Government versus Opposition at the Polls: How Governing Status Affects the Impact of Policy Positions

We argue that governing status affects how voters react to extreme versus moderate policy positions. Being in government forces parties to compromise and to accept ideologically unappealing choices as the best among available alternatives. Steady exposure to government parties in this role and frequent policy compromise by governing parties lead voters to discount the positions of parties when they are in government. Hence, government parties do better in elections when they offset this discounting by taking relatively extreme positions. The relative absence of this discounting dynamic for opposition parties, on the other hand, means that they perform better by taking more moderate positions, as the standard Downsian model would predict. We present evidence from national elections in Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, 1971–2005, to support this claim.     

政府经济考核指标体系的构建——以山东烟台市海洋经济考核指标体系构建为例

本文依据海洋经济考核指标体系设计的原则,并参照烟台各县市区海洋经济的发展目标、任务构建了具有三个维度的政府经济考核指标体系,并在此基础上采用层次分析法确定了各项考核指标的权重系数,保证了政府经济考核指标体系的科学性、实用性。     

中国"入世"与政府职能转变和职能开发

中国加入世贸组织后,最大的挑战是政府自身。特别是中国目前处于社会转型期,社会主义市场经济体制还不完善,政企、政社还没有完全分开。“入世”后,政府对经济的调控能力相对减弱;对社会事务的管理空前复杂。因此,政府应重新定位自身角色与职能,未雨绸缪,迅即进行自身的职能转变与职能开发,以适应中国“入世”以及经济全球化的挑战。     

Road Fund Tax Compliance: An Analysis of Enhancement Strategies

This paper focuses on a continuing concern of tax administrators, which is the selection of the most efficient means of ensuring tax law compliance. The selection of the most efficient enforcement techniques and strategies can reduce compliance costs, enhance revenues, and support a culture of voluntary tax law compliance. This paper reports on a national study of state compliance efforts regarding state motor fuel taxes and motor vehicle registration fees, which are major sources of revenue for state Road Funds. Because of special complexities and unique interstate cooperation efforts, the compliance efficiency assessment focuses on the commercial carrier taxpayer group.     

Fiscal Exchange and Tax Compliance: Evidence From a Field Experiment

Behavioral interventions appealing to taxpayers’ reciprocity often leave tax compliance unaffected. We provide evidence that a “fiscal exchange nudge” increased tax compliance in a setting where one might not expect it: crisis-ridden Argentina. In a randomized controlled trial with over 20,000 taxpayers, a tax bill visually celebrating realized public works benefiting children increased payment rates of tax delinquents by about 20 percent, or almost 40 percent when the bills were delivered in person. Without the appeal, the new bill design generated significantly fewer payments. Changes in the design of the tax bill also increased arrears cancellation. We estimate the ratio of marginal revenues to costs for the fiscal exchange bill to be 18. The factors we associate with the unexpectedly positive impacts are consistent with strengthening an affective response. We find persistent effects of the experiment two years later. The results suggest that communities have more scope to increase tax revenues through non-threatening interventions.     

Listening to the Government: How Information Shapes Responsibility Attributions

Assigning credit and blame in systems of multilevel government, such as federal states, requires information. This paper examines how voters respond to information about policy outcomes when attributing responsibility to multiple levels of government in a European context. Using an experimental design, we show that the responsibility attributions of British voters are affected by perceptual biases, notably their feelings about the government and the European Union (EU). But interestingly, we also find that voters, regardless of their predispositions, are only responsive to information they receive from their national government, whereas they ignore information provided by EU officials. These findings have implications not only for our understanding of attribution in systems of multiple levels of government, but also for how voters use information selectively depending on the credibility of the source.     

N Generations of Reform in UK Local Government: Compliance and Resistance to Institutional Pressures

ABSTRACT

The UK government under the Thatcher administration was one of the first to launch NPM-type reforms. Since then, several generations of reform initiatives can be identified in the UK—including the “quality” initiative under Major, the Blair administration's early emphasis on “Best Value,” followed by its emphasis on targets and inspection, and its recent reconversion to public governance concerns. The UK, then, represents an interesting test case for studying how several generations of reforms co-exist and inter-relate. This article examines the imprint of past reforms in the current drive towards contestability and choice in local government modernization. It argues that coercive isomorphism has been evident in local government but that resistance has been successfully mounted against each generation of reforms, that these resistance efforts have themselves displayed isomorphic tendencies but that, nevertheless, a gradual move towards a mixed economy of provision has emerged in many local authorities.     

顺应市场经济需要 转变政府职能

顺应市场经济需要,转变政府职能已成为政府机构改革的紧迫任务。本文论述了转变政府职能是市场经济的客观要求,市场经济条件下政府职能转变的重点,提出了绵阳市转变政府职能应把握的基本原则及初步设想。     

降低政府运行成本的对策探讨

政府机构为了维持正常运转在一定时期内付出的费用称为政府运行成本。目前政府运行成本过高的问题很突出,严重影响政府形象,必须按照十六大要求,转变政府职能,改进管理方式,推行电子政务,提高行政效率,降低运行成本。     

How Policy-Making Affects Implementation: The Decentralization of the Danish Disablement Pension Administration*

‘Presidents are more likely to be punished for not making promises of administrative reform than for not implementing them.’ (March & Olsen 1983, 291) Policy-making and implementation have usually been treated as two distinct disciplines. In this article it is argued that implementation is affected by the prior policy-making process. Hypotheses regarding such impacts are derived from the policy-making theories resting on a) the rational decision-making model. b) the conflict-bargaining model, and c) the garbage-can model: Implementation failures are more likely 1) if goals are absent or vague and if alternatives and their consequences have not been considered; 2) if the policy-making process involves participants with conflicting interests and compromising; 3) if there are many and changing participants with limited attention and if symbols are important in the poky-making process. These hypotheses are tested and discussed in relation to a reorganization case, the decentralization of the disablement pension administration in Denmark in 1976.     

