Executing priority national development in indonesia: Program innovation of the junior minister

In the process of Indonesia's administrative reform and conduct of its planned development efforts, several innovative measures evolved in its executive structure. One of these was the use of temporary organizational entities to expedite the achievement of development goals where sectors/programs of the national development plan encompass two or more executive agencies and/or levels of governments. In organizational design, the executive problem is the reconciliation between responsibility and authority with the purpose of achieving maximum technical efficiency in the execution of priority development programs. As an organizational device to deal with this problem, the offices of six junior ministers were established. By employing the technique of executive authority in rank, these ministers, heading temporary agencies organized in terms of program responsibility as specified in the development plan and as approved by the cabinet, have become the organizational means by which to integrate all of the disparate project activities vested in the executive line agencies in productive organizational cores. Should this organizational innovation prove successful, it will be one of the more important organizational contributions in recent years to the execution of centrally planned development programs in a developing society.     

Public administration and policymaking: The political/career executive environment

Federal government policymaking is improved by the partici-pation of career executives. As a minimum, contributions based on their professional expertise and institutional experience can serve as an early warning system for helping political executives to avoid mistakes in new policy ventures. However, a number of political, structural, and attitudinal factors cause the political/career executive relationship environment to be characteristically stressful, tense, and frequently not conducive to joint involvement in policymaking. Historic factors producing this environment include basic constitutional and democratic values regarding the exercise of unitary power, the ambiguous roles of political and career executives, the controversial executive workforce structure, and the differing orientations of career and non-career executives. More recent obstacles to developing a cooperative state of political/career relations consist of the rise of the administrative presidency accompanied by bureaucrat-bashing, an increased politicization of management, and the trend toward ideological administration. What has been termed the “quiet crisis” in public service has led to calls for change in presidential rhetoric, development of orientation and communication opportunities in the political/career relationship, and proposals of structural alternatives to the present executive workforce system established in 1978. The Bush administration has implemented several measures leading to a renewed recognition of the benefits to policymaking output of career executive involvement.     

How to grow a public executive: The federal executive institute experience

The symbol of excellence for executive development and managerial education throughout the world is The Federal Executive Institute (FEI) in the United States. In fact, the FEI became the model laboratory for growing public executives in the 1970s, as hundreds upon hundreds of visitors from around the world came to see the ”mecca of applied executive development.“ The FEI became a distinct culture and a genuine learning community that others attempted to model throughout the world. And yet, the failure of the ”FEI imitations“ was due mainly to academics who failed to understand the need for a ”PRAXIS, pracademic model of development,“ rather than a ”theory, academic framework of education.“ Hence, an analysis of this noted executive development success may help others to avoid the pitfalls that academics too often encounter when they attempt to train, develop, and/or educate the public administrators who do the work.     

The Maintenance of Executive Capacity in Germany: Revisiting the Annual Budget of the European Union

This article considers the executive capacity of the German government to coordinate the annual budget of the European Union in the post-Maastricht period. It identifies and elaborates two broad sets of factors essential to the development of this routinized policy process: internal executive coordination through specialized administrative techniques and coordination with external actors through multi-level institutional adjustments. The emergent picture shows the success of the Federal government in maintaining its executive capacity within an Europeanized policy sector.     

The Maintenance of Executive Capacity in Germany: Revisiting the Annual Budget of the European Union

This article considers the executive capacity of the German government to coordinate the annual budget of the European Union in the post‐Maastricht period. It identifies and elaborates two broad sets of factors essential to the development of this routinized policy process: internal executive coordination through specialized administrative techniques and coordination with external actors through multi‐level institutional adjustments. The emergent picture shows the success of the Federal government in maintaining its executive capacity within an Europeanized policy sector.     

Predicting executive vacancies: An organizational approach

When an executive departs, some organizations experience a vacancy while others do not. Recent research shows that the occurrence and length of vacancy instances within and across sectors varies widely. However, the causes of such variance in vacancies have yet to be carefully addressed by public management research. This study explores the determinants of executive vacancy, focusing specifically on organizational-level characteristics of size, performance, and sector as well as the role of anticipation of a departure. We use data from public and private US doctoral universities to identify 230 leadership transitions between 1993 and 2013. In this context, we find that anticipation of departure is an extremely strong predictor of vacancy. Moreover, private universities are significantly less likely than their public counterparts to experience executive vacancy while organizational performance and size do not appear to influence vacancy.     

