Democratic Outcomes Research Articles

Municipal amalgamations and their effects: a literature review

Abstract Municipal amalgamation reforms have been advocated as ways to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance capacity in local government service provision. Research on the consequences of amalgamations has reached maturity in terms of theories, research designs and methods, justifying a systematic survey of results. This article provides a synthesis of the empirical literature published over the last 20 years, organizing the effects of amalgamations into three categories: economic efficiency and cost savings, managerial implications, and democratic outcomes. Despite the significant variation across countries and reforms, some regularities emerge: cost savings being primarily limited to general administration expenditures (wages, office supplies, and so on), few changes in the quality of local services, and the diminished quality of local democracy. Several studies point to amalgamation reforms experiencing a trade-off between efficiency and democracy.

Neither end, nor means, but both—why the modern university ought to be responsive to different conceptions of the good

In this paper, I argue that universities ought to account for the diverse conceptions of the good employed by their students. The complex nature of the good of education, which has both instrumental and intrinsic aspects, means that the modern university should be impartial between students who consume this good for itself or as a means towards more fulfilling goals. The discussion on the intrinsic nature of education follows the line of the Humboldtian perspective. The instrumental benefits considered are the better democratic outcomes reached by having an educated population, the autonomy-facilitating character of higher education and the improvement of marketable skills. I put forward the view that achieving a balance between satisfying the needs of students valuing education intrinsically and those of students valuing it instrumentally is a strategy that should be employed by universities if they aim at regaining their imperiled legitimacy.

The Effects of Centralized Power and Institutional Legitimacy on Collective Action

Most observed institutional arrangements, observed in governments, firms, and other organizations, acknowledge the effectiveness of imposing sanctioning institutions and monitoring policies to achieve particular goals. Nevertheless, less attention has been paid to the influences of the delegation mechanism of sanctioning power, particularly, the legitimacy of the authority/institution, in centralized institutional arrangements. We report laboratory-experimental results that compare the performance of exogenous delegation versus the endogenous delegation of sanctioning power. The endogenous power distribution, defined as Democracy, weakly dominates the exogenous arrangement, the Leviathan, in terms of contribution levels and economic efficiency. However, the observed differences are not statistically significant, regardless of the effectiveness of the sanctions imposed. Democratic schemes are weakly preferred in centralized power environments, and existing evidence contradicts the belief of a robust causal relationship between indirect democratic institutions, collective action, and economic outcomes.

Perceived News Media Importance: Developing and Validating a Measure for Personal Valuations of Normative Journalistic Functions

ABSTRACTThis study features the development and validation of a multidimensional scale for Perceived News Media Importance (PNMI), a concept pertaining to how much individuals personally value normative functions of political/public affairs journalism. Comprised of six different dimensions that represent the weight of what citizens deem to be desirable about news work, the PNMI concept exhibits the capacity to strengthen scholarly explanations about the public’s perceptions of the news media and related democratic outcomes. More specifically this research, which employs three data sets, is designed to (1) explicate the PNMI concept, (2) develop and validate a PNMI scale, (3) and explore PNMI’s predictive value relative to news media use and support for freedom of the press. Evidence of validity is confirmed with media trust, political media use, political interest, and ideology. Furthermore, PNMI is shown to be predictive of (a) mainstream and social media-based news use, as conditioned by perceptions of the press satisfactory performing normative functions, and (b) support for press freedoms. While the hypothesized PNMI model (as a higher order latent construct with six lower order dimensions) exhibits a sound model fit, a combined data set (total N=912) reveals that PNMI could also be treated as a multi-factor, lower-order latent construct.

