Patterns of Local Policy Disruption: Regulatory Responses to Uber in Ten North American Cities

Since its inception in 2009, Uber has grown into a technology behemoth, with operations in over 70 countries and 500 cities around the world. Along the way, it has successfully forced regulatory upheaval in hundreds of local taxi markets controlled by municipal authorities. In this sense, Uber is not only a market disruptor, but also a policy disruptor. This paper examines the nature of such policy disruption at the local level by reviewing regulatory responses to Uber in ten North American cities. We find that regulatory outcomes are a function of two factors: Uber’s government relations strategy, either cooperative or confrontational, and the degree to which local governments perceive Uber as complementary or harmful to the existing marketplace. We conclude by proposing a typology of regulatory responses to Uber as a basis to identify patterns in the behavior of municipal regulatory authorities and political leaders.     

Assessing the Past and Promise of the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey for Public Management Research: A Research Synthesis

Since 2002, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management has used the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) to monitor efforts by federal executive agencies to manage human capital. Public management researchers have used FEVS data to produce dozens of peer‐reviewed publications on a range of topics of interest to policy makers, practitioners, and academics. Despite the proliferation of these empirical studies, the field of public management until now has lacked a critical assessment of the FEVS and of how researchers have used the data. In this article, the authors discuss the strengths of the FEVS and the opportunities this survey has created for public management researchers. Despite important contributions made to the literature using the data, there are weaknesses in the content, design, and implementation of the FEVS. The authors offer a set of recommendations for refining the survey and its implementation with the aim of improving the quality and value of the data. In doing so, they hope to foster a dialogue between public management researchers and the Office of Personnel Management on the future of the FEVS and to forge a stronger link between these two communities.     

Federal Intervention in the Management of Groundwater Resources: Past Efforts and Future Prospects

The role of the federal government in groundwater regulationis likely to increase over the next few decades. A combinationof events—including recent federal court decisions, pastfederal intervention in state groundwater utilization, the publicpronouncements by a variety of federal actors, and increasingconcern over the inability of states to control overdrafting—allsuggest that the federal role in groundwater management maybe increasing. These events are examined here, and it is arguedthat, without change in state groundwater management practicesto mitigate the negative effects of state competition for groundwater,federal intervention in groundwater management seems likely.     

Experimental results on data analysis algorithms for extracting and interpreting edge feature data for duct tape and textile physical fit examinations

A physical fit is an important observation that can result from the forensic analysis of trace evidence as it conveys a high degree of association between two items. However, physical fit examinations can be time-consuming, and potential bias from analysts may affect judgment. To overcome these shortcomings, a data analysis algorithm using mutual information and a decision tree has been developed to support practitioners in interpreting the evidence. We created these tools using data obtained from physical fit examinations of duct tape and textiles analyzed in previous studies, along with the reasoning behind the analysts' decisions. The relative feature importance is described by material type, enhancing the knowledge base in this field. Compared with the human analysis, the algorithms provided accuracies above 90%, with an improved rate of true positives for most duct tape subsets. Conversely, false positives were observed in high-quality scissor cut (HQ-HT-S) duct tape and textiles. As such, it is advised to use these algorithms in tandem with human analysis. Furthermore, the study evaluated the accuracy of physical fits when only partial sample lengths are available. The results of this investigation indicated that acceptable accuracies for correctly identifying true fits and non-fits occurred when at least 35% of a sample length was present. However, lower accuracies were observed for samples prone to stretching or distortion. Therefore, the models described here can provide a valuable supplementary tool but should not be the sole means of evaluating samples.     

Performance Federalism and Local Democracy: Theory and Evidence from School Tax Referenda

Federal governments are increasingly employing empirical measures of lower‐level government performance to ensure that provincial and local jurisdictions pursue national policy goals. We call this burgeoning phenomenon “performance federalism” and argue that it can distort democratic accountability in lower‐level elections. We estimate the impact of a widely publicized federal indicator of local school district performance—one that we show does not allow voters to draw valid inferences about the quality of local educational institutions—on voter support for school tax levies in a U.S. state uniquely appropriate for this analysis. The results indicate that a signal of poor district performance increases the probability of levy failure, a substantively large and robust effect that disproportionately affects impoverished communities. The analysis employs a number of identification strategies and tests for multiple behavioral mechanisms to support the causal interpretation of these findings.     

Performance Measurement and Cost Accounting: Are They Complementary or Competing Systems of Control?

In the public administration literature, research on performance measurement has recognized the important place of cost accounting in relation to performance. Extant research, such as the North Carolina Benchmarking Program, supports the proposition that performance and cost accounting naturally complement each other to increase trust in performance information and increase organizational learning. Other statements about cost accounting suggest that performance measurement and cost accounting compete as systems of control. This research uses general cost accounting plan information and performance measurements in the budgets of large U.S. cities to test the competing and complementary control relationship at the organizational and service levels. It finds that performance measurements and cost accounting are negatively related at the service level, which supports the competing control system hypothesis. At the organizational level, performance and cost accounting are positively related but not at traditional levels of significance.     

Preparing to lead: Mayoral transition planning in Canadian cities

Transition teams are often used to help Prime Ministers and Premiers move into their new roles. At the municipal level, the use of transition teams is relatively new. As such, we know little about what these groups do in comparison to federal and provincial transition teams. In this article, we examine mayoral transition teams and find that the increased use of these groups is a reflection of the enhanced organizational complexity of Canadian local government. Additionally, local conditions and candidate experience often dictate the shape and function of transition teams. Overall, we argue that more resources should be devoted to the municipal transition process.     

A new model for making Aboriginal policy? Evaluating the Kelowna Accord and the promise of multilevel governance in Canada

Government policy‐making affecting Indigenous communities in Canada has often been met with stiff resistance from Indigenous leadership. We examine multilevel governance as an alternate model for Aboriginal policy‐making by examining a particular case study: the process leading up to the 2005 Kelowna Accord. We find that although multilevel governance may have the potential to produce highly desirable outcomes, its emergence seems to depend heavily on political agency. Meaningful and enduring change to Aboriginal policy‐making will therefore likely require significant institutional adjustments to the Canadian federation.     

HARMONIOUS COEXISTENCE

正In upgrading its protection of wild elephants, China can look to Kenya Over the past few months, with the northward migration of Asian elephants in southwest China's Yunnan Province, the wild species has caught the eye of the international community, and the preparation for the establishment of an Asian elephant national park in China has been pushed forward.     

Blessed be Discord, 1910: Ricardo Flores Magón's Manifesto Mode

This article explores how Ricardo Flores Magón used images to transpose the graphic tradition of nineteenth-century Mexican political journalism into prose by deploying montage to craft both allegorical and prismatic images: while certain images are divorced from their original context and take on a new life, others, analogically related to a single idea, appear prismatically in fragments on the page. The affinities Flores Magón's writing shared with modernismo and the historical avant garde – as intensification of the former and precursor of the latter – have been a blind spot for literary history, to which this article attempts to restore the importance of his writing.