Explaining Self‐Interested Behavior of Public‐Spirited Policy Makers

Public choice theory (PCT) has had a powerful influence on political science and, to a lesser extent, public administration. Based on the premise that public officials are rational maximizers of their own utility, PCT has a quite successful record of correctly predicting governmental decisions and policies. This success is puzzling in light of behavioral findings showing that officials do not necessarily seek to maximize their own utility. Drawing on recent advances in behavioral ethics, this article offers a new behavioral foundation for PCT's predictions by delineating the psychological processes that lead well‐intentioned people to violate moral and social norms. It reviews the relevant findings of behavioral ethics, analyzes their theoretical and policy implications for officials' decision making, and sets an agenda for future research.     

Cost–benefit analysis: New foundations on shifting sand

New Foundations of Cost–Benefit Analysis, by Matthew Adler and Eric Posner, represents the most ambitious and credible effort to date to build a solid theoretical defense of the use of cost–benefit analysis (CBA) in evaluating government regulation. In this review, three cost–benefit “skeptics” offer their reactions to this ambitious and important book. We note its virtues – its humility, its scrupulousness, its open‐mindedness. We also explore its vices. If preferences are to be “laundered,” is it intellectually defensible to remove the bad but not consider adding the good? Does Adler's and Posner's welfarism really play the limited role they suppose, or does it risk “crowding out” other important deontological and distributional values? If CBA is merely a decision procedure that provides an imperfect proxy of welfare – the moral criterion we really care about – how do we know that the proxy it provides in practice will actually be accurate enough to be useful? Isn't this at bottom an empirical question that cannot be answered by this thoroughly theoretical book? If CBA is no more than an imperfect proxy for welfare, then alternative imperfect decision procedures may perform better in the real world.     

Accepting Authoritative Decisions: Humans as Wary Cooperators

Why are people more willing to accept some governmental decisions than others? In this article, we present results from a series of original experiments showing that people's reactions to a given outcome are heavily influenced by the procedure employed to produce the outcome. We find that subjects react much less favorably when a decision maker intentionally keeps a large payoff, thereby leaving the subject with a small payoff, than when that same payoff results from a procedure based on chance or on desert. Moreover, subjects react less favorably to outcomes rendered by decision makers who want to be decision makers than they do to identical outcomes selected by reluctant decision makers. Our results are consistent with increasingly prominent theories of behavior emphasizing people's aversion to being played for a “sucker,” an attitude that makes perfect sense if people's main goal is not to acquire as many tangible goods as possible but to make sure they are a valued part of a viable group composed of cooperative individuals.     

Who Delivers? Partisan Clients in the Argentine Electoral Market

Why do some parties fail to benefit from patronage in pork‐ridden political systems? This article analyzes the interaction between patronage and partisanship to explain why some incumbents are more likely to benefit from pork politics than others. We explain such differences by focusing on political parties' access to resources (supply side) and voters' dependence on fiscal largesse (demand side). We show how these differences affect the patron's choice of public sector wages and employment. We use subnational level data to show different electoral returns from patronage for the two major political coalitions in Argentina—Peronism and the UCR‐Alianza—and their effect on preferences over public sector wages and employment.     

Expertise and Bias in Political Communication Networks

Citizens minimize information costs by obtaining political guidance from others who have already assumed the costs of acquiring and processing political information. A problem occurs because ideal informants, typically characterized by the joint presence of political expertise and shared viewpoints, are frequently unavailable or rare within the groups where individuals are located. Hence, individuals must often look beyond their own group boundaries to find such informants. The problem is that obtaining information from individuals located beyond their own groups produces additional costs. Moreover, the availability of ideal informants varies across groups and settings, with the potential to produce (1) context‐dependent patterns of informant centrality, which in turn generate (2) varying levels of polarization among groups and (3) biases in favor of some groups at the expense of others. The article's analysis is based on a series of small‐group experiments, with aggregate implications addressed using a simple agent‐based model.     

