Googling the requester: Identity‐questing and discrimination in public service provision

Innovating upon previous field experiments and theories of identity‐based discrimination, we test whether public officials are using searches (“identity‐questing”) to profile citizens and acting on latent biases. Pairs of “institutional” and “noninstitutional” requesters send lower and moderate burden freedom of information (FOI) requests—providing no identity cues apart from undistinctive names, e‐mails, and ID numbers—to nearly 700 of Brazil's largest municipalities. Results show institutional requesters receive one‐fifth more responses than noninstitutional comparators. For moderate versus lower burden requests, noninstitutional requesters are 11% less likely to receive a compliant response than their institutional comparators. The only plausible explanation for these results is identity‐questing, a phenomenon that has far‐reaching policy implications. Most of the world's FOI laws, for example, contain vague ID obligations, which translate incoherently from laws to regulation and practice. Results enjoin public service providers to protect the identities of citizens by default or upon request.     

Politics and public service reform in small states: Malta

Administrative reform is inseparable from political reform, just as administration and politics share overlapping boundaries. This article reviews the goals for reform established in 1989 for the Maltese public service, against the political culture and administrative history of Malta. It argues that a small state's size encourages certain dysfunctional characteristics of the political culture, and aggravates the difficulties inherent in administrative reform. (© 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)     

Space,scale and jurisdiction in health service provision for drug users: the legal geography of a supervised injecting facility

Sydney's Medically Supervised Injecting Centre delivers the significant benefits of harm reduction, but has been controversial regards the law. Its contested history is examined here through the lens of legal geography. Narrative analysis reveals that the arguments for and against the centre's establishment referenced matters ranging from international treaties through to municipal governance. These arguments and their outcome were variously shaped by the different spaces and scales of jurisdiction but not simply in a zero sum game of law played out through the hierarchically ordered nesting of container-like territories. The implications for legal geography and for public health are discussed.     

Development administration in the context of world economic recession: Some ideas on service provision in southern Sudan

This papers brings together several strains of thought around an outline suggestion for reform of education administration and finance in the Southern Sudan. Administration has to be seen in terms of incentives and disincentives to action. The administration of the Southern Sudan constitutes the largest part of the elite of that part of the country and consumes most public funds as salaries. In political interactions with sections of the public there is a more pressing need to respond to the demands of educated youth for salaries than to make adequate provision for non-salary expenses of services to the public. But the system is not in a stable state and the full contradictions of the situation, for politicians, bureaucrats and public, are revealed by the financial restrictions enforced as a result of national debt and international recession. Politically leaders in government service and disaffected leaders in military opposition in the bush both continue to demand a fairer distribution of central resources. But the possibility of generating, at the grass-roots, both the resources necessary for non-salary costs and the necessary influence to demand services, is something which could be further explored in the interests of all parties. This is a potential new direction for reform in development administration.     

Incentives for separation and incentives for public good provision

In this paper, I examine how the incentives of regions to unite and to separate are related to the incentives to provide public goods. Separation allows for greater influence over the nature of political decision making while unification allows regions to exploit economies of scale in the provision of public goods. From a social welfare perspective, there are excessive incentives for separation and for the provision of public goods. When incentives for public good provision are not taken into account, however, these incentives can be misinterpreted as incentives for separation.     

The wisdom of crowds design for sensitive survey questions

Survey research on sensitive questions is challenging because respondents often answer untruthfully or completely refuse to answer. Existing indirect questioning techniques address the problem of social desirability bias at the expense of decreasing estimates' efficiency. We suggest the Wisdom of Crowds survey design that does not pose a tradeoff between anonymity and efficiency as an alternative. We outline the conditions necessary for the technique to work and test them empirically. Moreover, we compare the Wisdom of Crowd estimate of a right-wing populist party's vote share to alternative indirect questioning techniques' estimates as well as to the official election result in the 2017 German federal election. Provided its conditions are met, the Wisdom of Crowds design performs best in terms of both bias and efficiency. We conclude that the Wisdom of Crowds design is an important addition to social scientists' survey methodology toolbox.     

