THE TRADITION OF MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND ITS ROLE IN THE BUREAUCRATIC MANAGEMENT OF CRISES

This article explores the relationship between the United Kingdom's doctrine of ministerial responsibility and bureaucratic efforts to control four contemporary crises. Evidence emerges from a series of interviews with experienced crisis managers, which draws attention to the way in which this convention: (1) tacitly conditioned the thinking and behaviour of bureaucratic crisis actors through their sensitivity to political risk; and (2) was reinterpreted and utilized instrumentally by political and bureaucratic agents in response to the dilemmas posed by each crisis. The analysis of these themes connects governance and crisis literatures together by shedding light on the interaction between governance ‘traditions’, 21st century crisis episodes and the requirements of crisis management.     

Mass destruction

How international organizations influence the domestic politics and foreign policies of states is often ignored in the study of international cooperation. This article develops an approach focusing on how states may influence the international agenda, which then shapes the position‐taking opportunities and constraints politicians face as they try to maintain their domestic political positions. This article is a preliminary exploration of how agenda setting works, what kinds of agenda‐setting strategies are available, and under what conditions agenda setting matters. Aspects of past secessionist crises will be used to clarify the discussion. The interaction between domestic position taking and international agenda setting will then be applied to the current crisis in Yugoslavia to determine why Greece, in particular, has been more influential than one might have expected.     

BUREAUCRATIC RESPONSIVENESS: EFFECTS OF ELECTED GOVERNMENT,PUBLIC AGENDAS AND EUROPEAN ATTENTION ON THE UK BUREAUCRACY

What determines the bureaucratic agenda? This article combines insights from models of bureaucratic behaviour with agenda‐setting models of government attention to test the effects of elected government, public, and EU agendas on the bureaucratic agenda. Using time series cross‐sectional analyses of subject and ministry coded data on UK statutory instruments from 1987 to 2008, I find strong effects for both the elected government and EU legislative agendas on UK statutory instruments. Furthermore, by breaking the data into different sets based on their relationship with the EU, several logical differences in these effects are found. These results include the EU agenda having exclusive influence on instruments implementing EU directives, and the UK agenda being the sole driver of bureaucratic attention on those instruments that mention the EU but do not implement EU legislation. This article opens a new avenue for research on bureaucracy by approaching it as a unique policy‐making institution.     

Is resilience enough? The macroprudential reform agenda and the lack of smoothing of the cycle

After the financial crisis, central banks were entrusted with implementing an ambitious macroprudential reform agenda. The goal was arguably twofold: to increase the resilience of the financial system and to lower the amplitudes of the financial cycle. A decade later, the implementation of the agenda is characterized by the pursuit of measures to raise the resilience of the financial system, while tools to smoothen the cycle have been rather sidelined. To explain this difference in implementation efforts, the article combines ideational scholarship with the analytical stance of reputational theory and analyses the technocratic debate over macroprudential strategy among policy‐makers of the Fed, the Bank of England (BoE) and the European Central Bank (ECB). The article identifies reputational concerns linked to the need for discretionary interventions, the uncertain scientific status of the concept of the cycle and missing metrics as causes for concern, leading most central banks to shy away from forcefully implementing this policy goal.     

TWO MYTHS OF CONVERGENCE IN PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REFORM

The literature on public management reform exhibits two intertwined convergence myths. First, a world‐wide consensus on a new public management (NPM) reform agenda is seen to exist amongst policy reformers and practitioners. If this agenda is not fully implemented in all cases, this is generally explained by political and reform setbacks rather than disagreement on policy aims. Second, this NPM agenda is now seen as challenged and even abandoned and replaced by an emergent post‐NPM or ‘public value leadership’ agenda and/or policy paradigm. We show the NPM convergence is overstated, with a remarkable resilience of existing institutions, and a diversity of public management systems. On the other hand, even within NPM exemplars that have putatively now adopted a post‐NPM agenda, there is debate to what degree NPM has been abandoned, and over the novelty, coherence and resilience of the post‐NPM agenda. Divergence and contextual variation prevail. The role of myth in policy reform is further examined.     

