As nonprofit organizations perform many of the duties formerly discharged by government, the issue of democratic accountability becomes relevant. This article shows that governments are unwilling and, in some ways, unable to control such organizations completely. Moreover, we demonstrate how the innovative features of nonprofit organizations can directly serve to undercut democratic accountability.
Supervision and compliance play a central role across a wide variety of human activities. To understand the nature of interactions between supervisors and subordinates, the interests and capabilities of both need to be examined. The problems with most studies of supervision stem from overemphasizing the supervisor and paying too little attention to the subordinate. In this paper we present a model which focuses on both the supervisor's and the subordinate's motives and capabilities. This enhanced model extends the principal-agent approach to reflect the political nature of public agencies and the factors that constrain supervision. We examine the broad conditions where supervision does not work. We conclude that subordinates' compliance depends more on the subordinates' preexisting dispositions than on the severity and frequency of `punishment' by a supervisor.
How does armed conflict affect accountability and political trust in democratic governments? To answer this question, we present quasi-experimental evidence based on survey data which, coincidentally, were collected in the days surrounding an unanticipated violent attack by a rebel group in Mali. The chance occurrence of the attack five days into the survey demarcates respondents into two groups surveyed before and after the attack and allows us to examine how the attack affected approval of politicians and trust in political institutions. Our results show that people mainly attribute responsibility to the president and not to parliament or local government, while trust in institutions is largely unaffected. We also show that these effects are strongest in the region of the attack. These findings suggest that voters in new democracies are capable of attributing responsibility to individual politicians and governments while maintaining trust in the fundamental political institutions of democracy.
Soft power is the power to persuade whereby one actor in a non-coercive manner convinces another to want the same things he/she wants. Sport can be used as tool of soft power both internationally and domestically. Peace-building and nation-building can be achieved through four mechanisms of sport diplomacy and politics: image-building; building a platform for dialogue; trust-building; and reconciliation, integration and anti-racism. These mechanisms are not deterministically controllable and can have unintended consequences. On the one hand, sporting events can be used as a means of building trust between adversaries. On the other, the hostilities between peoples can be mirrored on playing fields. This article examines the intended and unintended consequences of each mechanism. It also examines the role of confounding economic factors. Each article comprising this Special Issue explores a different mechanism of sport politics and public diplomacy.
This article examines the effect of climate change on a type of armed conflict that pits pastoralists (cattle herders) against each other (range wars). Such conflicts are typically fought over water rights and/or grazing rights to unfenced/unowned land. The state is rarely involved directly. The rangeland of East Africa is a region particularly vulnerable to drought and livestock diseases associated with climate change. To analyze the possible effects of climate change on pastoral conflict, we focus our analysis on changes in resource availability, contrasting cases of abundance and scarcity. The role of resources is further contextualized by competing notions of property rights, and the role of the state in defining property and associated rights. We employ a contest success function (CSF) game-theoretic model to analyze the logic of range wars. This CSF approach emphasizes the low-level, non-binary nature of raiding behavior between pastoralist groups over limited natural resources. A central contribution of this approach is that the logic of raiding behavior implies a positive relationship between resources and conflict. This positive relationship is supported by several studies of the rangeland of East Africa, but is generally dismissed by the literature on the 'resource curse'. This relationship is contingent on other factors examined in the model, producing the following results. First, the level of property rights protection provided by the state generally reduces conflict between pastoralist groups. Second, if property rights protection is provided in a biased manner, then conflict between pastoralist groups increases. Third, severe resource asymmetries between two pastoralist groups will induce the poorer group to become bandits (focusing their efforts on raiding and not producing), while the richer group raids in retaliation.