Locke and the Politics and Theology of Toleration

Locke's theory of toleration has been understood to rest on the claim that persecution was insufficient to instil either (i) true or (ii) sincere belief in people. Although Locke did indeed make both these claims, neither was fundamental to his theory. Locke was principally concerned to deny that persecution was necessary to instil true or sincere belief; its insufficiency to those ends he, and his contemporaries, took for granted. His denial of the necessity of persecution presupposed that human beings were, in principle, naturally adequate to the discovery of God's wants for them. The same presupposition, which derives from natural theology, underwrote the views in politics and revealed theology that complete his theory and supplied its moral content. Contemporary theories of toleration purposing to proceed on Lockean assumptions are morally and philosophically impoverished by their failure to see the requirements laid on an adequate theory of toleration by genuinely Lockean terms.     

How Government Reactions to Violence Worsen Social Welfare: Evidence from Peru

Dissident violence inflicts many costs on society, but some of the longest‐lasting consequences for civilians may be indirect, due to the government's response. We explore how government policy responses affect social welfare, specifically through budgetary shifts. Using subnational violence and budgeting data for Peru, we demonstrate that attacks on soldiers during the budget negotiation period drive a shift from local social services, especially health, to defense. One soldier fatality implies a 0.13 percentage point reduction in the local health budget share (2008–12). Health budget cuts due to a single soldier fatality result in 76 predicted additional infant deaths 2 years later. We show that the effect on health budgeting operates through decreases in women's use of health facilities and postnatal services. We offer evidence that Peru's coercive response indirectly harms civilians due to butter‐to‐guns budgetary shifts. Our results identify a budgetary mechanism that translates dissident violence into a deterioration in social welfare.     

Government Partisanship and Managing the Economy: Japan and Sweden in Comparative Perspective

It is generally taken for granted that countries governed by leftist governments expand social policies and have an affinity for active fiscal policy that implies higher tolerance of deficit‐ridden budgets. In contrast, conservative governments are taken to be less likely to favor welfare expansion, especially when it has negative fiscal consequences. We challenge this conventional wisdom by comparing the reactions of the Swedish and Japanese governments to economic crises during the 1990s. The puzzle is that the Social Democratic governments in Sweden were able to reduce ballooning budget deficits and thus bring the economy back into balance, while still having one of the largest public sectors in the developed world. In contrast, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party governments in Japan have been unable to redress their deficit problems despite having one of the smallest public sectors among the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development countries. We argue that this can be explained by taking into consideration that governments’ tax and spending policies are influenced by bureaucratic structures and institutionally driven public beliefs. By comparing Japan and Sweden, we show how political parties actively seek to make their policy stances permanent by structuring taxation and expenditure policies to create institutionalized support for their policy preferences.     

Local Government Tax Policy: Measuring the Efficiency of New York City's Tax Mix, FYs 1984-1998

This article applies the Markowitz portfolio model to New York City's tax mix to determine whether it is 'mix-efficient,' in the sense that the portfolio minimizes volatility for given levels of growth. The results indicate that New York City's tax-revenue portfolio is very close to being mix-efficient. The analysis also extends the Markowitz portfolio model to consider the impact on growth and volatility of adopting a tax-equity constraint.     

Tax and Expenditure Limitations and the Fiscal Response of Local Government: Asymmetric Intra-Local Fiscal Effects

This article empirically investigates the effects of introducing statewide measures to limit the ability of local jurisdictions to raise revenue or make expenditures. It does so in intervals of five years over a 25-year period, using fiscal observations for 31,804 units of local government in 787 metropolitan counties across the contiguous United States. Specifically explored is the effect of tax and expenditure limitations on the variation in revenues and expenditures between general purpose governments and school districts within county areas. Rather than imposing a uniform constraint across jurisdictions, tax and expenditure limitations (TELs) are associated with increased variation across both general purpose and school district revenues and expenditures and, by implication, increased service differentials. Effects are found to be asymmetric, with increased variation greatest within counties comprising the urban core and those with relatively more disadvantaged populations. The implications are that TELs are most constraining on the ability of governments serving economically less prosperous and at risk populations to meet public service needs. Such differential effects are of more than questionable merit and are the result of the application of blunt instruments to what is often an undemonstrated need. The outcome impairs both the efficiency and responsiveness of the local public sector.     

收入分配的税收调控模式转变:从经济效率型到公平正义型

我国持续扩大的个人收入差距,是体制性和制度性发展模式导致的。从我国历次税制改革的情况看,税制的修改多注重其财政收入功能,税收调控收入分配的职能定位与税制模式的构建还没有实现有机的匹配。从经济效率型税收调控模式逐渐过渡到公平正义型税收调控模式,对于运用税收政策促进收入公平分配,实现分配正义,具有重要意义。