‘Hardware,Software or Network Connection?’ Theorizing Crisis in the UK Next Steps Agencies?

This paper explores the literature theorizing institutional crises by examining the policy problems faced by the UK's Child Support Agency and Prison Service Agency in the mid 1990s. In both these cases the 'hardware' (delivery through agencies), and the 'software' (policy saliency) were linked to their difficulties. However, these policy areas can be contrasted with the Benefits Agency, another highly salient policy area where no crisis occurred. This paper argues that it was neither the 'hardware' nor the 'software' but the way in which the bureaucratic networks surrounding these agencies operated that explains why the policy process was difficult. In concluding, the relevance of the network concept to the crisis literature is examined, illuminating the role that networks play in promoting or preventing institutional crisis as well as the research questions that arise if network relations are considered alongside a broader understanding of the dynamics of institutional crisis.     

Adding rooms onto a house we love: Central banking after the global financial crisis

This article examines the extent to which central bankers have been willing and able to rethink their beliefs about monetary policy in the wake of the global financial crisis. We show that despite the upheaval, the core pre‐crisis monetary policy paradigm remains relatively intact: central bankers believe that they should primarily pursue price stability through targeting a low inflation rate in a transparent manner, and that they need operational independence in order to achieve this goal. In a bid to address post‐crisis conditions and maintain their credibility, however, central bankers have also layered new elements onto this paradigmatic core. We document both the resilience of pre‐crisis beliefs and the process of layering using computer‐assisted text analysis and qualitative analysis of 13,586 speeches given between 1997 and 2017 by central bankers from around the world.     

The States' Role in U.S. Local Government Fiscal Crises: A Theoretical Model and Results of a National Survey

Abstract

This article hypothesizes four potential roles that states may play in dealing with local government fiscal crises: predict, avert, mitigate and prevent the recurrence of local fiscal crises. Based on a 50‐state telephone survey administered by the author to members of the National Association of State Auditors, Comptrollers and Treasurers in 2002, this article presents detailed information on states' roles in dealing with actual local government fiscal crises. The research found that ten states had formal definitions of local government fiscal crises while the remainder varied between having a working definition, having no definition, or leaving it to local authorities to define a fiscal crisis for themselves. Although the majority of states lacked a rigourous, legal definition of what constitutes a local government fiscal crisis, 36 states reported that they had had such crisis in recent history in their states. Seven overlapping categories of state approaches emerged: the directive approach, the proactive approach, the ad hoc approach, the special legislation approach, the reform approach, the takeover approach, and the responsive approach. States reported a wide range of activities under each of the hypothesized roles. In general, states tended to get involved after a crisis rather than before one occured.     

The Politics of Economic Crisis in Latin America

Researchers widely recognize that economic crises have important political consequences, yet there is little systematic research on the political factors that make nations more or less susceptible to economic crisis. Scholars have long debated the economic consequences of party systems, executive powers, and societal interest groups, but their relationships to crisis proclivity are poorly understood. We assess the political correlates of economic crisis using a cross-sectional time-series analysis of 17 Latin American countries over nearly three decades. Crises are measured along two dimensions—depth and duration—and disaggregated into three types: inflationary, GDP, and fiscal crises. Statistical results suggest that political institutions have a modest, and often unexpected, correlation with crises. More important than institutional attributes are social organization and the nature of party-society linkages, particularly the existence of a densely-organized trade union movement and/or a powerful leftist party. Strong unions and powerful parties of the left are associated with more severe economic crises, though there is some evidence that the combination of left-labor strength can alleviate inflationary crises. The results demonstrate the need to disaggregate the concept of economic crisis and incorporate the societal dimension when studying the political economy of crisis and reform.     

