Preventing Dysfunction and Improving Policy Advice: The Role of Intra‐Departmental Boundary Spanners

It is well established in the public management literature that boundary spanners – people or groups that work across departments or sectors – are critical to the success of whole of government and joined‐up working. In studying recent unprecedented change to central government agencies in the Australian context, our research identified that intra‐departmental boundary spanners also play a critical role in the functioning of government departments, particularly during restructuring. Although most contemporary literature in public management concentrates on boundaries across formal organisational entities (departments, agencies, sectors), boundaries also exist within departments. Our research has found that without dedicated intra‐departmental boundary spanners, significant role confusion and dysfunctional practices arise. In turn, this has serious implications for the quality of policy advice given to Cabinet. Further research needs to be undertaken into both the role of intra‐departmental boundary spanners and how to nurture and manage the practice of intra‐departmental boundary spanners. This is especially the case if changes in Australia represent a fundamental shift more broadly in the way central government agencies operate.     

Managing for Legitimacy: Agency Governance in Its “Deep” Constitutional Context

Recent literature on bureaucratic structure has gone further than studying discretions given to bureaucrats in policy making, and much attention is now paid to understanding how bureaucratic agencies are managed. This article proposes that the way in which executive governments manage their agencies varies according to their constitutional setting and that this relationship is driven by considerations of the executive's governing legitimacy. Inspired by Charles Tilly (1984), the authors compare patterns of agency governance in Hong Kong and Ireland, in particular, configurations of assigned decision‐making autonomies and control mechanisms. This comparison shows that in governing their agencies, the elected government of Ireland's parliamentary democracy pays more attention to input (i.e., democratic) legitimacy, while the executive government of Hong Kong's administrative state favors output (i.e., performance) legitimacy. These different forms of autonomy and control mechanism reflect different constitutional models of how political executives acquire and sustain their governing legitimacy.     

De facto independence after delegation: A fuzzy‐set analysis

The phenomenon of delegating public authority from elected politicians (or ministries headed by elected politicians) to formally independent regulatory agencies (RAs) is becoming increasingly widespread. This paper examines the relation between formal independence, as prescribed in the constitutions of agencies, and de facto independence. Toward this end, it conceptualizes and assesses de facto independence of RAs, and discusses organizational, institutional, and political explanations for divergence from formal independence. The complex relations between de facto and formal independence are examined with a cross‐national, cross‐sectoral comparison of 16 Western European RAs using fuzzy‐set analysis. The results show that formal independence is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for explaining variations in the de facto independence of agencies. Other factors, such as the lifecycle of agencies, veto players, and European networks of agencies, have a decisive impact.     

Multidimensional government‐citizen congruence and satisfaction with democracy

In the first comparative study of multidimensional government‐citizen policy congruence, this article shows that citizens are less satisfied with democracy when their views differ from that of the government on policy dimensions beyond the general left‐right axis. Satisfaction is reduced by a government that deviates on European integration and redistribution and partly also on social lifestyle, immigration and environmental protection. Furthermore, this analysis identifies the level of political interest as central moderator of this relationship. Satisfaction of citizens with stronger interest in politics suffers more when there is a politically distant government. Combining data from the 2010 Chapel Hill Expert Survey and two waves of the European Social Survey, the analysis builds on information on citizen‐government policy congruence of some 45,000 citizens and 31 governments in 15 Western and Central Eastern European countries. The article brings a multidimensional perspective to the study of policy congruence between citizens and governments in a time when the preference structure of parties and citizens has become increasingly complex.     

Testing the Development and Diffusion of E‐Government and E‐Democracy: A Global Perspective

E‐government uses information and communication technology to provide citizens with information about public services. Less pervasive, e‐democracy offers greater electronic community access to political processes and policy choices. Few studies have examined these twin applications separately, although they are widely discussed in the literature as distinct. The authors, Chung‐pin Lee of Tamkang University and Kaiju Chang and Frances Stokes Berry of Florida State University, empirically analyze factors associated with the relative level of development of e‐government and e‐democracy across 131 countries. Their hypotheses draw on four explanations of policy change—learning, political norms, competition, and citizen pressures. All four explanations are strongly linked to nations where e‐government policy is highly advanced, whereas a country’s e‐democracy development is connected to complex internal factors, such as political norms and citizen pressures.     

