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This article analyses how high‐level bureaucrats evaluate the leadership of technocrat and partisan cabinet ministers in different roles of policymaking. The argument is that bureaucrats perceive ministers with policy expertise to have a central role in policymaking, especially in policy‐directing tasks. Despite their essential contribution to coalition formation, ministers with political experience are negatively evaluated in all policymaking roles. The article presents evidence based on an endorsement experiment conducted with the high‐level bureaucracy in Brazil. The results show that ministers with policy experience receive positive evaluations from the bureaucracy in policy formulation and implementation roles but not to carry out political coordination activities with the presidency or the legislature. Ministers with a partisan profile receive negative evaluations in all tasks of the policy process. Exploring the mechanism, we show that the negative assessment of ministers with a partisan profile is maintained even when the profile of the bureaucrat is considered. These results show the negative attitudes of high‐level bureaucrats towards partisan ministers in contexts of substantial patronage and corruption and contribute to the debate on ministerial appointments and their implications for policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aotearoa New Zealand's rapidly growing aerospace sector is still in its infancy, which presents us with the unique opportunity to incorporate sustainability as a key performance parameter from the outset. Through surveys and interviews with key stakeholder groups, we show that currently, the sector largely deprioritises environmental sustainability and compliance with Te Tiriti o Waitangi in favour of economic growth. Actors are not incentivised to consider any aspects of sustainability. While environmental concerns are acknowledged, they are often viewed as technical challenges to overcome by individual companies, rather than global systemic issues that require a collaborative approach. Moreover, the Government's role as a customer, investor and regulator creates a sustainability leadership vacuum, with no clear commitment to quantify or prioritise sustainability within the sector. The results highlight the need for a new approach to balance growth with genuine sustainable development principles using innovative governance models.Abbreviations: DPMC: Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet; LCA: life cycle assessments; LCANZ: Life Cycle Association of New Zealand; LEO: low Earth orbit; MBIE: Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment; NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration; NZ: New Zealand; NZSA: New Zealand Space Agency: U.S.: United States (of America) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research note traces the life of H. Mohammad Hasan, who was honoured posthumously in 1998 with the Bintang Mahaputra Adipradana--an award given in recognition of extraordinary contributions and loyalty to the country. Born in 1925 as Tan Kim Liong in Dutch colonial Borneo, Hasan settled after independence in Jakarta, where he became a photojournalist. His work and passion for chess led him to befriend several up-and-coming politicians, including those from the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU). Chosen as NU's member of parliament in late 1956, he subsequently converted to Islam and adopted his Muslim name. As a cabinet minister during Soekarno's final years, he introduced the country's first tax amnesty programme to boost state revenues. Following the 1965 coup, Hasan moved to Hong Kong, where, in addition to engaging in business, he actively organized world chess tournaments. On returning to Indonesia in 1974, Hasan built Hasfarm, the country's largest private cocoa plantation. Hasan's multifaceted life journey ended in 1991 at the age of sixty-six. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1593 Francesco Maria II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, sent a number of diplomatic gifts to Philip II of Spain, intended for the crown prince, the future Philip III. The gifts included a silver model of a citadel accompanied by a set of compasses, the whereabouts of which are currently unknown; a small gilt-bronze sculptural group which has been identified with Giovanni Bandini's The Hunt , today in the Prado Museum; and an illuminated manuscript recounting glorious episodes from the reign of the Emperor Charles V, Philip III's grandfather, identified with British Library, Add. ms 33733, which contains miniatures possibly by Simonzio Lupi. A study of some of the inventories made in Madrid at the beginning of the seventeenth century has revealed that The Hunt and the illuminated manuscript might subsequently have belonged to persons close to the Duke of Lerma, Philip III's prime minister – namely, Juan de Borja, the duke's uncle, and Jerónimo Funes, the son-in-law of the secretary of state, Count of Villalonga, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article summarizes the presentations given at the X International Symposium on Concordat Law in Zaragoza in June 2022, which focused on the regulation of ministers of worship in state civil law. The participation of academics from different countries and universities was highlighted, reflecting a space for dialogue between diverse schools of thought. The presentations addressed topics such as the liberal origins of clergy endowments, ministers of worship in recent concordats, and the regime of ministers of worship in foreign legislations. The financing of Islamic communities in different European countries was also discussed, mentioning the difficulties faced by economic donations from countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia due to the religious radicalization that sometimes accompanies them. Additionally, several studies on the labor regime and social protection of ministers of worship in Spain are mentioned, as well as the scope of ministerial secrecy and the registration of ministers of worship in the Registry of Religious Entities. The monograph also includes communications on topics such as the protection of the confession secrecy, the sustenance of ministers of worship, the social security of ministers of worship of the Orthodox Church in Spain, and the rights and duties of ministers of worship in detention centers. Overall, the work offers a comprehensive and original insight into the topic of ministers of worship and their legal regime. [Extracted from the article]

