The Sophisticated Public: The Effect of Competing Frames on Public Opinion

Deliberation is the current buzzword among democratic thinkers. Deliberative democracy assumes that deliberation has an effect on the people engaging in the deliberative process. Several studies have demonstrated that this is indeed the case: deliberation increases political knowledge and opinion consistency, as well as mutual understanding and broader tolerance among citizens. In order to verify the findings from these studies and to confront the problems of internal and external validity in the previous studies of deliberation, alternative methodological designs must be applied. Applying an experimental split-sample design using CATI on the Danish electorate reveals how arguments and frames influence public opinion. Across various frames and arguments and political issues, positive (negative) arguments tend to push opinions in a positive (negative) direction. When competing frames are presented to the public, people submit to neither ambivalence nor non-attitudes. Quite to the contrary, people tend to follow their predisposition and provide more consistent opinions. Thus, deliberation composed of various competing frames and arguments facilitates – rather than distorts – sophisticated and considered public opinion.     

The Professors on Public Life

Many academics misunderstand public life and the conditions under which policy is made. This article examines misconceptions in three major academic traditions—policy as science (e.g., ‘evidence‐based policy’), normative political theory, and the mini‐public school of deliberative democracy—and argues that the practical implications of each of these traditions are limited by their partial, shallow and etiolated vision of politics. Three constitutive features of public life, competition, publicity and uncertainty, compromise the potential of these traditions to affect in any fundamental way the practice of politics. Dissatisfaction with real existing democracy is not the consequence of some intellectual or moral failure uniquely characteristic of the persona publica, and attempts to reform it are misdirected to the extent that they imagine a better public life modeled on academic ideals.     

责任政府:以公共责任为本位

责任政府作为一种理想的政府形态,其根本特征是政府以公共责任为本位的逻辑安排权力与责任的关系,从而彻底颠覆了传统政府组织以权力为本位的政治逻辑。责任政府的组织建设从责任开始,根据政府履责的需要决定政府权力的配置,以责任勘定政府权力的约束边界,按照履责的需要建构组织机构和配备人员编制。因此,责任政府的建立实现了政府与公民两者关系向民主政治的回归。政府的三项基本组织活动——决策、执行与监督适度分离,有利于政府高效地履责,也有利于对政府进行有效的问责。责任政府应该实现决策责任、执行责任与监督责任的分置与协调,同时建立决策权、执行权与监督权的分立与制约体系。政府问责制作为责任政府得以实现的关键机制,在于建立领导责任追究制度,通过领导责任追究制度,使各级领导真正成为各级政府履责的核心力量,推动责任政府建设,因此,责任政府建设的关键又在于政府问责制的确立。     

代际和公私观念对公共参与的影响——基于“80后”与“80前”的比较

本文以北京奥运会为问卷调查背景,考察了"80后"和"80前"在先公后私和公共参与的差异以及代际对先公后私和公共参与关系的影响。研究发现,"80后"在公私观念、公共参与方面具有自己独特的特点;代际在公私观念对公共参与的影响中起着调节作用。     

The Influence of Partisan Motivated Reasoning on Public Opinion

Political parties play a vital role in democracies by linking citizens to their representatives. Nonetheless, a longstanding concern is that partisan identification slants decision-making. Citizens may support (oppose) policies that they would otherwise oppose (support) in the absence of an endorsement from a political party—this is due in large part to what is called partisan motivated reasoning where individuals interpret information through the lens of their party commitment. We explore partisan motivated reasoning in a survey experiment focusing on support for an energy law. We identify two politically relevant factors that condition partisan motivated reasoning: (1) an explicit inducement to form an “accurate” opinion, and (2) cross-partisan, but not consensus, bipartisan support for the law. We further provide evidence of how partisan motivated reasoning works psychologically and affects opinion strength. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for understanding opinion formation and the overall quality of citizens’ opinions.     

The Conditional Effect of Specialized Governance on Public Policy

What are the policy consequences of creating functionally specialized venues for decision making? This study directly compares special districts with general purpose local governments to evaluate how specialization influences responsiveness and policy choice. Previous theorizing has assumed that specialization should have the same effect across all policy contexts. The findings presented here show instead that its effect is conditional on the status of public problems. Objective conditions related to a policy issue more strongly influence the responsiveness of multipurpose legislatures than that of special districts; thus the institutional effect of functional specialization varies with the severity of the public problem. The result is that governing structure matters most where problems are least severe. The findings demonstrate the importance of considering policy context when analyzing the effects of political institutions.     

