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Mexico's public security has suffered a militarization process for at least two decades. Although there is consensus on this trend at the national level in the specialized literature, little research has been conducted on its subnational impact. To amend this gap, this article inquires the way in which militarization has permeated the structure and operation of subnational security forces beyond the local autocratic dynamics that reinforce militarization. Specifically, this article focuses on police reconfiguration regarding interaction with military in the six most violent states in Mexico: Jalisco, Nuevo León, Guanajuato, Sonora, Sinaloa, and Zacatecas. The qualitative analysis presented is based on 15 interviews and 18 focus groups with police offices and public security officials of these states. We argue that military presence on the streets and the arrival of the military-to-executive positions in public security institutions contributed to the adoption of military operating modes by the state police during Felipe Calderón (Dec. 2006–Nov. 2012) and Enrique Peña Nieto's presidential terms (Dec. 2012–Nov. 2018). Additionally, this article aims to explain how the military has permeated the state's public security institutions at different levels and dynamics (management, training, and operation) that promote the adoption of formal or informal military features that enable state police institutions to behave alike and resemble the army in their everyday activities. From a theoretical and methodological perspective, this article calls for the construction of a research agenda that focuses on the local and subnational processes of the militarization of public security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The amenity arms race among post-secondary institutions is driving the new development or expansion of campus recreation facilities. However, investing in new and larger campus recreation facilities may not necessarily translate into usage and ultimately provide the associated benefits to students. This study explored whether human resource capacity and program capacity are mechanisms that help explain the conditions under which facility capacity translates into facility usage. Secondary data were obtained from NIRSA's research and assessment initiative from post-secondary institutions in the United States (n = 103) that contained measures of relevance to this study. Regression analyses with bootstrapping were conducted to examine the hypothesized relationships including mediation. Results identified that an indirect only mediation model (full mediation) was present, such that greater facility capacity translates into increased facility usage through human resource capacity and program capacity. Therefore, recreation professionals and programs are indicated as pivotal to making the most of facility capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public universities have sought to leverage innovation hubs as physical environments to enable new collaboration models and partnerships between students, academics, budding entrepreneurs, and wider industry. In particular, innovation hubs have allowed public universities to position themselves as active participants in the entrepreneurial arena. These innovation hubs, however, experienced a tremendous degree of disruption because of COVID-19-induced lockdowns, social distancing, closed borders, and a reduced number of persons allowed in a given space. Thus, it is essential to gain an understanding of how innovation hubs in public institutions have responded to these issues, ascertain the degree to which such disruption has impacted them, and identify the strategies that have allowed hubs to stay operational in such a disruptive environment. To do this, personnel involved in the management and administration of such hubs were interviewed, together with a selection of industry experts. This qualitative interrogation allowed a thematic analysis to be undertaken, thereby resulting in several emergent themes that contributed to identifying key learnings that could assist the operation of these innovation hubs in times of future disruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Admission to selective colleges has grown more competitive, yielding student bodies that are unrepresentative of the U.S. population. Admission officers report using sorting (e.g., GPA, standardized tests) and concertedly cultivated (e.g., extracurricular activities) and ascriptive status (e.g., whether an applicant identifies as a member of a racially minoritized group) criteria to make decisions. Using latent class analysis, we identified three groupings of institutions based on the admission criteria they claim to value. Public institutions largely practiced a "coarse sieve" approach that relied on sorting criteria. Some private institutions practiced "fine sieve" admissions by emphasizing concertedly cultivated and ascriptive status criteria. A few privates employed the "double sieve" that combined sorting and concertedly cultivated criteria. Results illuminate the shape of the admissions sieve, identifying institutional contexts that inform the admissions practices selective colleges claim to use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A defining feature of democracies is an independent legal system, where elites and the public alike accept the broader legitimacy of its actions, even if they run counter to political preferences. Existing scholarship suggests that public support for rule of law institutions is rooted in perceptions of procedural fairness. However, amid increasing levels of affective polarization, we posit a partisan presidential heuristic wherein citizens' views of legal institutions are influenced by their partisanship and signals from the president. Through multiple experiments, we demonstrate that support for two key institutions—the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice—is substantially derived from the intersection of one's partisan identity and their partisan proximity to the president. These effects are strongest among respondents exhibiting high levels of affective partisanship. Our results suggest that in forming perceptions of the rule of law, partisan politics is increasingly competing with perceptions of procedural fairness, thereby