Just and honest government

This article addresses the ways in which the United Kingdom has sought to apply principles such as ethics and values as the foundation of a strong public sector, the evolution of values, specifically the tensions between old and new values, and the ethical challenges brought about by the new public administration and management. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Initiatives and government expenditures

This paper demonstrates that provisions for initiatives have important effects on government spending. Provisions for initiatives encourage legislatures to approve any proposal which might attract substantial popular support. If these proposals are more likely to advocate increases than reductions in expenditures, the presence of initiative provisions will increase total expenditures. Direct government expenditures per capita are significantly higher in both states and municipalities which permit initiatives.The Project in State and Local Government Finance of the National Bureau of Economic Research supported the research presented in this paper. Only I am responsible for the content.     

Elections and government spending

It is widely believed that electoral pressures cause legislators to favor government spending programs. This electoral theory of spending is shown to encompass two core hypotheses: (1) the electoral consequences hypothesis, which states that support for spending programs improves the representative's electoral showing; and (2) the legislator insecurity hypothesis, which states that greater electoral insecurity leads representatives to be more in favor of spending programs. A test of these ideas using spending scores for U.S. representatives in 1986 finds that neither hypothesis is supported by the data.     

Gifts and government largess

He also serves as a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. His books include Social Science Theory: Structure and Application, The Broken Apple: New York City in the 1980s,and Military Doctrine and the American Character: Reflections on Airland Battle,published by Transaction.     

Liberal government and authoritarianism

This paper examines the intelligibility of authoritarian measures within Foucauldian analyses of the liberal government of the state. Such measures are understood as following from a liberal understanding of the task of government itself. This understanding rests on a distinction between the legal and political order (of 'the state') and a 'liberal police' of what is exterior to it, classically conceived as 'civil society'. The relation between these two aspects is conceived as a series of 'foldings' between the two sides of a liberal governing, which turn the injunction to govern through freedom into a set of binding obligations potentially or actually enforceable by coercive or sovereign instruments. The paper places this perspective within aspects of the genealogies of economy, poverty, welfare and police and discusses the trajectories of such foldings in the present.     

Regulation and government debt

Public Choice - Government debt is large in most developed countries, and while budget deficits may reflect short-term attempts to kick-start the economy in times of crisis by means of fiscal...     

中央与地方利益均衡分析

利益是人类生活的永恒话题。我国中央与地方关系的核心内容就是中央与地方的利益关系。在中央与地方的“利益博弈”中,中央过分集权会严重限制地方的积极性,影响公共利益的整体实现;而理性的地方政府不顾一切地追逐本地区经济利益的最大化,累积到一定程度,最终又会引发“公用地”的灾难。要解决这一两难问题,必须从制度上明确中央与地方各自的职权范围,逐步健全法律制度的有力制约,同时建立一套政府系统内部有效的治理制度,规范政府权力的正确行使,实现中央与地方利益的制度均衡     

Neighborhood government

Advocacy of neighborhood government should be based on a careful assessment of possible dangers and deficiencies, as well as merits. The obstacles to increasing neighborhood power include the costs of community organizing in terms of time and effort, community conflict, city-neighborhood conflict, and general political conflict. To persuade individuals to engage in collective action, it is necessary that the rewards of such action be greater than the personal costs. Serious participation is likely to occur only when neighborhood government programs offer visible rewards and work to solve concrete problems. There is a specific awareness that many unions and politicians will fight neighborhood government and that they have the power to damage or destroy it. There is also the sense that, whereas there has been success in developing community structures, it has been difficult to move government toward decentralization, toward more flexible administrative procedures.To appear in a forthcoming book,The City in the Seventies (edited by Robert K. Yin), to be published by F. E. Peacock Publishers, Inc.     

Adversarial legalism and American government

Compared to other economically advanced democracies, the United States is uniquely prone to adversarial, legalistic modes of policy formulation and implementation, shaped by the prospect of judicial review. While adversarial legalism facilitates the expression of justice-claims and challenges to official dogma, its costs are often neglected or minimized. A survey of existing research, together with a case study of environmental regulation in the Port of Oakland, indicates the extent to which adversarial legalism causes (or threatens) enormous dispute-resolving costs and procedural delays, which in turn distort policy outcomes. Adversarial legalism, moreover, has increased in recent decades, as Americans have attempted to implement the ambitious, socially transformative policies of activist government through political structures, forms of legislation, and legal procedures that reflect deep suspicion of governmental authority.     

Fiscal decentralization and government size

Numerous studies have attempted to model the possible factors contributing to universal growth in public sectors. This paper analyzes one device that appears capable of controlling some of that growth: fiscal decentralization. The results reported here also support the use of monopoly government assumptions in models of public policy     

Coalition government and electoral accountability

Single-party governments are commonly thought to be more clearly responsible for government policy than coalition governments. One particular problem for voters evaluating coalition governments is how to assess whether all parties within a coalition should be held equally responsible for past performance. As a result, it is generally argued that voters are less likely to hold coalition governments to account for past performance. This article uses data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project to assess whether and how the composition of coalition governments affects the way in which people use their votes to hold governments to account, and which parties within coalitions are more likely to be held to account for the government’s past performance.     

Pre-electoral commitments and government formation

Recent studies show that pre-electoral commitments and the ideological distance between parties influence government formation. But do pre-electoral pacts or rejections of party combinations really have an independent impact on the outcome of the government formation game? Which policy areas matter when parties agree to build a coalition? This paper addresses these questions by applying a dataset that includes information on preferred/rejected coalition partners and the policy-area specific programmatic heterogeneity of all potential coalitions. The results show that pre-electoral commitments have a significant impact on government formation after controlling for endogeneity problems. There is also evidence that not only diversity in economic issues determines the partisan composition of governments.