Governance and State Capacity

""This book develops a sociologically informed theory of constitutionalism in the global realm, addressing both national and transnational forms of constitutional ordering. The book begins with the argument that current approaches to constitutionalism remain tied to a state-based conception of constitutions, and overlooks underlying structural transformations that trigger the emergence of constitutional forms of ordering. Poul F. Kjaer aims to address this shortcoming by offering a sociological and historically informed analysis of the evolution of constitutionalism in the face of globalisation. The analysis contextualises on-going constitutional developments through the use of a long-term historical perspective, which is capable of highlighting the impact of deeper structural transformations unfolding within society.
The book looks at the ways in which national and transnational legal forms have evolved alongside one another. It demonstrates that the formation of global constitutions has not resulted in a corresponding decrease in the power of nation states, but instead, legal and political aspects of both the nation state and the transnational have been reconfigured and intensified in a mutually supportive manner.
In combining insights from a range of fields, this interdisciplinary book will be of great interest to students and scholars of constitutional law, sociology, global governance studies, and legal, social and political theory.

List of Content
Introduction: The Metamorphosis of Constitutionalism
Part 1: Structural Transformations
2. The Implosion of the Euro-Centric World
3. The Multiplicity of Normative Orders in World Society
Part 2: Re-configurations of Law and the Political
4. The Law within and in-between Normative Orders
5. The Political within and in-between Normative Orders
Part 3: Constitutional Stabilisation
6. The Breakdown of Constitutional Ordering through Globalisation-induced Crises
7.The Transmutation of Constitutional Ordering
8.Re-calibrating the Constitutional Concept
9. Conclusion

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This qualitative study examines the role of clients in petty corruption by analyzing actual corrupt exchanges between ordinary citizens and low level public and private employees in post-communist Hungary. Using a grounded theory approach, interviews reveal how clients from different social strata deal with low-level agents in corrupt situations. Findings suggest two contrasting forms of low-level corruption: transactions where the client and the agent do not have a prior relationship and where external factors dominate the relationship; and cases with stronger social ties between the actors, where the client has more freedom to structure the transaction. However, a client's social background frequently determines the form of corrupt transaction and the form of resources illegally exchanged in the deal.

""ABSTRACT: This study provides an empirically based analysis of corrupt governmental networks. We conducted 45 interviews in Hungary with different organizational actors who were actually participating in corrupt transactions or at least had first-hand
experiences of corruption. Given the secret nature of the topic, this article provides a unique insight into the phenomenon. Our findings show that corrupt elite cliques consciously design and coordinate multilevel structures of corrupt networks within and among organizations that involve a large amount of people. We identified the major network elements and their functions in corrupt transactions. The article also provides a typology of corrupt networks. The networks have different structural characteristics based on location of the ‘‘cash cows,’’ points from where the system is fed, and the actors’ positions of power. Our findings are compared with the already existing literature on dark networks, terrorist, and organized crime formations.""

""Corruption has become one of the most popular topics in the social scientific disciplines. However, there is a lack of interdisciplinary communication about corruption. Models developed by different
academic disciplines are often isolated from each other. The purpose of this paper is to review several major approaches to corruption and draw them closer to each other. Most studies of corruption fall
into three major categories: (i) rational-actor models where corruption is viewed as resulting from cost/benefit analysis of individual actors; (ii) structural models that focus on external forces that determine corruption; and (iii) relational models that emphasize social interactions and networks among corrupt actors. Focusing on actors’ behavior and the social context, this article explains corruption concepts taken from sociology, economics, organization studies, political science, social anthropology, and social psychology.""