Determinants of Firm‐Level Lobbying and Government Responsiveness in Agricultural Biotechnology in China

Understanding what stimulates agribusiness firms to lobby the government and what makes the government responsive to lobbying are the two issues that have been discussed extensively in the debates concerning determinants of biotechnology policy. This paper examines the factors influencing agribusiness firms' lobbying and government response using econometric modeling on a new data set of 160 leading agribusiness firms in the food, feed, chemical, and seed industries in China. The results show that approximately 10% of agribusiness firms lobbied the government about biotechnology policy and regulations and over half of those that lobbied received a verbal or written acknowledgment from government agencies. Seed and feed companies are more likely to engage in lobbying than chemical companies. Owning GM patents not only has a positive impact on firms' lobbying activities, but firms with these patents are more likely to receive a government response to their lobbying efforts. The experience of selling GM products does not significantly influence lobbying activities or response from the government.     

Second‐Order Devolution or Local Activism? Local Air Agencies Revisited

In response to calls from previous scholarship for further bottom‐up examination of local government roles in environmental policy, the authors revisit local air agencies to examine two separate phenomena occurring in environmental federalism: one from the top down (second‐order devolution) and one from the bottom up (local activism). Using survey data from local air agencies on devolved authorities to set air quality standards and to enforce federal and/or state standards, the authors identify three different types of local agencies: state administrative subunits (only enforcement authority), fully devolved agencies (authority to both set and enforce standards), and activist agencies (neither authority). Further findings indicate that state administrative subunits and fully devolved agencies are likely functions of second‐order devolution, while activist agencies are likely functions of local activism. Conclusions suggest that both top‐down and bottom‐up approaches to environmental federalism are shaping local government roles in environmental management.     

States of Environmental Justice: Redistributive Politics across the United States, 1993–2004

In the 20 years since a president committed federal government agencies to achieving environmental justice (EJ), states have been at the forefront of policy development. But states have varied in the nature and extent of their EJ efforts. We use Guttman Scaling to measure state EJ effort and test hypotheses regarding the relative importance of problem severity, politics, and administrative variables to variation in state policy development. Our analysis offers a novel characterization of state policy intensity and demonstrates its scalability. Income‐based problem severity, environmental group membership, and nonwhite populations were important predictors of state EJ policy intensity during our study period. The political geography of EJ policy also displayed a distinctive southern pattern and the EJ policy intensity model contrasted significantly with a model of environmental policy innovation. The findings suggest that state EJ politics are more indicative of redistributive policy than regulatory.     

The regulatory state and the UK Labour Government's re‐regulation of provision in the English National Health Service

Following its election in 1997, the UK Labour Government embarked upon a 10 year program of reform of the National Health Service (NHS). By 2005, Labour had doubled the NHS budget and dramatically transformed the shape of the Service. In England, a basic characteristic of the NHS is the organizational split between provider and commissioning agencies. In this article I argue that Labour's re‐regulation of NHS provision is a coherent representation of the influence of the “regulatory state” in restructuring arrangements between government, market, and society. The article offers an account of the regulatory state based on a discussion of five key theses: The Audit Society, Regulation Inside Government, The New Regulatory State, The British Regulatory State, and Regulatory Capitalism. The article unfolds Labour's program of reform across themes common to these accounts: the division of labor between state and society, the division of labor within the state, the formalization of previously informal controls, and the development of meta‐regulatory techniques of enforced self‐regulation. It concludes that the key themes of the regulatory state are at work in Labour's transformation of NHS provision and it offers a discussion of the implications for both scholars of regulation and the UK and European health policy literature.     

