1. Es lassen sich historisch immer wieder Situationen ausmachen, in denen auch kritische Betrachter des Zeitgeistes genötigt sind, mit Begriffen bzw. mit Begriffsfeldern zu operieren, obwohl die gehandelten Bezeichnungen vorerst noch unscharf und hinsichtlich ihrer wissenschaftlichen Seriösität allenfalls ein Versprechen für die Zukunft darstellen. ” Virtueller Staat“, ” E-government“, ” E-poli...

The relationship between decentralization and economic growth is generally studied from a perspective stressing universal or quasi-universal regularities across countries. That approach has generated many insights but seems to reach its limits. The paper explains why it allows contrasting positions with regard to the benefits of decentralization even among proponents of free and competitive mar...

The “Partisan Theory” of macroeconomic policy is based on the idea that political parties typically weight nominal and real economic performance differently, with left-party governments being more inclined than right-party ones to pursue expansive policies designed to yield lower unemployment and higher growth, but running the risk of extra inflation. Given suitable assumptions about the struct...

This paper studies how privatising service provision (shifting control rights and contractual obligations to providers) a ects accountability. There are two main e ects. (1) Privatisation demotivates governments from investigating and responding to public demands, since providers then hold up service adaptations. (2) Privatisation demotivates the public from mobilising to pressure for service a...

Although vast normative e-government literature supports the assertion that implementation of e-government reduces transaction cost and promotes Foreign Direct Investment; empirical evidence to support this thesis is limited. Even more, there is limited attempt when studying this phenomenon to integrate e-government literature with other literatures in which major constructs of interest are roo...

STUDY OBJECTIVE Australia has had a two party parliamentary political system for most of the period since its Federation in 1901, dominated either by a social democratic (Labor) or a conservative ideological perspective. This paper investigates whether such political differences at Federal and State levels have influenced suicide rates in the state of New South Wales (NSW) for the period 1901-1...

As China has emerged as one of the world’s economic powerhouses, research on guanxi, or social/business ties in China, becomes more common. This study employs a theoretical framework of social embeddedness, in which the flows of information, resources, and opportunities occur across recognized members of a social network to create mutual benefits. With this framework, the authors empirically in...

Research on the information society and the policies and strategies for its creation has tended to discuss them rationally as the national, and occasionally international or regional, responses to changes in the competitive environment. The predominant notion of the information society in various levels of governance has only rarely been critically examined. The paper provides a Foucauldian ana...