subverting support for legal institutions in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing theories of interaction between Congress and the Department of Defense (DOD) focus on elite-level principle-actor problems. However, the Department, as one of the most popular institutions in the United States, also has significant public appeal and maintains an active public affairs arm. This article builds on theories of bureaucratic reputation to argue that the DOD uses its public communications to advocate for its own budget. I leverage computerized text analysis to examine over 40,000 public facing documents published by the DOD since 2005. I find evidence that the DOD changed both the timing and the content of its public-facing communications to strategically argue for its budget. This is true during large budgetary shifts (like the U.S. budget sequester) and during the period of the year that the budget is under debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their work "Political Corruption: The Internal Enemy of Public Institutions," Ceva and Ferretti defend a conception of corruption as a breach of the duty of accountability for officeholders. I address two key aspects of their proposal. First, I contend that whistleblowing disclosures should be limited to acts of last resort, rather than as a common practice of ensuring answerability. Second, I argue that their account does not adequately distinguish between degrees of involvement in corrupt activities. Within hierarchical organizations, not all officeholders possess the same capacity and power to counteract unjust practices. Different contributory roles entail varying degrees of responsibility within the normative structure of answerability defended by the authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this response essay, Ceva and Ferretti reply to their critics and clarify some key aspects of their book. Specifically, the discussion starts by elaborating on the notion of an ethics of office accountability, explaining that the specification of institutional norms of officeholders behaviour is the result of practices of officeholders' interaction (including democratic practices) and reflection. The second theme is the responsibility for political corruption. The authors emphasise the importance of focussing not only on retrospective responsibility, for the sake of punishing corrupt behaviour, but especially on accountability as a form of self-reflection by the officeholders on the weaknesses of their institutional work together. This exercise is preliminary to their assuming forward-looking responsibilities for anti-corruption. The third and final part discusses political corruption as a specifically interactive wrong. For the authors, the magnitude and moral salience of the wrong of corruption, as well as the different wrongs implicated both from an interactive perspective and in consideration of the harm caused to third parties, must be assessed in light of the context and the moral standing of the public institution in question. In this sense, political corruption is a pro tanto wrong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The late Habsburg period (1867–1918) created a constitutional dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. This paper discusses the role of psychiatry in Cisleithania, both as a developing profession and as a distinct 'policy field'. Tension between psychiatry's academic professionalisation and the creation of public institutions as signature projects by individual crownlands created complex relationships between psychiatry and politics. In federalist Cisleithania, psychiatrists became very 'political': whether employed by the state or a crownland influenced their position on policy, despite claiming that their expert knowledge was 'scientific' and 'objective'. The conflicts between asylum-based and academic psychiatrists mirrored those between the central state and the crownlands. This led to intractable delays in mental health law reform, eventually resolved by Imperial decree in 1916. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conspiracy seems to be everywhere, and not only in the United States, where the "rigged election" conspiracy led a US president to reverse the results of a national election. We consider what is distinctive about contemporary conspiracism and argue that the prevalence of fact-free conspiratorial narratives marks a shift from what Hofstadter called the "pedantic" style of conspiracy theory. We show how conspiracism today threatens democratic institutions and sketch how the articles in this volume (on conspiracism) advance our understanding of conspiracy and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The attention to and concerns about conspiracy theories have increased in recent years, fuelled by a surge in conspiratorial discourse during the Donald Trump presidency in the United States. Responding to this development, the scholarship on how democracies should deal with conspiracy theories has focused on what new regulations and institutions ought to be introduced to tackle its threats to democracy. In this article, I consider this practical question from a different angle by exploring the discursive strategies that are available to political elites when they encounter a conspiracy theory. I flesh out three general strategies – ignore, rebut and embrace – and identify the circumstances that shape when each strategy should be used in order to maximize the effects of discourse as an anti-conspiracy mechanism. This perspective thereby aims to reveal the elements of skill and nuance that are required of a politician who seeks to engage a conspiracy theory in a way that advances democratic values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the well-documented negativity bias and attitudinal entrenchment associated with sharing and debating news in social media, a reasonable and already substantially investigated assumption is that those getting news about the European Union (EU) mostly from social media would be more sceptical of its institutions than others. Empirical research on this topic has thus far largely deployed experimental and observational methods to investigate this assumption. We contribute to the existing literature with an instrumental variable approach well-suited to establishing causal relationships in non-experimental data. However, we find no blanket causal relationship between relying on social media for news about the EU polity and becoming less trustful of its institutions. EU policies aiming to tackle negative effects of social media news consumption, therefore, need to be tailored to different demographic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