The Hyper-Hermeneutic Gesture of a Subtle Revolution

Abstract

I argue that Shakespeare's Timon of Athens exemplifies the concept of mourning play that Walter Benjamin had in mind when he wrote The Origin of German Tragic Drama. While others have interpreted the play in various ways, no one has attempted to understand Timon in a Benjaminesque manner that seeks to show the emergence of baroque tragedy as a new aesthetic form at odds with, and liberated from, classical tragedy's mythical foundation and instead premised on historical time and progress. In my discussion, I question the view that Timon possesses inheritable or transmissible human social bonds that can be the subject of annihilation as is the case in Shakespeare's other tragedies. Rather, Benjamin sees in allegory, as illustrated by Timon of Athens, the social condition of modernity replete with suffering, chaos, and violence, but devoid of real human bonds; indeed, it is without human meaning.     

Examining the French Hijab and Burqa Bans through Reflexive Cultural Judgment

How can we judge unfamiliar cultures while avoiding ethnocentrism and universals? It requires what I call reflexive cultural judgment. After considering the socially and politically situated knowledge and commitments that guide the judgment of others, those engaged in reflexive cultural judgment meditate on what they have learned in the intercultural engagement and cast a critical eye on their own supposedly universal principles to reveal cultural particulars that typically would not be as visible to insiders. To demonstrate this, the article examines French political judgment of Muslim women who wear the hijab (a head covering) and burqa (a face covering). Through content analysis of previously unanalyzed data on the National Assembly's 2009–2010 discussion of the burqa, the article identifies particular French assumptions about gender and freedom that informed the ban. The author then casts a critical eye on her own political situatedness, highlighting the limitations of American liberal thought on freedom and religion.     

The Institutional Basis of Intercommunal Order: Evidence from Indonesia's Democratic Transition

When authoritarian regimes break down, why does communal violence spike and why are some locations more prone to violence than others? To understand violence during transitions, it is necessary to understand what sustains order when regimes are stable. While existing theories attribute order to formal or informal security institutions on their own, I argue that intercommunal order obtains when formal and informal security institutions are aligned. During authoritarian breakdowns, the state's coercive grip loosens, exposing mismatches between formal and informal institutions and raising the risk of communal violence. Formal‐informal mismatches emerge in communities accustomed to heavy state intervention since they will have developed more state‐dependent informal security institutions. I apply an instrumental variables approach on a nationwide dataset of village‐level data to show that prior exposure to military intervention, proxied by the distance to security outposts, led to Indonesia's spike in violence during its recent democratic transition.     

Zone of Acceptance under Performance Measurement: Does Performance Information Affect Employee Acceptance of Management Authority?

Public sector employees have traditionally enjoyed substantial influence and bargaining power in organizational decision making, but few studies have investigated the formation of employee acceptance of management authority. Drawing on the “romance of leadership” perspective, the authors argue that performance information shapes employee attributions of leader quality and perceptions of a need for change in ways that affect their acceptance of management authority, conceptualized using Simon's notion of a “zone of acceptance.” A survey experiment was conducted among 1,740 teachers, randomly assigning true performance information about each respondent's own school. When employees were exposed to signals showing low or high performance, their acceptance of management authority increased, whereas average performance signals reduced employee acceptance of management authority. The findings suggest that performance measurement can alter public sector authority relations and have implications regarding how public managers can use performance information strategically to gain acceptance of management authority and organizational change.     

Between Deadlock and Decentralization: Bargaining Dynamics in Federal States

A classic way to meet regionally diverse interests is to grant partial autonomy to sub-national entities, either by assigning them the right to decide upon policies (federalism), to implement policies (decentralization), or both. This article argues and formally elaborates that central governments may intentionally choose to increase decentralization in an effort to facilitate agreements that otherwise would be deadlocked. In this regard, a central government's decision to promote decentralization depends on its own relative valuation of policy change and congruence. We illustrate the empirical validity of our argument with a case study pertaining to the Swiss New Regional Policy.     

Activation,Conversion, or Reinforcement? The Impact of Partisan News Exposure on Vote Choice

This study uses multiwave panel data from the 2008 presidential election to investigate the impact of partisan news exposure on changes in vote preferences over time. Overcoming key limitations of prior research, the analysis distinguishes among the potential effects originally delineated by Lazarsfeld and colleagues ( 1948 ): (1) activation—motivating partisans who initially say they are undecided or planning to defect to shift their vote back to their own party's candidate; (2) conversion—motivating partisans to shift their vote to the opposing party's candidate; and (3) reinforcement—strengthening partisans’ preference for their initial vote choice. The results reveal only modest evidence that partisan news reinforces existing vote preferences. Surprisingly, partisan news plays a more robust role motivating changes in vote choice: news slanted toward citizens’ own partisanship increased the odds of activation and decreased the odds of conversion, while news slanted away from citizens’ own partisanship proved a strong counterforce working in the opposite direction.     

