The Reinvention of Public Personnel Administration: An Analysis of the Diffusion of Personnel Management Reforms in the States

Reform is a common theme in American public administration. During the twentieth century at least 12 major administrative reforms have taken place at the federal level and countless others in state and local governments. Frequently, these reforms have addressed the operation of public personnel management systems. Recent efforts associated with the reinventing government movement, for example, have proposed numerous alterations to civil service rules and procedures, and many jurisdictions have implemented significant changes in their personnel practices. This article examines the extent to which these kinds of personnel reforms have been implemented by state governments. A reform index is developed to document the considerable variation among the states in their approach to personnel practices. Several state characteristics are associated with scores on this index, including legislative professionalism, which bears a positive relationship to reform, and the level of unemployment within a state and the proportion of state employees associated with public employee unions, which are both negatively associated with reform.     

Administrative Discretion and Active Representation: An Expansion of the Theory of Representative Bureaucracy

Recent studies of the theory of representative bureaucracy have focused on active representation, whereby administrators in public organizations work to advance the interests of particular groups, achieving policy outcomes that directly address the needs of those groups. The concept of administrative discretion is central to these studies, as an administrator must have the discretion to produce results that reflect the values and beliefs of these groups. While the presence of discretion is often implied in these studies, few have examined it explicitly. Using data from the Farmer's Home Administration, we explore whether administrators who perceive themselves as having more discretion enact policy outcomes that are more representative of minority interests. The results strongly support the conclusion that administrators who perceive themselves as possessing significant discretion and who assume the role of minority representative in their agencies are more likely to enact policy outcomes that favor minority interests.     

Conceptualising State Capacity: Comparing Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan

Strengthening the state is central to the post-communist reform agenda. Here, state capacity combines organisational, material and social resources and is conceptualised along four dimensions: ideational, political, technical and implementational. This conceptualisation is applied to a comparative, survey-based analysis in 2002 of 125 medium-ranking officials in two post- communist Central Asian countries, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The findings reveal that although Kazakhstan's controlled economic reform programme and natural resources have placed it in a stronger position to develop its state capacity, important ideational, political and implementational problems pose long-term obstacles for reform. In turn, Kyrgyzstan's early liberalisation in the absence of economic and social resources may be serving to undermine its state capacity.     

The corporate shaping of GM crops as a technology for the poor

The status of international agricultural research as a global public good (GPG) has been widely accepted since the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. While the term was not used at the time of its creation, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) system that evolved at that time has been described as a ‘prime example of the promise, performance and perils of an international approach to providing GPGs’. Contemporary literature on international agricultural research as a GPG tends to support this view and focuses on how to operationalize the concept. This paper adopts a different starting point and questions this conceptualization of the CGIAR and its outputs. It questions the appropriateness of such a ‘neutral’ concept to a system born of the imperatives of Cold War geopolitics, and shaped by a history of attempts to secure its relevance in a changing world. This paper draws on a multi-sited, ethnographic study of a research effort highlighted by the CGIAR as an exemplar of GPG-oriented research. Behind the ubiquitous language of GPGs, ‘partnership’ and ‘consensus’, however, new forms of exclusion and restriction are emerging within everyday practice, reproducing North–South inequalities and undermining the ability of these programmes to respond to the needs of projected beneficiaries.     

Grounds for self-government? Changes in land ownership and democratic participation in Chinese communities

Do variations in land ownership affect people’s democratic participation? Quantitative, cross-country research on this topic suffers from the non-comparability of regulatory systems and cultures, and the use of crude indicators to identify participation. This study attempts to overcome these methodological problems, by employing indicators of procedural and substantive participation in a structured, diachronic comparison of qualitative data from five sites in China – an authoritarian state, which, however, requires residents of urban communities and villages to participate in ‘self-government’. It examines whether and why changing land from collective ownership to state ownership, and residents’ compensated acquisition of cash and secure, fungible assets, strengthens or weakens participation in self-government. In the research sites, collective land ownership is found to stimulate participation in self-government. Transformation of the land to state ownership and people’s acquisition of private property weakens participation. The robust results of the study support the direction of a causal argument that collective land ownership is conducive to democratic participation. These findings imply that scholars and policymakers should consider the potentially adverse political consequences of changing land ownership. A further implication is that, absent substantial political reform, an urbanized China might be less rather than more democratic at the community level.     

Two Contrasting Constituencies in the Heart of England

This article compares two parliamentary constituencies in Warwickshire: one which might be expected to be Conservative but is held by Labour, and the other, a Labour seat for over fifty years, but now held by the Conservatives. Constituency level analyses permit a more fine-grained analysis of electoral trends, taking account of demographic factors otherwise being overlooked. Labour needs to be able to appeal to the aspirational voters moving into Nuneaton.