International rankings of government performance and source credibility for citizens: experiments about e-government rankings in the UK and the Netherlands

International organizations are an alternative to national governments as a source of information for citizens about governments’ performance. Experiments about high UK e-government performance reported in an international ranking find a United Nations (UN) source increases citizens’ perceptions of the truthfulness of reported performance and increases perceived high performance compared to national government reporting identical information. The UN source also has higher perceived honesty, helpfulness and knowledgeability. A replication experiment in the Netherlands generalizes the finding about perceived higher truthfulness. International sources boost the credibility of information about high performance, improving citizens’ perceptions of national governments.     

Computers versus Communism?

Markets depend for their efficiency on the flow of information stimulated by entrepreneurial activity. The economic revolution stimulated by the advent of computers in the West could, argues Sheldon Richman of the Institute for Humane Studies, Fairfax, Virginia, lead to political revolution in the Eastern Bloc as governments become unable to restrict the flow of information to their citizens.     

Finding a Bowling Partner: The Role of Stakeholders in Activating Civil Society in Germany,Spain and the United Kingdom

An 'activism index', combining data on membership of civil associations and societies and the level of activism suggests that, notwithstanding cultural differences, civil activism in European countries could be a great deal higher than its current level. If higher civic participation is to be achieved, each stakeholder group within local governance can play an 'activation' role in relation to citizens, both as individuals and in relation to the voluntary organizations which represent citizens in their collective activities. In practice, different stakeholder groups play this role in widely differing ways in the contexts of Germany, Spain and the UK. In the future, we can expect the lead role in activating civil society in each country to be taken by different stakeholders, depending on the trust currently placed in them by other stakeholders in the community and by the resources which they command.     

URBANISATION AND INFORMALITY IN AFRICA'S HOUSING MARKETS

Urbanisation is a growing phenomenon in Africa. Across the continent cities are drawing more and more people in search of economic opportunity. The majority of these people end up living in informal settlements: slums. As Africa's slums expand, international organisations, NGOs, and governments themselves call for strong public-sector action to deal with the problems in these settlements and to limit their expansion. However, government intervention in African housing markets may have contributed significantly to the growth of informal settlements. A maze of regulations and administrative barriers has imposed high transaction costs on formal-sector housing entrepreneurs. By raising the costs of providing low-income housing, African governments bear much responsibility for driving formal-sector entrepreneurs out of the housing market and for driving their citizens into slums.     

Constructive Pressures And Incentives To Reform: Globalization and its impact on public sector performance and governance in developing countries

Contrary to widespread pessimism regarding the effects of globalization on nation states and the quality of governance in developing countries, this contribution stresses that several of its features can be made instrumental, and be beneficial, in terms of public policy making and state capability. Four ‘constructive pressures’ stemming from globalization could be seized constructively by citizens and governments in the developing world: First, better informed and better connected citizens, and an emerging global civil society, demand improvements in service delivery, transparency, and participation. Second, subnational governments, often backed by local NGOs and businesses, and keen to attract foreign investment, increasingly exert pressure vis-à-vis central governments. Third, global investment strategies by private businesses increase the demand for appropriate institutional arrangements within developing countries as well as credible government policies. Although with mixed results, forth, International Organizations, in particular IFIs, have been addressing public sector modernization in developing countries, also sponsoring global public policy networks in critical areas. Moreover, policy coordination and cooperation among states increases significantly, constraining arbitrary action by governments. Globalization, thus, advances the discussion about, and the demand for, new institutional arrangements, clearly with new opportunities for improvements in state capability and governance.     

Balancing Hate Speech, Professional Ethics, and First Amendment Rights: A Case of and from the Judiciary

As an increasing number of state and local governments pass laws that prohibit discrimination against gay and lesbian employees, individual citizens and groups opposed to such rights continue to fight against them. Although the First Amendment to the United State Constitution guarantees the right to free speech, a potential problem arises when the impartiality of a member of the judiciary is questioned based on free ‘‘hate speech’’ expressed as a private citizen. This paper explores the dilemma the courts face relative to the professional ethics of those who oversee the courts where gay and lesbian and other employees attempt to ensure their rights to fair treatment in the workplace.     