公共权力转型期的政府公共服务

我国实行社会主义市场经济以来,市场经济的巨大发展推动着政府公共权力由传统的强制属性向契约和服务属性转型,政府由管制型向服务型转变,政府的公共服务职能日益凸显。与公共权力的本质要求相适应,政府公共服务应具备契约性、有限性、公共性及公正性等特征。在公共权力转型期,应该通过完善公共服务信息公开体系、创新公共服务公民参与机制以及构建公共服务监督体系来加强政府公共服务体制建设。     

The Impact of Public Funding on Contemporary Visual Arts

Public policy for supporting the visual arts has historically followed different traditions in France and the United Kingdom. In an environment of fiscal austerity that impacts upon public funding as well as private patronage, and given the tensions between artistic freedom on the one hand, and market constraints on the other, this article examines how these two traditions of financing artists has influenced the direction of the work itself. A brief historical presentation of the two forms of public support and their evolution in recent decades provides a framework for understanding government attitudes and policies on both sides of the Channel. A closer examination of selected artists, chosen here for their representativeness and their international renown, is used to illustrate the changing nature of public support for visual art creation.     

The Rituals of Public Meetings

Public meetings are often referred to as “rituals” to denote a largely symbolic activity with little concrete meaning. This essay explores how public meeting rituals may produce very real impacts on participants and pragmatic outcomes. Whereas tangible outputs of rituals are not always evident, ritual theory suggests that participants can derive latent meaning and significant comfort from their application. Although rituals serve to reify certain norms or control behaviors, they may also reaffirm civic values and encourage group cohesion. A deeper appreciation of public meeting rituals will enable participants and officials to respond more effectively to restructured or nontraditional formats as well as better deal with the challenges of maintaining participation when rituals lose their meaning.     

The Effects of Fiscal Decentralization on Public Spending: The Korean Case

The local government reforms of the 1980s and 1990s in Korea involved devolution of substantial resources from the central to local governments. Fiscal realignment between the levels of government occurred during the same period of time. This article places these changes within the context of fiscal decentralization, using a variety of time-series regression techniques, in an effort to assess its impact. Findings suggest that fiscal decentralization serves as a constraint on the behavior of central government, while it serves as a booster on behalf of underdeveloped local governments. Fiscal decentralization may be a very effective means of self-government, and plays a key role in improving the fit between the provision of public goods and citizens' demand in Korea.     

The New Public Service Revisited

The New Public Service describes a set of norms and practices that emphasize democracy and citizenship as the basis for public administration theory and practice. This article revisits some of the core arguments of the New Public Service and examines how they have been practiced and studied over the past 15 years. The authors conclude that neither the principles of the New Public Service nor those of the New Public Management have become a dominant paradigm, but the New Public Service, and ideas and practices consistent with its ideals, have become increasingly evident in public administration scholarship and practice.     

The Control of Public Networks

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the control of networks, an issue that we believe is critical for explaining the overall effectiveness of public networks. We first discuss why it is important to study the issue and why it has been neglected as a topic by public management and organization scholars. We then present the various types of control and how they are utilized in a network context. Finally, we discuss how the mechanisms of control might be related to network effectiveness, drawing heavily on an understanding of how this relationship is addressed by contingency theorists. We close by posing challenges to researchers for developing new insights into the control of networks and why this knowledge is relevant for public managers and policy makers.     

The Processes of Public Accountability

There is a sameness to writing on public accountability which does not always do justice to the subject. With responsibility and accountability conflated and an idealised version of the Westminster model held up as the only test, ministers constantly appear irresponsible. Yet a more complex account of public accountability is possible, one which acknowledges that no single institution can undertake the important work of ensuring accountability from ministers, the parliament and public servants.     

The Perils of Public Intellectualism

Against the background of prophetic and rabbinic thought and action, where ideas of God and the good allowed morality and spirituality to inform one another, Goodman considers the role of public intellectuals today. He cites the expanding electronic media for lengthening the reach and broadening the franchise but narrowing the gaze and the audience of those intellectuals who seek a public role and warns against oversimplification, shrillness, and the hazards of the echo chamber, where pigeonholing and niche marketing shrink one’s audience to the already convinced.

The Public Administration of Elections

The performance of election systems in the United States depends heavily on complex networks of people, tasks, organizations, and relationships, as well as the voting technology that has received so much attention since the presidential election of 2000. Public administration has much to contribute to our understanding of these systems. This article provides an overview of the field, highlighting linkages to theoretical approaches in public administration and emphasizing the importance of management in a brief case study.     

The Scope of Public Reason

This paper presents two conceptions of the scope of public reason. The narrow view asserts that the ideal of public reason must regulate questions of constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice, but should not apply beyond this limited domain. The broad view claims that the ideal of public reason ought to be applied, whenever possible, to all political decisions where citizens exercise coercive power over one another. The paper questions whether there are any good grounds for accepting the narrow view. I survey and reject three potential reasons. The priority argument for the narrow view claims that constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice are the only proper subjects of public reason because they have a special moral priority for our reasoning about justice. The basic interests argument supports the narrow view by arguing that public reasons only exist at the level of constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice. Finally, the completeness argument defends the narrow view on the grounds that public reason can only be complete if it abstains from most legislative questions. I conclude that there are no good reasons for accepting the narrow view of the scope of public reason, whereas there are several reasons to prefer the broad view.