The Politics of Growth Management Reform in the States: A Comparative Analysis

This article seeks to advance our understanding of the politics of growth management reform in the American states. First, it builds on prior research on agenda processes in other policy arenas to identify four "ideal" types of growth management reforms with empirical referents in the states: quantum, emergent, convergent and gradualist. Next, the political dynamics associated with each type are culled from the experiences of eight states pursuing such reforms over the past three decades. The article concludes by reviewing the implications of these findings for future research and for those pursuing growth management reforms in the future.     

A Comparative Analysis: New Public Management — The Way Ahead?

A set of measures constituting 'New Public Management' (NPM) has been adopted worldwide (Pollitt 1995). This article describes their implementation in the State of Victoria. In particular, the article assesses the reforms within the context of Pollitt's eight elements of NPM reforms that have taken place in management in the public sector in Victoria and, to varying degrees, in all OECD countries. It argues that the evaluation of the success of NPM in Victoria should be addressed by independent evaluations of the impacts of the changes within the political, executive and operational spheres of government, and on consumers and the public service itself. The article offers some lessons for those in government following Victoria's example of the implementation of NPM.
Good governance is critical to ensuring that challenges to society are dealt with adequately (OECD 1995:5).     

Public Incentives,Market Motivations,and Contaminated Properties: New Public Management and Brownfield Liability Reform

Brownfields pose challenges to both communities and policy makers. Public funds are insufficient to remediate these contaminated sites, but, given the uncertainty of contamination and the complexity of liability, private interests are reluctant to become involved for fear of future litigation. From a New Public Management perspective, market incentives can be used to encourage private sector remediation of sites. However, this change implies a shift in administrative function from regulation to “getting the incentives right.” In this research, the authors investigate whether state and federal reforms aimed at increasing private sector involvement have actually done so, and they consider the implications for other goals of brownfield remediation, such as providing economic development assistance in communities where such change is needed. Findings show that developers respond to insurance and tax incentives, but the authors question whether public incentives are making unattractive redevelopment opportunities worth investing in or simply making profitable redevelopment opportunities more profitable.     

Performance Management and Public Sector Reform: The Norwegian Hospital Reform

This article addresses the development of new performance management systems related to public sector reforms. One such system is Management by Objectives and Results (MBOR), based on an official OECD model. Such a system tries to establish unambiguous goals, objectivity, and incentive elements into often traditionally trust-based systems embedded in a complex political-administrative context. To analyze such performance management systems and how they work in practice, we focus on a recent reform of the hospital structure in Norway. Using a broad institutional perspective, we argue that the MBOR-system in Norway is a mixed and complex system encompassing different kinds of logic. These include instrumental elements from the new performance management systems combined with ad hoc preventive efforts by the political leadership, the influence of cultural constraints, elements of rather inappropriate self-interested action, and pressure from the environment. The study reveals that the hospital reform in Norway in practice can be seen as an integrated model, combining informal trust-based approaches and formal performance management measures. It also shows that negative side effects and dysfunctions might occur.     

Public Management Reform: a Global Perspective

This article summarises the results of a 'broad brush' global survey of 'new forms' of public management. The survey supports the view that the spread of the new forms cannot be seen as a global 'paradigm shift' in public management. However the new forms are increasingly found beyond the core set of OECD countries usually given as examples of reforming countries. The survey suggests that globalisation processes are increasing the amount of 'lesson drawing' between countries and contributing to the spread of new forms.     

New Public Management and Management Education: Foundations of Successful Management Reform

International experience shows that the main objective of New Public Management (NPM) reform has predominantly been to overcome the current crisis in funding and public service delivery. The achieving this objective has involved adopting a philosophy of 'more for less' or, in other words, by enhancing 'value for money' in public service delivery. To this end,NPM reforms have generally aimed at replacing the inherited or traditional bureaucratic structure of management with a market – or at least a competition-based – contract arrangement. As is the case in any contested market setting, the main concern of state and public administration is no longer merely to ensure a legally correct application of laws, but also to use scarce resources as 'efficiently' as possible in the pursuit of the desired ends of increased productivity and 'more for less'.     