Mapping walkability. A subjective value theory approach

The analysis of urban walkability has been extensively explored in the last decades. Despite this growing attention, there is a lack of studies attentive on how citizens' values, individual abilities and urban environment favour or hinder the propensity to walk. Hence, there is a need to explore how preferences and values of citizens vary in space in order to design walkability policies able to improve the capability set of citizens. In this perspective, the design of spatial decision tools aimed to plann public policies for the development of walkable cities needs further investigation. We propose a Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) method aimed to elaborate walkability decision maps for different groups of citizens that reflect their capability to walk in the urban environment. We tested the method in the city of Alghero (Italy). First, we analysed walkability under a normative model named CAWS; then we made a survey with 358 participants in order to study the driving values that influence their choice to walk and finalised to build an evaluation model attentive to individual differences. Cluster analysis was employed to group citizens into 11 groups based on their sociodemographic characteristics and preferences on spatial criteria of walkability. Finally, by integrating GIS with MCDA we built a set of decision maps representative of the walkability of the 11 groups of citizens. Results highlight the importance of citizens’ values for policy design, allow the interpersonal comparison among individuals and group preferences and give new suggestions for the formulation of walkability oriented urban policies. Moreover, the results confirm the usability of the general method as a decision support tool supporting the design of urban policies.     

Birth of the Modern Corporation: From Servant of the State to Semi‐Sovereign Power

It is widely known that large business corporations have accumulated enormous political and economic power since the early 20^th century. They not only create barriers to entry to small firms in the economic domain, they also pose a serious threat to democracy by dominating public discourse and occupying a wide range of public spaces. Efforts to halt or reverse the growth of corporate power have been largely ineffective, in large part because they have been entirely reactive. In order for citizens to reclaim the economy and politics, a new strategy is necessary, one that starts by analyzing the source of corporate power. The method of analysis in this article is historical, specifically the history of changes in the United States of the legal instruments of incorporation and their relationship to emerging conditions in the economy and business. In the first half of the 19^th century, corporations were chartered by state governments to carry out public benefit activities, particularly infrastructure projects. These mixed corporations lost favor during the depression of the 1840s and were replaced by private for‐profit corporations that continued using the same debt financing instruments employed by states. They were also still regulated by the states that issued their charters. When corporations sought to avoid competition by creating cartels, they had difficulty maintaining discipline and discovered they needed new rights in order to gain permanent control of markets. In the 1890s, they were granted the status of “natural persons,” with the legal protections of citizens, but they also gained the right to buy other corporations, thereby solidifying their market power and making them largely autonomous from public control. Each transition was contested, but when it was completed, it seemed to the public as if corporations had always had their new powers. In order to regain the power to hold corporations accountable to the public, those old contested issues need to be brought back into public discourse, so that citizens might decide for themselves how much power corporations should have.     

Make Governments Compete for People

The EEC is under severe criticism for failing lo live up to its early promise as the means to liberalise the European economy. Belgian economist Michael van Notten, a former official in Brussels, analyses the causes of bureaucratisation and proposes a means of liberalising the Community by making ifs governments compete for citizens and industry. He visualises the EEC as a European Hong Kong.     

European Periphery Crises,International Financial Markets,and Democracy

This article analyzes the origin and causes of the recent economic and financial crises, mainly for the countries located in the periphery of the European Union (EU), as well as their evolution and transformation into social, political, and institutional crises. After explaining the differential impact of the crises on EU economies, we analyze how the economic policies developed thus far not only are unable to resolve the current crisis pattern but also actually entail a risk to the present democratic models by transferring the legitimate control over governments from citizens and democratic parliaments to unelected, nonrepresentative international financial markets.     

Citizens’ e-participation on agenda setting in local governance: Do individual social capital and e-participation management matter?

Although a growing body of literature has touted e-participation as a means of facilitating greater citizen participation in policy decision-making processes, little is known about the driving forces behind citizens’ use of e-participation. Based on a literature review of social capital and citizen participation, this study develops and tests a model proposing that three dimensions of social capital and three dimensions of citizen participation management should be positively associated with e-participation in agenda setting. Using data from a Korean e-participation survey conducted in 2009, we found that citizens tend to be more active e-participants when they have greater trust in government and are weakly tied to offline social groups. We also found that citizen participants’ perception of government responsiveness to their input can facilitate their e-participation. The study findings imply that local governments should pay more attention to the function of public trust in local government and provide quality feedback in response to citizen input. They should also be sensitive to how the social factors of e-participants can facilitate involvement in agenda setting.     

