Suchergebnisse

1. The origins of the crisis in refugee policy -- 2. Liberal universalism and the problem of feasibility -- 3. Thin universalism and the problem of internal coherence -- 4. Social contract theory and moral motivation -- 5. The role of reason in moral motivation -- 6. Community and universal duties -- 7. Mobilising commitment to refugee rights.

Performance targets tend to be depicted as management tools, designed to improve public policy outcomes. Yet targets also have a symbolic function, signalling commitment to and underscoring achievement of political goals. This article explores the tension between these 'disciplining' and 'signalling' functions, looking at UK targets on asylum, 2000-10. Attempts to combine the two functions led to three types of problem: (1) technical targets designed to steer organizational performance lacked political resonance, prompting politicians to resort to top-down, political targets; (2) the imposition of unfeasible political targets created distortions in the organization, encouraging forms of gaming; and (3) the political risks of adopting stretch targets were not offset by the dividends of positive attention when targets were met: the government was unable to establish targets as the predominant mode of assessing its performance. The failed attempt to marry these functions suggests the need to decouple political and management targets in public administration. Adapted from the source document.

This article explores how patterns of information supply on policy problems influence political attention. It advances two central claims. First, different policy areas are associated with distinct practices in monitoring policy problems: Some produce abundant, ongoing, and reliable information, while others yield scarce, sporadic, and/or unreliable data. Second, these variations in information supply are likely to influence political attention, with information‐rich areas associated with a more proportionate distribution of attention, and information‐poor areas yielding punctuated attention. The article tests these claims through comparing U.K. political attention to asylum and illegal immigration. Asylum is observed on an ongoing basis through bureaucratic data, court hearings, and lay observations, producing more constant and proportiate political attention. Illegal immigration is observed sporadically through focusing events, usually police operations, eliciting more punctuated attention. These insights about political attention may also help explain why policy responses may be punctuated or incremental.

The dynamics of migration are incredibly complex, creating immense problems for governments attempting to steer immigration. These challenges are well elucidated in literature on societal steering, and especially Luhmann's analysis of the impediments to steering by the political and legal systems. Politics and the law develop highly simplifying models of the dynamics they are seeking to steer, resulting in various problems of distortion and counterproductive effects. We can see examples of this in the case of migration control, where attempts to prevent irregular labour or stay have led to numerous unintended effects. However, it is far from evident how such problems of steering can be addressed. A number of cognitive, social and political factors place pressure on policy-makers to adopt highly simplifying models of these processes. The implication is that policy interventions have a structural tendency to 'short-circuit' the complexity of the migratory processes they are attempting to steer.

There is a striking lack of research on the utilisation of expert knowledge in public policy debates and party political mobilisation. Existing contributions in related fields of scholarship generate rather contradictory expectations. On the one hand, political communications literature points to the dumbing down of political debate, implying a limited role for expert knowledge. On the other hand, a number of prominent sociologists have noted the centrality of science in political debate on the politics of risk. This article suggests that the two theses are not necessarily incompatible. For knowledge to be reported in the media, it clearly needs to conform to criteria of novelty, drama and scandal, but scientific findings can and often do meet these criteria, especially in areas of risk, where there is enormous potential to scandalise government actions or omissions. The article illustrates these tendencies through an analysis of the use of expert knowledge in UK debates on migration from 2002 to 2004. It explores how research was used in parliamentary debates, speeches and newspaper coverage of three prominent episodes in the politics of migration. The examples demonstrate well how the mass media utilises research to expose political scandal. The analysis also suggests the ambivalence of political actors and especially incumbents in drawing on research. While governments are keen to utilise research to legitimise policies, they are also aware of the limitations of science in underpinning risky decisions. The article concludes with a discussion of how politics has responded to this dilemma.