Decentralization and Economic Growth: Specification,Measurement, and Direction of Causal Relationship

The concept of decentralization has attracted the attention of scholars and policy makers alike for number of decades. Yet, there still remains a significant amount of confusion over its measurement and its contribution to an economy. Current literature on decentralization is characterized by the multitude of conflicting definitions and measurement instruments. Current literature on the relationship of decentralization and economic growth is also mixed. This article builds on the existing literature and develops a decentralization index that includes its most frequently mentioned dimensions. We find that our newly developed index captures decentralization concept better than other tools and that there is no significant relationship between decentralization and economic growth.     

Making Decentralization Work: A Cross-national Examination of Local Governments and Natural Resource Governance in Latin America

There has been increased emphasis in the last three decades on the decentralization of natural resource governance decisions to local government in developing countries as a means of improving environmental quality, public service delivery, and the accountability of local officials. We examine the performance of decentralization of natural resource management services in a large sample of municipal governments in four Latin American countries. Our analysis includes a variety of factors discussed in the literature as important in influencing the responsiveness of government officials to local needs. We provide a nested institutional model in which local officials respond to incentives created by the structure of formal political institutions at both the local and national level. The results provide support for the importance of considering local and national institutional arrangements as these co-determine the political incentives within decentralized systems.

Terrorism,Civil Liberties,and Political Rights: A Cross-National Analysis

This article examines the effect terrorism has on civil liberties and political rights across a wide range of democracies and regions. This study includes an analysis of the influence domestic and international terrorist attacks have on civil liberties and political rights in 48 democratic states from 1971–2007. The results from a time series cross-national analysis reveal that terrorism weakens civil liberties and political rights. However, certain types of democracies are more affected by terrorism than others. These findings have important implications for democracy and counterterrorism strategies in democratic states.     

The Relationship Between State Government Performance and State Quality of Life

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between government performance and quality of life in the American states. We contend that the management capacity of state governments should have direct, tangible impacts on the overall social and economic well‐being of state citizenry. In order to test this idea, we examine the influence of state management capacity (using the 1999 Government Performance Project grades), alongside other economic and political variables, on two prominent measures of state quality of life—The Morgan Quitno “Most Livable State” Index and State Policy Reports' (SPP) “Camelot Index.” We find that both state economic conditions and governmental policy priorities have significant impacts on state performance levels. But, our results clearly indicate that the management capacity of state governments also contributes directly to improving the overall quality of life for state citizens.     

Towards Performance,Quality and Environmental Management in Local Government: the Case of Spain

The search for improvements in the management and quality of public services seems to be a constant in all public administrations, and there is an ever-increasing use of management techniques and models from the business sector. The aim of this paper is to show which management systems are being used by Spanish local governments to improve their management in terms of economy, quality and the environment. Our analysis is based on a questionnaire sent to Spanish local governments about the tools they use and the factors that influence their implementation. The results show that more efforts are necessary to implement performance measurement and total quality management, but they also show some positive aspects, such as the usefulness of performance measurement and its application to decisions in those local governments that have implemented it.     

“Dieselgate:” How Different Approaches to Decentralization,the Role of NGOs,Tort Law and the Regulatory Process Affected Comparative U.S. and European Union Outcomes in the Biggest Scandal in Automotive History

ABSTRACT

The VW diesel emissions scandal (“dieselgate”) recounts how Volkswagen became ensnared in a self-inflicted and staggeringly costly cheating scandal that started in the U.S. and then spread to the European Union. This case study shows how fundamental differences in comparative public administration (CPA) between the U.S. and the European Union (EU) led to different consequences for one of the world’s largest and most highly-regarded European auto manufacturers with respect to four institutional variables: (a) approaches to decentralization, (b) the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), (c) civil (tort) law, and (d) regulatory environment.     