US studies of street culture note that acting 'crazy' can provide status on the street, but rarely elaborate on this phenomenon. Based on several years of participant observation in the street culture of a disadvantaged part of Copenhagen, this article provides an in-depth analysis of the phenomenon of 'craziness'. It reveals that it is a nuanced and multifaceted phenomenon and that street actors can strategically act crazy to gain several advantages. It further explains how 'craziness' has to be tempered with other amiable characteristics to be beneficial in street culture, and how it can also be advantageous in dealings with state institutions, as well as a disadvantage in mainstream society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the intricate interplay between citizens' trust in government institutions and their perceptions of institutional effectiveness. The two may have an endogenous relationship as they influence each other. Yet, since they stem from different sources and have distinct dynamics, their relationship may exhibit a directional bias in terms of causality: citizens' trust may impact the perception of institutional effectiveness more than vice versa. As the survey results from Hong Kong suggest here, this may indicate that trust is not only performance-based but also character-based, with the latter lasting longer and exerting a greater impact on perceptions of institutional performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The embedding of immigration checks into public institutions constitutes an integral part of contemporary bordering regimes. In this article, we situate recent changes to the UK's internal borderscape in two parts of the public sector: higher education and health care. We argue that, analyzed from institutional perspectives, these changes reflect not only a dispersal and deterritorialization of the UK's border regime, but also the emergence of specific relations between the government department responsible for this regime – the Home Office – and other parts of the public sector and its institutions. We maintain that these relations have developed into two main forms : the routinization of borderwork within public sector employees' roles, drawing workers from across public institutions into relations with the Home Office and subordinating the needs of those institutions to the demands of the UK's internalized border regime; and the establishment of information systems for datafication, to enable reporting and sharing data between public sector institutions and the Home Office, which are exploited for surveillance purposes. Such relations not only vulnerabilize public sector institutions by draining their resources and destabilizing institutional cultures, but also drive ongoing changes in the bureaucratic field of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While previous studies have interrogated the motivations of Boko Haram and the role of security agencies in counterinsurgency, explanations of the escalation of Boko Haram attacks on Nigerian security agencies have received limited academic attention. This study re-examines the dynamics of counterinsurgency operations in Nigeria within the context of the fragile state thesis. It argues that fragility of relevant state institutions has compromised the military-led counterinsurgency operations by flipping out strategic intelligence to the terrorists, embezzlement of arms procurement funds, sabotage and deplorable welfare condition of combatants, among others. Thus, the relevant state institutions should be strengthened to proactively respond to the maladies bedeviling the military-led counterinsurgency operations in the North-East region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia, racism remains a challenge to dismantle within public health institutions. This paper examines the pressures I experienced from some public health scholars and practitioners to conform to colonial and positivist approaches in knowledge production that still dominate the field. To challenge this hegemony, my research practices turned into what Mignolo calls "epistemic disobedience," an approach to delink from Western ways of producing knowledge. Based on this experiential learning process, I argue epistemic disobedience should not be overlooked in the discussion of decolonizing research and antiracist pedagogy in the context of doctoral training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to recent discussions on ideal anarchism vs. ideal statism. I argue, contra ideal anarchists, that coercive state institutions would be justified even in a society populated by morally perfect individuals. My defense of ideal statism is novel in that it highlights the moral benefits of state coercion. Rather than the practical effects on individual compliance or the distributive outcomes that follow therefrom, coercive state institutions are justified through the moral benefits they provide. The state is morally beneficial because it a) lessens the demands on the will that fall on agents under ideal anarchism, and b) counters the structural domination that follows from differences in natural endowments. By shifting the focus of the debate from feasibility to desirability, the paper exposes the flaws of ideal anarchism and provides new insights into the moral value of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue for the continuing relevance of formal organization. We do so by examining contemporary challenges to 'formality' in one particular sphere of organizational existence: that of political administration. We deploy the latter term to refer to those formal organizational activities involving the constitution, maintenance, projection and regulation of governmental authority. Political administration, we argue, maintains its distinctive character because of the singularity of its purpose or 'core task' – namely, the activity of governing in an official capacity through and on behalf of a state. We begin by outlining how