Toward More “Evidence‐Informed” Policy Making?

The quality of public decision making depends significantly on the quality of analysis and advice provided through public organizations. Champions of “evidence‐informed” policy making claim that rigorous evaluation practices can significantly improve attainment of cost‐effective outcomes. After decades of experience, performance information is more sophisticated, but evaluation practices and capabilities vary enormously. Public agencies gather and process vast amounts of information, but there has been little analysis of how this information is actually utilized for policy and program improvement. This article examines how government agencies use evidence about policy and program effectiveness, with attention to four themes: (1) the prospects for improving “evidence‐informed” policy making, (2) the diversity of practices concerning evidence utilization and evaluation across types of public agencies and policy arenas, (3) recent attempts to “institutionalize” evaluation as a core feature of policy development and budget approval, and (4) the relationships between public agencies and nongovernmental sources of expertise.     

Environmental Federalism Revisited: Second‐Order Devolution in Air Quality Regulation

In this paper we examine states' use of local clean air agencies and provide a preliminary assessment of what causes states to devolve air quality policy authority to the local level. Data from a unique comparative state survey shows that states vary widely in the number of local clean air agencies they employ and the amount of authority these agencies have to set standards, monitor air quality, and enforce regulations. Multivariate analyses suggest that second‐order devolution is partly driven by a general propensity to decentralize policy authority, but that policy‐specific factors relating to the problem and interest group environment affect devolution as well. These findings indicate that local agencies play an important role in U.S. air quality regulation, and that the dynamics of state devolution to local agencies deserve further study.     

Top‐Down Self‐Organization: State Logics,Substitutional Delegation,and Private Governance in Russia

This study investigates the counterintuitive emergence of self‐regulation in the Russian construction sector. Despite its proclivity for centralizing political authority, the government acted as the catalyst for the delegation of regulatory powers to private industry groups. The article argues that a factor little considered in extant literature—namely, a weak and corrupt bureaucracy—is key to explaining why the normally control‐oriented executive branch began to promote private governance despite industry's preference for continued state regulation. The article's signal contribution is to theoretically explain and empirically demonstrate how a government's prior inability to establish intrastate control over an ineffective and bribable public bureaucracy creates incentives for political authorities to search for alternative means for policy implementation outside of existing state agencies. These findings are important for understanding the impetus and logic behind particular regulatory shifts in countries where the state apparatus is both deficient and corrupt.     

Improving the Implementation and Effectiveness of Out‐of‐School‐Time Tutoring

School districts are spending millions on tutoring outside regular school day hours for economically and academically disadvantaged students in need of extra academic assistance. Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), parents of children in persistently low‐performing schools were allowed to choose their child's tutoring provider, and together with school districts, they were also primarily responsible for holding providers in the private market accountable for performance. We present results from a multisite, mixed‐method longitudinal study of the impact of out‐of‐school time (OST) tutoring on student reading and mathematics achievement that link provider attributes and policy and program administration variables to tutoring program effectiveness. We find that many students are not getting enough hours of high‐quality, differentiated instruction to produce significant gains in their learning, in part because of high hourly rates charged by providers for tutoring. We identify strategies and policy levers that school districts can use to improve OST tutoring policy design and launch improved programs as waivers from NCLB are granted.     

Regulatory Agencies—The Challenges of Balancing Agency Autonomy and Political Control

In this article we focus on the dynamic interplay between increase in autonomy of regulatory agencies and political control of those agencies. The general research issues are the weak empirical foundations of regulatory reforms, the complex trade‐off between political control and agency autonomy, the dual process of deregulation and reregulation, the problems of role‐specialization and coordination, and the questions of “smart practice” in regulatory policy and practice. The theoretical basis is agency theories and a broad institutional approach that blend national political strategies, historical‐cultural context, and external pressures to understand regulatory agencies and regulatory reform. This approach is contrasted with a practitioner model of agencies. Empirically the article is based on regulatory reform in Norway, giving a brief introduction to the reform and agency context followed by an analysis of the radical regulatory reform policy introduced recently by the current Norwegian government. We illustrate how regulatory reforms and agencies work in practice by focusing on two specific cases on homeland security and telecommunications.     