Feminism and the Realpolitik of Elite Philanthropy

Feminism and the Realpolitik of Elite Philanthropy Francesca Sawaya (bio) Joan Marie Johnson. Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women's Movement, 1870–1967. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. xi + 303. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95. Molly McClain. Ellen Browning Scripps: New Money and American Philanthropy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. xi + 303. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95. In recent years, historians have returned to the "paradox," as Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle put it in Ruling America (2005), that elites rule in our democracy. "Sometimes they seem to rule with the people's interest in mind," Fraser and Gerstle write, "sometimes not" (p. 1). Philanthropy has been one important practice that enables scholars to study that paradox. Because philanthropy is often studied as a ruling class phenomenon, however, scholars have tended to ignore the difference that gender, race, or ethnicity has on this class practice. Both Joan Marie Johnson's Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women's Movement, 1870–1967 and Molly McClain's Ellen Browning Scripps: New Money and American Philanthropy expand our understanding of twentieth-century philanthropy by focusing specifically on gender—on elite white women's involvement in ruling America. How did wealthy women engage in philanthropy? What did wealthy women's secondary status—at least relative to wealthy men—mean for their philanthropy? Was their philanthropy different than elite men's? Johnson argues directly and McClain suggests that wealthy white women's experiences of (relative) inequality meant that their philanthropy was more progressive and more engaged by the "people's interest" than the philanthropy practiced by elite men. Johnson furthermore redefines philanthropy, reading it as the realpolitik of elite rule in a capitalist democracy. Johnson's book therefore makes an invaluable contribution to the history of both philanthropy and the women's rights movement in the United States, compelling us to confront important questions about the challenges for democracies when money can dictate political outcomes—even democratic outcomes. [End Page 605] Funding Feminism "follows the money" to provide a riveting new vantage point on the fight for women's rights in the twentieth century. Johnson's thesis is that "the women's movement owes its success to the financial backing of [wealthy] women" (p. 5). Arguing that large-scale "scientific philanthropy" emerges simultaneously with "an organized women's rights movement" (p. 4), Johnson asserts that the "timing and success" of the major gains women made in the twentieth century in suffrage, labor, higher education, and birth control were "dependent on the major gifts only the wealthy could give" (p. 14). Considered within the historiography on philanthropy, there is a bit of sleight of hand here: almost none of the women Johnson tracks created nonprofit foundations—the characteristic expression of scientific philanthropy. Furthermore, even recent studies of philanthropy often focus on it as a "third sector" outside of government and business and therefore exclude direct political donations from their purview. Nonetheless, Johnson is usefully polemical here: elite philanthropy is an expression of the money/power nexus in the United States, she argues, and there is no more clear expression of that than political donations. Philanthropy is the top-down realpolitik of capitalist democracy. As Johnson writes, "access to political power" has always depended on "access to funding" (p. 18). The 2010 Citizens United decision, she says, demonstrates how extreme this dependency has become in our own day, but it also demonstrates that "continuity rather than change over time" is what we must track in political donations of elites (p. 11). Johnson, however, usefully complicates her definition of philanthropy as top-down realpolitik in terms of the women's movement. First of all, she points out that wealthy women's philanthropy, as opposed to that of men, was a weapon of the comparatively weak: "At a time when … [women] could not vote and when education, professions, and other opportunities were limited for them, philanthropy offered a unique tool" (p. 7). Indeed, because of elite women's secondary status legally and politically, and especially because of their financial vulnerability, their donations and activism were galvanized, according to Johnson, by a situated and experiential understanding of inequality. Like "many philanthropists...

Comparing America: Reflections on Democracy Across Subfields

Is America in a period of democratic decline? I argue that there is an urgent need to consider the United States in comparative perspective, and that doing so is necessary to contextualize and understand the quality of American democracy. I describe two approaches to comparing the United States: the first shows how the United States stacks up to other countries, while the second uses the theories and tools of comparative politics to examine relationships between institutions, actors, and democratic outcomes. I then draw on research in three literatures—clientelism and corruption, capitalism and redistribution, and race and ethnic politics and American Political Development—to lay out a research agenda for closing the gap between the subfields of American and comparative politics. In doing so, I also argue for richer engagement between academics and the public sphere, as opportunities for scholars to provide commentary and analysis about contemporary politics continue to expand.

