Suchergebnisse

Professional civil service recruitment is a core component of governance for development, as it is necessary for ensuring the capacity of civil servants, service delivery, fiscal sustainability, and proper salary management. Through an ambitious mixed method approach, this study seeks to provide a political economy analysis of civil service recruitment in Comoros—a fragile and decentralized state with a relatively large portion of spending on government salaries. More specifically, it aims to explain the recent dramatic increases in the number of civil servants in Comoros. The paper presents three main findings from the analysis. First, in 2010, elections at the national and local levels were associated with the largest recruitment in the past decade, due in part to the interplay of informal institutions such as political clientelism with the current public financial management system. Second, the institutions involved in recruitment are not permanent; they are evolving with the balance of power between the national and island governments. Third, civil service recruitment respects qualification standards.

Abstract
Integrity ought logically to be a particularly important concept within political science. If those acting within the political system do not have integrity, our ability to trust them, to have confidence in their actions, and perhaps even to consider them legitimate can be challenged. Indeed, the very concept of integrity goes some way towards underwriting positive views of political actors. Yet, despite this importance, political science as a discipline has perhaps focused too little on questions of integrity. Where political science has looked at the subject of integrity, it has often done so without using the specific linguistic formulation "integrity". Most commonly, the focus has instead been on "corruption"—a strand of research which has produced results that cannot always be translated into discussions of integrity, by virtue of its narrower focus upon the "negative pole" of public ethics. Other measures, such as "Quality of Government", focus on positive attributes, notably impartiality, but this also fails fully to capture the notion of integrity: dishonesty can be impartial. Specific formal "codes" used within public life and among political practitioners can be much more nuanced than the most widely used measures, and can be much closer to what we understand—academically—as "integrity". This paper argues that the hard conceptual and empirical work of elaborating integrity into a fully operationalizable concept offers the potential reward of an analytical concept that is more closely aligned with political reality.

AbstractThis note examines the Canadian federal government's attempts to use communication programmes to influence public opinion toward the Goods and Services Tax (GST). Using internal government documents and polling data, the authors describe the scope and objectives of the GST campaign, and assess its effectiveness in shaping public opinion. They then describe some of the weaknesses in popular discourse about the propriety of communication programmes of this kind.

AbstractThe financial cost of corruption has recently been estimated at more than 5 per cent of global GDP. Yet, despite the widespread agreement that corruption is one of the most pressing policy challenges facing world leaders, it remains as widespread today, possibly even more so, as it was when concerted international attention began being devoted to the issue following the end of the Cold War. In reality, we still have a relatively weak understanding of how best to measure corruption and how to develop effective guides to action from such measurement. This paper provides a detailed review of existing approaches to measuring corruption, focusing in particular on perception-based and non-perceptual approaches. We highlight a gap between the conceptualisation of corruption and its measurement, and argue that there is a tension between the demands of policy-makers and anti-corruption activists on the one hand, and the motivations of academic researchers on the other. The search for actionable answers on the part of the former sits uncomfortably with the latter's focus on the inherent complexity of corruption.

The financial cost of corruption has recently been estimated at more than 5 per cent of global GDP. Yet, despite the widespread agreement that corruption is one of the most pressing policy challenges facing world leaders, it remains as widespread today, possibly even more so, as it was when concerted international attention began being devoted to the issue following the end of the Cold War. In reality, we still have a relatively weak understanding of how best to measure corruption and how to develop effective guides to action from such measurement. This paper provides a detailed review of existing approaches to measuring corruption, focusing in particular on perception-based and non- perceptual approaches. We highlight a gap between the conceptualisation of corruption and its measurement, and argue that there is a tension between the demands of policy-makers and anti-corruption activists on the one hand, and the motivations of academic researchers on the other. The search for actionable answers on the part of the former sits uncomfortably with the latter's focus on the inherent complexity of corruption.