Gulick and the american presidency: vision,reality, and consequences

One of Luther Gulick's most significant legacies was his conception of the executive. This chapter explores the nature and origins of that conception and shows how it coincided with President Franklin Roosevelt's notions for altering the powers of the presidency. These two conceptions came together in the Brownlow Committee's recommendations and their subsequent promulgation in the Executive Reorganization Act of 1939.

Gulick's notions of an executive were derived from the city manager, a different executive than any with which the authors of the Constitution were familiar. It thus contributed to one of the most profound changes in our Constitution, reshaped our notion of the presidency, crystallized a new public philosophy about how we govern ourselves, and entrenched a conventional wisdom that underlies the practice of public administration. These results spawned an alliance between presidents, who found it useful to portray themselves as powerful chief executive officers buttressed by the potent symbols of science and efficiency and the nascent field of public administration which gained legitimacy as the obedient scientific managers of the president. An alliance, however, which could not survive the changes of constituencies that began to emerge in the late 1960s.

The presidency has evolved from managerial to plebiscitary and finally to highly politicized with a variety of potentialities not all of which can be viewed as benign, but all of which leave public administration without a role that is simultaneously legitimate and which encompasses the complexity and discretion dictated by our circumstances. The chapter closes with lessons we might draw from Luther Gulick's life and apply to our efforts to fashion a new role for public administration in a government of shared powers.     

A Comparative Perspective on Executive Development: Trends in 11 European Countries

Senior officials in public organizations have a variety of training needs. Yet, the reduction in training budget is often a primary means of improving budget balance. This contradiction calls for a comparative investigation into executive development. Focusing on eleven European administrative systems, the paper investigates (i) whether bureaucracies lead the way, or lag behind, in the development of specialized training programmes, (ii) whether there is a widespread understanding that specific topics are important for training, and (iii) whether senior officials vary in their perception of the usefulness of training for current posts and for promotion. Based on an institutional analysis, a mail survey and e´lite interviews with senior civil servants, the paper advances a three-fold argument. First, bureaucracies lead the way in the development of specialized training programmes. Second, senior officials want to prepare themselves for items of importance in the near-term future (for example the European Union), as well as to cover as many remote possibilities as they can (for example with management training) in the hope they will do better in any post, even though they cannot now predict what those posts will require of them. Third, although some types of executive development programmes turn out to work well, numerous others do not. The latter, however, are not always a waste of money because they are sometimes used as places to temporarily 'store' people or to 'get rid of people' that an individual agency does not want to have around anymore.     

Generalists and specialists in executive politics: Why ambitious meta‐policies so often fail

This article contributes to the politics of policy‐making in executive government. It introduces the analytical distinction between generalists and specialists as antagonistic players in executive politics and develops the claim that policy specialists are in a structurally advantaged position to succeed in executive politics and to fend off attempts by generalists to influence policy choices through cross‐cutting reform measures. Contrary to traditional textbook public administration, we explain the views of generalists and specialists not through their training but their positions within an organization. We combine established approaches from public policy and organization theory to substantiate this claim and to define the dilemma that generalists face when developing government‐wide reform policies (‘meta‐policies’) as well as strategies to address this problem. The article suggests that the conceptual distinction between generalists and specialists allows for a more precise analysis of the challenges for policy‐making across government organizations than established approaches.     