Going beyond “it depends:” the role of context in shaping participation in natural resource management

Public participation is increasingly advocated in natural resource management to meet a spectrum of instrumental to normative goals. However, the success of participation in achieving these goals is highly variable, depending on both societal and institutional contexts. Whether participation realises its benefits or succumbs to its pitfalls is shaped by dynamic interactions operating among three contextual dimensions: participatory rationales (instrumental to normative), institutional fit of different levels (types) of participation (information delivery to partnership to delegation), and social structures (such as cultural context, social capital and power distribution). Some levels of participation may support the existing power hierarchy, others benefit organized stakeholder groups and special interests, and still others foster deliberative democratic outcomes. We argue that wise choice of levels of participation in particular contexts shapes the balance of participation’s benefits and pitfalls.

Democracy Without Participation: A New Politics for a Disengaged Era

Changing patterns of political participation observed by political scientists over the past half-century undermine traditional democratic theory and practice. The vast majority of democratic theory, and deliberative democratic theory in particular, either implicitly or explicitly assumes the need for widespread citizen participation. It requires that all citizens possess the opportunity to participate and also that they take up this opportunity. But empirical evidence gathered over the past half-century strongly suggests that many citizens do not have a meaningful opportunity to participate in the ways that many democratic theorists require, and do not participate in anything like the numbers that they believe is necessary. This paper outlines some of the profound changes that have been experienced by liberal democratic states in the 20th and early 21st Centuries, changes which are still ongoing, and which have resulted in declines in citizens participation and trust, the marginalisation of citizens from democratic life, and the entrenchment of social and economic inequalities which have damaged democracy. The paper challenges the conventional wisdom in rejecting the idea that the future of democracy lies in encouraging more widespread participation. The paper takes seriously the failure of the strategies adopted by many states to increase participation, especially among the poor, and suggests that instead of requiring more of citizens, we should in fact be requiring less of them. Instead of seeking to encourage more citizen participation, we should acknowledge that citizens will probably not participate in the volume, or in the ways, many democratic theorists would like, and that therefore we need an alternative approach: a regime which can continue to produce democratic outcomes, and which satisfies the requirements of political equality, in the absence of widespread participation by citizens.

Promoting Democratic Engagement During College: Looking Beyond Service-Learning

Preparing students to be engaged participants in our democratic society has long been an important college outcome. Over the past few decades, postsecondary institutions have primarily attempted to improve civic outcomes by integrating service activities into their curricula. While research on the effects of service-learning are plentiful, research on how other educationally beneficial activities influence democratic outcomes is scarce. In this study, we find that service-learning may not be the only means for promoting democratic outcomes because other high impact practices, most prominently learning communities, have greater or equivalent relationship to two dimensions of democratic engagement.

The Great War, Revolution and the Struggle Over Peace: Russia, 1917

War and revolution were so tightly intertwined in 1917 Russia that the question of continuing the war to victory or finding a way to a negotiated peace became the basis for fundamental political conflict. This caused a dramatic realignment of politics and parties and drove the revolution steadily leftward. The question of the war was central to the three big crises of the Provisional Government’s period – the April Crisis, the July Crisis and the Kornilov Affair – as well as to the coming of the October Revolution. Despite their leadership of the soviets and effective control of the Provisional Government, the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary led Revolutionary Defencist bloc failed to solve the many problems facing Russia in the spring and summer of 1917. In no area, however, was the failure so disastrous as the failure to find some way to get Russia out of the war. The tragedy, perhaps pathos, of the Russian Revolution is that hope for a broad democratic outcome depended on a negotiated peace programme that, in the political and military conditions of Europe of 1917, had virtually no chance of success.