Beyond the wounds: The SCAR Project as space for examining breast cancer and mastectomy experiences

Most people never see the impact of breast cancer removal on a body. Even breast cancer survivors rarely see its physical effects on others. Gender-laden symbols underwrite breast cancer narratives, with mass media romanticizing the female body through pink ribbon imagery and youthful fashion model-perfect representations. The real body which has experienced breast cancer surgery through lumpectomy or mastectomy mostly is invisible, passive, and features scar tissue damage considered un-gaze-worthy. Yet, the Pulitzer Prize nominated Surviving Cancer: Absolute Reality (SCAR) Project uses Facebook to enable those who experience breast cancer to see post-mastectomy images and to share their own stories. Actual use of the SCAR Project Facebook page and to what end is the current study's focus. Four themes emerged among narratives: (1) Inspiration and Support, (2) Cancer Scar Meanings, (3) Authenticity, and (4) Redefined Beauty and Femininity. By examining women's experiences with breast cancer as shared on Facebook, we discuss slippages that emerge between pink ribbon imagery and processes of rebuilding female gender identity.     

Are people who cooperate ‘rational altruists’?

In experimental games, as in natural situations, people are often observed acting to the benefit of others even at considerable cost to themselves. Such behavior is contrary to the assumption of selfish behavior, but it is not necessarily contrary to the assumption of rationality: People cooperating under these circumstances could be ‘rational altruists’ who base their decision on the magnitude of the external benefit, as well as on the costs to themselves. We test that proposition using a prisoners' dilemma experimental paradigm. If it is correct, we should observe higher levels of cooperation as the external benefit in such games increases. But we do not — whether external benefit is measured in terms of number of individuals benefiting from a cooperative choice or the total dollar benefit produced. Cooperation must be explained otherwise.     

Resisting the resistible: re-writing myths of partition in the works of Ritwik Ghatak

For all of the individual, collective and national trauma caused by the Indian Partition, perhaps the most significant legacy has been the way the two new nations of India and Pakistan have written the (hi)stories of Partition to serve contemporary political needs. Both countries have a huge amount of investment in their versions of the past, and public dissemination of knowledge of the past amply demonstrates this. This article will examine the way Partition has featured in the work of Bengali cinema-director, author and playwright Ritwik Ghatak and the way Ghatak resists and rewrites in various ways this state-sanctioned version of his country's and his own past. The Bengal Partition provides the context within which all of Ghatak's work is situated. Interestingly, however, Ghatak never depicts the act of partition itself, choosing instead as his subject the streams of refugees who left what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh, and came to Kolkata in West Bengal. Ghatak's most characteristic story, then, is the story of the educated, middle-to-upper-class East Bengali refugee, who has lost everything by having to move west. This story is the story of Ghatak's own family and the family of the thousands of others, including the present writer, and, as such, it is not surprising that it has become the predominant Bengali narrative of Partition. By focusing on Ghatak's oeuvre, then, this article will examine this narrative of partition, thereby showing how Ghatak uses it to resist the most pernicious, and also most permanent myth of the Indian Partition – that it was an act which led to two different, mutually exclusive, heterogeneous but unified nations.     

Simulation and Managerial Decision Making:A Double‐Loop Learning Framework

Systems approaches present opportunities for public managers and policy makers to view policies and programs in a broader context. This article presents a framework to explain how simulation modeling promotes double‐loop learning in management teams by building and exploring collective mental models as well as by enhancing accuracy of the mental models. The authors discuss the types of problems that may benefit from simulation modeling and illustrate how double‐loop learning occurs in the process of dynamic hypothesis testing. Using a case from New York State's Division of Disability Determination, the article shows how simulation modeling built confidence in a management team's decision by providing the team with tools to share and examine multiple hypotheses about a declining trend in initial disability recipients in the state between 1998 and 2004.     