formality has regularly been opposed to substance in the social sciences, and how this has led to a series of unfortunate misunderstandings concerning the status of 'formal organization'. We then turn to show what it means to serve a state in a formal capacity. Here the concept of office is of crucial import and we seek to indicate its key components and their relation to classical organizational theorizing concerning formal organization. Having established the centrality of office to the organizational conduct of the work of the state, we proceed to examine two different but linked developments in politics and public management that have compromised or undermined formal official conduct in political administration and highlight the organizational, political and ethical problems they raise. These problems are not inconsequential but rather go to the heart of debates concerning intense political partisanship and radical scepticism towards public institutions. In taking this route, the paper makes two overall contributions. First, against the ongoing problematization of formality within organizational theorizing, we seek to revive the relevance of classical conceptions of formal organization for organization theory as a practical science. Second, we argue that formal organization within state, government and political administration remains practically crucial to navigating the 'extreme circumstances' that confront us in the here and now in what has been termed the 'New Era of Tragedy'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the incorporation of social dialogue in industrial relations and its role in pacifying public sector unions in Zambia. A sample of 19 managers of public institutions and union leaders in Lusaka participated in the research. The research reveals that social dialogue is used to pacify trade unions as governments implement structural adjustment policies, which bring about poor employment conditions. Although the unions have responded to pacification by diversifying and servicing their membership, they are still weak. This finding is significant because it helps us to understand why unions in Southern Africa are weak in the post-independence era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CAMSIS scale measures the long-term position of occupations in social hierarchies. The CAMSIS-China scale, which measures the social interaction distance among occupations as well as the social hierarchies of China in the 21st century, was constructed through the Goodman's class of Row-Column Association Models II (RCII) according to the occupation tables formed by CGSS data from 2003 to 2018. The validity of the CAMSIS-China scale has been verified. The results show that the most outstanding feature of the CAMSIS-China scale is that farm labors are at the lowest ends, and their scores are separated from other occupations with clear boundaries. Another feature is that occupations characterized by government and public institutions are with unusually high scores. Patterns of specificity reflect that the hukou and danwei sector/ownership, as key institutions to facilitate the redistribution of resources and life chances among Chinese citizens, affect social interaction patterns. Plain Language Summary: Construction and Validation of a Social Stratification Scale for China in the 21st Century 1. Constructed CAMSIS-China scale by using the RCII model. 2. Verified the validity of the CAMSIS-China scale. 3. Described characteristics of CAMSIS-China scale. 4. Discussed the factors that cause the particularity of CAMSIS-China scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State policymakers in the United States have in recent years experimented with new initiatives to change the procedures used by public institutions to assess and assign academically underprepared students to non-credit developmental education (or remedial) courses. This study explores whether the most recent developmental education reform in Floridas—Senate Bill 1720 has affected student enrollment in the Florida College System (FCS) institutions and whether the enrollment effects vary by race/ethnicity and age. Through a difference-in-differences analysis, we did not find statistically significant effects of the reform on the college enrollment in Florida, neither on the racial or age compositions of the student population, compared to non-Florida institutions in the surrounding region. These null results provide valuable implications for policy and research consideration in Florida and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legitimacy of putting public activities – such as providing education and welfare, but also running prisons or providing military services – into the hands of private companies is hotly contested. In The Privatized State, Chiara Cordelli puts forward an original argument, from a Kantian perspective, for why it is problematic: it replaces the omnilateral will of all citizens, which is realized through public institutions, with the unilateral will of agents to whom these activities have been delegated. While adding an important dimension to the debate, I am not fully convinced that private institutions always fail to realize the omnilateral will, and that this is the only, or always most central, normative problem of privatization. Instead, many concrete cases of privatization seem normatively overdetermined in their wrongness. Nonetheless, Cordelli's brilliant discussion invites us to rethink these phenomena from an important angle and helps us to better understand what an ideal civil service would look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of increasing artificial intelligence and proliferating conspiracy, technofetishism and moral panics, faith in ubiquitous data capture and mistrust of public institutions, the ascendance of STEM and the 'deplatforming' of the arts and humanities, this article considers doubt as an epistemological condition, a political tool, an ethical force, a rhetorical register, and an aesthetic category. Adapted from the author's May 2023 inaugural King's Public Lecture in Digital Humanities at King's College London, and structured in the form of a syllabus for a speculative class, it aims to identify where humanistic conceptions of doubt do, or could or should, reside within our digital systems: at the interface, within the code, or