基于胜任力的公共安全管理在职人员的培训系统创新

本文以广东省公共安全管理在职人员培训系统为研究对象,通过文献研究、系统研究、专家分析相结合的研究方法,构建基于胜任力的公共安全管理在职人员培训系统。该培训系统包括一个核心（胜任力）、一个对象（公共安全在职人员）、三个层面（制度层、资源层和运营层）、四大环节（培训需求分析、培训计划制定、培训组织实施以及培训效果评估）。希望通过这个培训系统,能够有效地提升公共安全管理在职人员的能力素质。     

A General Empirical Law of Public Budgets: A Comparative Analysis

We examine regularities and differences in public budgeting in comparative perspective. Budgets quantify collective political decisions made in response to incoming information, the preferences of decision makers, and the institutions that structure how decisions are made. We first establish that the distribution of budget changes in many Western democracies follows a non-Gaussian distribution, the power function. This implies that budgets are highly incremental, yet occasionally are punctuated by large changes. This pattern holds regardless of the type of political system—parliamentary or presidential—and for level of government. By studying the power function's exponents we find systematic differences for budgetary increases versus decreases (the former are more punctuated) in most systems, and for levels of government (local governments are less punctuated). Finally, we show that differences among countries in the coefficients of the general budget law correspond to differences in formal institutional structures. While the general form of the law is probably dictated by the fundamental operations of human and organizational information processing, differences in the magnitudes of the law's basic parameters are country- and institution-specific .     

The Comparative Historical Analysis of Public Management Policy Cycles in France,Italy, and Spain: Symposium Conclusion

This concluding article in the symposium develops generalizing arguments about the politics of public management reform in France, Italy, and Spain, by drawing out implications of the case studies presented in the three preceding articles. Some of these implications hold that established research arguments about politics of public management reform in the same cultural and geographical area require considerable qualification and reexamination. Some other implications of these case studies take the form of generalizing arguments about the process dynamics of public management policymaking. More specifically, an existing body of generalizing arguments is assessed and modified in the light of the research arguments crafted through the three case studies' dialogues between conceptual approaches and historical evidence. Together, these two discussions offer a contribution to the political science research literature on the politics of public management reform.     

The Comparative Historical Analysis of Public Management Policy Cycles in France,Italy, and Spain: Symposium Introduction

In recent studies of public management reform in France, Italy, and Spain inspired by historical institutionalism, the Napoleonic tradition is cast as a causal factor whose overwhelming strength explains how these countries' reforms proceed and finish. This symposium pursues the same research interest in the politics of public management reform and goal of understanding how reforms begin, proceed, and finish in these countries. However, the features of this research project include (1) a focus on instances of public management policymaking, (2) original research on public management reform episodes in each country, and (3) explanatory research arguments that place causation within events. Based on a comparison of explanatory research arguments developed in each case study, the symposium's conclusion extends earlier institutional processualist accounts of causal tendencies of public management policymaking and offers a critique of the historical institutionalist studies mentioned earlier.     

Strategy and Accountability: Structural Reform Litigation and Public Management

Structural reform litigation involves legal action against public bureaucracies alleging that an official has violated the legal rights of an agency's client. A pattern of rights infringements raises the specter of systemic dysfunction. If the court finds for the plaintiffs, or if the defendant agency agrees to settle, the remedy reconstitutes agency operations. What are the incentives faced by public managers whose agencies are involved in structural reform litigation? How might public managers retain public accountability while strategically using the institutional arrangements present in such cases? This article examines these questions through a spatial bargaining model and discusses its analytical implications in the context of a comprehensive suit against the child welfare agency in Kansas City, Missouri.     

Anticipating Uncertainty: The Strategy-Structure Problem in Public Bureaucracy

The connection between administrative structure and policy strategy for public agencies is neither well understood, nor widely appreciated in political science. Much more emphasis is placed on the structure of linkages between bureaucracies and other political institutions. In this article, 1 advance an argument explaining the importance of strategy in policymaking for public agencies, and demonstrate how the concept needs to be refined in order for it to have meaning for public sector organizations. Strategy is analyzed in terms of two categories of uncertainty: generalized and contingent. Because of the ubiquitousness of generalized uncertainty in public policymaking, developing a capacity for anticipating uncertainty problems is critical in strategy formation. Whether that capacity exists is a function of administrative structure. 1 further present an argument for why structure deserves consideration as a political and technical matter, and not simply as a consequence of political preferences.     

Public Sector Management Reform: Convergence or Divergence?

This collection of articles is yet further evidence of an emerging consensus around the world of the need to improve the performance of the public sector. This is happening across countries at different stages of development, with widely divergent cultures and different forms of economic organization. Gu Jiaqi, in discussing reform in China, refers to the public demanding that governments act with fewer inputs and with best outcomes. The recently published book, Reinventing Government, which appears to have captured the attention of both law–makers and the bureaucracy in the US (with some good reason), notes that Americans are demanding "more performance for less money" (1992, 2). In Australia, administrative reform was launched under the umbrella of a Financial Management Improvement Program which sought to change attitudes in the public sector to be much more concerned with outcomes and constantly relate these outcomes to the resources being applied to achieving them.
There seems to be little doubt that there is a common language in the area of results. While this is of considerable interest, of greater interest is the variety of means that are being pursued to achieve these ends. This note raises some questions about the compatibility of some of the means and the ends. It suggests that some of the means identified in these articles may be counter–productive.     

