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Political Control (political + control)
Selected AbstractsWriting the "Show,Me" Standards: Teacher Professionalism and Political Control in U.S. State Curriculum PolicyCURRICULUM INQUIRY, Issue 3 2002Margaret Placier This qualitative case study analyzes the process of writing academic standards in one U.S. state, Missouri. The researchers took a critical pragmatic approach, which entailed close examination of the intentions and interactions of various participants in the writing process (teachers, politicians, business leaders, the public), in order to understand the text that was finally produced. School reform legislation delegated responsibility for writing the standards to a teacher work group, but the teachers found that their "professional" status and their intention to write standards that reflected a "constructivist" view of knowledge would meet with opposition. Politicians, who held different assumptions about the audience, organization, and content of the standards, exercised their greater power to control the outcome of the process. As the researchers analyzed public records and documents generated during the writing process, they constructed a chronological narrative detailing points of tension among political actors. From the narrative, they identified four conflicts that significantly influenced the final wording of the standards. They argue that as a consequence of these conflicts, Missouri's standards are characterized by a dichotomous view of content and process; bland, seemingly value,neutral language; and lack of specificity. Such conflicts and outcomes are not limited to this context. A comparative, international perspective shows that they seem to occur when groups in societies marked by political conflicts over education attempt to codify what "all students should know." [source] Partisanship, Political Control, and Economic AssessmentsAMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 1 2010Alan S. Gerber Previous research shows that partisans rate the economy more favorably when their party holds power. There are several explanations for this association, including use of different evaluative criteria, selective perception, selective exposure to information, correlations between economic experiences and partisanship, and partisan bias in survey responses. We use a panel survey around the November 2006 election to measure changes in economic expectations and behavioral intentions after an unanticipated shift in political power. Using this design, we can observe whether the association between partisanship and economic assessments holds when some leading mechanisms thought to bring it about are excluded. We find that there are large and statistically significant partisan differences in how economic assessments and behavioral intentions are revised immediately following the Democratic takeover of Congress. We conclude that this pattern of partisan response suggests partisan differences in perceptions of the economic competence of the parties, rather than alternative mechanisms. [source] Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing: Authority Relations, Ideological Conservatism, and Creativity in Confucian-Heritage CulturesJOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR, Issue 1 2008DAVID YAU FAI HO ABSTRACT Throughout history, the generation, exercise, and dissemination of knowledge are fraught with dangers, the root causes of which are traceable to the definition of authority relations. The authors compare Greek myths and Chinese legends, setting the stage for a metarelational analysis of authority relations between teacher and students and between scholar-teachers and political rulers in Confucian-heritage cultures. These two relations are rooted in ideological conservatism. They are related in a higher-order relation or metarelation: Political control and the definition of the teacher-student relationship reinforce each other in consolidating authoritarian values. Thus, ideological conservatism shapes educational philosophy and socialization. It conflicts with present demands for creativity in the service of knowledge-based economies. Hence, a major issue in cultural change to be addressed concerns the dilemma between maintaining authoritarian control and enhancing creativity. [source] The Politics of Disciplining Water RightsDEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 2 2009Rutgerd Boelens ABSTRACT This article examines how the legal systems of Andean countries have dealt with the region's huge plurality of local water rights, and how official policies to ,recognize' local rights and identities harbour increasingly subtle politics of codification, confinement and disciplining. The autonomy and diversity of local water rights are a major hindrance for water companies, elites and formal rule-enforcers, since State and market institutions require a predictable, uniform playing field. Complex local rights orders are seen as irrational, ill-defined and disordered. Officialdom cannot simply ignore or oppress the ,unruliness and disobedience' of local rights systems: rather it ,incorporates' local normative orders that have the capacity to adequately respond to context-based needs. This article examines a number of evolving, overlapping legal domination strategies, such as the ,marrying' of local and official legal systems in ways that do not challenge the legal and power hierarchy; and reviews the ways in which official regulation and legal strategies deny or take into consideration local water rights repertoires, and the politics of recognition that these entail. Post-colonial recognition policies are not simply responses to demands by subjugated groups for greater autonomy. Rather, they facilitate the water bureaucracy's political control and help neoliberal sectors to incorporate local water users' rights and organizations into the market system , even though many communities refuse to accept these policies of recognition and politics of containment. [source] From