engineered into hardware and infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extant literature on rebel governance takes the political institutions that rebels develop to rule a civilian population as an indivisible entity. As a result, it cannot answer the question, why do those at the top of the power hierarchy in the pre-war period leave the rebel-controlled territories while mid-level officials are individually co-opted into the rebel political institutions? The argument is that rebels may co-opt not entire pre-existing institutions but selected individuals from these institutions, presumably mid-level officials with the experience of running the administrative affairs, into the new patronage system built by rebels. That claim will be tested against the pre-existing political and government institutions in the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces dominated by the Party of Regions in the pre-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past is continuously reinterpreted to serve the interests of the present. Over the last two centuries of turbulent Chinese history, the past has been redefined through narratives and categorisations. How does the party-state manage the diversity and complexity of China's past, and what implications does this have for state–society relations in China? Based on a case study of China's adoption of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention, this article argues that the Chinese party-state creates "infrastructures of memory," which enable it to actively manage China's diverse past through selective institutionalisation. This process creates a "cognitive map" of tangible and rationalised relations and boundaries between vernacular memories as interpreted by the state. Although this map is to shape and direct Chinese collective memory and identity, it also sparks contestation among members of the populace who seek to preserve vernacular and multiple memories of their socio-cultural past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School practices and policies are often influenced by various research, nonprofit, for-profit, and philanthropic organizations. To help understand their influence, this article provides a framework accounting for the variety of school improvement organizations (SIOs) and summarizes debates regarding their benefits and risks. I cluster SIOs as providing (a) direct school support, (b) research/advocacy, or (c) funding—each with a continuum of organizations underneath them. Studies highlight how SIOs take innovative risks, create improvement networks, and transform school practices. However, they also emphasize the danger of creating challengers to public institutions, the possibility of state retreat, and loss of community input. The article concludes by suggesting ways to use this framework for future studies, assess SIOs' outcomes, and address their risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coronavirus disease 2019 exacerbated health inequities in Bronx Communities. This study explored vaccine hesitancy among a random sample of faculty and students from Hebert Lehman College. Findings suggest faculty are largely vaccinated (87%), while 59% of students are unvaccinated. Significant gaps in information were found related to safety and complications. This suggests universities need to adopt an educational model with a multipronged social support strategy to gain students' trust and a greater sense of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual article presents a model for understanding and increasing the civic engagement of Latinx students in higher education. The model presents the key student attributes, precollege and college experiences, and institutional characteristics that impact the civic development of Latinx college students. Higher education practitioners and researchers can use the model to inform the understanding and development of programs, services, and practices to increase the civic engagement of Latinx students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archival records exist for the benefit of society; therefore, people are at the very centre of the purpose of keeping archives. The South African government developed the Batho Pele principles to embrace them as a charter for public service to ensure a reliable and customer-oriented public service. Archival institutions such as the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa and the provincial archives are not exempted from this responsibility. These repositories form a part of the South African Public Service and play a crucial role in promoting the preservation and access to significant records that have enduring value. The National Archives and Records Service of South Africa and the provincial archives are responsible for preserving public and non-public records and promoting them to the public. In this quantitative study, an online survey completed by 20 archivists from these repositories helped establish whether archivists from the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa and the provincial archives utilised public programming initiatives to fulfil the Batho Pele principles. The analysed data indicated that the public archival institutions struggle to conduct public programming initiatives, and their limited efforts were not effective. This implies that most of these repositories did not consider public programming initiatives as tools to implement the Batho Pele principles. The study recommends that South African public archival institutions take advantage of the 'window of opportunity' presented by the Batho Pele principles to strengthen their outreach strategies to improve archival service quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research shows that leader turnover and change in a leader's winning coalition are associated with rivalry termination. However, this research often conflates change in leadership or winning coalition with more fundamental reform of the institutions governing the state. This article argues that only changes in a rival's governing institutions should lead to rivalry termination. Changes in leader preferences may lead to conciliatory policies, but provide no certainty regarding the sincerity or longevity of these policies. Fundamental changes to the institutions of a state alter the menu of policy options