Hybrid regimes are characterised by a balancing act between democracy and authoritarianism, with neither political regime type being dominant. The balancing of the state between democratic and non-democratic modes of functioning can take the form of a state transforming from authoritarianism to democracy and a form of regression from democracy to authoritarianism, when the democratic system is upset by non-democratic mechanisms. The functioning of the political system in Ukraine during the years 1996–2004 was such that the authoritarian aspects of Ukraine's hybrid regime overshadowed its democratic elements. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way (2002; 2013) refer to this phenomenon as "competitive authoritarianism". This term denotes regimes where authoritarian features are more prevalent than democratic ones, according to the concept. Since 2004, the Ukrainian political system has transitioned towards a hybrid regime that places more emphasis on democratic characteristics. In the following twenty years, the Ukrainian hybrid regime was transformed between democratic-authoritarian hybrid regime (as a result of the events of the "Orange Revolution", and the "Revolution of Dignity") and authoritarian-democratic hybrid regime (during presidency L. Kuchma and V. Yanukovych). The hybridity of the political regime also translated into the functioning of the chief state bodies. The aim of this study was to find an answer to the question whether and to what extent did the hybridity of Ukraine's political regime imply on the specificity of the functioning of the institutions of the prime minister and government in the state. The research hypothesis is that the hybridity of the Ukrainian political regime, as a stage of transition from authoritarianism to democracy, partly contributed to changing the traditional order of functioning of the institutions of prime minister and government in the state just formally losing the head of state's dominant role in the process of government functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indonesian Defense Diplomacy through Confidence Building Measures (CBM) in Southeast Asia is a defense diplomacy step taken by Indonesia towards countries in Southeast Asia. So, the aim of this research is to find out the Confidence-Building Measures (CBMs) that Indonesia has built between international relations actors in the Southeast Asia region using three views of CBMs according to Glosserman, namely unilateral, bilateral and multilateral actions aimed at reducing and preventing war conflicts between parties to the conflict. This research uses a description method with qualitative analysis. As a result, Indonesia has taken important steps to build trust and reduce tensions in the region. Through various peaceful means such as military dialogue, exchange of security information, joint military exercises and multilateral diplomacy, Indonesia seeks to avoid conflict escalation and build mutually beneficial cooperation. In the framework of building CBM, Indonesia faces several conditions that influence the choice of CBM measures, such as prolonged disputes, threats of hostility, incentives to attack first, and disproportionate war costs. The importance of defense diplomacy and cooperation in the Southeast Asia region is reflected in Indonesia's participation in various regional frameworks such as the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), ASEAN Defense Ministers' Meeting (ADMM), and Shangri-La Dialogue. Indonesia seeks to build trust through dialogue, information exchange and joint military activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"L'énigme algérienne: Chroniques d'une ambassade à Alger" by Xavier Driencourt is a book that recounts the author's experiences as France's longest-serving ambassador to Algeria. Driencourt discusses the two main pillars of French influence in Algeria: economic position and cultural and educational influence. He also addresses the tensions and complexities in the France-Algeria relationship, including the perception of the French embassy as a lobby seeking to control Algeria. The book provides insights into the political landscape of Algeria, including the emergence of the hirak protest movement and the role of the military in the country's governance. However, some readers may find the book lacking in historical context and a deeper analysis of the Algerian regime. [Extracted from the article]

The first reporting period of 2024 US-Korea relations was busy, both with managing ongoing issues (good and bad) and adapting to genuinely new evolutionary turns in US-Korea affairs. Concerning the former, US-South Korea relations continued on the same trajectory since President Yoon Suk Yeol assumed office in 2022: deepening bilateral alliance interoperability, enriching trilateral cooperation with Japan, increasing economic security policy convergence with the US. And this despite new foreign, defense, finance, and trade ministers in Seoul. Widely viewed as a referendum on Yoon, April National Assembly elections cast a shadow over much of his foreign and security policy during the reporting period. However, the crushing defeat of Yoon's conservative People Power Party is unlikely to affect his approach to external affairs, where the president retains significant unilateral power. The "management" bucket also contains more threatening scenarios that have been building for months, years, decades. At the top of the list in importance is North Korea's build-out of its nuclear and missile program, which continued apace in the January-April 2024 period, also providing more evidence of the essential hopelessness