The dilemmas of incrementalism: logical and political constraints in the design of health insurance reforms.

Health care reform became a premier issue on the U.S. policy agenda in the 1990s. While the comprehensive proposal put forth by President Clinton failed, states and the federal government successfully pursued a variety of lesser initiatives. This article focuses on a set of reforms intended to make private health insurance more accessible and affordable to individuals and workers in small firms. It outlines the key arguments made by experts to justify stronger regulation of health insurance and the options and difficult tradeoffs that must be considered in policy design. It then examines the scope and strength of legislation adopted by 45 states and the federal government from 1990 to 1996. The substantial variation in state policies demonstrates that even though insurance market reform was the one issue that commanded nearly universal support in the health care debate, few design features were universally accepted by those who crafted the reforms. The article concludes by assessing the pattern of state and federal action. The reforms represent some progress on nominal access to insurance but little progress on the affordability of insurance for individuals and small groups. Few of the reforms present a serious challenge to existing practices and interests of the insurance industry. This pattern of policy design reflects the logical and political constraints of incrementalism. In a system where insurance coverage is voluntary, changes to increase access for one group tend to increase costs and thereby decrease access for another segment of the population. In addition, because incremental reforms will not attract sustained attention and support from the general public, it is politically difficult to impose substantial new regulation on a powerful industry.     

Senior Civil Servants and Bureaucratic Change in Belgium

The Belgian civil service used to be a Weberian bureaucracy, with a strict division of labor between civil servants and politicians, administrative careers based on both seniority and partisan patronage, and a technocratic culture coupled with a high level of alienation from both politics and politicians. Administrative reform came in the wake of the constitutional reform that transformed unitary Belgium into a federal state with several governments, each with a civil service of its own. The fiscal crisis prompted them to look favorably on the promises of New Public Management (NPM). The new Flemish government was first to take advantage of this opportunity, as it had the financial resources, the tendency to refer to Anglo-Saxon and Dutch examples, and the right political and administrative leadership.The staying power of these as yet precarious reforms depends on the continuity of political leadership, the establishment of an administrative culture matching the institutional innovations, and resistance to the endemic temptation to use them for partisan purposes.     

Slackers and Zealots: Civil Service, Policy Discretion, and Bureaucratic Expertise

We investigate how aspects of "civil service" systems of personnel management interact with bureaucratic discretion to create expert bureaucracies populated by policy-motivated agents. We construct a dynamic model in which bureaucrats may invest in (relationship-specific) policy expertise and may or may not be interested in policy choices per se. The legislature makes sequentially rational grants of discretion, which serve as incentives for expertise investment and continued service only for policy-motivated bureaucrats. Bureaucratic policy preferences and the legislature's agency problem vis-à-vis bureaucracies develop endogenously in the model. Bureaucratic expertise can be supported in equilibrium only at a cost of its politicization; "neutral competence" is inconsistent with strategic incentives of bureaucrats. We identify several conditions that support the development of an expert bureaucracy in equilibrium, including security of job tenure and control over policy issues for policy-motivated bureaucrats.     

The IRI in Italy: Strategic role and political constraints

The ‘IRI‐formula’ (which describes the situation whereby a public body owns private firms) was originally based on a delicate balance of powers between political guidance and managerial autonomy. Towards the end of the 1950s, this balance was upset and replaced by a strong politics‐business connection: public managers and political groups exchanged financial support for political protection. The present IRI management is trying to regain its autonomy, but is constrained by a system framed by the former politics‐business connection. It is in a very delicate political situation, created by the attempts of the PSI to replace the DC in the central role of Italian politics.     

Determinants of political judgments: The joint influence of normative and heuristic rules of inference

Prior research on political judgment has been polarized, with one group emphasizing normative models of political inference and the other emphasizing heuristic models of political inference. In accordance with recent findings in psychology, this article is rooted in the assumption that both normative and heuristic criteria simultaneously influence political judgments. Furthermore, differences in the relative extent to which these two processes serve to determine political judgments are hypothesized to depend on the nature of the judgment task. Two kinds of political judgments are considered: judgments reflecting beliefs about the candidates' stands on the issues and judgments reflecting global evaluations of the candidates. The reported results confirm that (1) voters rely on both normative- and heuristic-based considerations when forming these judgments, and (2) the relative extent to which these criteria influence these judgments depends on the complexity of the judgment task.     

