Civic Associations That Work: The Contributions of Leadership to Organizational Effectiveness

Why are some civic associations more effective at advancing their public agendas, engaging members, and developing leaders? We introduce a multi-dimensional framework for analyzing the comparative effectiveness of member-based civic associations in terms of public influence, member engagement, and leader development. Theoretical expectations in organization studies, sociology, political science, and industrial relations hold that organizations benefiting from either a favorable environment or abundant resources will be most effective. Using systematic data on the Sierra Clubs 400 local organizations, we assess these factors alongside an alternative approach focusing on the role of leaders, how they work together, and the activities they carry out to build capacity and conduct programs. While we find modest support for the importance of an organizations available resources and external environment, we find strong evidence for each of our three outcomes supporting our claim that effectiveness in civic associations depends to a large degree on internal organizational practices.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 36. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers

The Politics of the shrinking marketplace: Marketing voter disengagement

Marketing is traditionally associated with expanding the market for a branded product in order to increase profit; brands undertake research to ensure they possess a thorough understanding of the consumer, their wants and needs. We would all perhaps expect that the brand that is closest to their consumers, most on the pulse of the market, would be expected also to be the most profitable within a competitive marketplace. While a simplification of marketing, this highlights the important irony with political marketing; that while marketing increases in use and sophistication within political campaigning and communication, voter disengagement rises contiguously. Data collected during the 2005 UK General Election, and a long term study within the political parties’ heartlands, allows us to understand the nature and causes of political disengagement, and see why marketing is one root cause. The segmentation of voters, and targeting of those voters who can deliver the greatest profit, a victory in a marginal seat, leaves the majority of the electorate metaphorically out in the cold feeling unrepresented and marginalized. Through a comparison of attitudes within a safe and marginal Labour seat we find the dichotomy between opinions is stark on questions of representation, efficacy of the democratic process and interest in politics. This dichotomy filters through to voting behaviour and attachment to the parties and candidates and will often argue that they will only turn out to vote if they are asked and that support is deserved

Elected Mayors: Leading Locally?

The directly elected executive mayor has been with us in England for more than a decade. Drawing inspiration from European and American experience (see Elcock and Fenwick, 2007) the elected mayor has appealed to both Labour and Conservative commentators in offering a solution to perceived problems of local leadership. For the Left, it offered a reinvigoration of local democracy, a champion for the locality who could stand up for the community: in one early pamphlet, a Labour councillor envisaged that an elected mayor could “...usher in a genuinely inclusive way of doing civic business as well as giving birth to an institution that encourages and values people” (Todd, 2000: 25). For the Right, it offered the opportunity to cut through the lengthy processes of local democratic institutions by providing streamlined high-profile leadership. Although inconsistent in their expectations of what the new role of executive mayor would bring, Left and Right shared a view that leadership of local areas was failing. Despite the very low turnout in referendums on whether to adopt the system, and the very small number of local areas that have done so, the prospect of more executive mayors, with enhanced powers, refuses to exit the policy arena

Information, Candidate Selection, and the Quality of Representation: Evidence from Nepal

How do we improve the quality of representation in new democracies? This paper studies candidate selection by party leaders and asks whether poor information about public preferences can lead elite choices to diverge from mass opinion. Working with a political party in Nepal, we show that while elites value voter preferences, these preferences only explain one third of elite candidate selection. Next, we embed an experiment in actual candidate selection deliberations for this party and find that party leaders not only select different candidates when polling data are presented to them, but that their updated decisions also improve the party’s vote share. By opening the black-box of candidate selection, this paper demonstrates that closing the information gap between elites and voters has the power to improve the quality of representation

The politics of the transformation of policing

The politics of policing transformation in Northern Ireland, the nature and timing of the Agreements that created the the atmosphere for such transformation, and the difficulty in reaching them, are clear evidence that policing powers and structures are an integral part of the constitutional framework of contested societies and not a lower-order matter that can be more easily divided up as ‘spoils of peace’. Each step in the process of change, from the 1998 Agreement, to the debate on the International Commission’s Report (Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland, A new beginning: policing in Northern Ireland. Report of the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland, often referred to as the Patten Report)., to the various inter-party talks and agreements, linked discussion on policing to other issues in the peace process, such as governmental power-sharing, North–South cooperative institutions, demilitarisation by the British Army, arms decommissioning by the IRA and other equality issues such as language rights. Both nationalists and unionists strongly linked police reform to the wider peace process, and progress on policing would have been impossible without agreement on an open-ended constitutional framework that required neither political community to abandon their longer-term political goals. Nationalists did not and would not have abandoned their political campaign for a united Ireland in return for policing reform. Unionists would not have accepted the transformation of policing without a balanced constitutional and political agreement and without the IRA ending its armed campaign. Without a transformation of Northern Ireland itself there would have been no transformation of policing. The transformation was explicitly linked to the consociational power-sharing model at the heart of the new political structures in Northern Ireland, and the interlinked institutions between the Northern Ireland executive and the government of the Republic of Ireland