of international sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "Year of Elections" is upon us and, notwithstanding a ripple or two, there have been no upsets. In Taiwan, the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate won with roughly 40% of the vote, given the divided opposition. Incoming President William Lai Ching-te is expected to extend olive branches Beijing's way when inaugurated on May 20 but the odds of Beijing being receptive are depressingly low. In Pakistan, candidates associated with former Prime Minister Imran Khan won the most seats but not enough to form a new government (or get Khan out of jail). In Indonesia, defense minister and retired army Gen. Prabowo Subianto won as expected, the only (minor) surprise being his first-round majority, avoiding a June runoff (and giving him lots of time to prepare for his October inauguration). In Russia, to no one's surprise, Vladimir Putin emerged victorious, having neutered (if not murdered) any credible opposition. In South Korea, President Yoon Suk Yeol's People Power Party failed to unseat the opposition in National Assembly elections, causing many to refer to him as a lame duck, despite three years remaining in his term. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is also expected to emerge victorious with India's elections still underway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ministers may be powerful policy initiators, but they are not equally powerful. Cabinet control mechanisms have become a crucial part of cabinet governance, which can serve to contain agency loss and consequently constrain ministers in the policymaking process. However, empirical studies have not focused on the impact of such control mechanisms on individual ministers' political outcomes. I turn attention to certain cabinet committees as intra-cabinet control mechanisms and argue that members of these enjoy a policymaking advantage compared to nonmembers. Analyzing ministers' number of laws proposed to parliament in Denmark from 1975 to 2022, I look beyond parties as unitary actors and provide evidence for this causal relationship. Membership of the Economic Committee increases ministers' legislative activity. Thus, even within parties in cabinet, ministers have unequal possibilities to act as policy-seeking. These findings offer new insights into political parties in governments, cabinet governance, policymaking, and legislative processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our understanding of the role of firms in the making of European Union (EU) trade policy remains partial. This article contributes to expanding this literature by investigating under what conditions we observe more firm‐centric lobbying, compared to business associational lobbying, in EU trade policy. We advance the arguments that firm‐centric political lobbying in EU trade policy‐making is a function of both industry and country‐level characteristics. Relying on an original dataset of lobbying contacts with the EU Trade Commissioner, his or her cabinet members and the Director‐General between 2014 and 2018, we find that the likelihood of firm‐centric lobbying increases in (1) EU industries displaying high levels of multinational corporations' activity, global sourcing of intermediates and product differentiation and (2) countries characterized as liberal market economies. Besides showing that firm‐centric models of trade travel well in the EU context, we contribute to advancing the understanding of how domestic political institutions affect the politics of trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2011, Trade Ministers of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) adopted a Decision that allows WTO Members to accord preferential treatment to services and service suppliers originating in least‐developed countries (LDCs). In 2013, another Ministerial Decision was adopted to operationalise the 2011 Waiver Decision. This paper has examined whether the Waiver Decision had been effective in promoting LDCs' commercial modern and traditional services exports and whether Aid for Trade (AfT) flows in favour of the services sectors were instrumental in achieving this objective. The analysis has used 43 LDCs over the period 2005–2018 and the difference‐in‐difference framework along with the two‐step system generalised method of moments estimator. The control group includes 20 Low‐Income Countries (designated as such by the International Monetary Fund) from which LDCs (as defined by the United Nations) are excluded. The analysis has revealed that the Waiver Decision led to higher modern commercial services exports at the expense of traditional commercial services exports. Moreover, as LDCs improved their trading capacity over time (thanks to the cumulative AfT flows for services), the Waiver Decision induced greater modern commercial services exports, but exerted a mixed effect on LDCs' traditional services exports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study evaluates the institutional performance of Kemantren in Yogyakarta City. Changing the nomenclature of the subdistrict to Kemantren as a new local institution in Yogyakarta has some implications. This condition requires the development of a performance evaluation tool for Kemantren, which has yet to be available. A qualitative analysis was conducted to evaluate the performance of Kemantren as a new local institution. Primary data were obtained via in-depth interviews and FGDs, while secondary data were derived from official government documents. The study evaluated the performance of Kemantren by adjusting two Regulations of the Minister of State Apparatus Empowerment and Bureaucratic Reform to assess the performance of policies and public services, namely (a) The Regulation of the Minister of State Apparatus Empowerment and Bureaucratic Reform of the Republic of Indonesia Number 88 of 2021 concerning Evaluation of Accountability for the Performance of Government Agencies and (b) The Regulation of the Ministry of State Apparatus Empowerment and Bureaucratic Reform of the Republic of Indonesia Number 17 of 2017 concerning Guidelines for