available to the leadership and are difficult to undo. Institutional reform in Rival A makes the leadership of Rival B more willing to undertake potentially risky cooperative action, leading to rivalry termination. I test this argument in a dataset of rivalry terminations spanning 1919–2010, finding that institutional reform in one rival leads to an increase in the likelihood of rivalry termination regardless of the issues of contention. Irregular leader turnover and change in a state's winning coalition have no effect. Further, in a break with previous research, I find that any institutional reform—toward autocracy, toward democracy or laterally—is associated with an increased likelihood of rivalry termination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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'Volunteering' has been emerging in the last decades as an object of intensified political interest and promotion, assembled through a myriad of alignments, composed of state institutions and international bodies, corporations, and third sector actors, operating across local, nationwide, and transnational scales. This article focuses on a particular configuration that I call 'conscripted volunteering', in which soldiers engage in activities framed as 'doing good' beyond their regular military duties. The article explores how this configuration emerges in Israel through growing efforts to create assemblages of corporate, public, nonprofit, and military actors. These assembling efforts include initiating and maintaining connections, routinizing and sustaining partnerships, and aligning various interests and needs. While some assemblages gradually dissolve, others are successfully sustained and new ones emerge. The overall proliferation of such assemblages in Israel is identified in this article as an emerging 'military-industrial-nonprofit complex' that is forged by a consensual neoliberal agenda regarding citizenship and modalities of participation. These insights could be utilized to understand various types of military-humanitarian interventions and to reconceptualize military-society relations more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is significant disagreement on the moderating role of institutions on policy responsive- ness, yet overwhelmingly research in state politics has focused on single institutions. This project leverages a new aggregate scale of state institutions to evaluate if the collective insti- tutional context moderates the influence of public opinion on policy. I use a recently released latent scale of institutional context and find that high levels of accountability pressure strongly strengthen public opinion's influence on policy for both economic and social policy, while the strength of a state's checks and balance system is largely unrelated to policy responsiveness. These results demonstrate the importance of incorporating aggregate institutional design into our understanding of the role of institutions in state politics, and that collectively institutions play a large role in determining how public opinion is translated into policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populists in southern Europe and potentially beyond display a distinctive understanding of international relations, such as the belief that national or the "people's" sovereignty must be the main organizing principle of international affairs, a preference for a multipolar world, suspicion of multilateral governance institutions, and sympathy toward Russia and/or China. This phenomenon represents a potentially fruitful domain for scholarly inquiry to answer questions such as: what are some of the ontological features of populism and how are these elements connected to patterns of foreign policy preferences? This essay aims to provide tentative answers to these questions with a focus on Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State failure is highly threatening to incumbent elites, providing them motive to engage in genocide or politicide. The destruction of formal institutions may also remove political barriers to employing such atrocities. Thus, previous scholars expect state failure to increase the likelihood of genocide and politicide. However, such logic overlooks that these atrocities are government policy, which require planning and implementation. Since government institutions collapse during state failure, regime elites will possess little physical ability to commit widespread and systematic killing of their enemies. Therefore, I expect state failure to be associated with a lower likelihood of genocide and politicide. Using bivariate probit regression to handle the endogeneity between state failure and these atrocities, I find strong support for my argument in all country-years since 1946. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite evidence that United Nations peacekeeping is a cost-effective tool for addressing civil and interstate conflict, it has consistently experienced financial shortfalls as member states neglect to pay their dues. To enable investigation into the dynamics of peacekeeping support, we present newly collected data on all member-state financial contributions to all UN peacekeeping operations from 1990 to 2010. The data also include dues assessed by the UN to gauge the extent to which states fall short of what they owe. We show that financial shortfalls are widespread and vary across both missions and contributors. The data offer opportunities to understand patterns of financial support for peacekeeping across states, missions, and time, and can ultimately provide insight into the factors that lead states to support international institutions and public goods. We illustrate how scholars can use the data with an analysis of the factors that drive states to meet their financial commitments. We find that wealthier states, those more engaged in global trade, democracies, and those that also contribute personnel to peacekeeping operations are the most likely to pay their dues. Conversely, the United States and countries in the Americas, Africa, and Asia are more likely to shirk part or all of their financial obligations in a given year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the contradictory way in which community-based intervention concerning crime relates to political domination and to the institutions