Models of Public Service Provision—When Will Knights and Knaves Be Responsive to Pawns and Queens?

This article extends the framework of Le Grand (2003 Le Grand, J. 2003. Motivation, agency and public policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 2010 Le Grand, J. 2010. Knights and knaves return: Public service motivation and the delivery of public services. International Public Management Journal, 13(1): 56–71. [Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) to encompass responsiveness, and the main argument is that the combination of employee motivation, user capacity, and models of public service provision potentially has serious implications for responsiveness across service areas. Although research on employee motivation thrives, especially in the public service motivation (PSM) literature, few studies have investigated user capacity empirically, and we know little about the combination of PSM, user capacity and models of service provision. Analyzing four central service areas (day care, schools, hospitals, and universities), we find variations in both user capacity and PSM. Taking this variation as a point of departure we discuss what implications different combinations of employee motivation, user capacity, and models of public service provision may have for responsiveness.     

Public Service Efficacy

This article develops a measure of user capacity called Public Service Efficacy (PSE), which is applied to four sectors: hospitals, elementary schools, day care, and higher education. Tests of validity and reliability indicate good properties and consistent patterns across three of four sectors. The measure differentiates between users of the same services, and it increases with level of education. This indicates that PSE can enable us to identify individual users with low capacity and sectors with low average user capacity and thus improve our ability to address equity concerns and harvest potential benefits from user involvement in public service provision.     

Electoral Mobility and Social Change in Denmark

Danish politics in the 1970s is characterized by a remarkable increase in electoral fluidity. Increasing political mobility should be seen not as a product of passing and specific events, but as a product of basic societal change. The link between political mobility and some dimensions of social change is discussed theoretically and investigated empirically. The discussion focuses on the joint effects of socioeconomic change and political-institutional change. Some reasons why these changes should lead to increased electoral mobility are stated. The empirical analysis is carried out at the level of municipalities. A positive relationship between various indicators of socio-economic change and political mobility is demonstrated. The relationship is sustained when a control for the effects of social structure is introduced.     

International relations in China and Europe: the case for interregional dialogue in a hegemonic discipline

Abstract

The international relations (IR) discipline is known as an ‘American Social Science’ dominated by scholars and theories from the US core. This paper compares IR in two noncore settings, China and Europe. It shows that there is a growing institutional and intellectual integration into global Anglophone, mostly American, IR in both Europe and China. Both Chinese and European IR communities have established top Anglophone journals like the European Journal of International Relations and the Chinese Journal of International Politics to spearhead their integration into mainstream Anglophone IR and carve out a space for regional thinking. Yet, the analysis of their publication and citation patterns shows that IR outside the American core communicates through a hub-and-spokes system where there is always a connection to the American core but rarely very strong linkages to other peripheral regions. The two journals studied thus function as outlets for ‘local’ and American scholars, rely on ‘local’ and American sources, and there is very little integration and exchange between Chinese and European IR. Chinese and European IR would benefit from such a dialogue, especially regarding ‘schools’ of IR at the margins of an ‘American social science’.     

Comparison of handmarks in manual strangulation: an experimental study

A police case with a strangulated woman with fingermarks on the neck and two suspects identifying each other as the perpetrator set off a laboratory experiment. Twenty-one males participated in the study. Blue paint was applied to their fingers, after which they grasped a neck dummy and pressed hard as if strangulating someone. The imprint was removed from the dummy, and their hands were photographed. Five imprints were randomly chosen and superimposed on the hand photographs in blind trials. In no cases did we match an imprint to the correct hand. However, in four cases we matched the imprint with several hands, one of which was the correct one. This means we were able to exclude nonmatches in 4/5 cases. Overall, matching of hands and fingermarks is difficult and inconclusive. Objective criteria for matching are difficult to establish, and matching is probably best suited for cases with specific anatomical features.     

Meckel's diverticulum and intestinal obstruction--report of a fatal case

Meckel's diverticulum is an uncommon cause of intestinal obstruction in adult life. Rarely Meckel's diverticulum is complicated by a mesodiverticular band, which is believed to be a remnant of a vitelline artery. When this abnormality occurs it is associated with high mortality. We present a case of a 48-year-old man with increasing abdominal pain and vomiting for 3 days. Meckel's diverticulum was not taken into diagnostic consideration, and the man died. Autopsy revealed a Meckel's diverticulum with a mesodiverticular band and intestinal obstruction. Histological examination of cross sections of the mesodiverticular band showed the presence of an artery. Because of the high mortality of this rare anatomic anomaly in adults, we find the case of interest.     

Sudden cardiac death in young adults: environmental risk factors and genetic aspects of premature atherosclerosis

Familial hypercholesterolemia (FH) is a genetic disorder that may lead to premature coronary heart disease (CHD) and sudden cardiac death (SCD). Mutations in the LDLR or APOB genes cause FH. We have screened the LDLR and the ligand-binding region of APOB genes in 52 cases of SCD. Deceased patients were younger than 40 years of age and were suspected of having FH. The LDLR and APOB genes were examined via PCR, high-resolution melting, and DNA sequencing. Therein, it was observed that 7.7% of the screened patients exhibited a rare sequence variant in the LDLR gene, with 5.7% suspected of being pathogenic mutations. Lipid profiles and genetic testing for FH could be considered when autopsy reveals significant atherosclerosis of the coronary arteries in young adults. First-degree family members are advised to seek medical advice and testing to determine their own risks of atherosclerosis to prevent premature CHD and SCD.     

Regulation under uncertainty: The coevolution of industry and regulation

As production and design disintegrate and become more collaborative, involving dynamic relations between customers and firms supplying complex subsystems and service, products and production methods become more innovative but also more hazardous. The inadvertent co‐production of latent hazards by independent firms is forcing firms and regulators to address the problem of uncertainty – the inability to anticipate, much less assign a probability to future states of the world – more directly than before. Under uncertainty, neither the regulator nor the regulated firms know what needs to be done. The regulator must induce firms to systematically canvas their practices and identify potential hazards. But recognizing the fallibility of all such efforts, the regulator must further foster the institutionalization of incident or event reporting procedures: systems to register failures in products or production processes that could be precursors to catastrophe; to trace out and correct their root causes; to alert others in similar situations to the potential hazard; and to make certain that countermeasures to ensure the safety of current operations are taken and the design requirements for the next generation of the implicated components or installations are updated accordingly. In this essay we develop these arguments and look closely at changes in the Norwegian offshore oil and gas industry and its regulator, the Petroleum Safety Authority to better understand the coevolution of vertically disintegrated industry and new forms of regulation.