Government Budget Reforms: Agenda for the 1980s

A previous article (Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 1980) examined the progress and problems of budgetary innovation in the postwar era. Through a succession of reforms, budgeting maintained its coherence and continuity, It is likely, however, that future innovations will take a different path, one less certain of its success and more a product of fiscal stress than of government affluence. This article considers the reform issues likely to emerge in the coming years.     

The Capital Budget: History and Future Directions

While there is a substantial body of literature concerning capital programming and budgeting in the private sector, there is only a modest literature on this subject in the public sector. Government researchers and public administration scholars have, for about seventy-five years, recognized the value of budgeting for operating expenses and have tried to develop theoretical frameworks for the public budgeting process. However, very little of this attention has been devoted to capital budgeting. As Alan Steiss has stated," The theory of capital budgeting has not been set forth; rather the emphasis... has been on devising and improving the techniques of capital budgeting." Michael White has called capital budgeting an "elusive subject" that "lacks clear definitions, organized traditions of inquiry, conceptual boundaries, standard questions, and reliable data sets."     

Humanitarian Intervention: Past, Present and Future

Bellamy, A. (2006) Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq . London: Polity Press.
Weiss, T. (2007) Humanitarian Intervention . London: Polity Press.
Reed, C. and Ryall, D. (eds) (2007) The Price of Peace: Just Wars in the Twenty-First Century . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Seybolt, T. B. (2007) Humanitarian Military Intervention: The Conditions for Success and Failure . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heazle, M. and Islam, I. (eds) (2007) Beyond the Iraq War: The Promises, Pitfalls and Perils of External Interventionism . Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.     

Pandemic Disease: A Past and Future Challenge to Governance in the United States

Throughout history, pandemics have posed significant challenges to governments. Examination of the ways that governments have responded to pandemics can contribute to the U.S. government's ability to react in the future. We utilize past cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and multiple forms of influenza to identify specific challenges governments have faced. Based on that knowledge, we discuss the major issues that the United States will have to address in the event of a future pandemic.     

文明批判的已往与未来

文明批判是对文明发展的负面效应的深层反思。本文依次考察了社会早期较为朦胧的文明批判;两千多年的一次较深入的文明批判;近代以来一些不成气侯的文明批判;纪元第三千年期间新的文明批判。在批判中,人与自然、人与社会、社会有机体内部达到一种境界——和谐。     

Answering the Public Choice Challenge: A Neoprogressive Research Agenda

A neoprogressive research agenda is developed to challenge public choice theory's position as the new orthodoxy in both understanding and guiding policy choices about urban service delivery. Such a challenge requires more than accumulating negative empirical tests. Rather, we must accept the new burden of proof laid on proponents of progressive reform institutions by the theories of nonmarket failure and quasimarkets, ideas that undermined the intellectual pillars supporting progressive reform institutions and can only be challenged by new ideas. Public choice theory itself, broadly considered, is proposed as a valid source of such new ideas. Three research programs, in part already underway, are outlined as essential building blocks in the research agenda, focusing, respectively, on blunting the rough edges of the theory of nonmarket failure, coordinating the empirical critiques of quasimarkets in a new theory of quasimarket failure, and developing the new institutionalism so that it can provide the basis for comparing the production outcomes of alternative urban institutions.     

Britain and Europe: An Unforgettable Past and an Unavoidable Future

The title of this article is taken from the opening lines of Hugo Young's brilliant history of Britain's relationship with Europe, This Blessed Plot . That book begins with a sentence that says it all: 'This is the story of 50 years in which Britain struggled to reconcile the past she could not forget with the future she could not avoid.' Those words were written in the spring of 1998. Despite the early promise of Tony Blair's European policy, little has changed since. For France and Germany, the institutions of Europe represent a uniquely successful attempt to exorcise the past. For its part, Britain lives in the shadow of its history.
The struggle to reconcile national identity with strategic interests is as acute as it has ever been. For all that Mr Blair's government has done something in recent years to make Britain's case in Europe, it has failed to make Europe's case in Britain.     

Past and Future Directions of the APS: Some Personal Reflections

Reform of the public service has not been just some management fad, nor is it even driven by purely management considerations. Fundamentally, public service reform, both in the last decade and in the future, is being driven by basic changes in our society, economy and technology, which in turn influence what the public expects from government.
The reforms of the last decade or so have concentrated on changing the management framework and culture. Future reforms are likely to impact more heavily on the responsibilities of the APS and what it actually does. However, the underlying rationale will continue to be to ensure the delivery of services which respond more effectively to the needs of the community.     

