Defining subnational open government: does local context influence policy and practice?

Policy Sciences - What is open government? The contemporary conceptualization of open government remains rooted in transparency and accountability, but it is embedded within the political economy...     

Making votes count in parliament or government?

Several scholars have sought to elucidate voting strategies in proportional representation (PR) systems. The argument is that the existence of coalition governments forces voters to consider potential alliances and to vote in order to maximize their chances of influencing the outcome. In this paper, we argue that this vision is incomplete as PR, just as single-member district plurality, also creates incentives for voters to desert parties that have little chances of obtaining a seat in their district. We validate this theoretical claim using two different surveys conducted during the 2014 Belgian federal and regional elections. Our results show that both government and district viability have a substantial and distinct effect on vote choice.     

A revolution in Whitehall? Changes in British central government since 1979

Since the Conservatives came to power in 1979 there have been important changes in British central government which have their intellectual origins in managerialist thinking of the 1960s, but owe their recent implementation to the commitment of the Prime Minister to reform the civil service along lines advocated by ‘new right’ or ‘public choice’ theorists. While most institutional reforms of departments were for political reasons, changes in the processes of the civil service can be seen as an extension of developments beginning with the Rayner Scrutinies, and moving through the Financial Management Initiative and the Efficiency Strategy to Executive Agencies. The British unified civil service is challenged by pressures for fragmentation, but limits to the changes are set by the dominance of the concepts of ministerial responsibility to Parliament, parliamentary audit, and of Treasury control.     

Bundesbank‐government relations in Germany in the 1990s: From GEMU to EMU

The Bundesbank's widely‐discussed independence ascribes it only discretionary power in the realm of monetary policy, but its influence can extend into other areas of economic policy. Since the government retains the initiative in these policy realms, the Bundesbank's influence consists of being able to mould the form rather than the direction of government policy. To exercise this influence, however, the Bundesbank must have public opinion on its side. An examination of the government‐Bundesbank relationship as it touched upon the cases of Economic and Monetary Union in Germany (1990) and Europe (1990–98) reveals the extent and limitations of the Bundesbank's influence over economic policy.     

Is local politics local? French evidence

Abstract. In advanced democracies, are local political decisions determined by local events? Or are they really shaped by national forces? For the United States case, the evidence on this question is mixed. For the French case, the focus here, the evidence is also mixed, but less hard. In fact, for cantonal elections, in many ways archtypical local affairs, relevant systematic findings are virtually absent. We ask whether the cantonal elections of the Fifth Republic can be better understood as national, rather than local, contests. Our analysis leads us to the conclusion that the basic answer is, ‘yes’. There appear several theoretical reasons for this, which we give an account of. Further, we go on to show that cantonal races can actually serve as barometers to forecast upcoming national races.     

Success in opposition – failure in government: explaining the performance of right-wing populist parties in public office

Drawing on a conceptual distinction between traditional right-wing extremist and right-wing populist parties, this article examines the performance of the latter in public office. The central argument is that the specific populist aspects of such parties allow them to succeed in opposition and to do well at the game of elections. Once in government, their unique strengths turn into disadvantages. Significant structural weaknesses inherent in populist parties pose nearly insurmountable problems that make their long-term success in government questionable. The analysis also shows that the rise of right-wing populism has substantially increased the opportunity structures of conservative parties. Following the theoretical discussion, the article examines the case of the Austrian Freedom Party and draws parallels with the Italian and Dutch cases.     

Governed interdependence: Rethinking the government‐business relationship in East Asia

Analyses of East Asia's high‐performance economies have highlighted the advantages of a coordinated approach to market failures. With states dominating the process, both public and private agencies are increasingly involved. The recent literature sees public‐private cooperation as a limit to state capacity and thus a challenge to statism. Within an institutionalist framework, this paper proposes a fresh view of the government‐business relationship which avoids the statist premise of domination, but without relying on ‘weak state’ arguments. Through an examination of key organizational features of state and industry in Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, the paper proposes a theory of ‘governed interdependence’ in which both state and capital are taken seriously; where both strong state and strong industry go hand‐in‐hand; and where the capacities of both are mutually enhanced. The article identifies four principal types of government‐industry cooperation in the East Asian experience — some apparently ‘state‐led’, others apparently ‘business‐led’ — all of which can be accommodated by the theory.     

