Citizen oversight of independent police services: Bifurcated accountability,regulation creep,and lesson learning

By examining developments in England and Wales this article considers police reform in the context of the tension between operational independence and citizen oversight. The article assesses the nexus between regulation and accountability in order to shed light on how a bifurcated accountability paradigm has protected police autonomy. Particular significance is attached to the cold‐blooded police shooting of an innocent man as a critical moment in the recent history of police governance. The lesson‐learning strategy of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, created under the Police Reform Act 2002, is singled out as an important driver of police reform. Although police governance reform in England and Wales is context specific, it is held that appreciation of the regulation accountability nexus and complaints as lesson‐learning opportunities are of significance in other jurisdictions and sectors.     

Citizen Advisory Committees: A Tool to Remedy the Shortcomings of the Contingent Valuation Method Within the System of Multi-Level Governance

The Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) is an economic analysis tool used to measure the utility of producing of public goods, based upon individual’s declared preferences. The public decision-maker is thus able to arbitrate between the expenditure to be made. The approach has been deployed in a centralist conceptual plan, leaving little room for citizens in the decision-making process and it has been undermined by the rise in power, notably in Europe, of multi-level governance. The decision-maker is no longer alone in this process and public decision-making must operate on the basis of common views adopted by various levels of government that should also establish much stronger links with the citizen-users of public goods. This article analyzes the operational impact of Citizen Advisory Committees (CAC) as participative tools of CVM that result in an effective cooperation between the various public actors and the civil society in public decision-making.     

宪法义务比较研究

由于对传统义务本位的深恶痛绝,研究义务特别是宪法义务被看作是"屈服国家"或"过时的思想"。宪法学界普遍认识到人性与失察权力结合可能导致严重后果,但人性与失范权利结合可能产生的后果关注较少,造成了宪法义务研究阙如的事实。世界多数国家宪法都有公民义务的规定,鉴于此,我们在对156部宪法中义务内容与结构进行量化比较的基础上尝试做出一些结论和预测。     

关于构建我国公民法律信仰的若干思考

任何一个国家的法律建设与法治进程的推进及加速,都离不开信仰法律、崇尚法律的公民亲身参与和积极投入。但就目前我国社会现实的状况来看,我国公民的法律意识、法律理念、法律信仰和法律追求等方面尚存在某些不足与缺失。我国法治的现状还不能最及时、充分、有效地满足广大公民的利益需求,法治还缺少应有的刚性和力度。本文仅对此问题产生的社会背景和原因作了具体的分析,并依此提出了我们的一些建议和对策。     

Obstacles to citizen participation by direct democracy in Latin America: a comparative regional analysis of legal frameworks and evidence from the Costa Rican case

Starting from the 1980s, institutions of direct democracy were introduced into most Latin American constitutions. To date, the practical application of these institutions remains almost exclusively restricted to the subtype of government plebiscites while the use of citizen initiated instruments remains scarce. To explain the region's low frequency of use of citizen initiated instruments of direct democracy this explorative study proceeds in three sections. The first recapitulates regulatory legislation on, and practical experience with direct democracy in Latin America. The second proposes and applies an index for the comparative measurement of legal obstacles provided by institutional frameworks and goes on to discuss further explanatory propositions on factors that may interact with these legal obstacles to obstruct direct democratic citizen participation. Finally, these hypotheses are tested through an interview-based study with actors involved in the recent practical experience with direct democracy in Costa Rica. The study concludes that the institutional design of citizen initiated instruments of direct democracy alone does not suffice to explain the frequency of their practical application. Rather than this, application frequency appears to be a function of the combined interactive effects of legal institutional factors with sociological and political party factors such as strategic action preferences and party elites' attitudes.     

Hispanic Perceptions of Community Policing

Abstract

The two core elements of community policing are community partnership and problem solving (Rosenbaum, 1994). A major challenge that continues for proponents of community policing is developing and evaluating programs in areas with diverse ethnic groups. While many agencies have successfully developed community policing programs, empirical evaluations of community policing are scarce in areas that include a variety of minority groups. This research explores the effectiveness of community policing by examining citizen satisfaction with local police. Analyses are conducted with data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics on Criminal Victimization and Perceptions of Community Safety in 12 United States cities. The results indicate that Whites and Hispanics have the most positive perceptions of police, while Blacks, Eskimos, Asians, and Pacific Islanders have negative perceptions of police.     

Citizen Preference and Resource Allocation: The Case for Participatory Budgeting in Seoul

This article seeks to measure the extent to which the service priorities of citizens of Seoul, South Korea, are reflected in corresponding resource allocations in the city's budget, despite there being virtually no participation by citizens in the budget creation process. We find a less than perfect congruence between budget allocations and citizen preferences at both the city and district level. Given these results, we discuss the potential for participatory budgeting to address discrepancies in resource allocation by focusing on the unique demographic and cultural makeup of Seoul constituencies.     

Trust in Government: A By-Product of NGO Intervention in Public Policy

This article develops a theoretical rationale for the role of the rising number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), acting as independent agents, in influencing the risk exposure of governments to the loss of trust. In this article, trust is based on government performance consistent with citizen expectations. This performance-expectation connection is a concept in theories of democracy, trust, responsive government, and good governance. A role of the NGO in influencing trust in government is proposed centered on bringing government performance and citizen expectations into alignment.     

The Road to Good Governance: Via the Path Less Accountable? The Effectiveness of Fiscal Accountability in Liberia

Accountability mechanisms are touted as a path to “good governance.” But are accountability mechanisms a sure route to achieving the objectives of “good governance”? Limited case studies have offered inconsistent evidence (Blair, 2000 Blair, H. 2000. Participation and accountability at the periphery: Democratic local governance in sex countries. World Development, 28(1): 21–29. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Charlick, 2001 Charlick, R.B. 2001. Popular participation and local government reform.. Public Administration and Development, 21: 149–157. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Devas &; Grant, 2003 Devas, N. and Grant, U. 2003. Local government decision-making-citizen participation and local accountability: Some evidence from Kenya and Uganda. Public Administration and Development, 23: 307–316. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). But empirical evidence of the relationships among principles of good governance—high citizen participation, low levels of corruption, high-quality service delivery—and accountability mechanisms is lacking. We examine the effectiveness of accountability mechanisms in Liberia and find relationships between measures of county level fiscal accountability and measures of good governance do not always produce expected results, making fiscal accountability mechanisms no guarantee for achieving goals of good governance.     

In Search of Society? The Limitations of Citizen‐Centred Governance

Democratic governments have spent much of the last two decades attempting to recalibrate their governance systems around a single focal entity: the citizen. The all‐pervasive rhetoric of citizen‐centred governance has seen policies conceived, delivered and evaluated in terms of the satisfaction levels achieved by individual ‘citizens’. This article argues that by disaggregating societal interests down to the smallest available individual unit – the citizen – policy makers have created unrealistic expectations of individual participation, leading to public distrust when ‘citizen‐centred’ rhetoric does not match reality. Simultaneously, the focus on individual outcomes has narrowed the policy‐making gaze away from wider society‐level measures that could create more robust policy options in the face of ‘hard choices.’ The result – paradoxically – is that the more government focuses on pleasing the individual citizen, the less trusting those citizens are of government's ability to deliver meaningful outcomes.