Affirmative action policy in admissions system of higher education of post-Soviet Georgia

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore affirmative action policy in higher education (HE) admissions in post-Soviet Georgia.Design/methodology/approachThe study analyzed the effectiveness of the quota system from the perspective of the “minority rights protection” and “diversity” paradigms. The study used content analysis, focus group discussions, and interviews research methods.FindingsResearch revealed several important patterns: the problems of minority education are associated with academic achievements as well as social integration; although the importance of diversity is evident in the Government of Georgia, the benefits of diversity are not realized fully through affirmative action policies in institutions of HE. The authors have argued that the shift from the “minority rights protection” to the “diversity” paradigm is necessary to solve minority students’ existing problems and to benefit from the positive effects of diversity on academic and democratic outcomes for all students.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study have practical importance. They can be used for the implementation of the affirmative action policy in HE admissions system of Georgia.Originality/valueThe paper is based on original research conducted in Georgia and the study contributes to the development of the field of multicultural and minority education in Georgia.

Who Experiences Growth in News Media Literacy and Why Does It Matter? Examining Education, Individual Differences, and Democratic Outcomes

Developing news media literacy skills is recognized as an important part of becoming an informed citizen, but not enough research examines how growth in media literacy differs by individual characteristics. Using a panel study of undergraduate students, we examine which predispositions predict growth in news media literacy beliefs over the semester. We then test whether growth in news media literacy leads individuals to more highly value and engage in heterogeneous political discussion, a critical part of a functioning democracy. Our results suggest some individuals experience more growth in news media literacy, and that growth contributes to democratic attitudes and behaviors.

Is moral deference reasonably acceptable?

Advocates of epistemic conceptions of democracy sometimes argue that democratic decision-making is a more reliable guide to getting the issues at stake right than the decision-making of individuals. Such arguments give rise to the question of whether those finding themselves in the minority should defer to democratic outcomes. In this article, I discuss the bearing of the normative criterion of reasonable acceptability on this question. I thus ask, can the demand to defer to democratic outcomes be rendered reasonably acceptable to citizens who disagree with them? Using the example of David Estlund’s epistemic proceduralism, I show that the problem of moral deference is inherent to epistemic conceptions of democracy. I then discuss the kind of reasons that would make a demand of deference reasonably acceptable to the minority, arguing that they should be independent from the reasons supporting the majority position. Subsequently, I introduce the conciliatory conception of democracy as an example of what such reasons could be. The conception’s central idea is that disagreement between citizens conceived as equal epistemic authorities carries epistemic significance. This significance makes it rational for citizens so conceived to conciliate their conflicting judgments. Because democratic decision-making has an inbuilt tendency to track such conciliatory positions, the conception offers an independent reason to accept democratic outcomes as the more reliable guide to getting the issues at stake right.

Turning to history, appraising diversity and recasting democratization studies: some proposals

This article focuses on an assessment of the implications of a “turn to history” for the study of democratization. The authors refer to the fact that a “turn to history” has been linked to a broad set of standpoints incorporated into various contexts, which complicates any assessment of the impact of these standpoints on the agenda of research into democratization. According to the authors, it is not possible to suffice with a simple juxtaposition of historicizing and non-historicizing or “ahistorical” approaches. It is necessary to progress beyond this dichotomy and place emphasis on a more detailed, more specific identification and differentiation of the theoretical and methodological standpoints contained within the projects. In this spirit, the article focuses on an assessment of the implications of a combination of a “turn to history” and an acknowledgement of the diversity of modes and outcomes of democratization for the development of contextually sensitive approaches, which respect the complexity of the processes investigated and their configurations. This development helps open up a broad arena for a desirable interdisciplinary enhancement of the theoretical background of democratization studies, and for a more pronounced application of the “multi-sited” format of these studies.