Electronic government interoperability framework in Greece： Project management approach and lessons learned in public administration

The implementation of e-government is a burgeoning phenomenon across the globe. However, a review of the IS literature reveals the inability of public administration organizations to complete information technology projects successfully. Unless governments learn to manage the government transformation projects, these e-dreams will turn into global nightmares. The shortage of studies on e-government implementation presents a knowledge gap that needs to be plugged. This paper describes and analyzes the implementation and the project management approach of the electronic government interoperability framework （EGIF） in Greece. Our intent is to present an application of a goal-driven project management methodology named EGTPM （electronic government transformation project management） in order to use it as a methodological reference when navigating in the open sea of information technology project implementations in the area of public administration. The successful implementation of the specific project indicates that the application of EGTPM approach could provide a solution to achieve government transformation objectives more effectively and efficiently.     

Party government in Europe? Parliamentary and semi‐presidential democracies compared

Control over government portfolios is the key to power over policy and patronage, and it is commonly understood to lie with parties in European democracies. However, since the democratic transitions of the 1990s, Europe has had nearly equal numbers of parliamentary and semi-presidential regimes, and there is evidence that the ability of parties to control government posts in these two regime types differs. As yet, political scientists have a limited understanding of the scale and causes of these differences. In this article a principal-agent theoretical explanation is proposed. Data are examined on 28 parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies in Europe that shows that differences in party control over government portfolios cannot be understood without reference to the underlying principal-agent relationships between voters, elected politicians and governments that characterise Europe's semi-presidential and parliamentary regimes.     

Taxpayer governmentality: governing government in Metro Vancouver’s transit tax debate

In a 2015 plebiscite, voters in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia rejected a proposed sales tax dedicated to funding a regional transportation plan. Opposition was spearheaded by a taxpayer group that focused on the perceived incompetence and wastefulness of the region’s transportation authority. Exercising a liberal imperative of ‘permanent critique of government’, the taxpayer group assembled evidence addressed to ‘taxpayers’. Developing a theoretical account of ‘taxpayer governmentality’, the paper analyses how people are addressed and fashioned as taxpayer subjects, empowered and responsibilized to govern government, and their own political conduct, as sceptical, calculating, non-political, economic actors. The paper concludes by suggesting that this taxpayer subject may be productive for understanding the practice of liberal critique and limitations of the state.     

When does open government shut? Predicting government responses to citizen information requests

Methods for the analysis of “big data” on citizen-government interactions are necessary for theoretical assessments of bureaucratic responsiveness. Such big data methods also stand to benefit practitioners' abilities to monitor and improve these emerging transparency mechanisms. We consider supervised latent Dirichlet allocation (sLDA) as a potential method for these purposes. To this end, we use sLDA to examine the Mexican government's (non)responsiveness to all public information requests filed with the federal Mexican government during the 2003–2015 period, and to identify the request topics most associated with (non)responsiveness. Substantively, our comparisons of the topics that are most highly predictive of responsiveness and nonresponsivess indicate that political sensitivity plays a large and important role in shaping official behavior in this arena. We thus conclude that sLDA provides unique advantages for, and insights into, the analysis of (i) textual records of citizen–government interactions and (ii) bureaucratic (non)responsiveness to these interactions.     

Do intergovernmental grants create ratchets in state and local taxes?

A large literature on the ‘flypaper effect’ examines how federal grants to states at time period t affect state spending (or taxes) at time period t. We explore the fundamentally different question of how federal grants at time period t affect state tax policy in the future. Federal grants often result in states creating new programs and hiring new employees, and when the federal funding is discontinued, these new state programs must either be discontinued or financed through increases in state own source taxes. Government programs tend to be difficult to cut, as goes Milton Friedman’s famous quote about nothing being as permanent as a temporary government program, suggesting that it is likely that temporary federal grants create permanent (future) ratchets in state taxes. Far from being purely an academic question, this argument is why South Carolina’s Governor Mark Sanford attempted to turn down federal stimulus monies for his state. We examine both the impact of federal grants on future state budgets and how federal and state grants affect future local government budgets. Our findings confirm that grants indeed result in future state and local tax increases of roughly 40 cents for every dollar in grant money received in prior years.     

Policy diffusion in subnational governments: State–local relationships in the Brazilian education policy

Intergovernmental relations play a key role in policy diffusion among constituent units. Federal governments have adopted different mechanisms to guarantee minimum standards across the countries, but historical trajectories and widely shared policy ideas are also mentioned as relevant in diffusion processes. This paper focuses on the influence of federalism in policy diffusion at the subnational level in Brazil. The 1988 Constitution consolidated decentralization of the Brazilian education policy but required cooperation between states and municipalities. The lack of a national definition resulted in a great variety of cooperative programmes and coordination arrangements, allowing the identification of similarities and differences among their diffusion processes. This article shows that state governments are the main policy-makers regarding cooperation, which highlights that the role of the federal government does not entirely explain these processes. Nevertheless, policy trajectories and the movement of ideas and people municipalities were keys for policy diffusion.     