Aid and Performance: A Reassessment

Two visions of aid effectiveness and allocation are compared. The first, corresponding to the new aid paradigm, argues that aid is only effective if domestic policies are appropriate. The second, in contrast, argues that aid effectiveness depends on the external and climatic environment: the worse this environment, or the more vulnerable the recipient countries, the greater the effectiveness of aid. Cross-sectional econometric tests related to GDP growth on two 12-year pooled periods clearly favour the second view. The two views can be reconciled through the principle of performance-based aid allocation, where performance is defined as outcomes adjusted for the impact of environmental factors. Performance can then be measured in several manners which are subject to comparison. One approach would lead one to allocate more aid the worse the (external) environment is (for a given policy) and the better the policy is (for a given environment).     

Quality of Service,Expectation, Satisfaction and Trust in Public Institutions: The Abu Dhabi Citizen Satisfaction Survey

Structural equation modelling was utilised to develop and test three models while exploring the causality effect of constructs. The models hypothesised that trust in the government was a result of interactions of several other forces: namely, citizens’ expectation, perception of service quality and satisfaction with these services. The article validates and replicates the findings on the question of causality between performance and trust. The findings were very consistent with the previous ones. The model incorporating citizen's demographic data provided the best fit. According to this model, citizen demographics, expectations and quality of services influence citizen satisfaction; and ultimately, citizen satisfaction influences trust in government. The perceived quality of all services provides significant standardised estimates. However, congestion in streets, parking facilities, parks and recreation and schools are the most salient drivers of citizen satisfaction. The variables of income, education level, years living in Abu Dhabi and marital status exert the highest influence on this satisfaction construct. Perception of quality of services has a significant effect on overall satisfaction; and overall satisfaction drives trust in local government officials. In addition, citizen expectation influences perceptions of the quality of service and overall satisfaction.     

Revitalizing Local Government Performance Management: Further Dissecting the Role of Socioeconomic Status and Social Mobilization Policy

ABSTRACT

This article examines how socio-economic status and social mobilisation are linked to local government performance management in Nepal. As part of local government reform, Nepal adopted a social mobilisation policy in selected local governments to empower communities for their effective participation. Our results show that socio-economic status and social mobilisation have a significant relationship with performance management. Female literacy, for example, is strongly and significantly associated with performance management, while area has a significant positive relationship but population has only a weak positive relationship. In contrast, poverty has a significant negative correlation. More importantly, mobilisation has a significant, though modest, positive association with performance management particularly in participatory planning and budgeting, fiscal discipline, and administrative management. This indicates that improving the socio-economic status of citizens and their mobilisation for empowered collective action can be one important strategy to improve the performance capacity of local government.     

Understanding Regulatory Governance in Northeast Asia: Environmental and Technological Cooperation among China,Japan and Korea

After the early 1990s, the wave of regionalism covered broader areas in the world, and Northeast Asia, which had weak regional cohesion largely due to history-oriented animosity, gradually developed initiatives for regional cooperation since the late 1990s. This article seeks to address why and how China, Japan, and South Korea have pursued regional cooperation by relying on the concept of ‘regional governance’. It advances two arguments. First, the governments of China, Japan, and South Korea have identified the avoidance of risk from uncertainty as a major objective of promoting trilateral cooperation in specific functional areas. Second, they have gradually intensified the harmonisation of regulatory frameworks in the cooperative process in collaboration with non-state actors. The article examines the arguments by tracing the evolution of trilateral cooperation in environmental protection and information technology (IT) development.     

Implementing Environmental Sustainability in Local Government: The Impacts of Framing,Agency Culture,and Structure in US Cities and Counties

This article focuses on the organizational factors of environmental sustainability implementation in local government. We investigate the interactions, as well as direct and indirect impacts, of the framing of environmental sustainability and organizational culture and structure on implementation outcomes. We use a survey of 217 city/county planners and managers in 146 randomly selected American mid-sized cities and counties. The survey was specifically designed to tease out organizational features and their impacts. We model these impacts using structural equation modeling. We find that horizontally and vertically integrated organizational structure supports two essential dimensions of organizational culture: innovation adoption and consensus building. These cultural traits positively impact the framing of environmental sustainability at the core of organizations’ logic, which in turn significantly supports implementation outcomes. These findings provide important insights into city/county managers seeking to promote sustainability, and provide a base for future studies of the organizational factors of implementation.     

