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This paper revisits the relevance of conflict in governance and citizenship practices in cities. Europe national urban policies were readjusted in terms of economic policies and state expenditures in the 1980s and then again and more severely after the 2008 financial and economic crisis. Policy discourses in urban policy have emphasised the beneficial consequences of social and political consensus in helping cities to restructure economically as part of 'good governance'. At the same time, the paradigm of citizenship understood as a system of social and political inclusion based on economic redistribution and political participation has been substituted by one that has the objective to ensure social cohesion in societies. This substitution renounces the objectives concerning social justice, fails to face the tensions of increasing social inequalities and misses the contribution of social innovation and citizens' practices that incorporate counter-hegemonic ideals as equally important to an effective multilevel governance. A bottom-link approach is suggested as a synthesis of the tension between top–down policies and bottom–up practices.

This article provides a historical account of the developments of research into seemingly unselfish behavior between 1975 and 1993. I shall first argue that the triumph of the self-interest model in the examination of seemingly unselfish behavior can better be understood if it is remembered that the attempts by a handful of economists to expand their jurisdiction over phenomena that had remained outside their reach occurred at a time when natural scientists showed similar ambitions. As those economists' efforts found a more receptive audience within the profession, disputes shifted, within the discipline itself, to the public policy implications of seemingly unselfish behavior. Then I shall argue that the various efforts to go beyond the self-interest model in economics and political science failed to build a coherent alternative model and produced equally ambiguous policy implications. My conclusion stresses the difficulty of escaping the customary presupposition that seemingly unselfish behavior concerns close-knit groups whereas selfishness applies to impersonal gatherings.

Recent scholarship on nonmarket strategies has sought to understand organizational decisions to target specific institutional venues for nonmarket actions. We contribute to this emerging literature by studying institutional targeting between specialized and general-purpose tribunals, which are available to resolve disputes in a number of settings. Whereas prior work on institutional targeting has primarily focused on the differences in the policy preferences of public actors and the susceptibility of policy positions to influence activities, we focus on the differences in expertise and procedural flexibility that typically accompany tribunal specialization. We develop a theory about targeting decisions (forum shopping) in such contexts, which suggests two main drivers of tribunal targeting—expected settlement and expected returns. Drawing on these mechanisms, we formulate hypotheses linking tribunal targeting decisions to firm-level attributes such as (market) strategic stakes, institutional distance from competitors, and tribunal-specific capabilities. Our hypotheses are tested using a novel data set of patent enforcement against U.S. imports, which also sheds light on nonmarket strategies in patents.

ABSTRACT Despite rapid economic growth and massive inflows of aid, rural poverty in Mozambique is worsening. Agricultural production and productivity have not increased in the last decade. Use of chemical fertilizers and other modern technology is at a low level and decreasing. The present development model emphasizes that the role of government and donors is to provide human capital and infrastructure, while the private sector is responsible for economic development and ending poverty. The most recent national surveys confirm what is being seen elsewhere in Africa — that this non‐interventionist strategy does not raise agricultural productivity or reduce poverty. While 80 per cent of Mozambique's population is engaged in agriculture, this sector contributes only 20 per cent of GDP. This suggests that investments in agriculture are likely to generate pro‐poor growth, both to rural and urban dwellers. This policy failure is increasingly recognized, but donors and government have invested too much political capital in the current policy to change easily.

This article explores the nature of long-term interactions between bureaucrats and interest groups by examining two behavioral logics associated with stability in public policy making. In addition to the implicit short-term strategic choices that usually feature in resource-exchange explanations of interest group access to policy makers, this article shows that bureaucracy–interest group interactions are likely to be dictated by routine behavior and anticipating future consequences as well. By drawing on survey and face-to-face interview data of Dutch senior civil servants and interest groups, the analyses reveal that a practice of regular consultations, the need for political support, and a perceived influential position together explain why bureaucrats maintain interactions with interest groups. The combination of these behavioral logics adds important explanatory leverage to existing resource-exchange explanations and shows that organizational processes as well as long-term strategic considerations should be taken into account to fully explain bureaucracy–interest group interactions.