“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.     

Competing for father's love? The politics of central government agency termination in China

It is well known that public agencies are nearly immortal, but what explains their termination? This article argues that apart from conventional antecedents, political salience defined by top leaders largely shapes government agencies' life cycle. In one of the first large‐N analyses of agency termination in a non‐Western authoritarian regime, we used longitudinal data for the central apparatus in China from 1949 to 1976 to test this hypothesis. We specifically used Chairman Mao's written directives to measure political salience and found that agencies that received more directives were less likely to be terminated. In contrast, agencies less attended to the boss were less likely to survive major restructurings. We also found that peripheral agencies (e.g., smaller, lower‐ranking agencies with noncore functions) benefited more from leaders' attention. We compare the results with the existing literature and suggest some theoretical and policy implications.     

Exam‐centred Meritocracy in Taiwan: Hiring by Merit or Examination?

As a legacy of Imperial China, the Taiwan civil service entrance examination (CSEE) represents the hallmark of a unique exam‐centred meritocracy, in which government agencies and public managers are deprived of selection power. This system diverges from the trend of managerialism in Anglo‐Saxon countries. This paper argues that the evolution of meritocracy in Taiwan has been built around the CSEE and has contributed to a top‐down state‐building approach. The current system is a product of a long‐term power struggle among the Examination Yuan, government agencies, and civil service examinees. In contrast to the popular framework of patronage versus merit, the policy debate in Taiwan is better framed as whether or not recruitments are made on the basis of competitive examination. The value of ‘equality’ is upheld at the expense of the value of ‘competence’.     

Assembling E‐Government Research Designs: A Transdisciplinary View and Interactive Approach

There is a growing recognition in the field of e‐government that improving the quality and impact of research requires taking into account their complex contexts and drawing on more interdisciplinary and collaborative research. Limited attention so far has been directed toward the conduct of such research, particularly in contract‐based research arrangements for developing e‐government policy. A four‐nation study of public e‐procurement policy is used here to make transparent the process of designing and conducting transdisciplinary and interactive research. Further sharing of research designs and accounts is needed to advance theory, policy, and practice, and to develop a history of ideas in the e‐government research field.     

The Differential Empowering Effects of Europeanization on the Autonomy of National Agencies

This article examines the influence of Europeanization on the relationship between ministries and agencies at the national level. The core argument is that the differentiated nature of the international environment (with policy development often transferred to the international level and policy implementation left at the national level) transforms national agencies into policy‐developing actors that shape policies without being directly influenced by their national political principals. The increasingly common involvement of national agencies in European policymaking processes thereby increases these agencies' policy‐development autonomy but does not change their role in policy implementation. We examine this argument by testing an innovative hypothesis—the differentiation hypothesis—on a combined data set of German and Dutch national agencies. Our empirical findings support the hypothesis in both countries, suggesting that similar effects can be expected in other contexts in which semiautonomous agencies are involved in transnational policymaking.     

Preventing the Use of Deadly Force: The Relationship between Police Agency Policies and Rates of Officer‐Involved Gun Deaths

Killings of civilians by police officers have become a matter of intense public concern in the United States. High‐profile deaths, especially those of black citizens, have caused outrage and sparked the Black Lives Matter movement with calls for dramatic changes in how police agencies operate. However, little systematic research exists to answer questions about which policies should be ended or put in place to reduce these deaths. The authors leverage a large data set of gun deaths by police officers in the United States, combined with agency‐level policy data and community demographic data, to examine whether certain policies are associated with lower or higher rates of officer‐involved gun deaths. Findings show that one policy—the requirement that officers file a report when they point their guns at people but do not fire—is associated with significantly lower rates of gun deaths.