Does Public Service Motivation Lead to Budget Maximization? Evidence from an Experiment

ABSTRACT

One of the most enduring theories in public management is Niskanen's model of the budget-maximizing bureaucrat. While popular, the image of bureaucrats relentlessly advocating for larger budgets has been frequently attacked. A chief criticism is that the assumption of self-interest does not align with budget maximization, since bureaucrats have little direct way to benefit from larger budgets. A more plausible assumption that offers a stronger causal logic for maximization behavior is that bureaucrats are motivated to help others. If they believe that spending on public goods is beneficial to society, public employees may be likely to advocate for larger budgets. Using vignette-experiment methodology, this article finds that individuals with higher levels of public service motivation do not advocate for significantly higher budgets. The results undercut an alternative theoretical means to support Niskanen's original theory, thereby further undermining the budget maximization model.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of International Public Management Journal for the following free supplemental resource: Survey Text with Vignettes.]     

Equality of resources and the demands of authenticity

One of the most distinctive features of Ronald Dworkin’s egalitarian theory is its commitment to holding individuals responsible for the costs to others of their ambitions. This commitment has received much criticism. Drawing on Dworkin’s latest statement of his position in Justice for Hedgehogs (2011), we suggest that it seems to be in tension with another crucial element of Dworkin’s own theory, namely, its endorsement of the importance of people leading authentic lives – lives that reflect their own values. We examine this tension between responsibility and authenticity, and some strategies Dworkin does and could deploy to defuse it, which we think are unsuccessful. We then propose a solution for reconciling the demands of responsibility and authenticity, which is, so we claim, friendly to Dworkin’s fundamental commitments but which leads to a revisionist interpretation of the demands of equality of resources.     

“A Beckon to the Makings,Workings and Doings of Human Beings”: The Critical Pragmatism of John Forester

John Forester's important research project of developing a critical pragmatist approach to planning and policy analysis now spans two decades. Common themes that give direction and coherence to his project are, first, a new view of public planning as the restructuring of communication between stakeholders with divergent and conflicting interests and large inequalities in power and influence; second, a redefinition of the role of the planner away from a handmaiden of power to a hands‐on professional who fosters inclusive, participatory forms of collective action; and, finally, a deliberate concern with the micropolitics of planning that enables participants to broaden their full potential for democratic transformation within the context of strong, enduring inequalities in agenda‐setting and decision‐making power. This review traces the roots of Forester's project in pragmatist thought and in particular themes from Emersonian moral philosophy, adding a notion of “critical” to Forester's radical pluralist stance. Forester subscribes to John Dewey's argument for democracy, which inherently requires diversity to arrive at warranted truth. For Forester, the core task of a planner is to safeguard the participation of those normally excluded from decision making by institutionalized inequalities.     

‘Character' Analysis: Writing and Identity 1500‐1755

In this article, I examine the sources of our modern idea of human ‘character' and its availability for ‘reading' in early modern English, tracing the evolution of the word through 1755 - the publication date of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary; by this date, the word comprehends most if not all of its current meanings. By exploring the history of the word ‘character' in the early modern period, I hope to reveal some of the ways in which ideas about written signs and texts have been woven into current notions of identity - but not so much our own identities, perhaps, as the identity of others. The purpose of this article is to suggest how the past history of the word ‘character' - its sources in the domain of writing - still animates its present usage and conditions our understanding of who others are or can be. What I will be tracing here, more precisely, is a succession of semantic shifts, or ‘extensions' of the semantic domain, of the word ‘character' over the course of this period.     

For an International of Workers and Peoples

It is probably not easy for a foreign reader to understand many of our difficulties. It is only natural. Each people and each country have a life of their own, their own laws, their own hopes and misconceptions, and their own ideals. Such diversity is wonderful; it needs to be developed rather than stifled. I, for one, am sick of the attempts of some politicians to teach others how to live and what policy to conduct.—Mikhail Gorbachev.’¹

The report [Gorbachev's report at the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution] . . . makes a world assessment at variance with our understanding, virtually liquidating the contradictions of the period and acts as a damper on the world revolutionary movement. Our Party cannot accept its analysis, its argumentations and its conclusions.—Resolution of the Communist Party of India—Marxist.²

The Marxism we follow is superior to that followed by them [the Communist Party of the Soviet Union]—Saroj Mukherjee, Secretary, West Bengal State Committee of the Communist Party of India—Marxist.³