plan to practice: Implementing watershed-based strategies into local, state, and federal policy,ENVIRONMENTAL TOXICOLOGY & CHEMISTRY, Issue 4 2000Alice L. Jones Abstract Planners are becoming increasingly interested in watershed-based plans as a way to more accurately reflect the natural landscape processes that cross the borders of political jurisdictions. Although developing plans that cross political boundaries is a relatively simple matter, establishing the transboundary authority necessary to implement such plans is often a much different matter. We investigated the regulatory mechanisms under which a watershed-based storm-water management plan could be implemented in the Big Darby Creek, Ohio, USA, a national scenic river currently facing critical threats from nonpoint sediment- and pollutant-loaded storm-water runoff in the rapidly urbanizing portions of the watershed. The watershed encompasses portions of 7 counties, 11 incorporated areas, and 26 townships, each of which has some authority over land use and storm water. The transboundary options explored include creation of a storm-water utility, creating a conservancy district, or an independent approach requiring all jurisdictions in the watershed to simultaneously adopt a series of storm-water ordinances. We evaluated these options on a number of characteristics, including their relative ability to control runoff quality and quantity, the locus of political control and enforcement authority under each, funding considerations, and the likelihood of acceptance given the region's existing political realities. Although a central authority such as a conservancy district or storm-water management district would likely be most effective in protecting water quality, the long tradition of local controls on land use makes this politically infeasible. Thus, we argue that a watershed-based protection plan for the Darby region will require the simultaneous independent approach. The case study of the Big Darby suggests that the successful implementation of watershed-based plans may be more dependent on the plan's political savvy than its technical superiority. [source] Governance of Higher Education in Britain: The Significance of the Research Assessment Exercises for the Funding Council ModelHIGHER EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 1 2004Ted Tapper This article uses the political struggles that have enveloped the research assessment exercises (RAEs) to interpret the UK's current funding council model of governance. Ironically, the apparently widespread improvement in the research performance of British universities, as demonstrated by RAE 2001, has made it more difficult to distribute research income selectively, which was supposedly the central objective of the whole evaluative process. Whilst enhanced research ratings may be seen as a cause for celebration in the universities, the failure to anticipate this outcome and, more significantly, to plan for its financial implications is seen in political circles as a failure of higher education management. The article explores the alternative models of governance that are likely to emerge as a consequence of this crisis and, in particular, whether the funding councils can have much freedom of action, given the tighter political control of policy goals and their critical dependence upon the academic profession for the conduct of the evaluative process. [source] Reclaiming the National Health Service from political controlINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CLINICAL PRACTICE, Issue 5 2007Graham Jackson Editor No abstract is available for this article. [source] Can Politicians Control Bureaucrats?LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 4 2003Applying Theories of Political Control to Argentina's Democracy ABSTRACT In the United States, an important literature shows that legislators use interest groups, courts, and budgets to assert political control over bureaucrats. Similar theories can be applied to study the scores of new democracies that have emerged in recent decades. In Argentina, politicians in the first administration of Carlos Menem (1989-95) rewrote administrative procedures and relied on both "police patrol" and "fire alarm" oversight to realign the behavior of tax bureaucrats in conformance with their own policy preferences. Whereas U.S. legislators generally prefer complex administrative procedures, different electoral incentives led their Argentine counterparts to support reforms that significantly streamlined those procedures. This finding challenges theories that attribute legislators' bureaucratic preferences to the separation or fusion of powers between the executive and legislative branches. [source] A Clash of Vulnerabilities: Citizenship, Labor, and Expatriacy in the Cayman IslandsAMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 3 2001Vered Amit In this article, I examine the stalemates produced in the Cayman Islands, a major center for offshore finance and tourism, by globalizing processes that have encouraged the valorization of transnational mobility, commodification of labor, and exclusivity of citizenship. I argue that globalization takes form in the Cayman Islands through the channels carved out for it by local state interests and regulation that have defined citizenship as a terrain for competing entitlements between expatriate workers and enfranchised permanent residents. Caymanians struggling to retain local political control over their labor market only further its incorporation into the global economy while expatriates can find their exit from Cayman stymied by the localization of labor markets elsewhere, [citizenship, transnational, labor, offshore finance, tourism] [source] Northeast Asian Energy Cooperation: The Irkutsk Pipeline Project,PACIFIC FOCUS, Issue 2 2004Euikon Kim Northeast Asia is a cluster of countries with wide differences in political systems, stages of economic development, levels of technology, and natural resource endowments. In addition, infrastructures of