Human Rights in Policing: The Past,Present and Future

This article seeks to demonstrate, largely from practitioners’ perspectives, the growing evolution in understanding and implementation of meaningful human rights standards within the policing context. In the early 2000s, human rights were perceived and treated as a rather restrictive framework in UK policing. They are now more readily seen as a set of tools that guide and help the police to balance the views and interests of all parties to the criminal justice process. Human rights values enable police in the UK to better endeavour to do the right thing, ‘without fear or favour’.     

Monarchy and Democracy: A Progressive Agenda

The Blair governments since 1997 have seen the single most significant period of constitutional reform in Britain for over a century. However, they leave the monarchy, the institution at the apex of the unwritten constitution, untouched. It is argued that neither inaction nor abolition is advisable, but that reform should be undertaken, with particular attention to the rules of succession and to the royal prerogative powers, notable examples being the powers to declare war, to dismiss parliament, to assent to legislation and to appoint the Prime Minister. Those powers now exercised by the executive should be formally and linguistically separated from the office of head of state, and put on a statutory basis. The achievement of these reforms depends, however, on political will and cannot be initiated by the monarchy itself.     

Representative Bureaucracy: Understanding Its Past to Address Its Future

Julie Dolan and David H. Rosenbloom, eds., Representative Bureaucracy: Classic Readings and Continuing Controversies
Norma M. Riccucci, Managing Diversity in Public Sector Workforces
Margaret C. Rung, Servants of the State: Managing Diversity and Democracy in the Federal Workforce, 1933–1953     

Leveson Past,Present and Future: The Politics of Press Regulation

As a result of the phone‐hacking scandal and evidence of other serious journalistic abuses by some newspapers, the government set up the Leveson Inquiry to hear evidence from victims and to make recommendations for a new and effective system of press regulation. Leveson's recommendations for independent self‐regulation overseen by a “recogniser” was seen as a moderate solution which would uphold the principle of an unfettered press while providing appropriate protection from unscrupulous or unethical press behaviour. After historic cross‐party agreement, Parliament passed a resolution accepting a Royal Charter which adopted the great majority of his recommendations. In response, Britain's main national newspapers have pursued a campaign of systematic misinformation and distortion, aimed at discrediting the inquiry, its supporters and the cross‐party Charter, while promoting a different system which would remain almost wholly controlled by the industry and would in practice be little different from the discredited Press Complaints Commission. After decades of ineffectual political response to press abuse and press power, there is now a historic opportunity for Parliament to assert its sovereign power. Over the next 12–18 months, we will see whether we have reached a genuine milestone in British public life or whether the British press will remain the last bastion of unaccountable power.     

Reinventing the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration: Past Restructure and Future Redesign

The growing divergence between everyday realities and the way the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (DTCA) operated prompted it to adjust its procedures from the mid-1970s onwards. At first, it was thought that adjustment would be confined to the primary processes of the DTCA, its management style, and corporate culture. Gradually, however, it became apparent that this new modus operand!, based on a target-group approach to taxpayers replacing its earlier “types of taxes”-orientated approach, could only be realized by an overhaul of its organizational structure as a whole. Restructuring was formally rounded off on 1 June 1992. In 1993, the first year in which the DTCA operated fully in its restructured form, the benefits of the changes brought about in preceding years began to emerge. Society is constantly in motion. As society changes, the DTCA has to meet new challenges. To keep abreast of these changes, organizations need to be flexible and have the capacity for adaptation. Further adaptations on the part of the DTCA are therefore inevitable in the coming years.' The focus has been placed on working in the here-and-now, with the emphasis on broadening the DTCA public-orientated approach, on adequately tackling the fraud problem, and on ensuring that legal strictures are met. The article is an attempt to explain the background and the approach taken by the DTCA, a large organization of considerable importance that has to be constantly on the move and will remain so in the years ahead.     

The Past and Future of the New Judicial Federalism

This article argues that the new judicial federalism, the increasedreliance by state judges on state declarations of rights tosecure rights unavailable under the U.S. Constitution, representsnot a return to an earlier federalism but rather something new.Although the basis for a state civil liberties jurisprudencehad long existed, the "discovery’ of state constitutionalguarantees did not occur until the Warren Court pioneered anapproach to civil liberties that state courts could emulate.This "discovery" has led to only intermittent reliance on stateguarantees. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that state judges willreturn to the total deference to federal rulings in civil libertiescases that characterized preceding decades.