The Core Executive, Modernization and the Creation of PESC, 1960-64

The period between 1957 and 1964 was one of immense yet underestimated political and administrative change. It culminated in what many have seen as a golden age in Whitehall. This is reflected by the wealth of records now available for the study of government and policy networks. The period is thus an ideal one for collaboration between historians and political scientists.
The decisional case study examined in this article focuses on the early years of the Public Expenditure Survey Committee, as viewed from the perspective of welfare policy. The drive to 'modernize' government started with attempts to 'roll back the state' and to hive off the implementation of policy to executive agencies, very similar to those pursued in the 1980s by Mrs Thatcher and Next Steps. The reasoned rejection of such a policy was symbolized by the creation of PESC, a centralized attempt to allocate resources rationally. PESC itself, however, was initially a failure. External circumstances, such as the breakdown of political and administrative networks within the core executive, and internal tensions, including the Treasury's covert attempt to impose its own departmental interest, led the Cabinet Secretary to conclude that the prioritization and strict control of forward expenditure commitments was 'not possible'. This case study demonstrates how future studies of the core executive might be broadened and deepened.     

The core executive and small states: Is coordination the primary challenge?

This article interrogates three key arguments derived from the functional approach to studying the core executive: (1) that coordination is the primary problem that confronts executive decision‐makers; (2) that improved coordination will lead to better governance; and (3) that linkage problems dissipate as policy systems consolidate. Drawing on the experience of hitherto understudied small states, including 112 interviews with political elites, we show how the effects of country size create governance challenges in the form of leader dominance, patronage systems and capacity constraints. Our findings support the call to broaden the focus of functional analysis beyond its traditional emphasis on coordination. For scholars of small states we synthesize existing empirical findings and provide a theoretical justification for future work using an adaptation of the core executive approach.     

Executive Remuneration: Industry and Job Family Effects

This research explores the distribution of executive remuneration based on the type of industry and job family in South African state-owned enterprises. A regression analysis of secondary data collected on 222 executives was conducted. The overall results based on pairwise comparison suggest that the distribution of executive remuneration across various categories of industry was the same except between forestry—defense, forestry—telecommunications, defense—telecommunications, and energy—development funding. However, the results also indicated that there was no difference in the distribution of remuneration across various categories of job families in South African state-owned enterprises.     

EXECUTIVE EDUCATION FOR STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT: A SURVEY

ABSTRACT

Executive education is a growth industry in the United States. Executive education programs and, more particularly, the variety of teaching techniques they use, promise to be key issues in the field of public administration in as much as they may be precursors of techniques and technology that will be used in more traditional teaching venues. This study reports the results of a survey of executive education programs conducted in 1998 under the auspices of the South Carolina Executive Institute. The survey covered four areas – curriculum, participants, faculty, and program administration. We conclude that the immediate future of executive education likely will be marked by a continuing emphasis on customization, experimental learning, and rigorous evaluation of the results. Two areas in which there are likely to be more significant departures from existing practices in public sector executive education are program alliances and the use of new communications and information technology.     

MANAGING EUROPE FROM AN IRISH PERSPECTIVE: CRITICAL JUNCTURES AND THE INCREASING FORMALIZATION OF THE CORE EXECUTIVE IN IRELAND

This article analyses the management of European Union (EU) business by the Irish core executive. More specifically, it investigates the demands placed by EU membership on the Irish system of public administration and how the system has responded to these demands. Employing an institutionalist analytical framework, the article maps the formal and informal organizational and procedural devices or structures used to manage EU affairs in Ireland, as well as dissecting the key relationships that govern this management process and the role of the domestic agents actively involved in the EU’s governance structure, the cadre or boundary managers. The article also explores in a dynamic way the development of the capacity for the management of EU affairs in Ireland over time. Using the concepts of path dependence and critical junctures, we illuminate how key system‐management decisions became locked‐in over time and we isolate the triggers for significant adaptational change, be they domestic or external. Adaptation to EU business in Ireland was path‐dependent and consisted of gradual incremental adjustment. This system of flexible adaptation generally served Ireland well as the EU’s policy regime expanded and evolved, but in response to the shock rejection of the Nice Treaty by the electorate in 2001, significant formalization of the Irish system occurred with the establishment of new processes and rules for managing relations between the core executive and the EU.     