Innovations in the provision of public goods and services

Current efforts at administrative reform in both developed and developing countries have invariably focused on the critical issue of provision of public goods and services. The accumulated experience and attendant innovations are therefore vast. Few attempts have been made to pull this experience together and draw salient features which might be of use to newcomers to the task of improving provision of public goods and services. This article draws on a panel of experts and government officials convened by the author who have reflected and/or experimented with innovative approaches to public good and service provision. After discussing the role of the state, market and civil society relative to public goods and services, the article lays out a set of basic institutional options for innovations in provision. The article concludes with some strategic considerations on the sequencing of steps to achieve successful market-based innovations in the provision of public goods and services in the context of the minimalist and the strong but restrained state. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Human capital report cards for American states

A theoretical and empirical basis for comparing stocks of human capital in the American states is developed. Human capital report cards are measurement tools allowing states to benchmark their production and retention of the knowledges, skills and abilities required by economic development and public education policy making. A prototype report card is created from 12 indicators — seven of which theoretically capture a basic dimension of human capital and five of which measure complex human capital. Principal component factor analysis reveals that for the 50 states in the 1980s the concept of human capital is a multi-dimensional construct rather than a unidimensional one and that basic and complex factors do in fact distinguish the major cleavages among human capital measures. A further finding is that the relative positions of the 50 states can be plotted on the two dimensions with practical payoffs accruing to state and local planners.     

New directions for public service reform in developing countries

This paper argues that recent developments in practice and theory provide a more promising basis for public service reform in developing countries than we have had since at least the turn of the century. There have been significant instances of large‐scale reform success, such as Nepal's Public Service Commission and Malaysia's delivery unit, Pemandu, and also “pockets of effectiveness” in individual agencies in many countries. They contribute to a more fruitful and diverse repertoire of reform approaches than generally realized. Policymakers can draw on all those instances and types of reform, together with relevant rich country experiences, as they improvise and tailor responses to their always unique reform problems. Proceeding in this way helps reformers to expand the “reform space” available within the political economy. Donors can help reformers if they facilitate reform in the spirit of the Busan Partnership rather than impose their preferred models. In short, the new direction which this paper identifies can be stated as creative problem solving by local actors facilitated by sympathetic donors, building on examples of reform success and drawing on a repertoire of poor and rich country reform approaches.     

Demand for masters of public policy in public service

This piece was written to assist those who lead schools of public policy and administration in evaluating their pedagogies and examining their curricula. The perspectives contained in this piece reflect those of the author, who has spent the last 35 years practicing and leading public policy research and analysis in the Congressional Research Service (CRS)—the public policy agency created by the U.S. Congress for its exclusive use. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of CRS or the Congress.     

Parliamentary questions and oversight in the European Union

Delegation in the European Union (EU) involves a series of principal‐agent problems, and the various chains of delegation involve voters, parties, parliaments, governments, the European Commission and the European Parliament. While the literature has focused on how government parties attempt to monitor EU affairs through committees in national parliaments and through Council committees at the EU level, much less is known about the strategies opposition parties use to reduce informational deficits regarding European issues. This article argues that the European Parliament (EP) offers opposition parties an arena to pursue executive oversight through the use of written parliamentary questions. Using a novel dataset on parliamentary questions in the EP, this article examines why Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) ask questions of specific Commissioners. It transpires that MEPs from national opposition parties are more likely to ask questions of Commissioners. Questions provide these parties with inexpensive access to executive scrutiny. This finding has implications for the study of parliamentary delegation and party politics inside federal legislatures such as the EP.     

Economic security in an era of globalization: definition and provision

Abstract

Globalization has undermined the traditional definition of economic security that centered on economic vulnerability to other states. At the same time, globalization has produced a redefinition of economic security in light of the risks posed by cross-border networks of non-state actors and by the economic volatility of the new global environment. The relationship between economic globalization and undesirable economic and political outcomes must be specified precisely and assessed carefully, however. Judgements about economic security must weigh the effects of increased volatility introduced by globalization against the benefits of improved economic performance in the longer run. Institutions can offset economic insecurity through the provision of insurance, shoring up policy credibility, and guiding adaptation to the new environment. National institutions will remain central to the provision of economic security under conditions of globalization. Regional and global institutions can complement one another (and national institutions) in their alleviation of the new economic insecurity. Although some regional institutions drifted in the wake of the Asian financial crisis, new regional alternatives have emerged that promise to stake out new modalities of economic security.     

村民自治制度安排与农村公共产品供给

村民自治制度在某种程度上是国家为解决农村公共事务与公益事业供给而作出的制度安排。近十多年来,村民自治制度参与了农村公共产品生产,并取得了一定成效,但因自治组织兼政务、村务于一身,决策与服务存在独立性、封闭性和排他性等,不少村民自治组织不愿意与村民同心共事,更乐意与乡镇权力“合谋”,致使农村公共产品供给失效。不过,村民自治制度仍不失为村庄治理方面比较好的制度设计,只要我们进一步完善它,该制度就肯定能发挥其安排农村公共产品供给的潜力。