Analysing Choice in Australian Individual Funding Disability Policies

The Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) will allocate funding packages to people with disability who are assessed as needing paid support. The NDIS is an example of individual funding, which is currently not the dominant way of organising disability support in Australia. Individual funding aims to increase opportunities for personal choice. We present a framework for understanding current individual funding policies in each Australian jurisdiction according to two policy dimensions that potentially enable greater personal choice for people with disability: who holds their allocated funds and where support can be purchased. The findings show wide disparities in choice across the country, particularly due to constrained funds and the shortage of support to purchase in regional areas. The analysis demonstrates that NDIS implementation will need to consider that, while individual funding can be empowering for some people with disability, enabling choice can be challenging for administrators and service providers.     

The implementation of complex social policy: Institutional layering and unintended consequences in the National Disability Insurance Scheme

In this article, we identify the unfolding unintended consequences which flow from one instance of policy layering in Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). We show how use of a causal diagram, which highlights feedback loops and emergent properties, to map complex chains of causal factors can assist policy scholars and policy practitioners to understand the likely direction of change and possible responses. In the case of Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme, our analysis suggests that the likely direction of change will work against two of the fundamental design features of the NDIS: providing participants with more choice and control, and ensuring all eligible Australians are able to access appropriate services and supports regardless of where they live. Our analysis points to the use of price regulation as the site of potential intervention because of the role it plays in subsequent feedback loops and the development of the two, unwelcome, emergent properties.     

Will the National Disability Insurance Scheme Improve the Lives of those Most in Need? Effective Service Delivery for People with Acquired Brain Injury and other Disabilities in Remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities

The aims of National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) are to provide long‐term, person‐centred care and support to all Australians with a significant and ongoing disability, including individuals with an acquired brain injury (ABI). The scheme has significant potential to provide equitable opportunity of access to health and disability services. Historically, however, service provision in remote and outer regional areas of Australia lags behind more densely populated centres. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders living with disability are already significantly marginalised. Further to this, people with an ABI are very often misunderstood and overlooked by disability services, health professionals and governments, and frequently fall victim to the criminal justice system. This paper provides an overview of the state of ABI disability for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in remote and outer regional settings, and the present sets of barriers they face to obtaining quality care and effective interventions. A significant opportunity has emerged with the advent of the NDIS but equitable benefit can only be achieved if additional and specialised measures are devised and implemented to appropriately screen for, and assess, incidence of ABI; disability services are appropriately resourced to overcome the pre‐existing disadvantage, and education, training and recruitment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders with the NDIS is undertaken to lead attitudinal changes in community to disability and health services. This paper concludes with recommendations for the NDIS to meet its laudable objectives.     

Adjudicating reasonable and necessary funded supports in the National Disability Insurance Scheme: A critical review of the values and priorities indicated in the decisions of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal

Beyond the initial euphoria of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), tough choices will be needed for sustainability. Although the spirit of the NDIS is to deliver choice and control, the Australian government's objective is to ensure that rights and aspirations are proportionate to expectations of best practice, aptness of mainstream services and cost effectiveness. The position in this paper is that this test of ‘reasonable and necessary’ when determining funded supports, raises value dilemmas for government and citizens. The objective is to demonstrate this through a critical scrutiny of the reviews and decisions regarding reasonable and necessary funded supports of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT). In this paper, a synthesis and critique of 35 appeals to the AAT and one Federal Court Appeal are used to make explicit the decisional ambiguities and contestations in the scheme and the values and priorities that are currently dominant in the allocation of reasonable and necessary support. This in turn is used as a basis for a discussion about the operation of rights in the scheme and what counts as legitimate support. The benefit is for scheme transparency and fairness but also broader debate about core principles and values to inform decisions about scarce resources in society.     

THE JUSTICE MOTIVE IN THE SOCIAL POLICY PROCESS: SEARCHING FOR NORMATIVE RULES OF DISTRIBUTION

Policy analysis in the United States relies heavily on the microeconomic assumption that the primary motive in individual and organizational behavior is self interest. After describing how the over-reliance on self interest emerged, this paper provides evidence that participants in the social policy process relyon other motivations to structure their decision-rules which are equally if not more important than self interest. The paper goes on to describe and explain how decision-rules based on notions of distributive justice operate and to integrate this line of inquiry with an evolving paradigm for policy research which is sensitive to organizational context, supports adaptive administration, and encourages the analysis of the normative premises underlying social policy action.     

