Political Agency

"¿Es posible la existencia de administraciones públicas patrimonialistas que brinden políticas públicas de calidad? ¿La calidad de las políticas públicas se puede explicar, en parte, por las características organizacionales de las administraciones? ¿Gobiernos locales con administraciones que padecen buropatologías se constituyen en motores del desarrollo?
El modelo burocrático weberiano en América Latina pareciera que alcanzó una instalación incompleta. Joan Prats (1999) afirmó que “si la reforma administrativa fracasó no fue porque el modelo burocrático que se trataba de implantar no era el adecuado. De hecho el modelo ha dado y sigue dando rendimiento excelente en muchos países desarrollados. En América Latina… no llegó a institucionalizarse sino parcial y excepcionalmente el sistema que Weber llamó de dominación racional-legal encarnado en la burocracia… lo que se desarrollaron mayormente fueron “buropatologías” que en el mejor de los casos se aproximaban al sistema mixto que Weber llamó “burocracias patrimoniales””.
Así, la presente ponencia es un avance de la tesis doctoral que pretende explicar la relación entre los modelos de administración pública (variable dependiente) y las dimensiones de la calidad de las políticas públicas locales (variable independiente). Para ello, la variable dependiente es analizada a partir de la presencia o ausencia de ciertas características de tres modelos teóricos de organización de las administraciones: a) modelo patrimonialista, b) modelo racional – legal y c) modelo post-burocrático (nueva gerencia pública y/o governance) y la variable calidad de las políticas públicas es analizada a parir de nueve dimensiones: a) estabilidad, b) adaptabilidad, c) coordinación y coherencia, d) implementación, e) orientación al interés público, f) eficiencia, g) participación social, h) grado de planificación y finalmente i) evaluación. "

"This article aims to develop an alternative
formal model of judicial policymaking in
Supreme Courts. Differently from the
mainstream approaches of Law (legal model)
and Political Science (attitudinal, and strategic
models), we developed the hypothesis that
multiple behaviors could be observed as a
function of three main explanatory variables:
political preferences of judges, the limits of
interpretations of rules, and decisions costs
involved in the judgment of the case. As a
conclusion, ten propositions about judicial
policy process were developed as a way to map
the determinants of a final Court decision."

For over fifty years, successive waves of critique have underscored that the apolitical character of much of Political Science research betrays the founding mission of the discipline to have science serve democracy. The Caucus for a New Political Science was originally based on such a critique, and the Perestroika movement in the discipline included a call for more problem-driven as opposed to theory- or method-driven work that would better connect Political Science research to ongoing political struggles. In recent years, movements for a public Sociology and public Anthropology as well as dissonant movements in Economics and related fields have added to the insistence that social science research was too often disconnected from the real world. Phronetic Social Science has emerged out of the ferment for change in the social sciences, starting with the much-debated book by Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter (Cambridge 2001). Flyvbjerg critiqued the social sciences for mimicking the natural sciences while proposing an alternative approach that focuses research on helping people address the problems they are facing in the context they are facing them. Today, Phronetic Social Science goes beyond the call for an alternative approach to social inquiry and its growing adherents are providing evidence that this alternative approach to doing research can enrich the social sciences by more effectively connecting research to efforts to address real world problems as people experience them. This essay provides a genealogy of efforts to connect Political Science to politics, a review of the major critiques of mainstream research, an explication of the rationale for more problem-driven, mixed methods research, a specification of the key principles of the phronetic approach, and examples of its application in the public realm. The essay concludes with implications for realizing a more political Political Science by way of taking a phronetic approach.

The article first describes characteristics of major infrastructure projects. Second, it documents a much neglected topic in economics: that ex ante estimates of costs and benefits are often very different from actual ex post costs and benefits. For large infrastructure projects the consequences are cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and the systematic underestimation of risks. Third, implications for cost–benefit analysis are described, including that such analysis is not to be trusted for major infrastructure projects. Fourth, the article uncovers the causes of this state of affairs in terms of perverse incentives that encourage promoters to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits in the business cases for their projects. But the projects that are made to look best on paper are the projects that amass the highest cost overruns and benefit shortfalls in reality. The article depicts this situation as ‘survival of the unfittest’. Fifth, the article sets out to explain how the problem may be solved, with a view to arriving at more efficient and more democratic projects, and avoiding the scandals that often accompany major infrastructure investments. Finally, the article identifies current trends in major infrastructure development. It is argued that a rapid increase in stimulus spending, combined with more investments in emerging economies, combined with more spending on information technology is catapulting infrastructure investment from the frying pan into the fire.

A suitable quality level of municipal administration is a ba- sic condition for the existence and development of any ac- tivity, not only for market-oriented organizations but also for the public sector. Slovenian municipalities have not yet adopted a general policy on quality, and it is therefore dif- ficult to speak about the systematic introduction of entre- preneurial principles in municipal administrations. The pa- per analyzes the results of an extensive empirical research project on administrative capacity carried out among the directors of municipal administrations with an emphasis on the attempts to introduce entrepreneurial principles to municipal administrations.

