An unwilling client: how Hosni Mubarak's Egypt defied the Bush administration's ‘freedom agenda’

When the George W Bush administration announced the ‘freedom agenda’ in the Middle East, officials claimed it marked a major break in United States (US) foreign policy. In 2005, the administration intensified efforts pressuring Egypt, a client state, to democratize. However, the US continued pursuing security cooperation with and providing military aid to Egypt. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak repelled US reform efforts by exploiting the normative inconsistency between democratization and security in the war on terror. This paper reviews Mubarak's ‘balking’ strategy (Stephen Walt, Taming American power, New York: WW Norton, 2005), including feigning compliance through nominal legal changes and counter-arguments to buy time until the inconsistencies in US policy came to a head. By 2006, the US had abandoned the freedom agenda and the Egyptian regime had embarked on a repression campaign. As I argue, the implications of the contradictions in US policy towards Egypt demonstrate that weaker client states may enjoy increased agency vis-à-vis a weakly committed patron hegemon.     

Does the Network Centrality of Government Actors Matter? Examining the Role of Government Organizations in Aquaculture Partnerships

The growth in the use of collaborative governance arrangements has been accompanied by burgeoning scholarship in the field of public affairs that seeks to understand the benefits of engaging diverse stakeholders in common venues. However, few scholars have formally assessed the role of government actors in facilitating outcomes for individual participants in such efforts. Moreover, little work on collaborative governance examines how individual incentives and barriers to collective action are formed within the nested nature of these contexts. We contribute to the study of collaborative governance by formally investigating how the relative centrality of government actors in collaborative policy‐making venues affects individual relationship building and learning for participants therein. We find that government actor centrality is positively associated with relationship building and learning. However, in testing two different conceptualizations of “centrality,” we find that the definition of this construct clearly matters.     

Economic and Ideological Corruptions of the Regulatory State

What accounts for the excesses of the regulatory state? Economists have shown that bad regulations are often due to “rent seeking” and “regulatory capture” and have provided compelling accounts of the incentives that drive these processes. However, there remain many unwarranted regulations, such as recent gun control measures, that cannot be explained by an economic rationale. Rather, it is essential to understand the distinctively ideological origins and functions of such regulations. This paper examines both the economic and ideological corruptions on the regulatory state, suggesting that those concerned with the growth of state power will have to address both of these phenomena.     

Public executives: Actualization and conflict approaches

This study represents a test of Maslow's hypotheses that the management styles of self-actualized executives differ from those of less-actualized executives. The sample was drawn from among executives of seven state governments. The correlation of levels of actualization and executive behavior revealed that the more self-actualized executives were more willing to actively lobby for their decisional preferences than to simply accept decisions from superiors.     

The Importance of Professionalism: A Quantitative and Qualitative Look at Why Some U.S. Counties Do More on the Web than Others

Recent research indicates that many local governments are doing little to provide information and services to their citizens via the Internet, so more needs to be known about the underlying reasons for governments' adoption of web technology. A two-stage research project, statistical analysis followed by qualitative investigation, of a stratified random sample of American counties reveals the importance of advocacy by motivated individuals, both appointed and elected. The findings from both stages of this research underscore the importance of motivated professionals who choose to actively promote web technologies.