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Starting from the premise that charisma is to be understood as both a social and political process, it is argued that in Republican Rome it represented a moment of political and personal consecration for military leaders. Within this context some of the practices associated with the triumph had the function of dampening emergent charisma. They helped to maintain as foremost the institutions of the Republic in the face of extremely successful military leaders who had the potential to radically alter them. Their capacity was at its peak during the classical Republican period, but progressively diminished during the late stages of the Roman Republic.

The post-Fordist accumulation regime has drifted toward hedonistic consumerism: a mix of highly unequal and bourgeoning consumption. Since World War II, cultural and structural elements have led to a situation in which consumption, fostered by induced wants, far exceeds levels of basic need and tends to be monopolized by the wealthiest, both among and within nations. I suggest that a possible solution to these tensions may be found by applying Sen's notion of equality of opportunity to modern patterns of consumption.

The Decline of Politics: Governance, Globalization and the Public
Sphere, Peter Marden, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, pp. xvi, 286Here is a book that takes readers above and beyond the usual
one-dimensional approach to globalization, all too often couched in
economics, with which we have become familiar of late. Marden's
Decline of Politics will reward those readers who are looking for
a multifaceted analysis of global trends, and will intrigue and challenge
those who believe that they already understand them.

ABSTRACTThis article explores how Canadian federalism, with its complex mix of competencies, and the country's punctuated gradualism policy style interface with urgent, complex decision-making like the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that while punctuated gradualism favors tailored responses to pandemic management it is weaker when coordination and resourcing are to be undertaken during non-crisis situations and that, while the level of cooperation among Canadian jurisdictions has progressively increased over the years, policy is still almost exclusively handled at the federal, provincial and territorial levels. Furthermore, the model appears to have critical 'blind spots' in terms of vulnerable communities that do not emerge as such until after a crisis hits.

Not everyone's ideas count equally in terms of influencing and informing policy design and instrument choices. As the literature on policy advice has shown, such advice arises from many different actors interacting with each other often over relatively long timeframes. Actors within these 'policy advisory systems' operate within the confines of an existing set of political and economic institutions and governing norms, and each actor brings with them different interests, ideas and resources. Studying who these actors are, how they act and how their actions affect the overall nature of the advice system and its contents are critical aspects of current public policy research. But not all these elements have been equally well conceptualised or studied, especially those concerning their impact on the quality of policy advice emerging from a system. In this article, the general nature of policy advisory systems is set out, their major components described and a model of individual and organisational behaviour within them outlined inspired by a modification of the 'exit, voice, loyalty' rubric of Albert Hirschman. Our findings show how aggregated individual organisational behaviour along the lines suggested by Hirschman can over time result in very different kinds of advice being provided by an advisory system, with predictable consequences for its nature and quality.

AbstractDuring the past 30 years, research on policy analytical capacity's multidimensional nature and the evolution of policy advisory systems (PASs) has both increased knowledge of these processes and structures and opened new avenues of inquiry. While it is clear that changes in PASs in many countries have occurred ‐ featuring processes such as the increased externalisation and politicisation of policy advice ‐ studies of changes among the roles played by core policy professionals in advice provision have lagged. One aspect of this question concerns the nature and extent of changes in this 'forgotten fundamental' of advice systems related to how these professionals are arrayed within 'policy shops'—that is organisational units identified in the 1960s and 1970s as the main organisational home of policy professionals in government. Whether or not such shops have changed from the central‐integrated model identified in early studies and, if so, how, remain outstanding and foundational questions. Recent research in Canada has mapped the distribution of policy professionals at the central and provincial level and found more types of analysts and venues than in earlier eras— which range from the 'classical' integrated policy shops of the 1960s and 1970s which remain in central agencies and single‐purpose line departments to the much more 'distributed' patterns found in many departments dealing with multiple or complex controversial issues. Using Canadian data, this study outlines the development of these organisational types and their distribution in government and discusses the implications of these changes for better understanding the work, and needs, of core professionals in policy advice systems. .Points for practitioners
'Policy professionals' or public employees specifically tasked with policy analysis in government are key players in policy advisory systems despite the addition of more external and internal actors in policy advice systems in recent years.
How these advisors and analysts are organised in government, whether they work in clusters or small groups, and how they interact with other civil servants and policy‐makers are a key determinant of their activities and influence in policy‐making.
In the policy sciences, work in the 1960s and 1970s established 'the policy shop', that is relatively small centrally located organisational units employing mainly policy analysts, as the main home of policy professionals in government. These units often enjoyed a monopoly in analysis and played a key role in policy‐making. However, research on these organisations has not kept up with changes in advisory relations within and outside of governments and the impact such changes have had on the influence and activities of core professionals.
Recent work by the authors looking at the large Canadian province of Ontario has identified more than a single type of arrangement of analysts in the current era. This paper expands this analysis to both small and large jurisdictions in Canada, including the federal government, and develops two detailed case studies of the current organisation of policy professionals in smaller central agencies like Ministries of Justice as well as in larger omnibus Ministries of the Environment.
The study finds a 'distributed' model of policy shops—in which multiple policy units exist throughout the agency—to be dominant in both cases and in all the governments examined and suggests this is now the new normal, replacing the dominance of the older more integrated central shop model. The predominance of the distributed model contributes to the fragmentation of policy advice already underway in government due to the growth in the number of external advisors such as consultants and think tanks, and internal ones such as political staffers.

AbstractAssessing the policy analytical capacity (PAC) of governments has suffered in the past from the anecdotal nature of most studies, leading to different evaluations of specific analytical activities and of the overall competences and capacities of governments as a whole. What is needed to advance the field is a set of metrics that can generate insights into the capabilities of different units and how changes to their and overall government capacity develop over time. Focusing on this component of policy capacity, we map and measure the distribution of policy professionals in the provincial, territorial, and federal governments in Canada. Our measures are tested against two major findings regarding PAC: first that variation among governmental PAC varies by size of the civil service, with smaller jurisdictions likely to have less capacity, and second, that concentration of professionals in specific issue areas underscores that area's political and/or policy salience to the government concerned. Both measures prove robust in assessing Canadian government activities in these areas.Points for practitionersPolicy capacity is acknowledged as a significant perquisite for policy success.While some general frameworks exist highlighting policy relevant competences and capabilities important to policy success, how to measure these remains under‐investigated.Focusing on policy analytical capacity, this paper draws on the literature on policy professionals to develop two measures of this component of policy capacity linked to the extent to which an agency focuses on analysis and the proportion of their staff who work on the subject compared to other agencies.The measures are deployed in an illustrative case of Canada and Canadian governments at the territorial, provincial, and federal level which confirms their utility and robustness as indicators of the different levels of analytical capacity different agencies employ.

Incrementalism enjoyed an almost uninterrupted 40 year run as the dominant model of policy change from the publication of Lindblom and Dahl's first mention of the subject in 1953. In the mid-1990s, however, the elements of a new orthodoxy of policy dynamics began to appear in the form of various models of 'punctuated equilibrium', most notably in the works of Peter Hall, Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones. It is important to note, that the new orthodoxy did not replace the old, but rather supplemented it through the addition of notions of 'atypical' or 'paradigmatic' change to the pattern of marginal or incremental change put forward by Lindblom and his colleagues in the 1950s and 1960s. Contemporary models thus owe a great debt to incrementalism, attempting to incorporate its strengths while overcoming its weaknesses. This article discusses this evolution in theories of policy dynamics and the research agenda currently found in this area of policy studies.