Citizen Participation in German and Spanish Local Governments: A Comparative Study

In recent decades, citizens have become more and more disenchanted with the traditional institutions of representative government, detached from political parties, and disillusioned with old forms of civic engagement and participation. This has favored a renewed interest in citizen engagement and citizen participation and a growing re-emergence in academic and political discourse of ideas and values of community, localism, and citizen participation. This article analyzes the main objectives and the actual implementation of citizen participation initiatives in the local governments of two European Continental countries, Germany and Spain. The aim is to find out the factors that affect the possible decoupling between the objectives and the “real” uses of citizen participation. Our results show that most local governments in these two countries are using citizen participation only to increase the level of perceived legitimacy or to comply minimally with legal requirements, without really taking advantage of citizen participation to enhance decision-making processes. These findings confirm that institutional theory becomes the rationale to explain the implementation of citizen participation in these two European Continental countries.     

Of Wild and Cultivated Politics: Conflict and Democracy in Argentina

This is a study of cultural change within democratization. It uses conflict theory to understand the culture of conflict escalation and management, taking Argentina as its example. Beginning with the most extreme dictatorships, The Dirty War and the Rosas period, and then looking at other periods of governance, the essay illustrates that Argentina has an authoritarian culture of conflict. The essay suggests why these patterns have developed in Argentina. It asks whether it is possible to change such cultural patterns and whether the current democratizing effort includes efforts at change. It concludes that the democratization efforts since 1983 have included attempts to change culture, as well as electoral and institutional movement toward democracy.     

Agencification and Corporatization in Norway 1947–2011

We explore agencification and corporatization in the Norwegian central government. While these types of organizational change have often been linked to the NPM and post-NPM doctrines of recent decades, we will extend our analysis back to the post-World War II period. The empirical data are drawn from the Norwegian State Administration Database. The main focus will be on changes along the vertical dimension, i.e., conversions of ministerial units into state agencies and from state agencies to state-owned companies, or in the other direction. A main question is the organizational dynamics of agencification and corporatization. Why have the structure and organization of government changed, how and to what degree do the pattern of change reflect global trends in NPM and post-NPM reforms, and is the central government subject to the politics of structural choice. Moreover, what is the importance of national administrative doctrines, party constellations in government, and deliberate actions of administrative policy-makers?     

When Do National Administrations Adapt to EU Policies? Variation in Denmark and Greece

This article joins the Europeanization studies and examines the administrative adaptation to Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), a highly institutionalized and regulated policy, in two small older member states, Denmark and Greece. The findings demonstrate variation in administrative adaptation. In Denmark, both formal and informal administrative structures adapt to CAP, while in Greece administrative adaptation is limited to formal structures. This variation is attributed to two dimensions of the domestic institutional and organizational settings, namely “centralization” and “professionalism.” The comparative analysis provides an in-depth understanding of the administrative differences between North and South—a cleavage that became prominent during the Eurozone crisis.     

Turkey’s Public Administration Today: An Overview and Appraisal

ABSTRACT

This study overviews and appraises Turkey’s contemporary public administration system. Its prominent characterizing features are discussed, with an emphasis on both the achievements and problem areas. Turkey has a long history of strong traditional bureaucratic practices and culture, from which its contemporary public administration system has emerged since the Republic was established almost a century ago. Despite its many achievements, public administration has its problems, generally the product of conflicts between tradition and modernity. Due emphasis should, however, be given to addressing the challenges of its over-politicization, strengthening governance practices, enhancing the human factor, and instituting further modern administrative reforms.     

Europeanizing the National Education Space? Adjusting to the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) in the UK

This article examines the reception of the education Open Method of Coordination (OMC) in the UK as an aspect of Europeanization of national administrations. It addresses relationships between political and administrative actors in the process of responding to the education OMC. We argue that despite progress with institutionalization of the education OMC at the EU level, there is limited institutionalization of the education OMC at the national level. Against the backdrop of UK skepticism about engaging with the EU integration project, the interesting finding is the administrative strategies employed for deflecting EU influence on the national education space.     

Demystifying Decentralization and Its Setback: Evidence From Thailand’s Decentralization Reform

This analysis explores the options for a conceptual framework to explicate the dynamics of decentralization reform in Thailand. The first section examines typological frameworks used in various social scientific fields to classify decentralization. Second, as a case in point, we analyze the decentralization reform process in Thailand, which officially began in the late 1990s. Then, the analysis examines theoretical and empirical works that attempt to explain the dynamics of decentralization in Thailand. We suggest historical institutionalism, along with the concepts of path dependence and critical junctures, as theoretical approaches to understand decentralization problems with an eye to political actors’ strategic interests, as well as political and institutional contexts that restrain their choices.     

Do Citizens Trust the Civil Service Differently? Comparing the Determinants of Confidence in Political-Administrative Institutions

This paper asks whether citizens judge public administration to be trustworthy using different criteria from other political institutions. Using survey data, we estimate ordered logistic and multivariate regressions to compare the determinants of trust in six different political-administrative institutions. Findings show that social trust, political interest, as well as other individual characteristics, have very similar effects on trust regardless of the institution. The evidence shows that people who are older and more educated, interested in politics, and employed in the public sector, are only slightly more likely to make some sort of distinction. Implications for non-discriminant judgement mechanisms are discussed.     

Hybridity in the Public Sector—Comparing Development Features in Municipalities in Japan and Norway

The theme in this article is managerial or administrative changes in municipalities seen from the perceptions of citizens. It is asked what characterize these changes, whether they are showing an interrelated and hybrid pattern, and whether the perceptions are varying depending on individual demographic characteristics or contextual factors related to their communities and the country they are living in. The data used are from surveys in Japan and Norway in 2015–2016. The main results indicate that the change or reform measures are indeed interrelated and hybrid. They do not vary much related to individual characteristics, except for political attitudes but more so related to the size of their municipalities, year of local residency, and local political activities. Japan and Norway have also marked different profiles regarding the main perceptions of the citizens, reflecting major structural and cultural differences.