Islam, Demokrasi, dan Institusi Politik di Indonesia, Turki, dan Dunia Islam

Edward Schneier. 2016. Muslim Democracy: Politics, Religion and Society in Indonesia, Turkey and the Islamic World. New York: Routledge.This book is one of the most recent and pivotal works in studying of democratization in Muslim world. The controversial inference from the Edward Schneier’s work is that the variable of religion, especially Islam in this context, is not appropriate enough to explain the success or failure of democracy in Muslim majority countries. By using the mix method of statistics comparison and comparative case studies in Indonesia and Turkey, he argues that the difference of colonialization, history, geopolitics and the growth of developmental economy is crucial variable to elucidate the different outcome of democratization in Muslim countries. However, this book is like a generalization from prior works regarding this topic especially in explaining Islam and democracy in both countries. Some arguments fell down repeatedly with prior scholars such as the explanation of civil Islam to explain Indonesia democratization and the role of military-Islamist relations in depicting democratization in Turkey.DOI: 10.15408/sdi.v24i1.5223

Traveling Policy: Place Marketing and the Neoliberal Turn of Urban Studies in South Korea

This paper examines how South Korean policy field in the 1990s adopted Western style place-marketing strategies, and put them into practice as cultural revitalization programs of different Korean cities. The emergence of place marketing in Korea as a new paradigm for local growth stems from Korea’s transition from a developmental to a post-developmental system, which was a conjunctural outcome of democratization, neoliberalization and administrative decentralization of the early 1990s. This paper interrogates how place marketing traveled from the West to Korea in this context. In particular, it attends to how critical urbanists in Korea became a vanguard in mobilizing and developing place marketing for different local governments, perceiving it as a progressive alternative to the authoritarian, economy-centric developmentalist urban paradigm of the previous decades, despite its entanglement in the neoliberal urban paradigm of the West. The paper also examines the contradictions and conflicts that place-marketing policies have generated across different places in Korea.

Can Distrust Enhance Public Engagement? Insights From a National Survey on Energy Issues in Canada

ABSTRACTResearch examining the relationship between trust, public engagement, and natural resource management asserts that trust fosters positive behavior and enhanced cooperation. Yet some scholars are finding that certain kinds of distrust are helpful in achieving democratic outcomes by providing would-be participants with the motivation to engage in issues of public concern. This article seeks to clarify this apparent disjuncture in the trust literature by examining the multidimensional nature of trust as it relates to public engagement on energy-related issues in Canada. Based on a national online survey (n = 3000) we use a binary probit model to explore the connections between trust, knowledge, and public engagement. About 70% of respondents had participated in at least one form of public engagement over the last 3 years. Drawing on a two-dimensional conception of trust, we find that general trust on its own is not positively linked to public engagement. A combination of general trust and skepticism, however, is positively associated with public engagement and confirms our hypothesis that at least some concern regarding credibility, bias, and vested interest can motivate public engagement. In this sense, trust is not uniformly good for public engagement. These results signal a need to further refine our assumptions about the relationship between public trust, public engagement and environmental governance.

