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AbstractThe existing literature holds that favoritism in public procurement is due to discrimination or corruption. In procurement, the government agency faces a tradeoff between the expected allocative efficiency and the expected rent paid to the contracting firm. When the government agency's efficiency gain is larger (resp. smaller) than its rent loss, it is optimal for the government agency to choose the contract with the low‐cost (resp. high‐cost) firm. The general public usually deems that the latter case implies that there exists favoritism in public procurement. We point out that such seeming favoritism is not favoritism in the true sense. There may be an over‐identification of favoritism in public procurement in the existing literature.

AbstractThe article addresses the main theory of the political public sphere generally, and the role of the Internet and Internet‐based media in the theory specifically. It first reviews briefly the initial social research on the Internet in the 1990s concerning political participation. After a presentation of Jürgen Habermas' theory of the contemporary public sphere, it proceeds to discuss the main problems concerning the Internet as a platform or infrastructure for public debate: segmentation and concentration. It argues that a general conclusion is that the public sphere differentiates and become more complex. A key task for future research, it argues, is to investigate the complex connections between Internet publics and mass media publics.

AbstractThe flight of psychiatrists from public mental health facilities must be halted if the most afflicted psychiatric patients—the severely and chronically mentally ill—are to receive the best care and treatment possible.

"An analytical approach to corporate reputations from its leading scholar. Public perception, especially in the time of social media, is a core determinant of any organization's success and longevity. It is also fickle: organizations can fall astray of public approval through crisis, mismanagement, or sudden shifts in the public sensibility. In Reputation Analytics, Daniel Diermeier offers the first scientific framework for understanding and managing the vagaries of corporate reputation and public opinion. Drawing on a political scientist's understanding of the formation and dynamics of public opinion, Diermeier infuses his approach with lessons from game theory, psychology, and text analytics to produce a rigorous, altogether original approach that will have immediate application in both scholarship and practice. A milestone work from one of social science's most eminent scholars, Reputation Analytics ushers a new and advanced understanding on a topic that has long eluded such treatment-and an essential work for readers across industry and academics"--

Categories of research on the determinants of public policy are suggested & some representative works are cited to indicate the state of present knowledge. The categories include types of political systems, types of explanatory models, types of public policies, & cross-sectional & time series research. In each category representative works are reviewed. Several developments in political science suggest areas of future research: (1) the formal analysis of politics as a dynamic process, (2) the study of interest group & bureaucracies in relation to policy determinants, & (3) the development of better indicators of policy. Plans for a symposium on the policy determinants field are outlined. G. Simpson.

Most assessments of the influence of scholars and public intellectuals focus on their ideas, which are based upon an implicit assumption that their widespread circulation are a result of the veracity and strength of the ideas themselves, rather than the processes of production and distribution, including the intellectual’s own contribution to the ideas’ popularity by attending conferences and public rallies, writing for periodicals, and so on. This concise article offers an assessment of the late Stuart Hall’s role as a socialist public intellectual by connecting the person, scholar and public intellectual to the organisations, institutions and publications through which his contributions to both cultural studies and left politics were produced and distributed. This article includes an emphasis on Hall’s ‘Thatcherism’ thesis and his public interventions via the periodical, Marxism Today, during the 1980s.

Public diplomacy is a political instrument with analytical boundaries and distinguishing characteristics, but is it an academic field? It is used by states, associations of states, and nonstate actors to understand cultures, attitudes, and behavior; build and manage relationships; and influence opinions and actions to advance interests and values. This article examines scholarship with relevance, usually unintended, to the study of public diplomacy and a body of analytical and policy-related literature derived from the practice of public diplomacy. Ideas, wars, globalism, technologies, political pressures, and professional norms shaped the conduct of public diplomacy and the literature of scholars and practitioners during the hot and cold wars of the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, thick globalism, network structures, and new technologies are transforming scholarship, governance, and state-based public diplomacy. An achievable consensus on an analytical framework and a substantial scholarly and practical literature hold promise for an emerging academic field.

The emerging global trade and investment regime is a site of ongoing contestation between states, powerful industry actors and civil society organisations seeking to infuence the formation of legal rules, principles, practices and institutions. The inclusion of major transnational tobacco, alcohol and ultraprocessed food companies seeking to influence governments in these processes has resulted in the expanded distribution and consumption of unhealthy commodities across the globe, overshadowing many of the positive impacts for health hypothesised from liberalised trade. The growing number of pathways for market actors to exert undue influence over national and international regulatory environments provided by agreements, such as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, has given many cause to be concerned. In the context of continued commitment by states to international trade and investment negotiations, we present several avenues for public health scholars, advocates and practitioners to explore to rebalance public and private interests in these deals.

AbstractA government sets the level of taxation to provide a public good valued by consumers. There are two groups of consumers, the rich and the poor. The government has redistributive preferences, but is initially constrained to use lump‐sum taxation. This potentially leads the government to provide a very low level of the public good out of concern for not reducing private good consumption of the poor. In this context, allowing a small amount of redistribution from the rich to the poor may be Pareto improving. The loss in private consumption by the rich may be more than offset by the added utility from increased public good provision. I also analyze the extent to which a flat income tax can induce the government to choose a level of public good consistent with the Samuelson condition. When consumers have a survival constraint on private consumption, a progressive tax code is required to induce the government to choose the efficient level of the public good. Generally speaking, there is a trade‐off between a desire to restrain the government's ability to redistribute income and a desire to induce it to choose the level of the public good implied by the Samuelson condition.

This article theorizes how public performances matter in international negotiations. Studies of international negotiations are predominantly focused on power-political instruments in use around the negotiating table. I argue that public communication cannot be dismissed as cheap talk but that it plays a constitutive role in and on international negotiations. Contributing to the international relations (IR) literature on negotiations, the article suggests an orientation toward an increasingly important aspect of international negotiations in a hypermediated world political context, namely public performances that challenge the distinction between domestic signaling and claim-making toward negotiating parties. Hypermediated negotiations mean that much of what goes on in IR is spread to large audiences in new and emerging digital sites in near real time. Actors use public performances to define and legitimize their desired visions for negotiating outcomes. As public performances, these are power-political instruments in and of themselves, part of the array of tactics that states turn to when competing for influence in international negotiations. The theorization is illustrated with an example from the UK–EU Brexit negotiations. The illustration is a qualitative Twitter analysis that shows the performative toolbox in use, as well as the importance of public performances themselves in the endgame of the Brexit negotiations.