“Modernizing Government”: Mapping Global Public Policy Networks

Public sector reform is a key policy area, driven by global public policy networks. Research on these networks has been inductive, highlighting organizations like the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD). This article examines “virtual policy networks” (VPNs) on the Web. Using IssueCrawler, we conduct a hyperlink analysis that permits us to map seven VPNs. The first network mapped the hyperlinks of 91 organizations identified through inductive methods. The hypothesis that the virtual network would include all actors identified in the inductive approach was refuted. The other six networks focused on: market mechanisms, open government, performance, public employment, reform, and restructuring. Among the findings, the U.S. government is prominent in the first three, while international organizations dominate the others. VPN rankings show that the World Bank dominates the OECD. When the inductive research is blended with the VPN research, the OECD's prominence increases, and we see the importance of market mechanisms and reform VPNs as pillars of globalization.     

Enhancing democracy via bureaucracy: Senior managers' social identities and motivation for policy change

This article challenges the depiction of bureaucracy as a hurdle to democratic responsiveness. It proposes that senior civil servants' (SCSs) dual position as professionals and citizens may enhance government permeability to salient public agendas. Building on social identity theory, we argue that salient public agendas may arouse SCSs' social identification with in‐groups and thereby elicit their motivation for policy change within their task domain. Employing a mixed‐methods design, we analyze SCSs' social identification with the participants of the large‐scale social protests that took place in Israel during the summer of 2011, and their motivation for policy change in response to the protest agenda. We find that SCSs' social identification with the protesters enhanced their motivation for policy change. In addition, SCSs' perception of a conflict between responsiveness to the protest agenda and their organizational or professional identities shaped their preferences for policy solutions more than their motivation for policy change.     

“Big Tigers,Big Data”: Learning Social Reactions to China's Anticorruption Campaign through Online Feedback

This article examines the effect of campaign‐style anticorruption efforts on political support using the case of China's most recent anticorruption drive, which stands out for its harsh crackdown on high‐ranking officials, known as “big tigers.” An exploratory text analysis of more than 370,000 online comments on the downfall of the first 100 big tigers, from 2012 to 2015, reveals that public support for the top national leader who initiated the anticorruption campaign significantly exceeded that afforded to anticorruption agencies and institutions. Further regression analyses show that support for the leaders with respect to intuitions increased with the tigers' party ranking. Findings suggest that while campaign‐style enforcement can reinforce the central authority and magnify support for individual leaders, it may also marginalize the role of legal institutions crucial to long‐term corruption control.     

Are they listening? Public opinion,interest groups and government responsiveness

What is the role of interest groups in the transmission of issues between the public and government policy? While government responsiveness to voters has received widespread scholarly attention, little is known about the role of interest groups in the transmission of public opinion to government. It is argued here that interest groups importantly influence government responsiveness to public opinion, but that the effect varies by type of interest group: while cause groups increase the responsiveness of governments to their electorate, sectional groups decrease government responsiveness. Drawing on a new and unique dataset, this article examines the relationship between public opinion, interest groups and government expenditure across 13 policy areas in Germany from 1986 until 2012 and shows that interest groups indeed have a differential effect on the responsiveness of governments. The article’s findings have important implications for understanding political representation and the largely overlooked relationship between public opinion, interest groups and government policy.     

Outcome‐focussed planning in Australian local government: How council plans and cultural development plans measure up

Contemporary public policy increasingly emphasises a focus on outcomes, the difference that occurs in the lives of citizens from policy and activity of government. Other contemporary imperatives for effective planning include: recognition of the values of the community whom plans serve, direction towards goals and objectives, utilisation of evidence, articulation of theories of change that underpin planning and responsiveness to evaluation. This article reports a desk‐based research project to assess how local government planning documents meet these imperatives. Two documents are examined for 67 councils across Australia: the major strategic document, council plan or other‐named document and the cultural development plan (CDP) or other‐named document that directs staff and investment aimed at cultural enrichment of the LGA. Findings indicate that the majority of councils’ documents appeared only concordant with one or two of these planning imperatives. No plan addressed more than three. Overall, council plans and cultural development plans did not clearly indicate their responsiveness to values of their communities, nor include objectives that formed measurable steps towards goals or formally refer to the use of evidence in decision‐making. No plans included theories of change to underpin decision‐making. This analysis indicates clear areas of improvement for planning for local governance.     

