Bureaucratic Power and Public Policies: a Test of the Rational Staff Maximization Hypothesis

This paper tests the staff maximization hypothesis that bureaucratic power is positively related to labour inputs to the production of public sector goods and services. The context of the test is the staffing policies of three groups of British local authorities in three time periods. The relationship between bureaucratic power and changes in authorities' staff is estimated while controlling for the influence of local party politics, central grants and conditions in the environment of the local political system. The results of the statistical analysis refute the staff maximization hypothesis.     

有限理性利益人--公共政策学的人性假设

公共政策学的人性假设是其理论的根本出发点。以有限理性利益人作为公共政策学的人性假设,这既符合人的一般本性,也符合公共政策实践活动的人的特殊本性,更重要的是它为科学地揭示公共政策的本质及其运行规律提供了依据。公共政策行为实质是一种选择行为,有限理性利益人的行为选择具有价值偏好多元性、智能活动有限性和追求满意性的特征。有限理性利益人假设规定了公共政策学的逻辑起点、内在结构和研究路径,从而规定了公共政策学的整体面貌。     

Power in Editorial Positions: A Feminist Critique of Public Administration

Journal editors serve a vital, powerful role in academic fields. They set research priorities, serve as gatekeepers for research, play a critical role in advancing junior scholars as reviewers and eventually into editorial roles, build extensive networks, and gain valuable insight into the behavior and preferences of reviewers and scholars. This article analyzes data collected from leading public administration journals in 2017 to investigate the role of women as gatekeepers of public administration knowledge. The data illustrate a clear underrepresentation of women on editorial boards. Drawing from these data, research on journal editorships, and feminist theory, the authors present a critique of the current state of public administration research and a discussion of a way forward. They conclude with a proposal for how all public administration scholars (junior, senior, men, and women), journal leadership, and academic departments can move toward increasing women's representation in these important positions.     

公共选择理论的“理性人“假设评析

"理性人"假设是公共选择理论的核心.公共选择理论的"理性人"假设,对于我们正确地审视传统政府管理理论的缺陷,构建既能够有效地解决实际问题、促进经济和社会的健康发展,又充满生机和活力的新型政府管理模式,有着重要的理论价值和现实意义.但是,"理性人"假设及以其为核心的公共选择理论也逐渐暴露一些不容忽视的局限性和片面性.因此,我们需要以对政府管理或一般的行政管理过程中的人性的多角度审视来超越"理性人"假设,并形成对以其为依据的政府管理模式的有效限制.     

Bureaucratic Behavior in the Local Public Sector: A Revealed Preference Approach

Public sector bureaucratic utility is typically assumed to be a function ofbudget size or government employment. Although intuitively appealing, thereare no definitive direct tests of the assumption. To fill this gap, thispaper exploits data that isolate resource allocation decisions made by localpublic sector bureaucrats. We use revealed preference theory to find thatthe bureaucracy behaves ``as if'' bureaucratic utility is an increasingfunction of employment across government functions and public spending,providing direct evidence justifying the popular assumption in theoreticalmodels of government behavior.     

Public Service Motivation Concepts and Theory: A Critique

With its growth in popularity, public service motivation (PSM) research has been subjected to increasing critical scrutiny, but with more focus on measurement and models than on concepts. The authors examine PSM against standard criteria for judging the strength of concepts (e.g., resonance, parsimony, differentiation, and depth). After providing a critique of PSM concepts, they conclude with suggestions for research programs that could improve the explanatory power of PSM theory.     

Interest Groups and Investment: A Further Test of the Olson Hypothesis

Mancur Olson's institutional sclerosishypothesis may be evident in the effects ofinterest groups on investment in physicalcapital. To test this proposition, we usecross sectional data on 42 countries forwhich information on the number of interestgroups is available to estimate the effectof those groups on the share of GDP thatgoes into physical investment. The resultsindicate that interest groups have adifferent effect on physical investment inOECD and non-OECD countries. In the OECDcountries, we find support for thehypothesis that interest groups harminvestment in physical capital. Indeveloping countries, interest groupseither have no effect on physicalinvestment or they have a slight beneficialimpact.     

Bureaucratic Posture: On the Need for a Composite Theory of Bureaucratic Behavior

This article examines the underlying assumptions and main findings of four streams of research on bureaucratic postures. It explores the utility of each school of thought for understanding how perspectives on bureaucratic postures are associated with the advancement of the public interest and bureaucratic performance. A main conclusion is that, although limited in scope of application, each stream has merit. Nonetheless, the existing research is too narrow: The field needs to consider a more complex model of bureaucratic behavior that draws from these four fields to offer a framework that is widely applicable to the range of motives for work found in the public bureaucracy and the variety of behaviors that individuals exhibit. Some attributes that may characterize such a model are sketched out.     