Inflation drag or taxation in drag: Responsible for the rising share of government in Australian GDP?

I am sure that these results will be by no means the last word. Possible many other influences have been neglected. Nonetheless, they are quite striking, and appear to indicate that price-level effects (inflation) have been a major if not the major influence in terms of raising the shares of government revenue and expenditure in GDP over the period 1949–50 to 1987–88 in Australia. This inflation drag which is really taxation in drag has only been able to operate because of a combination of a highly progressive personal-taxation system and the absence for most of this period of any inflation indexation of the tax system.I postulate that the primary cause is a high demand from certain segments of the community and special interest groups for greater government outlays and transfer payments. However, these demands may not in themselves be enough to achieve the objectives of these groups unless combined with (rational) voter ignorance about the real price to be paid for these activities in terms of higher taxes (and future taxes to pay the accumulated deficits).     

What matters to citizens in crisis recovery? Being listened to,action, and confidence in government

Policy Sciences - The policy decision-making process in the aftermath of a crisis is a dynamic and iterative process involving circumstances that are emotionally convoluted rather than stable and...     

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.     

The glitterati government? Amateur celebrity candidates in American elections, 1928–2018

This paper examines amateur celebrity candidates in American elections from 1928 to 2018. Our central finding is that while not many celebrities run for public office, those who do usually win. We argue that the strategic-politician theory helps explain both why so few stars run for office and why those who do are generally successful. Besides name recognition, celebrities' most significant electoral advantage might be that they do not need a career in politics, which allows them to be picky about the races they enter. Although winning is not a foregone conclusion for celebrities, the most pertinent question seems to be not “can they win?” but “will they run?”     

How responsible is 'responsive' government?

The work of John Rohr focuses primarily upon the constitutional dimension of the work of public servants, most particularly, but not exclusively, career civil servants employed in central government. In stressing public service ethics as a form of constitutional practice Rohr's aim is to help reinforce the legitimate role of career public servants in government and to remind practising public bureaucrats (and academics and politicians) of the nobility of the 'administrative vocation' of state service, a somewhat daunting task in today's political climate. In this article I examine Rohr's work to see what ethical light it might throw upon recent and ongoing political attempts to make the British public administration more 'responsive'. I do so, first, by outlining the main themes of Rohr's work and their location within the US constitutional tradition. I then proceed to discuss the extent to which they translate into other constitutional contexts. Finally, I attempt to put Rohr's work to use in discussing aspects of civil service reform in Britain under recent Conservative administrations and that of the present New Labour government.     

Who opposes government arts funding?

While the reasons for the controversy overpublic arts funding are well-understood,less clear is the set of variables thatassociates with strong opposition orsupport for arts subsidies. Using data fromthe General Social Survey, this paperbuilds a model to predict opposition basedon ideological, economic, and demographiccharacteristics. The most importantpredictors of opposition are found to bepolitical views, gender, income, privatedonations to the arts, and region ofresidence. The results in this papersuggest that the benefits of public artsfunding accrue primarily to those in thehighest income class, and that supportvaries somewhat according to the level ofgovernment providing the funding. ``The far right is waging a war for the soulof America by making art a partisan issue.And by trying to cut these arts programs,which bring culture, education, and joyinto the lives of ordinary Americans, theyare hurting the very people they claim torepresent.'' Barbra Streisand, in a speech delivered atHarvard University (1995) The National Endowment for the Arts hasbecome a play thing ... for an elitegroup. Newt Gingrich, in an interview on C-SPAN(Lamb, 1994)     

From politics to good management? Transforming the local welfare state in Italy

In light of recent welfare reforms associated with new forms of managerial and financial accountability, this paper analyses the significance for the construction of new legitimate forms of governance of the relationship between public managers of welfare provider units and local elected politicians. The shift from local government as democratic representative institutions to depoliticised efficient agent of welfare provision has created in Italy the opportunity for the emergence of a new cadre of managers, less subject to interference by the parties. The increasingly problematic relationship between managers and politicians reflects the dynamics of a shifting game, originally intended for sector-specific interests, that was later transformed into a struggle between political elites across territory and about territorial politics. Any set of alternatives juxtaposing efficient management and politics is best viewed by taking account of the significance of local welfare institutions for political legitimacy.