Private Finance initiative (PFI) has been introduced by the government as new method to procure public assets in Ninth Malaysia Plan. These procurement main objectives are to reduce Public Sector Borrowing (PSBR), enhance the quality of public sectors assets and the transfer of risks to private sector. The PFI is the structure of Design, build, finance and operate (DBFO) arrangement. The government buys services from private sector with defined output specification. The payment mechanism to private sector is in the form of performance and the government will pay periodically until concession period end. However, the PFI in Malaysia will implement in two methods as implement in the United Kingdom (UK) and Malaysia’s reinvented PFI. This research area is expected to produce an actual scenarios that happening in the Malaysian construction industry. The research is intended to explore and investigate the current development in term of PFI in the construction industry. Research has been made with personnel of Main Board Construction Company in Malaysia to identify barriers, concerns, risks and benefits in the PFI. Among the concerns of PFI implements in Malaysia are the government is not doing enough to promote PFI understanding and there are arguments that PFI in Malaysia may not successful. Among the barriers of PFI to construction company are the cost of bid or proposal will be high and the financial institutions are not prepared to give commitment. Among the barriers of transparency in the concession project is the government has the tendency to select predetermined construction company and the government have socio-political reason to help Bumiputera’s companies. Furthermore, the most risk undertaken by Special Purpose Vehicles (SPV) is performance risk. The government is unlikely to transfer finance risk to private sector. PFI will benefit Construction Company mostly through transfers of skills and technology. Finding from this research may also provide new insight on the theoretical perspectives on PFI implementation in a contractor perception and also other parties involved.

In this experimental and collaborative discussion panel, we hope to tease out the relationship between the provisional (the contingent, the temporary) and utopian space. If the dream is a wish your heart makes, what kind of dreaming happens when the sleeper tosses and turns, unable to get a foothold in the dream? The panel will be structured as a series of five chained papers, working as a kind of academic renga where each panel participant will produce a short paper (approx. 5 min.) that responds to the previous paper. The result will be a series of linked papers, but linked in a way that the terms of the conversation will shift from presenter to presenter. In this way, we hope to produce a dream logic out of the provisional shifting of our ideas, and, out of this, trigger discussion from our chained associations.

"Most studies of city branding are written from a marketing or management perspective. This book is different, as the micro-management issues of city branding are discussed within a broader macro-theoretical or structural context while analysing questions from the point of view of local economic development and industrial policy.

Conceptual tools are provided to assist branding in global inter-city competition. But the text is not just a toolkit for city marketing, but a theoretically oriented description of the preconditions and means of economic city profiling and restructuring on a highly competitive global scene.

In this sense the book is theoretically oriented and contextual, and it approaches the branding challenge from the point of view of urban political economy, as reflected in the concept of the informational city, the growth machine thesis and the world city hypothesis."

This paper stems from research  that explored older lesbian’s past and present life course experiences of coming out , direct or indirect discrimination at: work, with family and friends, with health and access to healthcare systems. The coherent stories that my informants presented as one of “luck and fortune” are political, and tell a story of different flows of power, and different forms of resistances. Central to these narratives was the coming out process which was crucial in understanding why older lesbians treat their sexuality as secondary during social encounters, and further illustrates how they are caught in between the co-existing ideologies of heterosexism and homophobia. This process and its full life cycle is a symbolic journey out of which personal and social transformation is achieved. Here, I present part of the research that focuses on the narratives of the everyday in the lives of older lesbians  residing in the gay capital  of Brighton and Hove (and the vicinity), UK.

"Contemporary society is global and digital. States and corporations extend their political and economic power into digitality by means of the formulation and articulation of global and national security, surveillance, and censorship policies and practices concerned with information and communications technologies (ICTs) infrastructure, networks, and content.

States and corporations control most mechanisms of production and circulation of information, establishing a political economy of truth that is vital for economic production and political power. States and corporations deploy legislations, disciplinary and panoptical policies and practices, and apparatuses of security concerned with information and communications. These deployments synergize into a biopolitics of information and communications – i.e., a normalization of civil societies’ political and economic agency, inasmuch citizens and consumers, which makes difficult to contest state and corporate régimes of truth.

The speedy development and economical accessibility of novel ICTs remarkably strengthen civil societies’ demands for more transparent and accountable information about state and corporate actions, and enhance the former’s sousveillance of the latter. Whereas demands for transparency and accountability are not new to civil society, when sousveillant, they can be understood either as a contemporary inversion of disciplinary panopticism or, even, as the deployment of disciplinary technologies of power by civil society.

Collective hacktivism and whistle-blowing are sometimes crowdsourced research and data mining endeavors that attempt to produce and circulate information. These efforts can be understood as sousveillant and parrhesiastic contestations of state and corporate régimes of truth. Anonymized/encrypted communications and social media allow for collaborative networks that enable an ever more recurrent periodicity of parrhesiastic discourses relevant to national and global politics.

Contemporary biopolitics of information and communication require that civil societies be not only responsibility for their political agency, but also for the resemantization of their own politics of truth and, by extension, of their newborn digital agency."