MARKETS OR POLITICS? THE DETERMINANTS OF LABOUR RELATIONS IN A NATIONALIZED INDUSTRY

This article examines 'market' and 'political' explanations for the nature of nationalized industry labour relations, using British Rail as a case study. The market perspective suggests that market insulation generated 'cosy' industrial relations since it allowed managers to acquiesce in restrictive practices. More robust labour management recently is the result of greater exposure to market forces. This explanation is rejected because BR was exposed to competitive pressures before the Thatcher era, and because there is no simple relationship between market forces and managerial actions. Instead political uncertainty is the primary determinant of the state of industrial relations. In the 1970s British Rail management and unions formed a 'tacit alliance' to limit the potential damage of government interventions. This alliance has broken down in the 1980s not primarily because of market pressures but because government interventions have become more explicitly concerned with industrial relations.     

THE NEW POLITICS OF MEDICINE

THE NEW POLITICS OF MEDICINE
Brian Salter
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 236 pp., £17.99 (pb) ISBN: 0333801121     

THE POLITICS OF DECLINE: AN INTERPRETATION OF BRITISH POLITICS FROM THE 1940s TO THE 1970s

THE POLITICS OF DECLINE: AN INTERPRETATION OF BRITISH POLITICS FROM THE 1940s TO THE 1970s
Geoffrey K. Fry
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 307 pp., £55 (hb) ISBN: 0333726227     

THE POLITICS AND MANAGEMENT OF HUNG AUTHORITIES

Hung local authorities have grown in numbers in recent years. This paper analyses the experience of those authorities. First it reviews the growing body of literature and argues that it has largely been concerned with particular authorities. The authors then proposed a research-based classification of hung authorities, before examining both the nature of political behaviour and changes in management. Finally, the paper identifies factors leading to stability and instability in hung authorities and the characteristics of both situations.     

NIGEL BALCHIN AND THE POLITICS OF SOUNDNESS

The bulk of Nigel Balchin's fiction follows the same pattern – a sound male character observing an unsound one; his plots are occasionally more complicated, as when a character examines critically his own soundness or when scientific soundness is transformed into political unacceptability. The novels are therefore a good guide to soundness as a golden mean. But rulers need to balance sense and vision. Balchin questions the value of bureaucratic games in modern organizations which harm a balanced resolution. It is surprising that as a psychologist who understands the pragmatic of interpersonal politics in organizations he failed himself to acquire the depth of vision of a great political novelist.     

CHARACTERIZING NEW LABOUR: THE CASE OF THE CHILD TRUST FUND

The UK Child Trust Fund (CTF), which came into effect in January 2005, appears to be an exemplary instance of ‘asset‐based welfare’, of the redistribution of wealth rather than simply income. However, this article shows that over the course of its development, and in its final implementation, CTF policy became ever more focused on generating a ‘savings culture’ and enhancing financial literacy. In explaining this outcome, it is argued that it may be characteristic of New Labour for which, it is further argued, welfare policy should seek to push individual aspirations and outlooks in certain directions. The article takes an interpretive approach to the study of policy and politics, arguing that we should look carefully at the processes of argument and selection by which ‘objects’ of policy are specified. This can help us characterize the approach of varying administrations, their ‘governmentality’.     

BY VOLUNTARY AGREEMENT: THE POLITICS OF INSTRUMENT SELECTION

There are many ways in which policies can be sanctioned, and legislation is only one of a number of alternatives. This article examines one such alternative: voluntary agreements. After outlining the major characteristics of this policy instrument there is an examination of the various factors which appear to influence their selection in favour of legislation. This is followed by an attempt to trace a pattern of policy succession by examining three particular cases where there has been a change in the principal policy instrument. Finally, the discussion as a whole is set in the context of the executive domination of Parliament. The implications of the use of non-statutory instruments, such as voluntary agreements, for this relationship are noted.     

POLITICS BY HEURISTICS: POLICY NETWORKS WITH A FOCUS ON ACTOR RESOURCES,AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE CASE OF RENEWABLE ENERGY POLICY UNDER NEW LABOUR

Policy network analysis is criticized for being a ‘heuristic’ device, yet ‘heuristic’ methods may be essential to achieve detailed understandings of specific policy outcomes. Rational choice modelling alone cannot perform a similar function. This paper develops a ‘heuristic’ policy network approach that focuses on the analysis of actor resources. Changing contexts can alter the resource distributions of actors within a policy community. This can lead to new policy outcomes. Policy networks can therefore be rescued from criticisms made by, for example, Dowding, by re‐visiting Rhodes's earlier emphasis on analysis of actor resources. This approach is illustrated in the case of UK renewable energy policy under the UK government of New Labour. Changing contexts have strengthened the resources of the main renewable energy interest groups to achieve higher targets and more technology‐specific means of financial incentives. The Renewable Energy Association has achieved legislation favouring feed‐in tariffs as is the practice elsewhere in Europe for small renewable generators.     

THE ROLE OF POLITICS AND INSTITUTIONS IN THE ITALIAN ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM TRAJECTORY

This article applies broad conceptual categories of comparative politics to the explanation of administrative reforms in Italy. It takes as its argument some lines of influence on public sector reform of the features of the party system in Italy, the executive‐legislative balance, the politician‐bureaucrat relationship, and the role of administrative law. In the search for explanations for the trajectory of administrative reform, pre‐existing political and institutional factors also have to be interpreted through the lens of negotiated change occurring via processes of conversion and layering involving new and old institutions that has taken place in Italy since the ‘political crisis' began in 1992.     