Structure and Process: Examining the Interaction between Bureaucratic Organization and Analytical Requirements

Attempts by politicians to control bureaucratic decisions include both structural (how is the agency making the decision organized?) and procedural (what rules must they follow when making the decision?). But how do these two modes of influence interact? This article examines the interaction between bureaucratic structure and one procedural control, the requirement that agencies conduct an analysis of their decisions prior to their issuance. I look at this interaction in the context of two types of analysis, cost‐benefit analysis and environmental impact assessment. I interview 16 individuals in each field and draw from their experiences of conducting and reviewing more than a thousand analyses. The conduct of analysis is affected by where analysts are placed in agencies. In particular, independence of analysts has a trade‐off. The more independent analysts are, the more likely they can challenge preferred decisions in their agency. But independent analysts are brought into decisions later and their independence may limit their long‐term impacts on agency culture. Despite this trade‐off, analysts expressed a clear preference for independence. The interaction between different controls of bureaucratic behavior is a potentially fruitful line for further research.     

Civil religious orientations and children's perceptions of political authority

Previous studies concerning the influence of religious variables in the political socialization process have been inadequate because they employed crude operational measures of religious beliefs. This study utilizes the presence of civil religious orientations as an alternative conceptualization of religious beliefs and finds that civil religious orientations among children are highly related to early perceptions of political authority. Moreover, the data suggest that the presence of these civil religious orientations are far more important than the nature of early perceptions of the president in the development of support for the political system.An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the 1980 Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.     

Agenda responsiveness in the European Council: public priorities,policy problems and political attention

The existence of political responsiveness in multi-level systems like the EU remains an open question despite significant recent research on the topic. This article studies whether the European Council responds to the shifting policy priorities of European citizens. More specifically, it explores the synchronic and diachronic associations between what people consider to be the most important problems and the political attention devoted to these issues from 2003 to 2014. The economic crisis after 2008 appears to have made the ranking of public concerns and the European Council agenda more alike. However, a detailed examination of the shifts in prioritisation of single issues over time reveals little evidence for dynamic issue responsiveness. Recently the European Council has paid more attention to the issues that the public considered the most pressing problems but the convergence could possibly be driven by the intensity of the underlying policy problems.     

Social constraints in the political arena: A theoretical inquiry into their form and manner

In the past three different paradigms or, more loosely, frames of reference, have been used by students of politics to interpret various dimensions of mass political participation. Each of these, which are referred to as the political socialization, the group interests and beliefs, and the political party/organization paradigms, has received empirical support for its scheme of interpretation; yet recent political events also suggest that these frames of reference may be inadequate, and may need to be complemented, if not replaced, by other schemes. The present paper outlines one such scheme, drawing upon recent writings on social networks and social influences on political participation. It relies on the metaphor of a political arena, and proposes two simple propositions to account both for conventional and unconventional participation in this arena.An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the Annual Meetings of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, New York, NY, August 1976.     

Political Appointments, Civil Service Systems, and Bureaucratic Competence: Organizational Balancing and Executive Branch Revenue Forecasts in the American States

Scholarship on executive politics provides conflicting views about whether staffing administrative agencies through politicized or (politically) autonomous means is the best method for maximizing bureaucratic competence. We offer a theoretical account which maintains that obtaining a proper balance between both types of personnel systems across the supervisory and subordinate levels of an organization will best foster bureaucratic competence. We evaluate our organizational balancing thesis using data on executive branch general revenue fund forecasts in the American states from 1987 to 2002. States with a combination of politically appointed agency executives and merit-selected subordinates generally provide more accurate revenue forecasts than states that possess uniformly politicized personnel selection systems. Conversely, states with a combination of department head–appointed executives and subordinates chosen from an at-will system (i.e., nonmerit) produce more accurate forecasts than states with uniformly autonomous personnel selection systems. Our statistical findings underscore the positive consequences associated with balancing politicized and autonomous means of selecting personnel within hierarchies of political organizations.     