Business associations in Kenya: the success factors

Governments create the political and economic environment in which their countries' businesses operate, usually described as the ‘enabling environment’ or ‘investment climate’. In response, business associations seek to influence public policy to make it easier for their members to “do business”. Scholars suggest that interest groups are able to form lasting relationships with governments based on a resource exchange mechanism. This paper suggests that, at least in developing countries, a more nuanced explanation is necessary. Business associations, in particular, need proactively to pursue a logic of ‘competence’ as well as a logic of ‘positive relationships’. This paper assesses the outcomes of advocacy projects undertaken by business associations in Kenya in the period 2008–2013, considers the degree to which the associations contributed to the decision to change policy and then analyses the factors perceived by business associations to have led to their success in influencing public policy. We find evidence to support the expectation that business associations must develop a wide range of competences whilst building relationships with multiple stakeholders. The findings will be relevant to practitioners as well as to researchers and donors. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Labour market risks and political preferences: The case of temporary employment

The political economy literature has gathered compelling evidence that labour market risks shape political preferences. Accordingly, insecurity fuels support for redistribution and left parties. This article analyses this argument for temporary workers, a so far neglected risk category which has increased dramatically in the past two decades. Temporary workers also have been in the focus of recent insider‐outsider debates. Some authors in this line of research have argued that temporary work leads to political disenchantment – for example, non‐instrumental responses such as vote abstention or protest voting. This contradicts risk‐based explanations of political preferences. The article discusses both theoretical perspectives and derives conflicting hypotheses for the empirical analysis of temporary workers' policy and party preferences. The review reveals considerable ambiguity regarding the questions which parties temporary workers can be expected to support and what the underlying motives for party choice are. Synthesising arguments from both perspectives, the article proposes an alternative argument according to which temporary workers are expected to support the ‘new’ left – that is, green and other left‐libertarian parties. It is argued that this party family combines redistributive policies with outsider‐friendly policy design. Using individual‐level data from the European Social Survey for 15 European countries, the article supports this argument by showing that temporary, compared to permanent, workers exhibit higher demand for redistribution and stronger support for the new left. Neither the risk‐based nor the insider‐outsider explanations receive full support. In particular, no signs of political disenchantment of temporary workers can be found. Thus, the findings challenge central claims of the insider‐outsider literature.     

Gendering the ‘responsible risk taker’: citizenship relationships with gender-neutral social assistance policy

This paper explores the gendered relationships among reforms to social assistance policy, concurrent transformations in citizenship rights to benefits, and low-income parents' experiences of these changes in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. Policy discourse in all three provinces increasingly constructs mothers and fathers as ‘responsible risk takers’ who are entitled to income support conditional on their employability efforts (for example, attendance in welfare-to-work programmes) or market citizenship. Qualitative interviews with 41 mothers and five fathers illustrate how this ‘gender-neutral worker-citizen’ model can be gendered in application and is contradicted by parents' gendered identities and everyday realities when living on social assistance. Using the theoretical perspective of gender as a social structure, the paper draws upon these findings to provide empirical support for a dominant theoretical argument in feminist scholarship – that gender-neutral policy is gendered and has deeply gendered consequences.     

When Will Public Officials Listen? A Vignette Experiment on the Effects of Input Legitimacy on Public Officials’ Willingness to Use Public Participation

Public officials can be reluctant to use citizens’ input in decision-making, especially when turnout is low and participants are unrepresentative of the wider population. Using Fritz Scharpf's democratic legitimacy approach, the authors conducted a survey-based vignette experiment to examine how the input legitimacy of participatory processes affects (1) public officials’ willingness to use public participation in administrative decision-making, (2) their assessment of the quality of the policy decision, and (3) their anticipation of popular support for the policy outcome. The study shows that turnout and participants’ representativeness have a positive and significant effect on public officials’ attitudes toward public participation. Specifically, participants’ representativeness influences public officials’ willingness to use citizens’ inputs more than turnout.     

Evidence in the Networked Governance of Regional Decarbonisation: A Critical Appraisal

This paper examines the use of evidence in collaborative policy making focusing on the challenges of implementing national decarbonisation policies in regional areas. Its case study of a staged policy intervention to promote the ‘transition to a low carbon economy’ in Victoria's coal‐dependent Latrobe Valley reveals the selective use of evidence to support policy directions that emerged from the interaction of policy knowledge and the political mood. The paper shows how local conditions can be manipulated to enable the production of evidence consistent with the policy objective, but also suggests that despite combining orchestrated evidence with customised forms of networked governance, it is not possible to suppress or deflect unresolved political disagreements.     

