Dynamics of power in contemporary media policy-making

Despite the growing interest in the organization and regulation of media industries, there is relatively little public discussion of the material processes through which media policy is developed. At a time of considerable change in the global media environment, new actors and new paradigms are emerging that are set to shift the balance of power between public and private interests in the policy-making process. This article focuses on some core challenges to the pluralist conception of public policy-making that still dominates today and considers whether key aspects of UK and American media policy-making can be said to be competitive, accessible, transparent or rational. Based on interviews with a wide range of ‘stakeholders’, the article assesses the power dynamics that underlie media policy-making and argues that the process is skewed by the taken-for-granted domination of market ideology

Dynamic political contexts and power asymmetries: the cases of the Blue Nile and the Yarmouk Rivers

This paper explores the evolving patterns of hydropolitical relations in the dynamic contexts of Yarmouk and Blue Nile Rivers in comparison. The analysis aims at shedding light over the complex implications that recent political and social changes have aroused for the water disputes between Jordan and Syria on the one hand, and Ethiopia and Egypt on the other. In both basins, cooperative efforts toward the integrated management of transboundary waters have been only partially effective and largely undermined by the perpetuation of unilateral actions by riparian states. In the case studies, the lack of a basin-wide vision over the control and use of shared waters has resulted in disputes among the basin states and ultimately in an unsustainable, unfair, and unwise utilization of the resources. This paper argues that a substantive and effective integration of national water policies is unlikely to occur, unless power asymmetries are properly addressed in order to overcome the likelihood of hegemonic regimes

Negative incentive steering in a policy network

In this article the process of developing a policy for the recent comprehensive retrenchment operation in the Dutch university system is analysed from a theoretical point of view on decisionmaking. The article especially addresses the question whether some empirical evidence can be found for the rationalist view of collective decision-making, which states that a process of social communication should eventually lead to a unanimous and rational consensus concerning the selection of the optimal policy.\ud \ud The actual analysis concerns the way a retrenchment policy has been developed in a process of social communication between the most important actors: the Minister of Education and Science and the thirteen Dutch universities. It is assumed that the various communicative linkages between these actors can be interpreted as a policy network in which both governmental and non-governmental actors operate.\ud \ud The article concludes that in the Dutch university policy-network a complicated balance of interdependencies exists and that several sub-networks can be distinguished. It is also concluded that the Minister, while recognizing the interdependencies in the network, was able to use a special kind of (negative) incentive, inducing the universities to act as he wished.\ud \ud This negative incentive steering, however, also persuaded the universities to go to the utmost in their consultation efforts, thus trying to reach the rationalist ideal of collective decision-making. The final conclusion therefore is that the rationalist view of collective decision-making does not appear to be unrealistic. The article ends with a warning against a common mistake made regarding the normative appearance of the rationalist perspective

Measuring Organizational Power: Resources and Autonomy of Government Agencies

Although power is a major concern of organization theory, little research has focused on the horizontal dimension of power between organizations at relatively equal hierarchical levels. This study attempts to fill that void by operationalizing organizational power for 127 federal government agencies. The derived measure is subjected to tests for internal and external validity by empirically testing one promising theory of agency power.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Committee Influence Over Controversial Policy: The Reproductive Policy Case

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/74678/1/j.1541-0072.1999.tb01964.x.pd

Community action: value or instrument? An ethics and planning critical review

The community concept has maintained a constant and growing interest in urban studies and many related fields. The origin of this continuing interest seems to derive from the importance of the concept of community within diverse forms of political language and interpretations within different planning practices. In this contribution, through the analysis of different ethical and planning theories, we want to provide an update framework on community action. According to this objective, the argumentation will proceed through a literature review on four ethics theories and three key aspects related to spatial planning, as well as matching this theoretical analysis with exemplifying practices. The final objective is to provide an original analysis on drivers and outcomesof different forms of community, raising general issues that refer to spatial planning, social organization and regulation

Public ICT Innovations: A Strategic Ambiguity Perspective

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in the Journal of Information Technology . The definitive publisher-authenticated version, RAVISHANKAR, M.N., 2013. Public ICT innovations: a strategic ambiguity perspective. Journal of Information Technology, 28 (4), pp. 316 - 332, is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/jit.2013.18Public Information and Communications Technology (ICT) innovations are seen as having the potential to usher in a new era of technology-enabled models of governance in emerging economies. While it may be desirable for the implementation of such innovations to be underpinned by precise planning, structure and clarity, policy implementers in emerging economies are confronted instead by situations where ambiguous goals and means are standard. This paper considers high levels of ambiguity as a relatively enduring and intrinsic aspect of public ICT innovations in emerging economies. Drawing on an ethnographic study of Bangalore one, an innovative public ICT project implemented in Bangalore, India, the paper examines how strategic ambiguity is deployed by key public actors to chart the course of the implementation process and to steer it towards reasonable outcomes. Theoretically, the paper suggests that although strategic ambiguity is a precarious and unsettling condition in general, it can work effectively in contexts that are reasonably tolerant of ambiguous norms. The findings of the study also present arguments for why evaluation mechanisms need to be fundamentally reframed in order to assess the extent of implementation success of public ICT innovations in emerging economies

The Presidency and the Executive Branch in Latin America: What We Know and What We Need to Know

The presidential politics literature depicts presidents either as all- powerful actors or figureheads and seeks to explain outcomes accordingly. Th e president and the executive branch are nonetheless usually treated as black boxes, particularly i n developing countries, even though the presidency has evolved into an extremely complex branch of government. While these developments have been studied in the U nited States, far less i s known in other countries, particularly in Latin America, where presi dential systems have been considered the source of all goods and evils. To help close the knowledge gap and explore differences in policymaking characteristics not only between Latin America and the US but also across Latin American countries, this paper s ummarizes the vast literature on the organization and resources of the Executive Branch in the Americas and sets a research agenda for the study of Latin American presidencies.Fil: Bonvecchi, Alejandro. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Departamento de Ciencia Política y Estudios Internacionales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Scartascini, Juan Carlos. Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo; Estados Unido

A lei de ferro de Michels e o pluralismo: a democracia na Guerra Fria

O texto revisita a teoria da organização partidária, a partir de um questionamento da impossibilidade da democracia partidária, tal como anuncia Robert Michels com sua noção de "lei de ferro" da oligarquia. Busca contextualizar o debate no âmbito da disputa ideológica do pensamento liberal da Guerra Fria. Procura explicitar as diferenças entre concepções de partidos e aborda o dilema socialista da participação de massas na representação moderna. Pretende atualizar a importância do resgate dos partidos no processo de emancipação do "público" na contemporaneidad

Exposing Politicians’ Peccadilloes in Comparative Context: Explaining the Frequency of Political Sex Scandals in Eight Democracies Using Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis

This article was published in the journal Political Communication [© Taylor & Francis Group]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2012.737434Political sex scandals are largely absent in some democracies but proliferate in others. However, there have so far been few if any comprehensive attempts to document the actual number of sex scandals that have occurred and to explain their presence (and, indeed, absence), and the one study that has (Barker's 1994 study) ended in the early 1990s and had numerous problems in relation to defining and documenting such scandals. Based on extensive research, this article documents the number of sex scandals in eight advanced industrial democracies and tries to explain their occurrence using Charles Ragin's fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis. The article has three goals: to determine the number of sex scandals in different democracies, explain why this might be, and demonstrate the utility of fuzzy set qualitative case analysis for small- and medium-N comparative research