetuate the structural mismatch between wages and costs. This Viewpoint essay addresses these shortcomings. After reviewing alternatives to the federal poverty level, it argues that the most realistic and accurate floor to the middle class is the ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) Household Survival Budget. The essay then turns to policies that help realign wages and cost of living and presents initiatives that are being implemented in states across the country. Four policy areas would enable more workers to support their families and fulfill the promise of being middle class in America: meaningful work with stable and sufficient wages, upskilling and digital retooling, fiscal cushion for periods of financial instability, and affordable credit.     

Development of an Index of Subsidized Housing Availability and its Relationship to Housing Insecurity

Housing insecurity is a known threat to child health understanding predictors of housing insecurity can help inform policies to protect the health of young children in low-income households. This study sheds light on the relationship between housing insecurity and availability of housing that is affordable to low-income households.

We developed a county-level index of availability of subsidized housing needed to meet the demand of low-income households. Our results estimate that if subsidized units are made available to an additional 5% of the eligible population, the odds of overcrowding decrease by 26% and the odds of families making multiple moves decrease by 31%. Both of these are known predictors of poor child health outcomes. Thus, these results suggest that state and federal investments in expanding the stock of subsidized housing could reduce housing insecurity and thereby also improve the health and well-being of young children, including their families' food security status.     

Legal History and the Problem of the Long Civil Rights Movement

This essay offers a critical examination of use of the term “long civil rights movement” as a framework for understanding the legal history of the battle against racial inequality in twentieth‐century America. Proponents of the long movement argue that expanding the chronological boundaries of the movement beyond the 1950s and 1960s allows scholars to better capture the diverse social mobilization efforts and ideas that fueled the black freedom struggle. While not questioning the long framework's usefulness for studying the social movement dynamics of racial justice activism, I suggest that the long framework is of more limited value for those who seek to understand the development of civil rights, as a legal claim, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century. The tendency of long movement scholars to treat civil rights as a pliable category into which they can put any and all racial justice claims is in tension with historical understandings of the term. Susan Carle's Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880–1915 suggests an alternative approach. Her detailed and nuanced account of a period in American history when racial justice activists understood civil rights as a relatively narrow subset of legal remedies within a much broader struggle for racial equality indicates the need for an alternate history of civil rights—one that places the evolving, contested, and historically particularized concept of civil rights at the center of inquiry.