This article argues that niche party formation is only one of several substitutable strategies for niche activists seeking policy influence. Other organizational mechanisms are argued to be superior to political parties under certain institutional conditions. I introduce a formal model of how activists achieve policy influence by choosing to support the formation of whichever type of organization will optimally send a signal of electoral threat to mainstream politicians. Institutions determine the different access costs for the various organizational mechanisms that can be used to send this signal, and also determine the associated response costs to mainstream politicians of making concessions to different organizational mechanisms. Therefore under particular institutional circumstances that affect these two cost parameters, interest group entry may surpass party entry as the optimal strategy for activists. The predictions of the model are assessed via a nested logit model using cross-national survey data on how activists have allocated their individual support to different organizational mechanisms.

In recent decades great focus has been placed on the excessive consumption of alcohol by young Danes. In this connection, Danish parents have been called upon by the national health authorities to function as prevention workers with a view to reducing their children's alcohol intake. Parallel to these efforts, and also responding to the increase in drinking by young people, efforts to reduce the harm caused by the drinking practices of adolescents have grown bottom-up among parents. In this article we identify and compare these two seemingly contrasting discourses, both of which influence the prevention field: a public alcohol prevention discourse and an everyday discourse, respectively. The analysis is based on alcohol legislation, public health programmes and national alcohol recommendations, as well as on a qualitative study of a special Danish phenomenon: parties for young people organized by parents. In the two discourses alcohol consumption is presented differently. However, traditionally liberal Danish alcohol policy plays an important role in both: the central feature of this policy relies on individual control rather than on public regulation.

This article studies the press coverage of the 12th amendment of the Interstate Treaty on Broadcasting and Telemedia, which defines to what extent public service broadcasting is allowed to operate on the Internet in Germany. This article seeks to find out whether the German press provided
visibility and diversity or whether it restricted the process of opinion forming on this issue. From a pluralistic democratic perspective, balanced and diverse media coverage is an important precondition for decision-making processes in media and communication policy. By means of qualitative
content analysis the frames used by five national print media were identified and examined for diversity. The findings show that the press has indeed restricted the process of opinion forming. Frames with a negative evaluation of public service online activities prevailed regardless of editorial
positions. Alternative frames only occurred fragmentarily. This study demonstrates the importance of diverse media coverage as the basis for coordination and problem solving in the increasingly complex field of media and communication policy.

Policy-makers world-wide are concerned about severe housing problems experienced in cities of the developing world. This paper examines the rental housing situation in Accra, Ghana. It presents findings of a qualitative investigation of the experiences of property owners ( n = 21) and tenants ( n = 23) in an informal private housing market that caters to the housing needs of an expanding section of Accra residents but lacks an institutional framework for regulating landlord/lady–tenant relations. The specific focus of the investigation is on perceptions of an intensifying tenancy management practice called the advance rent system. Overall, the findings reveal severe rental housing pressures and conflicting relations between renters and property owners rooted in asymmetrical perceptions regarding this system. The paper describes the conditions that shape landlords/ladies' behaviours towards renters and their reactions to what are generally perceived as fraudulent tenure terms that property owners arbitrarily impose on tenants in this market. The paper concludes by suggesting policy recommendations to mitigate constraints plaguing a dysfunctional rental market system.

Abstract
In this paper I explore the pedagogical and political shift marked by the meaning and practice of diversity offered through New Labour education policy texts, specifically, the policy and practice of personalized learning (or personalization). The aim of this paper is to map the ways in which diversity relays and mobilizes a set of neoliberal positions and relationships in the field of education and seeks to govern education institutions and education users through politically circulating norms and values. These norms and values, I want to argue, echo and redeem the kinds of frameworks, applications and rationalities typically aligned with modes of neoliberal or advanced liberal governance, e.g. marketization, monetarization, atomization and deregulation. I conclude the paper by considering how diversity in education renders problematic conventional antinomies of the citizen and consumer, public and private, state and civil society, etc., and forces us to confront the rhizomatic character of contemporary governance and education in the era of neoliberalism.