The state inherited a public service characterized by weaknesses in the administrative and working systems. Hence, it lacked effectiveness, efficiency and ethical behavior in performance and service delivery and unpredictable resource flows had undermined the allocative and operational efficiency of the public sector at the federal, regional, and local levels in Ethiopia. The half-day documentary on PSCAP and the discussion that followed showed that the decentralization process showed that has moved from deconcentration of administrative burden to a more devolutionary tangent. Moreover, it has overseen the transformation from the Central Personnel Agency to a more complex human resource development and management system that is in track. There are improvements in the justice delivery system where backlogs in adjudication of pending cases are clearing faster. The FEACC vehemently enforces discipline without recourse to bails and/or utter neglect. The Federal Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (FEACC) and the Courts are handing this. Urban management has improved literally from non-existence to efforts to manage the burgeoning towns and cities of Ethiopia. Revenue collection and administrations has seen a revolutionary jump-start… the conclusion was that state capacity development is a continuous process and hence, it cannot be a onetime program.

This is the first of my series of talks as Guest Faculty of Kuvempu University, Shimoga, Karnataka. I begin with a sneak peak at the role that the Indian govt plays in the business and economy of the country. I then trace the historical perspective, the history of govt intervention in the economy, which has undergone considerable transformation from 1947, when India became independent, until today. The break came in 1991 when there was great turnaround and many changes were made. In the light of this historical background, I look individually at the different roles that the Govt plays, as regulator, promoter, entrepreneur, planner and partner. I close with an assessment of the achievements of the state , and the challenges that still remain to be overcome.

Georgia is the most democratic country in the Caucasus, but arguably its democratization has also been riddled by Huntingtonian developmental crises, resulting in ethnic conflicts and civil wars. We argue that variation in the type of political instability is best understood by focusing on the interaction between nationalism and political institutionalization rather than on their independent effects. We show that Gamsakhurdia's “state-breaking nationalism”, coupled with political deinstitutionalization, produced separatist and centrist civil wars. When Saakashvili's “state-making nationalism” enhanced state capacity, it marginalized the opposition and rekindled frozen separatist conflicts, but stronger administrative institutions enabled the government to avert another revolutionary regime change.

"We discuss the work of Bob Jessop, focusing on the transition he proposes to the contemporary state form – the Schumpeterian workfare post-national regime (SWPR). After a brief presentation of the author’s account, we explore its main critiques and recent reformulations. We then consider whether Jessop’s narrative resorts to economic determinism, structuralism or functionalism, as some authors have indicated. We defend that while some traces of these might indeed be found, they can be sidestepped by approaching the emergence of the SWPR as part of an ongoing research agenda. We
finally propose some changes to the latter, related to developing an explicitly evolutionary theoretical framework, to the space that post-Fordism comprehends and to the articulation between different subtypes of post-Fordist social formations and accumulation strategies. A central point is not proposing competing regimes of accumulation for a single space, but rather a single regime that articulates the relevant forms of capital and is brought about by competing accumulation strategies."

The paper makes three central arguments: First, sudden influxes of official development aid into countries with unprepared governance institutions hinder their long-term economic and structural development. I analogize to the "resource curse" of countries rich in natural sources that cannot effectively absorb newly realized resource rents stemming therefrom, highlighting recent international experience in this regard; Second, "raining" significant development aid on an economy before helping it develop basic capacity (i.e., competence) to govern is not only counter-productive, but is corrupting. In such cases, the aid is, in effect, a supply-side appeal to (and institutionalization of) monopolistic rent- taking tendencies. Thus, the aid does long-term damage to the country by perverting its governance system and converting localized petty corruption into institutionalized grand corruption – corruption that is difficult (or impossible) to reverse through traditional anti-corruption campaigns. Third, in situations where official development aid has induced the institutionalization of grand corruption, traditional cleanup efforts – focused on ex ante public awareness, anti-corruption committees, and punitive sanctions – have proven to be virtually worthless. Therefore, in cases of grand corruption institutionalism, rather than focus on ineffective punitive sanctions, I propose ex ante anti-corruption cleanup efforts concentrate on regularizing the rent taker’s future behavior. Such inducements to regularization could include amnesty programs designed to bring the underground economy into the open.