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In a context where states increasingly complement
their physical presence with digital means, the classic
idea of infrastructural state power needs reconsideration.
The COVID-19 pandemic represents an unparalleled opportunity to that end, given the uniformity of one type of digital infrastructural intervention - the offer of contact tracing apps - and its highly varying performance across geographies. Against this backdrop, the article seeks to expand traditional discussions on state infrastructural power by testing a series of propositions on the explanatory factors behind tracing apps' emergence and adoption rates. The findings stemming from a pool of 150 countries show no straightforward connection between traditional and digital forms of infrastructural power. They also point at the primacy of governmental trust over financial, institutional, and technological factors - including privacy standards - when explaining high adoption, suggesting that the relational aspect of infrastructural power acquires a proportionally greater weight in the digital era.
El artículo se propone ofrecer un análisis integral sobre la manera en que ha sido abordada la cuestión de la inestabilidad de las políticas públicas: su impacto en el desarrollo económico de los países, la heterogeneidad de enfoques teóricos que la estudian, las maneras en que ha sido conceptualizada y las posibles causas que la literatura ha delineado explicando el fenómeno. Ofrece asimismo un diagnóstico sobre los niveles de inestabilidad de las políticas en Argentina y Brasil entre los años 1995 y 2006 y discute brevemente algunas previsiones de la teoría a la luz de los resultados observados. Estos resultados arrojan una serie de conclusiones: a) hay un nivel sustancialmente más alto de inestabilidad de las políticas en Argentina que en Brasil; b) hay una desproporción entre la importancia del concepto como determinante del desarrollo y su sistematización como variable independiente, y c) se produce una serie de contradicciones entre diferentes corrientes neoinstitucionales, y entre algunas de estas teorías y la evidencia empírica. ABSTRACT: The article aims to present a comprehensive analysis of different aspects concerning the concept of policy instability: its impacts on economic development, the multiple and hetereogeneus theoretical approaches that address it, the construction of its definition and the possible causes behind it. It also offers a diagnosis of policy instability levels in Argentina and Brazil between 1995 and 2006, and discusses some of the theoretical previsions in light of the evidence found. The general findings suggest that: a) there is a significantly higher level of policy instability in Argentina than in Brazil, b) there is a mismatch between the importance of policy stability as a determinant of development and its systematization as independent variable, and c) a series of contradictions can be found between different rational choice neoinstitutionalist theories, and between some of these theories and the empirical evidence.
Smart cities have traditionally been studied from a technocentric perspective. However,such technological conceptualizations of smart cities are no longer adequate in today’s society. This policy brief discusses another alternative, human centric smart cities. Human centric smart cities are cities that practice smart governance, are collaborative, focused on user needs, supportive of innovation, and are ultimately oriented towards the development of wellbeing and the creation of public valuefor its citizens. In human centric smart cities, the use, implementation, and development of technology is guided by these foundations. The policy brief draws on insightgenerated from an international symposium organized for the City of Berlin on the future of smart cities. The brief itself is structured around four core aspects: human centricity, inter-sectoral collaboration, data governance, and administrative capacity. The brief ends by providing initial recommendations on how to start thinking about and implementing new human centric smart city strategies.
Key Points:
• In human centric smart cities, adopting a public valueor happiness orientedapproach to development will be critical.
• The notion of innovation and service development inside human centric smartcities is changing, driven primarily by a shift in the structure of smart city ecosystems.
• New human centric smart city data governance strategies must be in line withthe creation of public value, data sovereignty, and the maintenance offundamental rights and freedoms such as those related to privacy andfreedom of expression.
• The change towards more collaborative, open, and human centric smart citieswill require new governance strategies and new administrative capacities.
In spite of the many efforts in the pursuit of a European single market, many barriers continue to lie ahead, as the field of public procurement illustrates. In 2015, around 40% of all high-value procurement tenders in a large pool of European countries attracted only 2 bidders or less, and only 3% of all winning companies had their offices outside the procuring country. This paper explores a rather unaccounted dimension behind the competitiveness of tenders: the administrative capacities of contracting authorities. For this, we first build a theoretically-informed multidimensional framework of administrative capacities and subsequently test the effect of these capacities on competitiveness, by using a comprehensive and curated database of more than 120.000 procurement contracts in 32 European countries. The findings show that most administrative measures robustly explain a portion of competitiveness, in particular administrative aspects related to the choice of instruments and procedures to conduct the bidding calls, such as electronic procurement. Findings also show that the behaviour of these relationships is counterintiuitive at times, and highly dependent on the national context, suggesting that organizational path-dependency undermines convergence under EU regulation.
The Institutional Profiles Database (IPD) produced by the Agence Fran ̧caisede D ́eveloppement (AFD) has been carried out in 2001, 2006 and 2009, anda new wave is planned for 2012. Although the structure of the surveys variesgreatly between 2006 and 2009, the similarity of a substantial proportionof the questions allows for exploring and exploiting the panel componentsof the database. This paper presents some general patterns of short-terminstitutional change, aided by a conceptual classification of the institutionalvariables. It tests two hypotheses in a preliminary way: a) that institutionstend to score higher over time, and b) that institutions tend to convergeacross countries. Additionally, it explores associations between institutionsand growth for the period 2001-2009.
This article provides a succinct review of the arguments stressing the mutual relationship between institutions and economic performance, and a scholarly account of some of the most popular econometric strategies used to minimize reversed causality problems in impact estimation. Among the techniques revisited we find the instrumental variables (IV) approach, distributed lags and vector autoregressions (VAR), quasi-experiments, and identification by heteroskedasticity (IH). Ultimately, the review is conceived as a methodological aide to researchers seeking to explore causal relationships through the use of the Institutional Profiles Database (IPD) produced by the Agence Francaise de Developpement (AFD).
For a number of years scholars have theorized about a change of paradigm in the collaborative practices between governments and citizens as a result of the newly emerged many-to-many forms of connectivity. A vibrant agenda on open government has flourished since, with critical advances on the conceptual front, but much less empirical testing of its propositions. This article makes use of a recognized typology of co-production initiatives in order to implement a Cox hazards survival analysis of 465 open government platforms from a global sample in 87 countries. Its main findings suggest that government-initiated collaborations have the lowest risk of termination and that citizen-to-government initiatives the highest. They also show that while internationally-exerted pressure for openness favors the genesis of open government platforms, it does not affect their survival chances.
Organization studies have long built a ‘business case’ for diversity, which today includes innovation capacity among the benefits of diverse workforces. Diversity’s impact on innovation has been tested in private firms, yet no systematic study exists in public management. We address this challenge using a twostep dynamic panel data analysis via generalised methods of moments estimation in 36 European countries. The findings confirm that higher public workforce diversity leads to higher public sector innovation. This effect, however, is mediated by the administrative ecosystem, where greater uniformity in managerial practices makes diversity more salient, an obstacle to unleash its innovative potential.