of the State in Quebec, Canada by exploring the pertinence of the Gramscian conception of civil society. Surprisingly, although Antonio Gramsci offers an interesting set of concepts for the study of the relationship between civil society and government institutions, his ideas have rarely been used to understand community intervention in general and that related to public security in particular. Gramscian concepts such as civil society, political society, hegemony, and the integral State strike us as particularly useful in this regard. In our opinion, they offer a much more comprehensive view of the current relationship between community action (civil society) and the criminal justice system (the government) than narratives that insist on the alleged autonomy of civil society and on the weakening of the State. To show the utility of these concepts, we used them to understand community tensions related to racially discriminatory practices by police officers in the multiethnic borough of Montréal-Nord in Montreal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevailing definitions of organized crime and methodological approaches to studying it derive mainly from the Global North. However, an emergent body of literature suggests that organized crime in the Global South differs from organized crime in the Global North. Focusing on the case of Mexico, I argue that mainstream criminological theories' inability to explain significant aspects of organized crime in that country stems from their underspecified scope. Mainstream theories analyse organized crime as a phenomenon that transpires in societies characterized by high levels of internal peace, rule of law and strong public institutions. In Mexico, a country that fails to adhere to these conditions, organized crime manifestations defy prevailing theoretical assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing consensus within both policy and academic circles, including various schools of political, legal, and economic thought, that institutions matter and that the quality of institutions and governments makes an important difference for economic development. However, while the institutional literature has extensively discussed different types of institutions and their importance, only a few quantitative measures of formal institutions and their quality are available. What is more, most analyses referring to the quality of public institutions concern the national or regional level and the issue at the local level is relatively understudied. The purpose of the article is to fill this gap in two ways. The first one is to identify territorial differentiation of the quality of public institutions at the local level in Poland; the second one, to explain the reasons of the differentiation of institutional capacities in the context of historical, cultural, and social factors. The research has shown that the quality of public institutions is highly related to historical circumstances. However, although their impact is strong, the historical conditions are definitely not the only factor influencing local institutional capital in Poland, as they appear to be deeply affected also by the level of urbanization and the degree of human capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a special issue initiated by Academic Women in Public Administration (AWPA) and the periodical that discusses emerging health and human service trends in public and nonprofit institutions with a focus on resiliency through administrative and management practices. Topics include the purpose and mission of AWPA; the underrepresentation of women in public administration scholarship; and the exploration of resiliency in public and nonprofit sectors during times of crisis.

Much liberal-democratic thought has concerned itself primarily – even exclusively – with coercive interference in citizens' lives. But political actors do things – they engage in influential speech, they offer incentives, they mislead other actors, they disrupt the expected functioning of decision-making mechanisms etc. – that fall short of coercion, yet may nonetheless call for normative evaluation and public justification, precisely because they serve to purposively alter citizens' beliefs, intentions and behaviour. With this article, I explicate a conception of political manipulation to capture this sort of interference, and to distinguish individual manipulation from the manipulation of nonindividual agents like committees, institutions and states. The account, beyond being necessary for further work on the ethics of political manipulation, should prove useful to both normative thinkers interested in power, justice and the ethics of democratic decision-making, and empirical scholars in search of a conceptual apparatus to sharpen their investigations into the exercise of subtle forms of political power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In risky public-private partnership (PPP) projects, governments and public institutions tend to offer private investors certain guarantees for their participation. However, when public sector capacity and institutions are weak, these guarantees can generate moral hazard in the bidding process and lead to contractual renegotiations, resulting in a loss for taxpayers. Drawing on a sophisticated, agent-based model that recreates the complex dynamics of the PPP procurement process, this paper demonstrates public sector competency is crucial for limiting moral hazard when guarantees are offered in PPP projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the associations between statewide affirmative action bans and the racial composition of undergraduate students at public 4-year colleges and universities in five states, that is, Arizona, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma. I use the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System data from 1999 to 2017, and find that despite having few selective postsecondary institutions, public four-year institutions in these five states experienced an average decline of 0.42 percentage points in the enrollment of underrepresented racial-ethnic minority students following bans on affirmative action. Further, the bans also decreased the enrollment of underrepresented racial-ethnic minority students at four state public flagship universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on