Behind the Scenes with the Pen and Ink Corps! The role of the Army Pay Services during the Great War in maintaining the loyalty of the fighting soldier and preserving the social fabric of the United Kingdom

This paper explores the role of the Army Pay Services during the Great War. On the face of it this may not appear to be a major issue in the overall conduct of the War. However, the Army Pay Services, together with the expansion in depth and scope of separation and dependent’s allowances, and the employment of women resulted in a massive bureaucracy being effectively administered and managed. It is argued that the results of this maintained the loyalty of the fighting British Army and maintained the morale and social fabric of the nation.     

Rome's ‘legal’ camps for Roma: the construction of new spaces of informality

This article examines the ways in which Italian legislation and local policy in Rome since 2007 have aimed at containing and controlling the Roma population, but have resulted instead in the Italian state's own violations of national and international human rights standards. Roma have been relocated to isolated mega-camps subjected to regulations, surveillance and ‘workfare’, which, rather than reducing crime and increasing formal employment, leave residents few alternatives to illegal or semi-legal income generation. These camps also appear to generate ambiguous relationships between local officials, police officers and powerful individuals within the communities. They are thus loci in which various dimensions of illegality and power intersect and merge. The analysis explores the grey areas created by contradictory and hyper-bureaucratic regulations and attempts to shed light on the strategies of survival through informality that emerge within the interstices of the law.     

Agents of Change: The Role of Public Managers in Public Policy

Our article outlines a number of ways that theories of public management can contribute to the work of public policy scholars. We first outline some of the ways in which public managers have been incorporated into previous work on public policy, and the limitations faced by previous treatments. We then discuss the role that public management plays in the policy process, with a specific focus on managerial quality, networking, and performance evaluation.     

How police agency diversity,policies, and outcomes shape citizen trust and willingness to engage

While widespread agreement that policing in the United States needs to be reformed arose in the summer of 2020, little consensus about specific reforms was reached. A common theme that arose, however, is a general lack of trust in the police. One response has been to increase agency diversity in terms of both officer race and officer gender. However, important questions exist about when – and what type(s) of – diversity shape citizen trust in and willingness to cooperate with the police – especially when considered in conjunction with agency performance and policies. To answer these questions, we use two conjoint experiments to evaluate whether citizens consider diversity when evaluating police agencies. We find that while both racial and gender diversity can influence public evaluations sometimes, these effects tend to emerge in the context of only the most (least) diverse institutions and are muted compared to the effects of agency policies and performance.     

Shopping or Specialization? Venue Targeting among Nonprofits Engaged in Advocacy

Studies of venue shopping have typically analyzed the case of an individual advocacy group or issue campaign rather than comparing venue strategies across multiple groups. Moreover, this literature focuses on interest groups and advocacy coalitions whose principal mandate is to influence public policy. Using original data, we test theories of venue selection among nonprofit organizations that report engaging in policy processes but the majority of which do not self‐identify as an advocacy group. Our analyses explore the “where” of nonprofit advocacy across three different venue types: branch (executive, legislative), domain (bureaucracy, elected officials), and level of government (local, state, federal). Like interest groups, we find that nonprofits shop among both executive and legislative branches and among elected and bureaucratic domains; however, they tend to specialize in one level of government. Geographic scope and revenue source predicted venue targeting, but most other organizational characteristics including age, capacity, and structure did not.     

The creation of a Ministry of Culture: towards the definition and implementation of a comprehensive cultural policy in Peru

In June 2010, a Ministry of Culture was created in Peru, raising many questions regarding the ability of this new administrative structure to effectively implement a comprehensive cultural policy, which has been lacking so far, for the Peruvian State has based its previous policies almost exclusively on the preservation of cultural heritage. The Ministry inherits the flaws of the National Institute of Culture, and must address various challenges: the improvement of heritage management; the inclusion of indigenous populations in a never established national identity; a renewed scheme of promotion of the arts and incentives to cultural industries. The article discusses possible policy options for the new ministry, evidences the needs for a renovation of bureaucratic culture within the ministry, for clarification in the objectives set to the Ministry and for more comprehensive data about cultural practices in Peru.     

