Traditions of governance: interpreting the changing role of the public sector

The role of the state is changing under the impact of, for example, globalization. The changes have been variously understood as the new public management (NPM), the hollowing–out of the state and the new governance. This special issue of Public Administration explores the changing role of the state in advanced industrial democracies. It focuses on the puzzle of why states respond differently to common trends.
This introductory article has three aims. First, we provide a brief review of the existing literature on public sector reform to show that our approach is distinctive. We argue that the existing literature does not explore the ways in which governmental traditions shape reform. Second, we outline an interpretive approach to the analysis of public sector reform built on the notions of beliefs, traditions, dilemmas and narratives. We provide brief illustrations of these ideas drawn from the individual country articles. Finally, we outline the ground covered by all the chapters but we do not summarize and compare their experiences of reform. That task is reserved for the concluding article.     

The Reinvention of Public Personnel Administration: An Analysis of the Diffusion of Personnel Management Reforms in the States

Reform is a common theme in American public administration. During the twentieth century at least 12 major administrative reforms have taken place at the federal level and countless others in state and local governments. Frequently, these reforms have addressed the operation of public personnel management systems. Recent efforts associated with the reinventing government movement, for example, have proposed numerous alterations to civil service rules and procedures, and many jurisdictions have implemented significant changes in their personnel practices. This article examines the extent to which these kinds of personnel reforms have been implemented by state governments. A reform index is developed to document the considerable variation among the states in their approach to personnel practices. Several state characteristics are associated with scores on this index, including legislative professionalism, which bears a positive relationship to reform, and the level of unemployment within a state and the proportion of state employees associated with public employee unions, which are both negatively associated with reform.     

Administrative Discretion and Active Representation: An Expansion of the Theory of Representative Bureaucracy

Recent studies of the theory of representative bureaucracy have focused on active representation, whereby administrators in public organizations work to advance the interests of particular groups, achieving policy outcomes that directly address the needs of those groups. The concept of administrative discretion is central to these studies, as an administrator must have the discretion to produce results that reflect the values and beliefs of these groups. While the presence of discretion is often implied in these studies, few have examined it explicitly. Using data from the Farmer's Home Administration, we explore whether administrators who perceive themselves as having more discretion enact policy outcomes that are more representative of minority interests. The results strongly support the conclusion that administrators who perceive themselves as possessing significant discretion and who assume the role of minority representative in their agencies are more likely to enact policy outcomes that favor minority interests.     

Conceptualising State Capacity: Comparing Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan

Strengthening the state is central to the post-communist reform agenda. Here, state capacity combines organisational, material and social resources and is conceptualised along four dimensions: ideational, political, technical and implementational. This conceptualisation is applied to a comparative, survey-based analysis in 2002 of 125 medium-ranking officials in two post- communist Central Asian countries, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The findings reveal that although Kazakhstan's controlled economic reform programme and natural resources have placed it in a stronger position to develop its state capacity, important ideational, political and implementational problems pose long-term obstacles for reform. In turn, Kyrgyzstan's early liberalisation in the absence of economic and social resources may be serving to undermine its state capacity.     

When winners are losers: The stalemate of Australian politics

The 1998 federal election emphasizes the fact that in Australian politics the power of the major parties remains strong both in terms of voter identification and in terms of setting the policy agenda on which political contests are fought, say Professors John Wanna and Patrick Weller from the Department of Public Policy at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. The results of the election nevertheless illustrate a substantial level of discontent in the community, and the term of the next government promises frequent stalemates, as the clash between the House of Representatives and the Senate makes the passing of controversial legislation difficult.     

Grounds for self-government? Changes in land ownership and democratic participation in Chinese communities

Do variations in land ownership affect people’s democratic participation? Quantitative, cross-country research on this topic suffers from the non-comparability of regulatory systems and cultures, and the use of crude indicators to identify participation. This study attempts to overcome these methodological problems, by employing indicators of procedural and substantive participation in a structured, diachronic comparison of qualitative data from five sites in China – an authoritarian state, which, however, requires residents of urban communities and villages to participate in ‘self-government’. It examines whether and why changing land from collective ownership to state ownership, and residents’ compensated acquisition of cash and secure, fungible assets, strengthens or weakens participation in self-government. In the research sites, collective land ownership is found to stimulate participation in self-government. Transformation of the land to state ownership and people’s acquisition of private property weakens participation. The robust results of the study support the direction of a causal argument that collective land ownership is conducive to democratic participation. These findings imply that scholars and policymakers should consider the potentially adverse political consequences of changing land ownership. A further implication is that, absent substantial political reform, an urbanized China might be less rather than more democratic at the community level.     

Women,Science and Culture: Science in the Nineteenth-century Periodical

The Victorian periodical press offers unique insights into many diverse areas of nineteenth-century experience, and the complex relations between gender, science and culture in particular, yet it has been consistently marginalized as a primary resource in academic study. The Science in the Nineteenth-century Periodical (SciPer) project at the universities of Sheffield and Leeds is creating a new point of access to a wide range of non-specialist periodicals across the century by means of a fully searchable electronic index. By detailing the entire contents of each journal, and not just those articles that have a clear scientific relevance, it becomes clear that science formed a fundamental and integral part of nineteenth-century culture. The electronic index, moreover, will include hypertext cross-reference links that will allow the user to identify a dialogic pattern of encounters between ostensibly diverse articles, rather than only to browse in a simple chronological mode. By adopting this innovative approach, the SciPer database will reveal the manifold intertextual relations between the fictional works of women writers like Elizabeth Gaskell and the scientific articles that often appeared in the pages of the same magazines, and will show that writers of both sexes and across several different genres actively engaged in vibrant interdisciplinary debates concerning scientific issues in a forum provided by the periodical. Although the SciPer database itself is not specifically focused on issues of gender, the index will include several periodicals aimed explicitly at a female readership and, by providing access to titles still rarely utilized in modern scholarship, it will offer further insights into the important contemporary debates about women and science, as well as the more subtle ways, in which gendered imagery was employed within scientific discourse. This article details some critical findings from Punch , The English Womans Domestic Magazine , Cornhill Magazine and the Review of Reviews .     

Nourishing men's anger and inflaming the fires of hatred: Bayle on religious violence and the ‘Novus Ordo Saeclorum’

In 1697, the Huguenot writer Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) published his Dictionnaire historique et critique ‐ a one‐man encyclopaedia. The article entitled Macon drew attention to the cruel atrocities perpetrated during the French Wars of Religion. This article explains the context of Bayle's critique, arguing that he uses the example to reflect on the Gallican regime's renewal of persecution against his community, and on the notorious revocation by Louis XIV, in 1685, of the Edict of Nantes. As a long‐term remedy for state violence against a law‐abiding minority, he recommends deliberative freedom within a framework of government impartiality, thereby anticipating a new secular order. A new translation of Bayle's article Macon can be found in the appendix.