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Reconceptualizing the Politics of Pockets of Effectiveness: A Power Domains Approach
Full text linkThis previous chapter argued that existing studies of PoEs have struggled to specify the forms of politics that shape how PoEs emerge and perform PoEs over time. To help address this problem, this chapter outlines the new conceptual and methodological approach developed for this project, which constitutes the first systematic investigation of PoEs across different types of political context. In conceptual terms, the authors argue that an alignment of political settlements analysis with critical theories of state power and African politics can help reveal how PoEs are shaped by underlying relations of power and politics. However, PoEs also need to be located within the particular ‘policy domain’ that they operate within, and which defines the political role they play, the policy challenges they face, and the organizational characteristics they require to perform effectively. The chapter identifies how this integrated ‘power domains’ approach can generate researchable propositions and how these were investigated through a mixture of within- and across-case analysis. It summarizes the results of the expert surveys that undertaken in Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia, which were chosen to represent different types of political settlement. These surveys identified state agencies that operated within the domain of economic governance, namely ministries of finance, central banks, and revenue authorities. The chapter discusses how in-depth mixed methods investigations of these fifteen organizational case-studies were undertaken, tracking performance from the early 1990s through to the late 2010s, and locating each within shifting political settlement dynamics and the changing transnational political economy of development
The Negotiated Politics of Social Protection in East and Southern Africa
Full text linkSocial assistance programmes proliferated and expanded across much of the global South from the mid-1990s. Within Africa there has been enormous variation in this trend: some governments expanded coverage dramatically while others resisted this. The existing literature on social assistance, or social protection more broadly, offers little in explanation of this variation. Drawing on the literature on political settlements and democratic politics, we argue that variation results from the political contestation and negotiation between political elites, voters, bureaucrats, and transnational actors. The forms of politics that matter at each of these inter-related sites of negotiation include struggles over ideas as well as material interests and reflect the ways in which social assistance is being used to advance certain political as well as developmental projects in sub-Saharan Africa
The politics of promoting social cash transfers in Zambia
No full textThis chapter examines the rise of social cash transfers in Zambia, going beyond the focus on elections and institutions within mainstream accounts of how social protection is likely to emerge in Africa to demonstrate that there are two alternative drivers: shifting dynamics within Zambia’s political settlement and the promotional efforts of a transnational policy coalition. The extensive efforts of this policy coalition helped get social cash transfers onto the policy agenda, but they only gained political traction when the balance of power within Zambia’s ruling coalition shifted and key actors perceived there to be a crisis regarding the distributional strategies deployed to maintain the stability and legitimacy of the political settlement. Social protection has yet to displace existing interests, ideas, and rent-allocation practices; however, cash transfers are gaining localized support. What matters now is the way in which such transfers become integrated within Zambia’s distributional regime
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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