Ice Ice Baby: The De Facto Termination of Parental Rights by an Enforcement Agency

The current administration's zero tolerance stance on illegal immigration has resulted in the separation of thousands of families and the de facto termination of parental rights. While undocumented parents were always at risk of detainment, expanded immigration enforcement under the Trump administration has greatly increased that risk. Detainment has directly and indirectly resulted in the prolonged separation of parents from their children. This Note proposes a Department of Homeland Security Regulation that will require ICE to use the least restrictive methods to achieve its goals while emphasizing efforts to keep families together.     

Meta‐Governance of Partnerships for Sustainable Development: Actors' Perspectives from Kenya

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development promotes multi‐stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) as a means of implementation while at the same time putting renewed focus on the need for national‐level ownership and implementation. Despite the fact that an ever growing body of literature on the merits and drawbacks of MSPs delineates several success conditions for partnerships, efforts to translate this knowledge into national‐level meta‐governance for MSPs remain marginal to date. This study outlines the benefits the literature alleges for such “meta‐governance” frameworks, before it uses a country‐level study with a series of stakeholder interviews to take a closer look at national‐level context conditions and lessons learned with regard to two water partnerships in Kenya. Our findings suggest that to date the existing meta‐governance for partnerships in Kenya is rather weak and fragmented. Yet respondents support the view that MSPs could benefit from such a framework, in particular regarding local ownership of MSPs and the potential to scale successful cases. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Investment Approach to Public Service Provision

The investment approach to public service provision is now receiving considerable attention worldwide. By promoting data‐intensive assessments of baseline conditions and how government action can improve on them, the approach holds the potential to transform policy development, service implementation, and program evaluation. Recently, variations on the investment approach have been applied in Australia to explore the effectiveness of specific programs in employment training, criminal justice, and infrastructure development. This article reviews the investment approach, presents a Public Investment Checklist to guide such work, and discusses three examples. It concludes by considering the implications of investment thinking for the work of policy designers and public managers.     

Network structure and collaborative innovation processes—A comparative analysis of two elderly service networks in Shanghai

How does the structure of government‐funded service networks affect the process of service innovation? We have conducted a comparative analysis of the structure and processes of collaborative innovation of 2 government‐funded community‐based elderly service networks in Shanghai. We have found that in consistent with the literature, a network that has a network administrative organization structure is better able to manage the process of service innovation in a way that balances the need to achieve government policy goals on the one hand and the imperative to facilitate bottom‐up citizen participation on the other. Surprisingly, contrary to what prior studies have suggested, we have found that a network in which a lead organization plays a dominant role, despite its more centralized process of service innovation, is often able to deliver a variety of high‐quality and low‐cost services addressing citizens' needs. With the leadership provided by the network lead organization and its close affiliation with the street‐office government, the network has been able to solicit government support. Such a hierarchical yet responsive state‐society relation has emerged as a result of the coalescence of a corporatist state legacy and an increasing pressure for local governments to seek citizens' support in service delivery.     

Electoral volatility and parties’ ideological responsiveness

For a number of decades now, scholars have been indicating that ties between citizens and parties are eroding. As a consequence, electoral behaviour has become more volatile and also more unpredictable. The consequences of this process of change on parties’ strategic behaviour have, however, received little attention. In this article, the impact of dealignment on parties’ strategic behaviour is examined, with the focus being on the extent to which parties are responsive to the mean voter. The expectation of dealignment allowing parties ‘to move around more freely’ leads to the hypothesis that parties are more responsive in a context of dealignment. The analyses provide evidence that is in line with this expectation. Ideological responsiveness is conditioned by the level of volatility in the electorate. The conclusion to draw from these results is that dealignment, which profoundly affects voters’ behaviour, leads parties to become more responsive to the mean voter.     

Attitudes towards highly skilled and low‐skilled immigration in Europe: A survey experiment in 15 European countries

To what extent do economic concerns drive anti‐migrant attitudes? Key theoretical arguments extract two central motives: increased labour market competition and the fiscal burden linked to the influx of migrants. This article provides new evidence regarding the impact of material self‐interest on attitudes towards immigrants. It reports the results of a survey experiment embedded in representative surveys in 15 European countries before and after the European refugee crisis in 2014. As anticipated by the fiscal burden argument, it is found that rich natives prefer highly skilled over low‐skilled migration more than low‐income respondents do. Moreover, the study shows that these tax concerns among the wealthy are stronger if fiscal exposure to migration is high. No support is found for the labour market competition argument predicting that natives will be most opposed to migrants with similar skills. The results suggest that highly skilled migrants are preferred over low‐skilled migrants irrespective of natives’ skill levels.     

How mass media attract political elites’ attention

Political agenda‐setting research has shown that policy makers are responsive vis‐à‐vis media priorities. However, the mechanisms behind this effect have remained understudied so far. In particular, agenda‐setting scholars have difficulties determining to what extent politicians react to media coverage purely because of the information it contains (information effect), and to what extent the effect is driven not by what the media say but by the fact that certain information is in the media (media channel effect), which is valued for its own sake – for instance, because media coverage is considered to be a reflection of public opinion. By means of a survey‐embedded experiment with Belgian, Canadian and Israeli political elites (N = 410), this study tests whether the mere fact that an issue is covered by the news media causes politicians to pay attention to this issue. It shows that a piece of information gets more attention from politicians when it comes via the media rather than an identical piece of information coming via a personal e‐mail. This effect occurs largely across the board: it is not dependent on individual politician characteristics.