Policy work at the sub‐national level: Analytical styles of Canadian and Czech directors and managers

This paper uses data from two countries to develop profiles of policy directors and managers in the sub‐national public bureaucracies of Canada and the Czech Republic. Canadian directors and managers undertake more analytically complex tasks for which research and evaluation is necessary. In comparison, Czech managers are more firmly engaged in project management agendas, and Czech directors tend to rely on personal experience and routine approaches. Overall, the sample shows that different policy styles are emphasized in each country and at different levels ranging from rational‐technical and advisory‐interactive (Canadian directors and managers), process expertise (Czech managers), and a combination of analytical rationality and issue activism (Czech directors).     

The trust deficit in Sino-Japanese relations

Abstract

Recent years have seen a deterioration in political relations between China and Japan, in particular over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands and history-related problems. Commentators have noted an attendant decline in trust between the two sides and have stressed the need for confidence-building measures in order to address the trust deficit. This article explores the origins of declining trust between the Chinese and Japanese leaderships. It argues that attempts to build a friendly and trusting relationship in the early post-war and post-normalisation periods began to fail in the 1980s, and have been in a gradual state of decline ever since. Using the concepts of trust and friendship, the article suggests that the lack of trust properties such as empathy, bonding, reliability and predictability have contributed to the deterioration of trust at both elite and popular levels.     

Gender Differences in Resistance to Schooling: The Role of Dynamic Peer-Influence and Selection Processes

Boys engage in notably higher levels of resistance to schooling than girls. While scholars argue that peer processes contribute to this gender gap, this claim has not been tested with longitudinal quantitative data. This study fills this lacuna by examining the role of dynamic peer-selection and influence processes in the gender gap in resistance to schooling (i.e., arguing with teachers, skipping class, not putting effort into school, receiving punishments at school, and coming late to class) with two-wave panel data. We expect that, compared to girls, boys are more exposed and more responsive to peers who exhibit resistant behavior. We estimate hybrid models on 5448 students from 251 school classes in Sweden (14–15 years, 49% boys), and stochastic actor-based models (SIENA) on a subsample of these data (2480 students in 98 classes; 49% boys). We find that boys are more exposed to resistant friends than girls, and that adolescents are influenced by the resistant behavior of friends. These peer processes do not contribute to a widening of the gender gap in resistance to schooling, yet they contribute somewhat to the persistence of the initial gender gap. Boys are not more responsive to the resistant behavior of friends than girls. Instead, girls are influenced more by the resistant behavior of lower status friends than boys. This explains to some extent why boys increase their resistance to schooling more over time. All in all, peer-influence and selection processes seem to play a minor role in gender differences in resistance to schooling. These findings nuance under investigated claims that have been made in the literature.     

Getting to Sweden,Part II: Breaking with Corruption in the Nineteenth Century

Issues about corruption and other forms of ‘bad government’ have become central in large parts of the social sciences. An unresolved question, however, is how countries can solve the issue of systemic corruption. In this article, based on Elinor Ostrom's theory of common pool resource appropriation, a new theoretical model for explaining this type of institutional change is developed. Sweden during the nineteenth century is used as an illustration of the model by showing how the country made a transition from being largely patrimonial, nepotistic and corrupt to a modern, Weberian, efficient and impartial state structure. Building upon a companion article about the importance of losing a war as a precondition for breaking systematic corruption, this article stresses the importance of three additional factors in Sweden: previous changes in courts and the legal system; recognition of the problem by the main contemporary political actors as shown in debates in the Diet; and the new liberal ideology that made an important impact on the Swedish political scene during this period.     

Disability and Its Correlates in a Developing Country Context: Evidence from Multiple Datasets and Measures

Disability profiles showing how the magnitude of disability differs across subgroups of a population are important tools in designing effective policies. Yet little is known about the sensitivity of the correlates of disability to the way disability is measured. This study uses an unprecedentedly large amount of nationally representative survey data from Indonesia. Based on 13 different datasets that were collected between 2000 and 2014, and which together contain disability information on more than 1 billion individuals, we assess how robust disability profiles are to measurement issues. Our findings suggest that irrespective of the dataset and measure used, disability is disproportionally more common among the poor, the elderly and rural areas in the country. Hence, Indonesian policies on poverty reduction, population ageing, and rural development should pay particular attention to how they reach and affect persons with disabilities. Our research further reveals that the gender gap in disability is highly sensitive to measurement issues with different datasets and measures reaching different conclusions about the size and direction of the gap.     

China’s economic reforms: A synoptic view

Structural-systemic reforms of China’s economy were initiated in 1979 against a background of economic crisis, absence of a reform blueprint, and unsatisfactory experience with past developmental models. The reforms may be seen as having five major components; pragmatic gradualism; marketization of the coordination mechanism; diversification of the property structure (destatization); outward orientation (controlled openness); and retention of political monopoly power by the communist party. Of these, the proliferation of various property forms is novel, problematical, and conceptually intriguing. The reforms have resulted in or been accompanied thus far by modernizing but erratic and uneven economic growth and marginal political liberalization; strong inflationary pressures; unresolved state sector property problems; and uncertainties of political succession. The vision of China’s economic future is obscured by the unfinished business of significant state ownership of industry and an authoritarian polity seasoned by corruption. Unless these are removed, the danger remains that the reforms will be undone.     

Lobbying and asymmetric information

Informational lobbying — the use by interest groups of their (alleged) expertise or private information on matters of importance for policymakers in an attempt to persuade them to implement particular policies — is often regarded as an important means of influence. This paper analyzes this phenomenon in a game setting. On the one hand, the interest group is assumed to have private information which is relevant to the policymaker, whilst, on the other hand, the policymaker is assumed to be fully aware of the strategic incentives of the interest group to (mis)report or conceal its private information. It is shown that in a setting of partially conflicting interests a rationale for informational lobbying can only exist if messages bear a cost to the interest group and if the group's preferences carry information in the ‘right direction’. Furthermore, it is shown that it is not the content of the message as such, but rather the characteristics of the interest group that induces potential changes in the policymaker's behavior. In addition, the model reveals some interesting results on the relation between, on the one hand, the occurrence and impact of lobbying and, on the other hand, the cost of lobbying, the stake which an interest group has in persuading the policymaker, the similarity between the policymaker's and the group's preferences, and the initial beliefs of the policymaker. Moreover, we relate the results to some empirical findings on lobbying. qu]Much of the pressure placed upon government and its agencies takes the form of freely provided “objective” studies showing the important outcomes to be expected from the enactment of particular policies (Bartlett, 1973: 133, his quotation marks). qu]The analysis here is vague. What is needed is an equilibrium model in which lobbying activities have influence. Incomplete information ought to be the key to building such a model that would explain why lobbying occurs (information, collusion with decision makers, and so on) and whether lobbying expenses are socially wasteful. (Tirole, 1989: Ch. 1.3, p. 77, Rentseeking behavior).     

Robberies in Prague

This paper is concerned with the issue of robberies in the Czech Republic, primarily in the capital city, Prague. Statistics show that there has been a sharp rise in the number of robberies recorded in the Czech Republic following the political upheavals of 1989. In spite of this, current Czech criminology does not give proper attention to this kind of criminal activity. For this reason, the authors will attempt not only to summarise research efforts hitherto undertaken in this field and place them in a wider international context, but also to offer basic and criminologically relevant data on offenders, victims and some other significant factors, making use of official crime statistics as well as special police statistical records, including data obtained through the authors' own analysis of a sample of court files.