Democratisation in the Maghreb by J. N. C. Hill

78 BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS French asylums), we pass to extensive experimentation on native patients when psychiatric hospitals were inaugurated in the Maghreb in the 1930s. Figures are lacking for this aspect and Studer argues that being “the most likely to die, and the least likely to be cured”, women soon became a testing ground for experimental therapeutics invented in the 1930s and widespread in the following decades such as ICT, ECT, and psychosurgery. Concerning “soft therapies”, such as psychoanalysis, these seemed to be rare for native patients owing to the difficulties of communication and the enduring trope of the lack of intelligence and capacity of self-awareness. The source material the author analyses, with undisputed accuracy, is the scientific literature and the scant statistics, while no documents from hospitals, such as clinical records, are taken into account. Examining this other kind of material in further studies, if preserved and available to scholars, would be valuable in order to analyse in more depth the “gap between theories of North African women and actual practice in asylums and hospitals” through the sources which allows us to apprehend the “actual practice” in process (diagnosis formulations, therapies, etc.), even if biased by the practitioners’ writing constraints, that is biased both by the medical gaze and the institutional duties. To summarize, this book analyses in depth questions until now unseen, unexplored and offers satisfactory answers, which are fundamental to complete the picture of colonial psychiatry, giving consistency both to insane women and to the doctors who failed to enter in contact with them. It tells maybe more, as Studer writes, about “those non-describing than those un-described”, as it is capable of deconstructing the fabric of scientific knowledge in the colonial context, and finally it opens up the field to further explorations, thanks to the critical perspective adopted and the gender lens. MARIANNA SCARFONE Université de Strasbourg J. N. C. HILL, DEMOCRATISATION IN THE MAGHREB, EDINBURGH: EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016 Why did Tunisia become a democracy after the so-called “Arab Spring” of 2011-12, and the other countries of the Maghreb did not? In this attractive volume, Jonathan Hill of King’s College, London applies political science theory to explain why Zine el Abidine Ben Ali’s rule in Tunisia collapsed, while the authoritarian regimes in Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania remained intact. Ultimately, Dr Hill argues, the effectiveness of state coercion, and (to an extent) the West’s failure to exert meaningful pressure for reform, have been critical in maintaining authoritarian rule in most of the Maghreb. Dr Hill suggests that the analytical model of “competitive authoritarianism” BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS 79 popularised by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way can usefully be applied to the states of North Africa. According to Levitsky and Way, competitive authoritarian regimes might cede to Western pressure by adopting a democratic facade - multiparty elections and constitutional bodies – but these liberalising reforms do not inevitably lead to democratic outcomes. In particular, Levitsky and Way identify three factors to explain why some regimes democratise, and others do not: linkage (the strength of a state’s links to the West), leverage (the extent of Western governments’ influence over a regime) and organisational power (the cohesion and strength of the state’s coercive apparatus). Much of the attraction of Levitsky and Way’s model lies in its disarming elegance and simplicity. Levitsky and Way cut through the thicket of democratisation theory with a straightforward, comprehensible model that may be widely applied. In Democratisation in the Maghreb, Jonathan Hill convincingly argues that Levitsky and Way’s model should be extended to cover four countries in the Maghreb: Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, and Tunisia. This deals effectively with one of the perennial critiques of Levitsky and Way’s model, namely, the selectiveness of its case studies. Levitsky and Way exclude military-controlled regimes and other states where the executive office is not elected. Hill rightly points out that this denies the utility of the competitive authoritarian model to whole swathes of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and argues the case for extending their model to most of the Maghreb. However, Hill acknowledges that Libya’s civil war is beyond the explanatory power of...

FROM RED TAPE TO WHICH PERFORMANCE RESULTS? EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RED TAPE AND VARIOUS DIMENSIONS OF PERFORMANCE IN HEALTHCARE WORK UNITS

Decades of research on red tape have still to provide final answers as to whether red tape reduces performance. This may be due to not distinguishing the different dimensions that public service performance consists of. Shifting the focus to rules and their characteristics, this study analyses how the degree of compliance burden and lack of functionality of rules relates to overall and dimensional public performance. Building upon the argument that red tape reduces resources and motivation and by doing so influences performance, hypotheses are put forward regarding the relationship to performance. Using red tape reports from employees in 49 work units and performance rated by the supervisor, this study shows that performance is at its lowest when the rules have a high compliance burden and lack functionality. Moreover, the dimensional analyses show that compliance burden may be most detrimental for output, whereas lack of functionality reduces responsiveness and democratic outcomes.

Social influences on expressed willingness to pay: results of a deliberative monetary valuation study in Colombia

Deliberative monetary valuation (DMV) methods can support environmental decision making by enabling the exchange of arguments and information to produce more democratic outcomes. The product of a valuation may be an array of expressions of willingness to pay (WTP) by individuals or a collectively agreed monetary value. Concerns have been raised, however, as to whether this product is an outcome of thoughtful and independent decision-making or influenced by social pressures to conform. Our study examines this issue and addresses concerns about the use of DMV, based on a public deliberation of forest conservation in Colombia. We analyzed the impacts of social conformity on WTP under two different decision scenarios: individual and collective. The results suggest that the impacts of social conformity are greater when a collective decision is required. These findings indicate that tensions between the differing goals of DMV could undermine its democratic promise.