Empowered and enraged: Political efficacy,anger and support for populism in Europe

This article addresses the psychological dynamics between internal political efficacy, emotions and support for populism. Contrary to the extended idea that populism is associated with low levels of political competence, it is argued that individuals’ self-competence beliefs enhance populist attitudes. Individuals who conceive themselves as able to understand and participate effectively in politics are more critical towards politicians and more prone to consider that citizens could do a better job. The article also hypothesises that internal efficacy enhances the likelihood of experiencing anger, which in turn promotes populist attitudes. Experimental and comparative observational evidence shows robust direct effects of internal efficacy over populism, as well as a smaller indirect impact via feelings of anger. These findings raise important questions regarding the nature of populism and how to fight it in our emancipated and information-intensive democratic systems.     

PUBLIC SERVICE VALUES: A NEW APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF MOTIVATION IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

This article details an approach for empirically eliciting and examining public service values and their impact on decisions made by public servants. The approach involves adaptation of the Schwartz Portrait Values Questionnaire such that it: (1) elicits values relevant to an individual's public service role rather than broad personal values; and (2) incorporates values omitted by the Schwartz framework, including those identified by Jørgensen and Bozeman and others. To examine the impact of public service values on specific public management decisions, we use structured decision context statements similar to those proposed by Tetlock. We find that: (1) the adapted instrument maps favourably to the Schwartz personal value space; (2) the public service values space includes value sets that expand and refine the personal value space defined by Schwartz; and (3) the public service values elicited can be used to predict decisions made by respondents in specific public service decision contexts.     

MAKING GOVERNANCE NETWORKS EFFECTIVE AND DEMOCRATIC THROUGH METAGOVERNANCE

In response to the growing discrepancy between the steadily rising steering ambitions and the increasing fragmentation of social and political life, governance networks are mushrooming. Governance through the formation of networks composed of public and private actors might help solve wicked problems and enhance democratic participation in public policy-making, but it may also create conflicts and deadlocks and make public governance less transparent and accountable. In order to ensure that governance networks contribute to an effective and democratic governing of society, careful metagovernance by politicians, public managers and other relevant actors is necessary. In this paper, we discuss how to assess the effective performance and democratic quality of governance networks. We also describe how different metagovernance tools can be used in the pursuit of effective and democratic network governance. Finally, we argue that public metagovernors must develop their strategic and collaborative competences in order to become able to metagovern governance networks.     

IS OUTPUT PERFORMANCE ALL ABOUT THE RESOURCES? A FUZZY‐SET QUALITATIVE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF STREET‐LEVEL BUREAUCRATS IN SWITZERLAND

This article refines Lipsky's assertion that lacking resources negatively affects output performance. It uses fuzzy‐set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to analyse the nuanced interplay of contextual and individual determinants of the output performance of veterinary inspectors as street‐level bureaucrats in Switzerland. Moving ‘beyond Lipsky’, the study builds on recent theoretical contributions and a systematic comparison across organizational contexts. Against a widespread assumption, output performance is not all about resources. The impact of perceived available resources hinges on caseloads, which prove to be more decisive. These contextual factors interact with individual attitudes emerging from diverse public accountabilities. The results contextualize the often‐emphasized importance of worker–client interaction. In a setting where clients cannot escape the interaction, street‐level bureaucrats are not primarily held accountable by them. Studies of output performance should thus consider gaps between what is being demanded of and offered to street‐level bureaucrats, and the latter's multiple embeddedness.     

The politics of external approval: Explaining the IMF's evaluation of austerity programmes

During the European debt crisis, numerous states launched austerity programmes. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) evaluates and forecasts the likelihood of member states’ success in implementing these programmes. Although IMF evaluations influence country risk perceptions on capital markets, little is known about their reasoning. This article uses fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to explore on what grounds the IMF evaluated the success prospects of austerity programmes during the European debt crisis. Results reveal that IMF evaluations are heavily influenced by the programme's implementation credibility. They require a tractable policy problem, a country's institutional capacity to structure implementation, and favour expenditure reduction over revenue measures. By acting as a strict guide on the road to fiscal adjustment, the IMF indirectly influences member states’ scope of policy making through its surveillance activities. Extensive austerity programmes that need to be implemented swiftly are evaluated negatively if the country is not involved in an IMF programme.     

FRIENDS WITH MY FUTURE SELF: LONGITUDINAL VIVIDNESS INTERVENTION REDUCES DELINQUENCY

In a field experiment, we use a novel method to test whether instilling a greater sense of vividness of the future self motivates people to act in a more future‐oriented way and reduces their delinquent involvement. We manipulate vividness of the future self by having participants, a sample of high‐school youth (N = 133), “befriend” an avatar representing their future self on a social network website. For 7 days, they reply to short messages from their future self designed to trigger thinking about that distant self. Using repeated‐measures analysis of variance (ANOVA), we find that participants who had been linked to their future self report less delinquent involvement, whereas controls did not. Furthermore, the results of a nonparametric bootstrapping procedure show that this effect is mediated by changes in vividness of the future self, such that increases in vividness lead to lower self‐reported delinquency. We conclude that vividness of the future self holds promise not only as a cognitive explanation for the failure to make informed cost–benefit trade‐offs but also for interventions aiming to reduce delinquency.     

TACKLING HEALTH INEQUALITIES IN POST‐DEVOLUTION BRITAIN: DO TARGETS MATTER?

Since devolution in 1998, many aspects of public policy in Great Britain have diverged between England, Scotland and Wales, including how targets and performance assessment are used in the National Health Service and local government. Health inequality is an example where all three countries have recognized a need to act but approaches to performance assessment differ. Based on interviews with senior managers, the complexity of health inequality as an object of local intervention is explored and compared. Despite contrasting approaches to targets, local discourses in all three countries had significant similarities. Health inequality had to compete against a preoccupation with improving access to acute services generally and balancing budgets over the short term. There was a bias in the interventions described towards targeting health behaviours, but with limited use of evidence about efficacy, and indications that measuring progress with reducing health inequalities was starting to lead to an emphasis on ‘quick wins' from pharmacological interventions.     

PROFESSIONAL AUTONOMY AND PASTORAL POWER: THE TRANSFORMATION OF QUALITY REGISTERS IN SWEDISH HEALTH CARE

In the context of the recent transformation of control in Swedish health care, the changing role of quality registers are analysed as a vivid example of how professional groups become involved in new modes of regulating professional work. Based on a critical appraisal of the main currents in the research on NPM, it is argued that understanding ‘the productive side of power’ is an underexploited theme. The main part of the article is devoted to a detailed analysis of how a seemingly insignificant, but in its consequences important, professional practice was transformed from a resource for clinical research, an entirely professional concern, to a tool for hierarchical control. In the concluding sections, a number of important conditions for the successful use of ‘soft power’ in modern societies are identified and discussed.