公共管理定式中的公益内涵：比较、辨析、界分

公共管理的范畴及属性决定了公共管理的目标在于诉求公共利益,并成为公共管理的核心价值,因而公共利益在公共管理定式中具特定的内涵。公共利益与共同利益、国家利益、社会利益在概念上有许多相似之处,然则其内涵有差异,不能同一而用。比较、辨析、界分公共管理定式中的公共利益内涵,并从法治层面厘清国家利益与社会公益之界限,防止假国家利益之名侵犯社会公共利益发生,这对转型期中国社会发展有着重要的意义。     

Public Subsidies for Private Schooling: A Comparative Analysis of Argentina and Chile

Argentina and Chile have long-standing policies that award public subsidies to private schools. This article compares the academic outcomes of seventh- and eighth-graders in public and private schools in each country. Three types of private schools are analyzed: Catholic schools that are subsidized by the government, nonreligious schools that are subsidized, and private schools that receive no subsidies. Ultimately, the analyses suggest a mixed portrait of private school effectiveness, in which Catholic schools have the most consistent links to achievement. Nonreligious subsidized schools in Chile, often operated by for-profit corporations, produce outcomes no different from public schools.     

Corporatism, Public Policy and the Labour Movement: A Comparative Study

This article identifies two dimensions which distinguish corporatism, especially as defined by Philippe Schmitter, from pluralism. Noting that most discussions of corporatism have emphasized one dimension and neglected the second, the article seeks to determine, empirically, whether the two dimensions are as closely associated as the concept suggests. The finding, for the cases studied, is that they are inversely rather than positively correlated. The search for an explanation of why this might be the case leads to two conclusions. First, that the management of labour-capital conflict in advanced capitalist countries has relied less on inter-group and group-state interaction than corporatist theory would suggest. Second, that Schmitter's conceptualization of corporatism is seriously flawed and that other corporatist writers avoid these flaws only at the cost of drastically reducing the concept's distinctiveness from pluralism.     

Campaign-Finance Reform: A Public Choice Perspective

The Federal Election Campaign Act as passed in 1971 and amended in 1974represented landmark federal legislation. It imposed new restrictions oncampaign contributions and contained path-breaking provisions for the useof public funds to partially finance the campaigns of qualifyingpresidential candidates. The nominal intent of the legislation was torestrain the skyrocketing campaign costs and the feared abuses thatgrowing dependencies on such money engendered. Three decades later, withthe campaign spending ``arms race'' still raging. Congress sought toimpose further constraints on campaign spending with enactment of theBipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA). Competing theories ofgovernment regulation are reviewed to better understand the intent andlikely consequences of the 2002 legislation in particular and campaignfinance regulation in general. A simple model of the campaign spendingprocess highlights the likely causes of the rapid growth in campaignspending. Data and evidence are presented to test hypotheses concerningthe timing of and underlying motivations for BCRA.     

行政类事业单位改革的法学分析

行政类事业单位是我国事业单位中十分特殊的一类,虽与公益类事业单位一样均使用事业编制,但在主要职能、资金来源、产出等方面存在不同.行政类事业单位主要为授权执法主体,也有少量法定执法主体和委托执法主体.认定事业单位承担行政职能,应以法律、行政法规、地方性法规和党中央国务院文件规定为依据,以是否主要履行行政职能为标准,坚持从严认定,积极稳步推进、分步实施,改革方向是职能归位、调整机构.目前我国事业单位法治建设比较薄弱,应将依法规范摆到更加重要的地位,依法探索行政类事业单位改革的实现方式.     

Explaining Public Management Policy Change: Germany in Comparative Perspective

Public management policies have changed significantly in numerous countries in recent times. Policy entrepreneurs remain active in this policy domain, which encompasses government-wide rules and routines in the areas of expenditure planning and financial management, civil service and labor relations, procurement, organization and methods, and audit and evaluation. Case-oriented comparative research provides policy entrepreneurs with historically and theoretically informed knowledge useful in designing or improvising change strategies in this domain. This article focuses on the case of public management policymaking in the German federal government during the 1980s and 1990s. A coherent explanation of the careers of the overbureaucratization issue in the 1980s and the lean state issue in the 1990s is provided, along with an explanation for marked changes in selected public management policies in the 1990s. Analysis of this case is also harmonized with findings about public management policy change in the U.K., New Zealand, and Australia. Limited generalizations about the process of public management policy change are proposed. Policy entrepreneurs can factor these generalizations, plus analysis of the Germany case, into their prospective, situational analysis of the process of public management policy change.