Double-Edged Swords: Expert-Stakeholders as (Slightly) Unreliable Instruments for Control and Autonomy of Executive Agencies

Establishing executive agencies at arms's length of parent departments has caused widespread concern regarding their autonomy. In the Netherlands, ministries have established different types of boards to monitor agencies. Also, agencies have established an independent review commission. The different boards and the review commission can be looked at as expert stakeholders. This article poses the question whether and how expert stakeholders contribute to either the ministries' control on agencies or the autonomy of agencies. The article is based on qualitative research on six of the largest executive agencies. The article concludes that expert stakeholders act as double-edged swords: they contribute to control on agencies but also to their autonomy. Expert stakeholders improve the monitoring capacity of ministries and thus contribute to control. Conversely, they also strengthen agencies, as they provide political multiplicity and boost reputational uniqueness. The question of which of these prevails is mainly influenced by time, capture, and policy crises.     

Is Local Development Good Politics? Local Development Expenditures and the Re-Election of Governors in the Philippines in the 1990s

Abstract

Are incumbent governors who put more weight on development spending likely to be re-elected? To answer this question, an economic model of a re-electionist local chief executive is introduced and validated with a panel data of provincial governors who ran for another term of office during the election years 1992, 1995 and 1998 in the Philippines. It is found that incumbent governors improve their re-election chances with higher spending on economic development services, other things being constant. Moreover, governors who are members of political clans also have higher development spending especially when faced with rival clans. Thus, elections are still an effective disciplining device, more especially when rivalry is intense among political clans. The policy implication then is to enhance political competition rather than just ban political dynasties to improve the performance of elected officials under decentralization.     

Executive Succession and the Performance of Public Organizations

A theoretical framework is developed for the analysis of the impact of executive succession in public organizations. The central concepts in the model are the motives of chief executives, the means at their disposal and the opportunities available for influencing performance. The main hypothesis that flows from the model is that the effect of executive succession is likely to be small but significant. Furthermore, the strength of the impact of succession is contingent on a variety of external and internal circumstances. Seventeen testable hypotheses concerning these contingency effects are presented as a research agenda for studies of top management change in the public sector. The theoretical arguments are illustrated with reference to UK local government.     

The UK BSE Crisis as a Failure of Government

This paper uses the BSE ('mad cow disease') crisis as a case study of the workings of the British core executive during a crisis event. Using the evidence from the Philips Inquiry, which reported on the BSE/vCJD crisis in 2000, the study analyses the patterns of decision making and the structures of institutional and resource dependence. It concludes that the lack of co-ordination between and within institutions and what was acknowledged to be the mismanagement of expert advice raise serious questions about the executive's ability to manage serious crises. The findings concur with scholarship indicating executive fragmentation and lack of accountability. Consecutive British governments have sought to diminish the centre's responsibility for managing public policy without putting an effective alternative mechanism in place.     

Parliamentary scrutiny of executive patronage: The relationship between institutional norms,reputation and accountability

While executive patronage brings important benefits in terms of governance and control, political influence over the selection of agency staff entails a democratic dilemma: how should the exercise of executive patronage be controlled? This article addresses this critical issue, examining Westminster's system of pre-appointment scrutiny by analysing an original database that encompasses every pre-appointment hearing held between 2007 and 2018. The article demonstrates that although the conduct of hearings accords with select committees’ longstanding commitment to cross-party working, members have not prioritized pre-appointment scrutiny relative to their other committee activities. By systematically disaggregating the factors which affect how select committees dispatch this account-holding responsibility, the article deepens previous analyses of pre-appointment scrutiny, and dovetails with scholarship examining the institutional determinants of select committee power. More broadly, it draws attention to the reputational dynamics of accountability, and how institutional norms can serve as vital reputational resources, enabling account-holders to demonstrate ‘responsible’ account-holding.     

China's Stimulus and the Fall of the Dollar

As British Prime Minister Gordon Brown notes in this section, we are witnessing the birth pangs of a new global order in this deepest financial and economic crash since the Great Depression. There will be plenty of pain all around for a while. And when the quarter-century leveraged-debt bubble of the United States—the explosion of which detonated the crash—is finally unwound, the new global balance will favor an Asia flush with cash. The G-20 will replace the G-7 as the executive committee of globalization. And, if wise leadership stays the course, there will be a "green lining" to the recovery as the fiscal stimulus is imbued with an environmental sensibility.