Modern Pirates: How Arbitration Lawyers Help Corporations Seize National Assets and Limit State Autonomy

Large‐scale companies have worked for centuries with the governments of powerful nations to extract wealth from the rest of the world. Since the 1990s, one important method of continuing that legacy has been the use of secretive legal proceedings known as investor‐state dispute settlements (ISDS). Through this innocuous‐sounding practice, transnational corporations (TNCs) are able to blame foreign governments for their failure to extract as large a profit as they anticipated from their operations abroad. Asserting that changes in fiscal, environmental, or social policies have harmed them, TNCs have claimed that foreign governments should compensate them for the loss of potential revenues. ISDS tribunals have awarded billions of dollars as a result of such claims, mostly made under the auspices of bilateral investment treaties. Not only must governments spend millions of dollars defending themselves against assaults and tens or hundreds of millions if they lose their cases, but the ISDS system also has a chilling effect on the adoption of legislation designed to protect the health and safety of citizens. As a result of all the lawsuits in which corporations collect damages from governments under investment treaties, an array of groups in the legal industry have profited substantially: law firms representing corporate interests, arbitrators and other specialists in corporate arbitration, and litigation funders. The arbitration industry is, as a practical matter, the glue that holds the system together. The law firms involved in this industry do not wait passively for cases to arise. Instead, they actively pursue corporations to seek arbitration with governments, proselytize for the legitimacy of the current international investment regime, and block reforms that would limit arbitration opportunities. By creating methods of insulating TNCs from normal business risks and forcing host governments to bear the burden of liabilities, the arbitration system has effectively reinstituted a neo‐colonial regime through the judicial system.     

RISE OF THE THERAPEUTIC STATE: NEW CHALLENGES FOR TWENTY‐FIRST‐CENTURY MEDICINE

In recent history, the politics of health has drifted inexorably towards a paradigm in which it is the responsibility of the state rather than of individuals to manage their health. What were once considered private health matters for individuals are now attributed with society‐wide importance. This has given rise to a strident ‘therapeutic state’ which pays obsessive interest in its citizens’ eating, drinking, smoking, exercise and sexual habits. However, many of the therapeutic state's own recommendations are poorly evidenced and doctrinaire. The lack of accountability and adverse incentives which creeping state intrusiveness brings will ultimately disconnect the health system from the needs of citizens and treat their personal information with inexcusable carelessness.     

False promises of co-production in neighbourhood regeneration: the case of Dutch community enterprises

Many European countries are implementing austerity measures alongside trends of welfare state retrenchment. Entrepreneurial forms of active citizenship are considered as a new form of public management to fill gaps left by spending cuts and to continue neighbourhood regeneration. Inspired by British practices, Dutch citizens are trying to set up community enterprises (CEs) to provide services or other benefits for residents in deprived neighbourhoods. Based on a qualitative panel study, this article reveals supportive responses but also resistance from local governments and housing associations. Within a positive policy discourse on co-production, institutional responses often encompass forms of ‘counter-production’ that hold CEs in full uncertainty about crucial conditions for their business.     

Ctrl+Alt+Delete in the name of COVID-19: When a reset leads to misrecognition

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck the world in March 2020, it impacted all areas of society. Most conspicuous were the lockdowns that were quickly imposed in many countries along with other restrictions. These interventions into the everyday life of ordinary citizens were, perhaps not surprisingly, often met with resistance by citizens and businesses that felt their rights were being trampled on by governments. In this paper, we analyse reactions towards the far-reaching measures taken by the Danish government to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus in the fur industry and thereby prevent the development of new mutations of the virus: to cull all minks and temporarily ban mink production in Denmark. We argue that by studying this case, valuable lessons can be learned regarding how a business community reacts when faced with a great reset. Taking the current climate crisis into consideration, it must be expected that emission-heavy industries, like agriculture, will be faced with calls to radically change their mode of production in the near future. In this sense, we propose to view the Danish mink case as an early example of what a great reset could look like, how it is perceived by those who experience it first-hand, and how feelings of resentment and resistance can develop following a logic of (mis)recognition.     