Little scholarly literature has examined why the chambers of the US Congress use conference committees to reconcile inter-cameral legislative differences. Historically, conference committees handle the most important legislation. Why would the chambers be willing to delegate conciliation authority to a subset of the membership that is then granted wide leverage in shaping the policy choices on legislation with such broad implications for the membership? We theorize that conference committees, by way of an information advantage, offer a means of promoting bicameral agreement and avoiding the risk of failure associated with bargaining between the chambers. We develop a formal model of two-sided incomplete information and find that certain conditions on preferences and information yield the chambers, who must be complicit in the decision to go to conference, higher expected policy returns to delegating this authority to utility maximizing conferees. The results of this model suggest that centrally located conference committees, and a reduction in the chambers' information, encourage the use of conference. We offer preliminary empirical support for these propositions.

The Turkish state has been going through a neo-liberal transformation resulting from the strategic reorientation of state institutions in ways that enhance and facilitate the strategies pursued by market-oriented social forces. The reform that granted legal independence to the Turkish Central Bank (TCMB) in 2001 was an institutional turning point within the state structure in Turkey; this policy shift prohibited TCMB's granting of credits to the Treasury and other public institutions. Institutionalization of an anti-inflationary approach to macro-economic policy altered the power balance not only between different state agencies, but also between social groups in favour of financial interests that benefited from monetary stabilization. Rooted in a neo-Gramscian framework, this article explores the legal independence of the TCMB as a function of the market-oriented domestic social forces that emerged as a result of the process of neo-liberal globalization initiated in the 1980s. The article also emphasizes how the hegemonic unification of diverse identities and interests around the strategy of achieving price stability was crucial in the autonomy of the TCMB.

This special issue of German Politics and Society offers a retrospective look atthe German Citizenship Act (Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz, StAG), which passed in1999 and came into force in 2000.1 The law was and continues to be understoodby many academics, policymakers, and lay commentators as constitutinga "paradigm shift" in German citizenship policy and, by extension,prevailing conceptions of German nationhood. The introduction of the lawof territory (jus soli), in particular, was greeted as a welcome acknowledgementof Germany's de facto status as a modern immigration country. Childrenborn and raised in Germany would no longer be rendered permanentforeigners as a consequence of the dominance of the law of descent (jus sanguinis)in the Reichs- und Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz (RuStAG), 1913. Proponentsassumed that the reduction of the residency requirement for naturalizationwould also allow greater numbers of long settled immigrants to assume therights and privileges of German nationality. Just as importantly, Germanywould join the European mainstream as regarded citizenship policy. Thestigma associated with its traditionally ethnic conception of nationhoodwould give way to a more positive, civic identity.

When considering householder responses to flood risk, researchers and policy makers have perhaps focused too much on the influence of risk perceptions and concerns about material costs and benefits. Using secondary analysis of survey data from UK households who had experienced flooding or who were at risk of flooding, this paper presents evidence to suggest that protective behaviour may be influenced less by material and financial considerations than by concerns about feelings of anxiety and insecurity. It also looks at the role of beliefs about protection and flooding in mediating the impacts of flood experience and suggests that experience reduces confidence in the ameliorative capacity of insurance and promotes the belief that protective measures increase anxiety about flooding. The paper concludes that more research should be carried out on the role of anticipated emotions in risk response and that policy makers and the designers of protection products should pay more attention to the emotional barriers and incentives to adaptation.

ABSTRACTThe recent surge in African economic growth rates associated with the rise in commodity prices have led to renewed interest in the role of resources in economic growth. Africa has multiple economic and social needs, infrastructure being one of them. The resource sector is contributing towards growth of investments in infrastructure, but how effective this contribution is to wider development goals needs to be chronicled. This paper examines two vectors of interaction between infrastructure and commodities: first, the direct provision of infrastructure for commodity extraction; second, the use of resource rents for infrastructure spending. This paper emphasises the policy need to align infrastructure spending with development needs, rather than building transport networks per se. We find there are positive indications that such recognition exists on a policy level, and there are partial successes. However, more needs to be carried out to ensure sub‐Saharan Africa can benefit from its infrastructure spending in relation to the commodity sector. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.