Responsibility to Be Enthusiastic? Public Servants and the Public Face of “Promiscuous Partisanship”

Contemporary public service leaders are no longer the anonymous mandarins of Westminster folklore. Whether giving public speeches to outside organizations or communicating directly with the media, senior public servants are emerging from anonymity to become public actors in their own right. This article undertakes a comparative study across four Westminster jurisdictions—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom—to examine the formal rules and guidelines that apply to public servants when making public statements in their official capacity. Drawing on the late Peter Aucoin's notion of “promiscuous partisanship,” the article argues that public servants are expected to demonstrate a new level of enthusiasm when explaining or justifying government policy to the public. This has implications for the extent to which nonpartisanship can continue to effectively function within Westminster systems.     

Subnational Responses to Fracking in Canada: Explaining Saskatchewan's “Wild West” Regulatory Approach

This article assesses the regulatory response to fracking by Saskatchewan, Canada's second largest oil‐producing province. Public officials and industry representatives claim fracking regulations are “comprehensive” and “robust”; however, there has been no comparative assessment of this claim. To address this gap, we outline the dominant regulatory pathways of U.S. states and Canadian provinces, ranging from applying existing regulations with minimal revisions, to enacting broader revisions or bans. We account for this variation using a framework from Davis ( 2012 ) emphasizing governments’ dependence on the oil sector, the level of support for fracking among elected officials and policy makers, and the influence of key “constituencies.” The article then traces the growth and impact of fracking in Saskatchewan and analyzes new trends in the province's regulation of fracking. Given the province's application of existing regulations with minimal revisions and active weakening of enforcement, we identify Saskatchewan as taking Rabe and Borick's ( 2013 ) “conventional” regulatory approach, typical of Davis's “energy dominant” states.     

“Grabbing Hand” or “Helping Hand”?: Corruption and the Economic Role of the State

This article seeks to disentangle which features of government intervention are linked to corruption and which are not, by distinguishing between the government roles of regulator, entrepreneur, and consumer. It finds that the degree of regulation of private business activity is the strongest predictor of corruption, and that high levels of public spending are related to low levels of corruption. There is no evidence of direct government involvement in production having any bearing on corruption. It is concluded that advanced welfare capitalist systems, which leave business relatively free from interference while intervening strongly in the distribution of wealth and the provision of key services, combine the most “virtuous” features of “big” and “small” government. This suggests that anti‐corruption campaigners should be relaxed about state intervention in the economy in general, but should specifically target corruption‐inducing regulatory systems.     

Politics of childcare policy beyond the left–right scale: Post‐industrialisation,transformation of party systems and welfare state restructuring

Childcare policy has become an integral part of social and economic policy in post‐industrial democracies. This article explores how the transformation of party systems structures the politics of childcare policy. It reveals that political parties contend with each other over childcare and female employment policy on the social‐value dimension as well as the redistributive dimension. Assuming that different party policies have distinct impacts on public childcare policy, it is hypothesised in this article that a government's policy position – composed of the governing parties' policy positions – affects changes in public spending for childcare services. Through an analysis of the pooled time‐series and cross‐section data of 18 advanced industrialised countries from 1980 until 2005 using multivariate regression methods, it is revealed that a government's redistributive left–right policy position interacts with its social liberal–conservative policy position, and that a left–liberal government raises its budget for childcare services while a left–conservative government does not.     

Representation,agendas and institutions

Dynamic agenda representation can be understood through the transmission of the priorities of the public onto the policy priorities of government. The pattern of representation in policy agendas is mediated through institutions due to friction (i.e., organisational and cognitive costs imposed on change) in decision making and variation in the scarcity of policy makers' attention. This article builds on extant studies of the correspondence between public priorities and the policy activities of government, undertaking time‐series analyses using data for the United States and the United Kingdom, from 1951 to 2003, relating to executive speeches, laws and budgets in combination with data on public opinion about the ‘most important problem’. The results show that the responsiveness of policy agendas to public priorities is greater when institutions are subject to less friction (i.e., executive speeches subject to few formal rules and involving a limited number of actors) and declines as friction against policy change increases (i.e., laws and budgets subject to a greater number of veto points and political interests/coalitions).     