Performance Assessment of Public Service Delivery Units. The assessment results show a significant impact from changing the nomenclature of subdistricts to Kemantren as a new local institution in the form of special funds. Although the Kemantren program has been funded through special funds from the Yogyakarta Special Region, the policy process starting from policy formulation, implementation, and policy reporting has no difference. In public service performance, Kemantren has done well, although it has not changed much after the change in the nomenclature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Westminster parliamentary democracies like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, research has found that cabinet composition is driven mainly by longstanding norms and practices that privilege older, white males with certain educational and political experiences. Do these trends apply at the subnational level where the demographic make‐up can be quite different? To answer this question, we draw upon an original dataset of all members of the legislative assembly and cabinet in three Canadian territories from 1979 to 2022. These territories are unique given that Indigenous communities loom large in their governments and societies. Using an event history model, we find that territorial cabinets very much reflect the demographic make up of their legislatures, similar to what occurs at the federal level. We also observe important differences between the territories, which suggest that the influence of Westminster structures and norms are likely mediated by factors unique to each territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ending gender-based violence was a central promise of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's self-declared feminist government. Executive speeches about gender-based violence provide clues about what types of feminist ideas undergird the 42nd Parliament. Was carceral feminism advanced, by focusing on punishment? Or neoliberalized feminist ideas, by focusing on the market? Or social justice feminist ideas, by focusing on systemic change? Applying the concept of governance feminism and using Bacchi's WPR approach, this article investigates how gender-based violence is problematized in English- and French-language House of Commons debates in the 42nd Parliament by the cabinet. The speeches problematize gender-based violence as preventable and caused by systemic issues, but this transformational discourse is undermined by a focus on strengthening carceral responses and limiting human potential to economic productivity. Feminist ideas about gender-based violence were adopted, relying on carceral and neoliberalized feminist ideas. The Trudeau Liberals' campaign for change was discursively undermined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Court of Appeal has ruled that the UK government was wrong to introduce regulations in 2019 stating that pre-settled status (PSS) awarded under the EU Settlement Scheme was not sufficient for EU nationals to pass the habitual residence test when claiming benefits. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) also found that people with PSS were not protected from nationality discrimination. However, the Court of Appeal determined that those with PSS are entitled to protection from the Charter of Fundamental Rights, specifically the right to dignity. The Supreme Court has refused the Secretary of State's permission to appeal, making the Court of Appeal's decision binding. [Extracted from the article]

The phenomenon called legislative inflation is extensively used in public debate across jurisdictions – including new democracies attempting to overcome communist legal heritage. Typically, the phrase refers to the quantitative aspect – growth in the number, volume and frequency of amendments of primary and secondary legislation exceeding the natural demands of the technological progress and growing complexity of business relations. This paper attempts to provide a bird's eye view of legislative inflation in Poland after the 1989 democratic breakthrough. As Poland is an example of successful democratic and market transition of the nineties, substantial redrafting of the legal framework during EU accession and populist right-wing governance, the results seem relevant beyond the domestic context. Documented patterns suggest that the search for driving forces behind the legislative inflation should shift from the parliament towards cabinet ministers and the bureaucratic apparatus under their supervision, the pace of legal text production justifies the search for a theoretical conceptualisation of how the law could govern societies unwilling and unable to familiarise themselves with its flow and to examine the impact of legal text production on society and the economy it seems useful to shift from the data on the text itself towards its actual impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of official visits by U.S. Presidents and Secretaries of State on foreign direct investment inflows. The key difficulty in determining a causal effect is the issue of endogeneity. To address potential endogeneity, we use the Endogenous Treatment model (ETM). The estimation results provide evidence that the official visits of U.S. Presidents have a statistically significant positive effect on both foreign investment inflows from the U.S. and on total foreign direct investment inflows. This is robust even after the inclusion of other control variables identified by the literature as confounding factors for foreign direct investment. When we examine the effect of different types of visits, the results show that bilateral meetings during the official visits of U.S. Presidents have a statistically significant positive effect on both foreign investment inflows from the U.S. and total foreign direct investment. These results imply that the visits of U.S. Presidents offer a signal of the confidence of American administrations in the host country, which may in turn encourage American and non-American firms to invest in that country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]