INSTITUTIONAL AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP DIMENSIONS OF CASCADING ECOLOGICAL CRISES

While some of the future impacts of global environmental change such as some aspects of climate change can be projected and prepared for in advance, other effects are likely to surface as surprises – that is situations in which the behaviour in a system, or across systems, differs qualitatively from expectations. Here we analyse a set of institutional and political leadership challenges posed by ‘cascading’ ecological crises: abrupt ecological changes that propagate into societal crises that move through systems and spatial scales. We illustrate their underlying social and ecological drivers, and a range of institutional and political leadership challenges, which have been insufficiently elaborated by either crisis management researchers or institutional scholars. We conclude that even though these sorts of crises have parallels to other contingencies, there are a number of major differences resulting from the combination of a lack of early warnings, abrupt ecological change, and the mismatch between decision‐making capabilities and the cross‐scale dynamics of social‐ecological change.     

Management strategies in response to an institutional crisis: The case of earthquakes in the Netherlands

When a policy sector is confronted with a relatively strong and steep decline in legitimacy, we speak of an institutional crisis. We know little about the causes or consequences of these crises. This article explores how institutional crises are managed. It focuses on the effects of management strategies observed in a case study of an institutional crisis in the Netherlands. While we found that policy elites displayed a tendency to maintain the status quo of a policy sector, we also found that the effectiveness of their response strategies was negated by the counter‐response it evoked among freshly energized interest, advocacy and citizen groups. We conclude that the resolution of an institutional crisis is inherently contested. Based on our case study, we develop a theoretical model and formulate propositions that may help to improve our understanding of institutional crisis management.     

EU agencies' involvement in transboundary crisis response: Supporting efforts or leading coordination?

EU agencies have emerged as entities offering technical coordination to member states and support to the European Commission in different policy areas. Their expertise may play a role in responding to unexpected crises. Against this backdrop, we examine under which circumstances EU agencies, through their specialized expertise, are involved in transboundary crisis responses, and when they acquire a leading position in coordinating those responses. To do so, we study four agencies which faced crises: the EBA and the 2012 banking crisis; the ECDC and the 2014 Ebola outbreak; EFSA and the 2011 E. coli outbreak; and Frontex and the 2015 refugee crisis. Our findings discuss to what extent agencies' involvement in transboundary crises is related to functional (sector characteristics) and institutional (delegation of authority) variables. We also identify that under certain political conditions EU agencies' coordination capacity is activated, allowing them to emerge as leading institutions in transboundary crisis resolution.     

The logic of interdisciplinary studies

In this article, I argue that emerging economies are systematically becoming more susceptible to both currency and banking crises after financial liberalisation (FL). Using data for 27 emerging economies from 1973 to 1998, univariate and multivariate analyses indicate that the likelihood of currency crises and banking crises increase after FL. In particular, liberalisation allows more liquidity to enter an emerging economy, which finds its way into productive and speculative projects. What is common to both types of crises is a significant increase in speculative financing, thereby increasing the chance for borrower default. Thus, the outflow of international capital becomes more likely. The chance of a crisis occurring in response to changes in short-term loans is greater after FL than before. Similarly, the chance of a currency crisis occurring following a currency overvaluation is larger after FL than before. In comparison, the likelihood of a banking crisis occurring in response to an overvalued currency remains the same. Finally, the results show that the chance of a currency crisis declines over time, while the chance of a banking crisis increases after FL.     

BEYOND POLICY NETWORKS: POLICY FRAMING AND THE POLITICS OF EXPERTISE IN THE 2001 FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE CRISIS

For the past decade, the policy community/issue network typology of pressure group interaction has been used to explain policy outcomes and the policy‐making process. To re‐examine the validity of this typology, the paper focuses on the UK government's response to the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) crisis, and in particular the decision to pursue contiguous culling rather than vaccination to overcome the epidemic. Rather than illustrating the emergence of an issue network in agricultural policy, the decision‐making process of the FMD outbreak demonstrates continuity with prior crises. In addition, the politicization of scientific expertise is identified as an emerging trend in crisis management. Policy framing is used to explain the impetus behind the contiguous cull decision, concluding that the legacy of previous policy choices conditioned the crisis response to a far greater degree than contemporaneous pressure group action.     