Opposition Policy Influence through Agenda‐setting: The Environment in Denmark, 1993–2009

This article addresses the opportunities that the opposition has to influence policy – a topic that has been neglected in existing party policy research. The idea that is developed is applied to a remarkable environmental policy development during the Danish right‐wing government in the 2000s. Contrary to its position when it took office in 2001, the right‐wing government turned green and adopted a series of green policy initiatives. It is argued in this article that vehement and persistent criticism from the left‐wing opposition provides an explanation for this turn. Taking media coverage, public opinion, carbon dioxide emissions and the government's approval ratings into account, the empirical estimation based on unique quarterly data shows that opposition criticism had a systematic impact on the government's pro‐environmental policy development. The implications for party policy research are important. If the aim is to understand how parties matter to policy, the opposition should be taken more seriously.     

NGOs and the “Information Society”: Grassroots Advocacy at the UN—A Cautionary Tale

This article looks at the United Nations‐brokered World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in light of nongovernmental organization participation as a full partner in consultations and decisions. Combining participation‐observation fieldwork, interviews, and eye‐witness accounts with a selective content analysis of key WSIS documentation, official and dissenting, the article presents the occupational hazards of this sort of encounter between civil society participants, government, and business sectors as global information and communication technologies (ICTs) and media agenda‐setting partners. It focuses on the hazards of key word strategies in what are now irrevocably computer‐embedded domains for action and access. Hyperlinked textual production and related key word search functionalities are now, I argue, integral to global agenda‐setting in the intertwined areas of ICT, media, and sociocultural policy. This formal encounter between multilateral institutions and social justice and ICT advocacy, online and on the ground, raises new questions for policy research in these domains, questions that require fresh approaches.     

The Dynamics of Political Attention: Public Opinion and the Queen's Speech in the United Kingdom

This article represents the effect of public opinion on government attention in the form of an error-correction model where public opinion and policymaking attention coexist in a long-run equilibrium state that is subject to short-run corrections. The coexistence of policy-opinion responsiveness and punctuations in political attention is attributed to differences in theoretical conceptions of negative and positive feedback, differences in the use of time series and distributional methods, and differences in empirical responsiveness of government to public attention relative to responsiveness to public preferences. This analysis considers time-series data for the United Kingdom over the period between 1960 and 2001 on the content of the executive and legislative agenda presented at the start of each parliamentary session in the Queen's Speech coded according to the policy content framework of the U.S. Policy Agendas Project and a reconstituted public opinion dataset on Gallup's "most important problem" question. The results show short-run responsiveness of government attention to public opinion for macroeconomics, health, and labor and employment topics and long-run responsiveness for macroeconomics, health, labor and employment, education, law and order, housing, and defense .     

Building e‐government in East and Southeast Asia: Regional rhetoric and national (in)action

Among many regional policy initiatives taken by states in East and Southeast Asia in the wake of the 1997 financial crisis, one central project launched by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and taken up by its dialogue partners in East Asia, was promotion of information and communication technology. While part of ASEAN's 1999–2004 action plan focused on services for business, another part sought to put public sectors online, and to promote electronic government, or e‐government. Taking the 16 states and quasi‐states of East and Southeast Asia, this article evaluates progress at the action plan's mid‐point in January 2002. It begins by defining e‐government and reviewing three academic literatures on the information age, developmental states, and Confucian societies. It then describes the major policy initiatives taken by ASEAN and its partner states, and surveys implementation progress through an analysis of government homepages and sites. Its main finding is that e‐government activity in East and Southeast Asia is highly diverse, reflecting national strengths and weaknesses rather than regional capacity for policy change. The article argues for increased attention to national implementation strategies. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The “baby steps” in mainstreaming sustainable public procurement in Ghana: A “double‐agency” perspective

The emerging literature on public procurement policy suggests that public procurement may be leveraged to advance several public policy agenda. Hence, many countries have reformed their public procurement process towards social and environmental outcomes termed sustainable public procurement. These reforms have often been launched in response to international initiatives such as the global 10‐year framework for action on sustainable consumption and production by the Johannesburg implementation plan in 2002 and the Sustainable Development Goals. Yet, empirical evidence on the drivers and benefits of SPP in developing countries is still scarce. This gap is addressed with a qualitative case study of six public sector institutions in Ghana. On the basis of elite interviews, this paper highlights barriers to mainstreaming SPP in Ghana's public sector. We further advance the scanty principal–agency literature by establishing a double‐agency relationship in the context of SPP, which depicts limited agency cases where principals lack the capacity to defend their own interests.     