政府规模扩张:成因及启示

政府规模的决定因素是公共管理前沿研究问题之一.实践层面上,自改革开放以来机构精简一直是国政府改革的一个重点.然而,精简后再膨胀的问题一直无法解决.本文尝试回答如下问题:政府规模扩张是否有一些系统性的因素起作用?基于面板数据分析,用随机效应、固定效应模型和广义矩估计法研究政府规模扩张的决定因素.计量分析结果表明,瓦格纳定律(随着经济发展政府规模将扩张)在中国是不成立的,经济越不发达的行政区域,政府规模反而越大.财政收入端或开支端分权与政府规模存在显著的正相关关系,而县均人口、开放度及外商直接投资与政府规模呈显著的负相关关系.基于实证研究的结果,本文认为,地方政府的考录制度仍然有缺陷;当前的财政分权(支出端分权、收入端集权)很有可能助长了地方政府扩张规模;合并县域或许有助于政府精简.     

Managing dissonance: Bureaucratic justice and public procurement

This article puts forward an analytical framework for understanding administrative justice. It does so by reading a leading approach, Jerry Mashaw's administrative justice models, in conjunction with the pragmatic sociology of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, and their orders of worth framework. This provides an enhanced framework, which, while remaining consistent with Mashaw, offers additional insights and is particularly suitable for analyzing decisionmaking environments in the modern contracting state. The article illustrates the workings of the new framework by looking at a controversy under UK and EU law concerning the inclusion of labor objectives in public procurement. The discussion reveals a decisionmaking environment characterized by system dissonance. Actors must navigate different sets of tensions and tradeoffs between competing normative and ethical visions for procurement decisionmaking.     

Bureaucratic Roles: Political Loyalty and Professional Autonomy*

Political leaders in many countries have experienced growing problems of capacity in the postwar period, a development leading to an increase in the delegation of authority to public administration and civil servants. This delegation of authority creates a significant potential for discretionary decision-making authority on the part of public bureaucrats. One way of studying how bureaucrats handle this situation is to focus upon bureaucratic roles. Bureaucratic roles traditionally contain both political and professional norms. This article discusses how these political and professional considerations can be defined and how these norms are balanced given the potential for conflict which is present. The discussion is illustrated by measuring the perception of bureaucratic norms and role enactment among civil servants in Norwegian ministries. Results indicate that civil servants appear to have few problems in attending to and balancing both political and professional role norms.     

Political Leadership and Bureaucratic Autonomy: Effects of Agencification

Previous studies have shown that agencification tends to reduce political control within a government portfolio. However, doubts have been raised as regards to the robustness of these findings. In this article we document that agency officials pay significantly less attention to signals from executive politicians than their counterparts within ministerial (cabinet-level) departments. This finding holds when we control for variation in tasks, the political salience of issue areas, and officials' rank. Simultaneously we observe that the three control variables all have an independent effect on officials' attentiveness to a steer from above. In addition we find that the more organizational capacity available within the respective ministerial departments, the more agency personnel tend to assign weight to signals from the political leadership. We apply large-N questionnaire data at three points in time, spanning two decades and shifting administrative doctrines.     

Cooking the books: Bureaucratic politicization and policy knowledge

Accurate knowledge about societal conditions and public policies is an important public good in any polity, yet governments across the world differ dramatically in the extent to which they collect and publish such knowledge. This article develops and tests the argument that this variation to some extent can be traced to the degree of bureaucratic politicization in a polity. A politicized bureaucracy offers politicians greater opportunities to demand from bureaucrats—and raises incentives for bureaucrats to supply—public policy knowledge that is strategically biased or suppressed in a manner that benefits incumbents reputationally. Due to electoral competition, we suggest that the link between bureaucratic politicization and politicized policy knowledge will be stronger in democracies than in autocracies. A case analysis of Argentina's statistical agency lends credence to the underlying causal mechanism. Time‐series cross‐sectional analyses confirm the broader validity of the expectations and show that the relationship is present only in democracies.