national economies are mutually complementary: Japan and Korea have capital and technology on the one hand and Russia and China enjoy abundant resources and cheap labor. Yet many socio-political elements have so far barred active economic cooperation among Northeast Asian national economies from becoming a reality, such as, North Korean nuclear issues, different ideologies, unstable political systems, and anti-Japanese sentiments. The Irkutsk Pipeline Projects can be a litmus test for the future economic cooperation in the region. Market forces in Russia, Japan, South Korea and China increasingly tend to jump national boundaries and to escape political control, seeking for economic profits, whereas socio-political factors have tendency to restrict and channel the economic activities. Thus, problems of the Irkutsk Pipeline Projects lie in how and where those positive and negative factors are reconciled. [source] Lyndon Johnson, Community Action, and Management of the Administrative StatePRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2001RICHARD M. FLANAGAN The Community Action Program (CAP) was one of the highest-profile but least successful of President Johnson's Great Society programs. Pluralist and neo-Marxist theories hold that the origins of CAP and the problems that the program encountered were rooted in the politics of interest group and racial conflict, respectively. Drawing on archival evidence, this article turns attention to the important, yet forgotten, administrative dimension of CAP. The decentralized features of CAP were developed as a strategy to manage the federal bureaucracy and avoid conflict with Congress. Ultimately, CAP floundered as the decentralized control of the program freed it from the political control of the White House. The article concludes with a discussion of the problems presidents face in managing the federal bureaucracy and how the development of CAP reflects Johnson's management style in enacting domestic policy goals. [source] BETTER REGULATION IN EUROPE: BETWEEN PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND REGULATORY REFORMPUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Issue 3 2009CLAUDIO M. RADAELLI Can the European regulatory state be managed? The European Union (EU) and its member states have looked at better regulation as a possible answer to this difficult question. This emerging public policy presents challenges to scholars of public management and administrative reforms, but also opportunities. In this conceptual article, we start from the problems created by the value-laden discourse used by policy-makers in this area, and provide a definition and a framework that are suitable for empirical/explanatory research. We then show how public administration scholars could usefully bring better regulation into their research agendas. To be more specific, we situate better regulation in the context of the academic debates on the New Public Management, the political control of bureaucracies, evidence-based policy, and the regulatory state in Europe. [source] Civil Service Law in the People's Republic of China: A Return to Cadre Personnel ManagementPUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW, Issue 3 2007Hon S. Chan Despite the outward appearance of depoliticization, the civil service in China today is actually being repoliticized. This paper compares the 1993 Provisional Regulations on State Civil Servants with the Civil Service Law approved by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in April 2005. The 2005 reform formalized what had been a historical pattern,the Communist Party holds tight control over leadership change and management at various levels. The Civil Service Law has turned the Communist Party of China into a political institution that has become the source of both civil service empowerment and control. Although civil service reform in China differs markedly from approaches adopted elsewhere, China is clearly expanding its political control to ensure greater leverage over the bureaucracy. In this regard, China is in line with the global trend. That said, civil service reform in China has focused on structural elements and formal reorganizations, whereas most industrialized democracies have engaged in a dialectic between individualist and corporate responses to managerial questions. An understanding of the Chinese ability to adopt reforms,while strengthening its traditional hold,provides key perspectives not only on the world's largest nation and a rapidly emerging force in global political and economic relationships but also on the Chinese experience with important public sector reforms that have occurred in many other countries over recent decades. [source] Regulatory Competition and Accountability: Comparing Universal Service in Telecommunications in Australia and Taiwan,AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Issue 2009Chen-Dong Tso The recent trend of transforming regulatory bureaus into independent agencies has raised concerns over accountability once the regulator is cut loose from political control. There is also concern that the promotion of public values may be at risk when the regulatory function is outsourced to a mission-limited independent agency. To find possible solutions to these problems, this study compares the provision of telecommunications universal service in Australia with that in Taiwan to determine how different accountability designs lead to different means of ensuring universal service provision. Following a detailed investigation, this article finds that the consumer sovereignty model used in Australia performs better than the fiduciary trusteeship model in Taiwan in constraining the capture of the regulator by the dominant carrier. Overall, the author argues that, as a social goal, ensuring universal service should rely on both a politically mandated institution and competing regulatory agencies that accommodate different value groups so that a line is drawn between the social and commercial spheres. [source] | ||||||||||||||||