the profiles of the National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS) in the three Maghreb countries: Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, through their research policies, human resources, governance, funding and scientific production. A bibliometric study was carried out for the three selected countries based on the Scopus database covering the period between 2005 and 2019. The research shows the distinctive case of Tunisian growth of scientific production compared to the other two countries; it also stresses the universities' emergence as a major research actor, thus challenging the predominance of the public mission-oriented institutions dedicated to agriculture and veterinary sciences. Finally, it indicates significant differences between the three countries concerning governance and funding, and human resources. Overall, the NARS in the three countries are still very fragile, and a need for significant changes in the research policy making is certainly required to overcome these shortcomings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins with an overview of recent and current trends in scientific output in Africa. The focus is on how global dynamics and foreign funding support are directly affecting structural aspects of scientific research. It examines the fundamental role of foreign programmes and new forms of academic cooperation in African science. This includes a discussion of multilateral or transcontinental agreements and local universities, the role of private philanthropy and public institutions, trends in domestic expenditure on research and innovation, and how these are linked to the recent positive upturn in scientific production in many African countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have argued that immigrants' trust in institutions is the result of the exposure to host-country institutions but also shaped by past experiences in the country of origin. These experiences create a "home-country point of reference," a political/institutional memory that becomes the relevant comparison for any political/institutional interaction in the host country. We develop further this concept and unpack its key determinants—the age at migration and the historical conditions of the home country at the specific time of migration. Only those immigrants who were too old to forget the historical and contextual features of the country-of-origin institutions at the time of migration will rely on this comparison when interacting with institutions in the host country. Across time, there is both a continuous positive/negative accumulation of trust for the host-country institutions among those with less/more democratic points of reference. We examine immigrants' political trust using survey evidence from Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does exposure to rebel rule affect citizens' political attitudes after armed conflicts end? We combine original survey data from Côte d'Ivoire with a natural experiment based on the arbitrary location of a ceasefire boundary to estimate the effects of exposure to rebel rule by the Forces Nouvelles (FN) on Ivorians' sense of democratic citizenship. Our findings show that individuals in communities ruled by the FN held more negative attitudes about local government institutions 7 years after the reunification of the country, held weaker commitments to civic obligations, and were more likely to condone extralegal actions. The effects of rebel rule are larger than the effects of extreme lived poverty and appear among both rebel coethnics and non-coethnics. Using qualitative and survey evidence, we propose three theoretical mechanisms to explain why exposure to rebel rule weakened citizen-state relations: disrupted norms of compliance with state-like authorities, the formation of local self-help institutions leading to negative assessments of the redeployed state, and resentment due to unmet expectations of economic recovery. Our study informs debates about the links between war, citizenship, and statebuilding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent history of urban public libraries reveals significant changes in the way librarians, city officials, and patrons understood the value of public institutions. Branch libraries in the South Bronx during New York City's financial crisis of the 1970s reveal both the dramatic and seemingly minute developments through which the city shifted toward neoliberalism. This article draws on archives of the New York Public Library and the papers of Local 1930 (The New York Public Library Guild, AFSCME District Council 37). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, an attempt has been made to make a nuanced study of the images portrayed of the shaikh by Hamid Qalandar and his protagonist, Shaikh Nasiruddin, in the malfuzat of the shaikh entitled Khairul Majalis. It highlights that the shaikh willingly chose the path of faqr (poverty), faqa (deprivation/hunger) and wanted to renounce duniya wa khalq (world and people), which resulted in an antipathy towards shughl (government service) and the state and all its institutions. Fawaid-al-Fuad, malfuzat of Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya, constructed the rudimentary tariqa — in effect, a powerful, rudimentary preliminary lineage of the Chishti silsila was constructed. Khairul Majalis effectively highlights the virtues of Shaikh Nasiruddin, and thus he successfully claims to tap into the paradigm of conduct of an 'ideal murid '—an embodiment of an 'ideal murid '—stringently following the different principles and practices of Chishti silsila so clearly laid out in Fawaid-al-Fuad —thus a 'worthy successor'. The didactic and discursive nature of the Khairul Majalis and the malfuzat genre, in general, is evident. These hagiological work(s) need to be studied in the context in which it/they emerged, and the intentions of the hagiographer, the background and/or agenda in presenting the text must be taken into account before reaching any conclusions based on it. As evident, the malfuzat strives to draw out the best traits of the respective protagonist to hold them up as a model of piety and a recipient of divine grace. In the process, they accentuate the construct of the paradigm of conduct appropriate to a Shaikh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]