Coping and Resilience during the Food,Fuel, and Financial Crises

This article aggregates qualitative field research from sites in 17 developing countries to describe crisis impacts and analyse how people coped with the food, fuel, and financial crises during 2008–2011. The research uncovered significant hardships behind the apparent resilience, with widespread reports of food insecurity, debt, asset loss, stress, and worsening crime and community cohesion. There were important gender and age differences in the distribution of impacts and coping responses, with women often acting as shock absorbers. The more common sources of assistance were family, friends, community-based and religious organisations with formal social protection and finance less important. The traditional informal safety nets of the poor became depleted as the crisis deepened, pointing to the need for better formal systems for coping with future shocks.     

Prospect theory,operational code analysis,and risk-taking behaviour: a new model of China’s crisis behaviour

Integrating prospect theory and operational code analysis, this paper introduces an innovative approach to studying the decision making of Chinese leaders during crises. The unique contribution of this paper is to adopt the methodology of operational code analysis to measure the domain of actions of policy makers in the application of prospect theory. We suggest that leaders’ operational code beliefs can help us to identify in which domain of actions (gains or losses) leaders are located during crises. Xi Jinping experienced two notable foreign policy crises in 2014, the ‘oil rig’ crisis with Vietnam and the ‘P-8 crisis’ with the United States, which are examined in detail to illustrate Xi’s operational code beliefs and risk-taking behaviour of ‘confident accommodation’ behaviour during crises. To test the process validity of integrating operational code analysis and prospect theory, Hu Jintao’s operational code beliefs and crisis behaviour in 2011–2012 are then compared to Xi’s beliefs and decisions in this study of China’s crisis behaviour.     

Caretaker Governments in Czech Politics: What to Do about a Government Crisis

Czech politics suffers from a low durability of most of its governments, and frequent government crises. One of the products of this situation has been the phenomenon of caretaker governments. This article analyses why political elites have resorted to this solution, and discusses how this has reflected an older Czech tradition. Two cases of such governments are analysed in detail. The To?ovský government was characterised by the ability of the Czech president to advance his agenda through this government at a time when the party elites were divided. The Fischer government was characterised by the considerably higher role of parties that shaped and limited the agenda of the cabinet, and the president played a more static role.     

Crises and unpredictability in developing countries

Developing countries have suffered most of the financial crises in the context of the process of economic and financial globalisation. Both current and previous crises have revealed that unpredictability is a feature common to all the episodes which occurred during the process of globalisation. Although certain alarms went off, any of those external financial crises were actually predicted by the advanced methods in use for prediction and country risk analysis. Taking into consideration the information above, the aim of this paper is to check the ability to foresee external financial crises in developing countries of both the country risk index published by Euromoney and the Credit Ratings variable included therein. We have focused on the external financial crises that took place between 1992 and 2011, that is, in a full globalisation era. The results are negative. It appears that neither the index nor the sovereign ratings are able to reflect early enough the vulnerabilities that arise previously to the setting off the crisis episodes. This leads us to conclude that the existing models of country risk have limits. Thus, it would necessary to develop new instruments to measure this risk, considering uncertainty as an essential feature of the current economic and financial environment.     

Going South: capitalist crisis,systemic crisis,civilisational crisis

This article argues that the current protracted and severe financial and economic crisis is only one aspect of a larger multidimensional set of simultaneous and interacting crises on a global scale. The article constructs an overarching framework of analysis of this unique conjecture of global crises. The three principal crisis aspects are: an economic crisis of (over) accumulation of capital; a world systemic crisis (which includes a global centre-shift in the locus of production, growth and capital accumulation), and a hegemonic transition (which implies long term changes in global governance structures and institutions); and a worldwide civilisational crisis, situated in the sociohistorical structure itself, encompassing a comprehensive environmental crisis and the consequences of a lack of correspondence and coherence in the material and ideational structures of world order. In these ways, the global system is now `going south'. All three main aspects of the global crisis provoke and require commensurate radical social and political responses and self-protective measures, not only to restore systemic stability but to transform the world system.