REFORM OF INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS IN AUSTRALIA: THE POLITICS OF FEDERALISM AND THE NON-POLITICS OF MANAGERIALISM

A remarkable process of reform of intergovernmental arrangements was initiated in Australia in 1990 designed, according to its proponents, 'to improve our national efficiency and international competitiveness and to improve the delivery and quality of services governments provide'. Unlike previous 'new federalisms' in Australia (and elsewhere) the reform process on this occasion was neither totally unilateral, nor top-down in design and implementation. Rather, while reflecting the commonwealth (federal) government's frustrations at the limits imposed by the federal system on its political power and administrative capacity, the process intentionally was cooperative, incorporating all state and temtory government leaders, and including representatives of local government. In the context of a review of the origins, nature and objectives of the reform initiative, this article points both to the valuable innovations embodied in its processes, and to the risks of reduced political access and citizen participation created by its attempts to apply 'single-government' managerialist principles to the redesign of intergovernmental arrangements in federal systems. Political and bureaucratic objectives, combined with a lack of adequate appreciation of federal principles, led, in our view, to an attempt to supplant participatory politics with relatively less accessible and responsive managerial structures.     

ISSUE DEFINITION AND THE POLITICS OF STATE ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE POLICY ADOPTION

ABSTRACT

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of research regarding environmental justice. Nearly all of this research, however, focuses on documenting the proximity and exposure of poor and minority communities to sources of environmental risk. Researchers have yet to assess systematically governmental responses to inequities in the distribution of this risk. Our paper begins to fill this gap by examining the policy responses of state governments to charges of environmental injustice. First, we provide a brief overview of environmental justice policy activity at all levels of government. Second, we discuss how issue definition may help determine the politics of policy adoption in the area of environmental justice, and develop a theory to explain these policy adoptions. Third, we model state policy activity using probit and ordered probit analysis, testing to see whether these responses are best explained by the severity of the environmental justice problem in the state, state racial diversity, state political capacity, or state administrative capacity and evaluating whether these results are more consistent with redistributive or protective regulatory policy. We close by discussing what our results imply for issue definition in environmental justice and the prospects of adequate state policy responses to inequities in the distribution of environmental risk.     

NEW FORMS OF ADMINISTRATIVE LAW IN THE AGE OF THIRD‐PARTY GOVERNMENT

This article explores the democratic values underlying public services when they are outsourced. Building on Rosenbloom and Piotrowski's (2005a, 2005b) framework, we examine whether and how administrative law norms – that serve as central democratic governance and accountability mechanisms in the administrative state – are extended to the new (private) frontline service providers. Through a study of the regulation of the privatized welfare‐to‐work programme in Wisconsin, we find that new forms of administrative law are evolving in third‐party government. These forms differ from administrative law as it usually applies to public agencies in several important aspects. The findings highlight the active role of legislative and administrative mechanisms in the promotion of these new forms of administrative law; and they shed light on the transformations that administrative law norms undergo in the age of third‐party government.     

PERFORMING AUTHORITY: DISCURSIVE POLITICS AFTER THE ASSASSINATION OF THEO VAN GOGH

In November 2004, the assassination of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam by an Islamic extremist shocked The Netherlands. Critics of multiculturalism quickly linked the murder to the perceived failure of ‘soft’ integration policies and questioned the authority and legitimacy of Amsterdam’s political leadership. This article studies the response of political leaders to those challenges from a performative perspective. Analysing governance as performance illuminates the importance of actively enacting political leadership in non‐parliamentary settings such as talk shows, mosques and other religious meeting places, and improvised mass meetings in times of crisis. The authors distinguish different discursive means of performing authority, make suggestions for dealing with crisis events in ethnically and culturally diverse cities and draw some lessons from this approach as well as for methods of studying public administration.     

LIFE AND DEATH OF AN INSTITUTION: THE CASE OF COLLECTIVE WHEAT MARKETING IN AUSTRALIA

Since the 1980s, there has been renewed interest among political scientists in the role of institutions. An important strand of this ‘new institutionalism’ is historical institutionalism. Recent theoretical developments have sought to address the most obvious criticisms of the historical institutionalist approach, particularly the critique relating to its tendency to focus on explanations of stability. However, the institutional histories under consideration are generally incomplete as they do not include the entire life of the institution. Drawing on the history of collective wheat marketing in Australia, this article seeks to address this gap by considering a case in which strategies of institutional reproduction initially appeared to have managed change successfully but ultimately sowed the seeds of institutional demise. By considering the death as well as the life of an institution, we can gain a clearer picture of the effectiveness of institutional strategies of adaptation and change.     

DEVELOPMENTS IN THE PURCHASING PROCESS IN THE NHS: TOWARDS AN EXPLICIT POLITICS OF RATIONING?

The introduction of the internal market to the National Health Service in Britain marks a major change in the form of provision of health care interventions. This article reports the findings of independent research into the development of the purchasing process in eight purchasing authorities (which collectively purchase health care for 5 per cent of the population of Britain), and considers the extent to which this has led to an explicit politics of rationing in British health care. The structure and organization of purchasing organizations is described, along with their relationship with providers of health care. The ability of purchasing organizations to assess the health needs of the populations for which they purchase health care services, and their ability to influence change in the nature of the services provided, is also examined.