The Role of Policy Labs in Policy Experiment and Knowledge Transfer: A Comparison across the UK,Denmark, and Singapore

Abstract

Policy labs have been increasingly used to generate scientific evidence and political momentum to boost policy experiments, but our understanding of the conditions for knowledge creation and transfer through policy experiments in the labs is scarce. This paper compares the UK’s Cabinet Office’s Behavioral Insights Team (BIT), Denmark’s the Danish MindLab, and Singapore’s the Human Experience Lab (THE Lab) to identify their similarities and differences in fostering policy experiment and knowledge transfer. It is found that BIT as the “Nudge Unit” is keen on bringing in rigorous scientific evidence to advocate effective albeit controversial policies, critical to its survival and influence in an adversarial political circumstance. MindLab takes more initiative to co-create and run projects together with agencies and organizations. THE Lab is dedicated to gleaning ethnographic insights from various stakeholders to support design thinking in policy implementation. These discernable differences can be attributed to their different political regimes and policy environments, which suggest workable avenues for policy labs in other countries.     

Rapporteur-shadow rapporteur networks in the European Parliament: The strength of small numbers

Specialisation and delegation of policy leadership within committees is the norm rather than the exception in legislatures around the world. Yet, little research has studied the sub-groups of lawmakers who serve as policy leaders on particular bills. This article uses conceptual and methodological tools from social network analysis to investigate the groups’ composition and relational structure. It tests the proposition that limited human resources lead lawmakers from small parties to more frequently engage with a greater number of colleagues from other parties across a wider range of policy areas. This may have important relational benefits that have the potential to outweigh the structural disadvantages of small party size. The article examines whether small party lawmakers participate more, are more central and have greater potential for brokerage in policy-making networks, or if the constraints associated with small party size and/or particular ideological leanings prevent their realisation. Empirically, the analyses focus on working relationships between rapporteurs and shadow rapporteurs in the adoption of reports by standing committees of the 7^th European Parliament, 2009–2014. Methodologically, a mixed methods approach is employed. The quantitative analyses show that small party size does not affect legislators’ participation in policy-making networks, but that it increases legislators’ centrality and brokerage potential. Regarding ideology, being committed to democratic participation as a good in itself has a positive association with all three outcomes, while attitudes to European integration show no effect. The qualitative data suggest that the relational benefits of belonging to a small party partially mitigate the structural disadvantages associated with it. They also indicate that policy making in the European Parliament is quite inclusive, as any systematic exclusion tends to be the result of self-marginalisation.     

Disability and support relationships: What role does policy play?

Very little is known about how relationships between people with disabilities and their paid support workers are positioned in policy. With the policy shift toward choice of provider, individualised approaches, person centredness and self‐directed funding, the nature of their relationship assumes a more prominent role in the quality of support practice. The policy analysis in this article explores the extent to which current disability policy acknowledges, promotes, or diminishes the relationships between people with disabilities and workers, in their organisational context. It uses Honneth's conditions for recognition—love (cared for), rights (respected) and solidarity or social esteem (valued)—to understand how policy positions mutuality in the relationship. The policy review applied a three‐stage process: categorisation of policies, textual analysis and content analysis to policy documents at four levels—international, Australian federal, state and organisational in two case studies. The analysis revealed that while a rights framework is explicit in most policies, the emphases on the conditions for recognition within a relationship between people with disabilities and workers are compromised in instructional policies that attempt to manage the tension between choice and risk, particularly at the organisational level.     

Why Solidarity Matters: The Political Strategy of Welfare Design

Reporting on our recent book, The Solidarity Society, this article explores the way in which the design of welfare programmes interacts with and shapes the underlying quality of social relations between members of society—and, through this, public attitudes to welfare. Given that sustaining generous welfare over long timescales requires the support of electorates, this ‘relational’ dimension of welfare policy is crucial for the long‐term strategy of tackling poverty and inequality. The article looks in particular at the ‘welfare dilemmas’ that can arise from tensions between targeting and universalism and between need and entitlement, where the distributional and relational elements of welfare policy work against one another. We conclude that entrenching a generous welfare settlement will require strong elements of both universalism and reciprocity in the design of welfare.     

The Policy Design Effect: Proximity as a Micro‐level Explanation of the Effect of Policy Designs on Social Benefit Attitudes

Public and individual support for a policy is affected by how it is designed – that is, how eligibility is determined. This results in universal policies being more popular than contributions‐based policies, which in turn enjoy more public support than the selective kind. The literature on welfare attitudes have argued that this ‘policy design effect’ can be explained by a combination of self‐interest patterns, public perceptions of the recipient group and whether eligibility under the policy is perceived as fair or arbitrary. The explanations, however, lack micro‐level theory and testing as to why the design of a policy affects individual and public support. This article seeks to explain this policy design effect by theoretically outlining and testing how being proximate to recipients of a social benefit affects attitudes towards the benefit. A survey of attitudes towards spending on five social benefits in Denmark shows a large impact on attitudes from being proximate to recipients under selective policies, little or no impact from universal policies and a pattern that falls in‐between for the contributions‐based policy. This article thus provides micro‐level evidence for the different impacts on attitudes depending on the design of a policy, and a possible explanation for why the design impacts attitudes differently.     