Financing China's Suburbanization: Capital Accumulation through Suburban Land Development in Hangzhou

China's rapid urbanization has resulted in substantial suburbanization over recent decades. However, limited research has been conducted into how land‐based capital is mobilized, accumulated and circulated within the circuits of the capital accumulation process, or how land‐based capital is used to finance massive investment in suburbanization by China's local governments, especially since the trend in land commodification during the 2000s. We examined the capital switching experience in the city of Hangzhou and our findings indicate that local governments have attempted to simultaneously strengthen housing development and industrial growth. In contrast to experiences of suburbanization in Western countries, a real estate boom during the early days of suburbanization in Hangzhou was not necessarily the result of diversion of excess capital from over‐accumulated investments in the manufacturing industry. Rather, it was a consequence of capital accumulation facilitated by land‐reserve systems and land‐based financing of infrastructure orchestrated by local government. Local governments and their affiliated land‐reserve centers and local investment platforms have acted as entrepreneurs by using profits from suburban property development to subsidize industrial investments and fund the infrastructure‐supported expansion of outer suburbs. These findings highlight the potential risks of land‐centered accumulation and provide important reflections upon the theory of David Harvey in the context of urban China.     

New Public Management and Citizens' Perceptions of Local Service Efficiency,Responsiveness, Equity and Effectiveness

Abstract

We examine the relationship between a range of new public management (NPM) practices and citizens' perceptions of service efficiency, responsiveness, equity and effectiveness in English local governments. We find that public–private relationships have a negative relationship with citizens' perceptions of all four dimensions of local service performance, but an entrepreneurial strategic orientation exhibits a positive association with all four. Performance management is also likely to positively influence rather than negatively influencing citizens' perceptions of local public services. Further analysis revealed that the impact of NPM practices varies according to the level of socio-economic disadvantage confronted by local governments.     

Determinants of e-participation in the citizens and the government initiatives: Insights from India

The paper attempts to examine the determinants of two types of citizens' e-participation – initiated by the citizens and the government. The factors of e-participation were delineated from a review of democracy and e-participation literature and a regression model was developed. On the basis of 407 responses collected through an online and offline survey among the Indian participants, the model was tested. The analysis showed that the citizens' participation efficacy and values determine e-participation of both types. For the citizens' initiatives freedom to participate and legal support for the participation efforts were also the determining factors. The extant research on types of e-participation services is inadequate. The paper attempted to fill the gap and contributes in i) explaining the importance of facilitating multiple stakeholders' initiatives for improved citizens' participation ii) differentiating determining factors among e-participation initiatives and iii) suggesting policy recommendations for successful e-participation initiatives. The future research can focus on determinants for collaborative service initiatives from the citizens and government.     

Self-Organization and the Role of Government: How and why does self-organization evolve in the shadow of hierarchy?

Self-organization is a concept that is often used to legitimize a government’s retreat from sectors in which it has traditionally played a vital role. In this article, we analyse how the emergence of new welfare services is mutually shaped by factors that stimulate self-organization among citizens and by meta-governing interventions by local governments. Self-organization seems to takes place in the shadow of a government hierarchy: either a fear-based one or a benevolent one. Boundary spanners play an important role in establishing these new arrangements, thereby making use of, and developing, trustworthy relationships between citizen groups and government.     

Hybrid Forms Of Accountability: Citizen engagement in institutions of public-sector oversight in India

The public sector institutions which are responsible for monitoring government performance are not normally open to citizen participation. Yet there is widespread dissatisfaction with the capacities of states to exercise self-restraining functions effectively, and a growing interest amongst citizens to inform, monitor, or participate directly in the workings of these oversight institutions. This paper examines two citizen-initiated efforts in India to engage with public sector oversight functions. In one case, citizens attempted to engage with administrative accountability institutions (monitoring efficiency and quality in the food subsidy system), and in the second, citizens challenged official auditing systems in local government by producing parallel accounts of local spending which contradicted official versions. Both cases involved citizens breaking away from the ‘vertical’ channels of accountability traditionally open to civil society (lobbying, voting), and insinuating themselves to previously closed ‘horizontal’ accountability functions (the state's internal procedures for administrative review or financial auditing). We argue that for such ‘hybrid’ forms of accountability to be effective, it is important that citizens be given legal standing within institutions of public sector oversight, a continuous presence within the oversight agency's work, structured access to official documentary information, including spending records, and the right to issue dissenting perspectives directly to legislative bodies.