The Theory and Practice of “Nudging”: Changing Health Behaviors

Many of the most significant challenges in health care—such as smoking, overeating, and poor adherence to evidence‐based guidelines—will only be resolved if we can influence behavior. The traditional policy tools used when thinking about influencing behavior include legislation, regulation, and information provision. Recently, policy analysts have shown interest in policies that “nudge” people in particular directions, drawing on advances in understanding that behavior is strongly influenced in largely automatic ways by the context within which it is placed. This article considers the theoretical basis for why nudges might work and reviews the evidence in health behavior change. The evidence is structured according to the Mindspace framework for behavior change. The conclusion is that insights from behavioral economics offer powerful policy tools for influencing behavior in health care. This article provides public administration practitioners with an accessible summary of this literature, putting these insights into practical use.     

Autonomous Agencies,Happy Citizens? Challenging the Satisfaction Claim

Is the delegation of public services to semi‐autonomous agencies associated with increased citizen satisfaction? This article assesses three theoretical routes that might link the two: responsiveness, credible commitment, and blame deflection. The article draws on data from the European Social Survey and an expert survey about delegation of tax and police services to semi‐autonomous agencies in 15 countries. No supporting evidence was found for the responsiveness and credible commitment theories. Yet semi‐autonomous agencies sometimes can absorb or deflect blame for bad performance. In the tax case, dissatisfied service users blame the agency, rather than the government. The presence of an agency worked as a scapegoat for dissatisfied service users and resulted in less dissatisfaction with the government in countries where tax services were delegated.     

Innovation Policy in Italy (1993–2002): Understanding the Invention and Persistence of a Public Management Reform

The literature on the politics of public management reform in Italy broadly contends that the country's legalistic administrative tradition suppresses reform. This article questions and qualifies this line of argument on the basis of a newly reported case of public management reform that endured for more than 10 years. The study tracks and explains the emergence of the policy issue of “government innovation” and its persistence on the specialized policy agenda of the Ministry for Public Administration. The initial emergence of the government innovation policy in Italy and its directional stability is explained by applying event‐centric approaches to historical analysis, together with the institutional concept of policy subsystems. The article shows the need for modifying central arguments—both substantive and theoretical—about the politics of public management reform in Italy.     

“Editorials at a Glance”: Cultural Policy,Gender, and Modernity in the World War I Bureau of Cartoons

Cultural policy during the Great War, rather than radiating from the central government, evolved from contemporary culture—propaganda, movies, and mass media. The state was a player, but quasi‐public organizations such as propaganda agencies, non‐state actors like the YMCA, and “public opinion” played important roles. The Committee on Public Information (CPI)—the government's propaganda committee—influenced Americans through books, advertisements, posters, and cartoons. This essay examines two of the CPI's efforts: the Bureau of Cartoons and the Division of Pictorial Publicity. In these materials, we can see the intersection of class‐based notions of gendered idealism and a developing media state's use of a sentimental culture of the Victorian middle‐class to represent and motivate the nation. With staff drawn primarily from advertising agencies and newspapers, the Committee's work shows how the formulation of cultural policy is the result of complex negotiated processes involving state interests, cultural liaisons, and ideological assumptions.     

“It's the Central Government's Fault”: Elected Regional Officials' Use of Blame‐Shifting Rhetoric

This article investigates regional officials' use of blame‐shifting rhetoric in times of heated public criticism of unpopular regional policy decisions. Based on a content coding of nearly 500 political accounts from elected regional officials it is shown that “it's the central government's fault” is the most frequently used excuse when regional officials publicly defend unpopular decisions to cut public health care. The article finds that this excuse is used more by regional leaders (mayors and chairmen of regional boards) than by other elected officials and that partisan competition affects how often this excuse is used.