Comparing the role of personal and organisational support on the innovative behaviour of frontline healthcare workers in Australia and the United States

This paper empirically uses a street-level bureaucrat (SLB) lens to compare the impact of personal and organisational support on the innovative behaviour of frontline healthcare workers in Australia and the United States. Survey data came from the 260 U.S. and 220 Australian respondents. The structural equation model shows that organisational (i.e. manager–subordinate relationships) and personal supports (i.e. psychological capital [PsyCap]) significantly influence the innovative behaviour of frontline SLBs in health care. Further, the mediation results show that reciprocal social exchanges provide the foundations for facilitating the growth of healthcare workers’ PsyCap, which then gives them the resilience to be innovative in the workplace. The U.S. respondents perceived stronger organisational support and consequently had a better platform for building PsyCap – providing better work conditions for facilitating innovative behaviour to bourgeon. The paper adds to SLB theory concerning the influence of two variables on SLBs' innovative behaviour, in addition to a meaningful comparison of the U.S. and Australian healthcare workers. If governments and organisations want innovative workers, then the policies must be based on empirical evidence that shows the impact on all stakeholders, including SLBs, because otherwise, irrespective of policy directives, the outcome is low levels of employee wellbeing (which likely results in limited innovative activity).     

The Future of Social Policy in Scotland: Will Further Devolved Powers Lead to Better Social Policies for Disabled People?

Scotland has laid claim to being ‘different’ from the rest of the UK with regards to disability policy. This article examines the evidence for that with regard to long‐term and social care, and discusses the possibilities opened up by the devolution of disability benefits. It asks whether Scotland will demonstrate policy divergence from the rest of the UK, and whether that is likely to be beneficial for disabled people. It argues that Scotland has the potential to create better social policies for disabled people, but faces significant challenges in doing so.     

Strategic use of evidence in state-level policymaking: matching evidence type to legislative stage

Although interest in research utilization in the policy process has grown, how advocates strategically deploy different types of evidence to influence lawmakers remains not well understood. In this paper, we draw on the Advocacy Coalition Framework and the Narrative Policy Framework to show how various types of evidence—from empirical findings to personal anecdotes—were utilized by advocates during the 2 years leading to the passage of California’s historic 2010 law to extend foster care. The result was a generous and flexible entitlement policy passed with bipartisan support in the context of a recession, a state budget deficit, and an ambivalent governor. We find that leaders of a diverse advocacy coalition strategically showcased different types of evidence at specific moments in the legislative process. Each evidence type can be tied to a specific narrative element and strategy. Advocates first used research evidence to convince lawmakers of the policy’s effectiveness, then used professional expertise and benefit-cost analysis to convince them it would come at an acceptable cost, and finally used personal narratives to motivate them to act. We conclude that though benefit-cost analyses play an integral role in policymaking during a time of austerity, advocacy coalitions may still benefit from personal stories that lend emotional potency and urgency.     

发展型福利模式下的中国养老制度安排

养老问题是人口老龄化研究的核心命题。随着人口老龄化成为中国社会的常态,中国的养老制度安排不应是应急策略,还必须考虑到老龄社会的可持续发展。本文以发展型福利的视角重新审视中国养老制度,试图为实现养老政策的发展型转变构建一个初步的分析框架。发展型福利模式强调经济与社会发展的内在整合,重视社会福利的生产主义特色,并致力于推进福利主体的能力发展。基于此,本文认为构建中国的发展型养老政策应首先重塑养老制度安排的价值立场,协调短期目标与中长期战略的关系,并由此在行政管理体制创新的基础上推进老年福利的适度普惠性、在机会平等的基础上促进老年人口参与发展过程、增进对未来劳动人口的人力资本投资、以及关注家庭能力发展在养老可持续性中的作用。这些分析对于政府审视现有养老制度安排,并合理选择养老政策改革的切入点提供了理论和实践依据。     

Social media echo chambers and satisfaction with democracy among Democrats and Republicans in the aftermath of the 2016 US elections

There is widespread evidence that individuals select information that supports their convictions and worldviews. This behavior yields the formation of echo chambers – environments in which an individual’s own political beliefs are repeated and amplified and dissenting opinions are screened out. Recent research demonstrates that social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter can facilitate this selection into homogenous networks. Using data from a representative nation-wide online survey, we consider the degree to which respondents’ social media networks resemble virtual echo chambers. We then analyze the effect of these social media echo chambers on satisfaction with democracy among Democrats and Republicans in the aftermath of the 2016 US elections. Our findings reveal that virtual echo chambers boost democratic satisfaction among Republicans but they do not have an effect on system support by self-identified Democrats. Our paper therefore adds to a growing literature linking online behaviors to mass attitudes about politics.