Real Institutional Responses to Neoliberalism in Australia

The paper defines the state's apparatus as a site of power and contestation. This view enables contingency in the realm of government to be taken seriously. Accordingly, the paper takes a critical view of the idea of neoliberalism as a general global process. The paper reviews Paul du Gay's history of the state's apparatus, including his nostalgia for bureaucracy and his disdain for entrepreneurship. The paper contrasts du Gay's stylised take with a study of shifts in institutional structures and behaviours in Australia's state apparatus since the mid 1970s leading to the present period of Howard neoliberalism. The paper positions these shifts in the context of Coombs‐led institutional reform in Australia; it examines the potential for institutional resistances and responses; and draws implications for how we view institutions as having agency in the political processes of state apparatus reform.     

The Conditioning Effects of Policy Salience and Complexity on American Political Institutions

Years ago, Bill Gormley introduced public policy scholars to a new and innovative salience- complexity typology for regulatory policies. This typology not only helps scholars catalog numerous policies into distinct categories, but also helps explain variation in political processes. Specifically, different policies provide different incentives for political actors to be involved in policymaking. Salience encourages activity on the part of elected officials; complexity often requires policymaking outside of the public sphere. In this article, I extend Gormley's salience-complexity typology to more than just regulatory policies and confirm that levels of institutional activity vary across this range of public policies. I also expand on Gormley's contribution by differentiating the distinct impacts that policy type has on the policy activities of Congress and the presidency, and propose that institutional activity differs according to the dynamics of a policy's salience.     

Spies and Postmen: Communications Liaisons and the Evolution of the Qing Bureaucracy

This article introduces the “communications liaison” (titang guan)—an official category little acknowledged in past scholarship on the late imperial Chinese state. Communications liaisons stationed at garrisons and administrative seats compiled intelligence and news reports for supervising officials in distant locations. In Beijing, capital liaisons compiled documents into court gazettes and supervised the distribution of documents, seals of office, and imperial gifts to the provinces. Besides these responsibilities, capital liaisons acquired reputations for following personal and patronage agendas that undermined the integrity of the bureaucratic state. Longstanding financial and administrative inconsistencies within the Qing bureaucracy induced liaisons to misbehave. Still, characterizations of liaison malfeasance transformed over the course of the dynasty due to institutional developments including the implementation of new communications systems, the standardization of provincial administrations, and the expansion of office sales. Whereas liaisons in the early and mid-Qing periods were parties to political exchanges among the bureaucratic elite, by the dynasty’s waning years, liaisons provided services for the larger population of bureaucratic personnel. The liaisons’ transformation from spies into postmen, as seen through the eyes of official critics, offers an opportunity to evaluate the impact of major changes in the Qing bureaucracy upon some of its least known officeholders.     

From Democracy to Bureaucracy： The Baojia in Nationalist Thought and Practice, 1927-1949

In the 1939 New County Reforms, the Nationalist government made the baojia system the lowest level of self-government in the country. This decision was the result of more than ten years of discussion among Nationalist administrators and writers who were searching for a tutelary system to train the people in their political rights in preparation for constitutional rule. In the 1920s and 1930s, Nationalist writers claimed to be following Sun Zhongshan＇s （Sun Yat-sen） philosophy by reinventing the baojia as a form of democracy. Harkening back to a reimagined national past, they ＂discovered＂ that the imperial baojia was not a system of local control, but a traditional model of bureaucratically-designed local self-government. Nationalist writers dovetailed this new baojia with Sun Zhongshan＇s philosophy in order to rationalize its position as the foundation of the Three Principles of the People State. Once philosophically legitimized, Nationalist writers endorsed the baojia as a top-down bureaucratic system that would transform the political, social, and economic life of the country; it would become the core political unit of their state-making and nation-building projects. In so doing, the baojia came to represent the Nationalists＇ deeply-held belief in the power of human agency to create state institutions capable of entirely remaking society and transforming the nation.