Trade Winds: NAFTA and the Rational Public

The sharp increase in suppport for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) poses a challenge to many of our conceptions of public opinion. Most large shifts in public opinion follow major events. Based on models estimated from the September to November NBC News/ Wall Street Journal surveys, I show this was not the case with respect to public opinion on NAFTA. Instead, the increase in support for the pact reflected a slower response to a public debate over the merits of free trade versus protectionism. As the debate proceeded, large segments of the public— including the least interested—developed more highly constrained belief systems. By the end of the public discourse, the most and least interested citizens both linked attitudes on the merits of trade to their positions on NAFTA and to their evaluations of the elites on each side of the issue. People made up their minds on NAFTA on the basis of arguments about trade, not about their own self-interest. The NAFTA case suggests that there may be a rational public at the individual level after all, even among people who may not usually be interested in public affairs.     

Federal Expenditure and Fiscal Illusion: A Test of the Flypaper Hypothesis in Australia

Despite the fact that there are strong a priori grounds forpresuming that the intergovernmental grants characteristic offiscal federalism in Australia may generate fiscal illusion,no empirical effort has been directed at this line of inquiry.The present article seeks to go some way toward remedying thisdeficiency by evaluating the flypaper variant of the fiscalillusion hypothesis using a time-series analysis of AustralianCommonwealth expenditures for 1981 to 1992. The results of theseestimations provide some tentative empirical support for theexistence of a flypaper effect on public expenditure in Australiafor the period under review.     

公共政策法治化初探

公共政策是承载公共权力的各种组织为处理公私事务、实现公共利益而制定并实施的除法律以外的活动策略和行动准则。法治国中,公共政策和法律是两类相互联系又相互独立的社会现象。司法实践中,当法律无规定或规定模糊、冲突时,公共政策的适用是必要的,但必须谨慎。     

透过"权力的眼睛"的理性批判思想

福柯透过"权力的眼睛"揭示了现代社会的权力的普遍性,并断言现代社会实际上是一个"圆形监狱".通过分析理性霸权地位的发生历史及知识--权力的联系,他批判了理性对他者甚至主体本身的压制,并试图提出一条通过话语政治和生物政治来瓦解、抵抗理性霸权的道路.在主张人的自由和解放问题上,他和马克思有相通之处,但在具体实现道路上,二者又迥然不同.他对马克思的一些批评有不公正的地方.     

Staff Selection in the Australian Public Service: A History of Social Closure

This paper argues that recruitment and promotion within the Australian Public Service (APS) have historically exemplified the practice of 'social closure'. Three periods of AP'S staff selection that correspond to what Halligan and Power identify as the bureaucratist/technicist, administrationist and political management models of executive branch regime are identified. Social closure in each instance was based on educational credentials or lack thereof. These practices have been justified in terms of various 'ideologies of promotion'. Such ideologies tend to reflect the ideal or material interests of social groups rather than the skill requirements of administrative work. The current form of social closure based on economics degrees illustrates this phenomenon. Accordingly, greater recognition of the value of non-economics degrees is required.     

The Effect of Administrative Burden on Bureaucratic Perception of Policies: Evidence from Election Administration

This article argues that administrative burden—that is, an individual's experience of policy implementation as onerous—is an important consideration for administrators and influences their views on policy and governance options. The authors test this proposition in the policy area of election administration using a mixed‐method assessment of local election officials. They find that the perceived administrative burden of policies is associated with a preference to shift responsibilities to others, perceptions of greater flaws and lesser merit in policies that have created the burden (to the point that such judgments are demonstrably wrong), and opposition to related policy innovations.     

Fault Lines: The Effects of Bureaucratic Power on Electoral Accountability

This article introduces a new explanation for why citizens may fail to vote based on government performance. We argue that when politicians have limited capacity to control bureaucrats, citizens will not know whether government performance is a good signal of the incumbent's quality. We develop a selection model of elections in which policy is jointly determined by a politician and a bureaucrat. When politicians have incomplete power over policy, elections perform worse at separating good and bad types of incumbents. We test the theory's predictions using survey experiments conducted with nearly 9,000 citizens and local officials in Uganda. We find that citizens and officials allocate more responsibility to politicians when they are perceived as having more power relative to bureaucrats. The allocation of responsibility has electoral consequences: When respondents believe that bureaucrats are responsible for performance, they are less likely to expect that government performance will affect incumbent vote share.