Democracy,Al Qaeda,and the Causes of Terrorism: A Strategic Analysis of U.S. Policy

How will the strategy of spreading democracy affect the threat of terrorism from Al Qaeda and likeminded Islamic extremist groups? This article analyzes how spreading democracy would impact four different sets of underlying motivations that lead to this kind of terrorism. It will show that the widespread belief in the power of democracy is likely misplaced because democracy will be unlikely to change perceptions of occupation, will itself threaten Islamic identity and culture, will be unlikely to mitigate economic grievances, and will be unlikely to provide a more legitimate government than one based on religious law.     

Contracting Out Local Government Services to Private Agents: An Analysis of Contract Design and Service Delivery Performance in Ghana

Contracting out is generally justified on the principle that as governments contract out part of their responsibilities in service provision to private agents, they harness the power of market competition which leads to efficiency in service provision. In working with private contractors, local governments (LGs) face problems related to agent opportunism, while agents also face risks such as dereliction of payment responsibility by LGs for services delivered. The literature shows that these problems are addressed through a web of contractual arrangements. Using agency theory, this study investigates the relationship between contract design and quality of services delivery in three Ghanaian cities (Accra, Kumasi and Tema). The study found a surprising negative correlation between contract document and agents' performance. The paper concludes that effectiveness of contracting out documents depends on contract management capacity of government administrators. In its absence, LGs that contract out are exposed to risks. The paper uses the findings to reflect on the inherent deficiencies in agency theory and Africanist literature on patronage.     

Lesbian,Gay and Bisexual Populations: The Role of English Local Government

Abstract

The role of local government has recently come under debate, in the context of state retrenchment, public sector cuts and the marketisation of welfare. Recent discussions have centred on local authorities as leaders, on enterprise and on democracy, but there has been little discussion of local authorities in relation to equalities issues and minority groups. This article examines the role of local government in relation to one minority grouping, Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual (LGB) people, drawing on empirical material gathered from 2007 to 2010 as part of a large Economic and Social Research Council research project. It describes the importance of equalities legislation and related implementation mechanisms in driving forward the LGB equalities agenda, explores aspects of welfare delivery to LGB people and addresses democratic processes. The article suggests that a collision of different forces is currently taking place: the legislation supports the protection of the LGB communities, but this support is undermined by the recession-related and ideologically driven public sector cuts. In addition, aggregate approaches to local democracy may override the interests of minority groups such as LGB people.     

Housing and Council Tax Benefits Administration in England: A Long-Term Perspective on the Performance of the Local Government Delivery System

The Coalition government announced, in 2010, that between 2013 and the end of 2017 all existing claims to income-based welfare allowances, including housing benefit, would gradually move to the Universal Credit (DWP 2010). This article evaluates the performance of the Council Tax and Housing Benefits Administration Services under the current system for the delivery of these benefits since they were transferred fully to local authorities in 1993 up until December 2011. During this period the performance of local government has been influenced by four successive national delivery regimes, namely: Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT); Best Value; Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) and Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA). An earlier article (Murphy, P., Greenhalgh, K. and Jones, M., 2011. Comprehensive performance assessment and public services improvement in England – a case study of the benefits administration service in local government. Local Government Studies, 37 (6), pp. 579–599) examined the CPA period in detail and found a significant improvement in performance across all types of authorities in all parts of the country during this period. The current article complements this earlier analysis and provides a longer-term perspective on the performance of the benefits service between 1993 and December 2011. The findings of this article show that under CCT the performance of the system was poor, there were wide variations in individual local authority performance, with many acknowledged inadequacies in the system and unacceptably high levels of fraud. However, towards the end of CCT and in the subsequent Best Value period the antecedents of some of the tools and techniques subsequently used to drive improvement in the CPA era were either put in place or were being developed. The Best Value period itself did not show significant improvements in performance and it was not until many of the initiatives were refined, developed and applied within the CPA framework that sustained and significant improvements became evident. This overall improvement generally continued under the CAA although the previous trend of consistent reductions in the variation between authorities’ performance had changed between 2009–2010 and 2011–2012. It is too early to judge whether these latest trends will be maintained under the Coalition government’s localism regime.     

Analysis of Ethical Leadership and Integrity Development in Local Government: The United States,The Netherlands,Montenegro, and Serbia

This research seeks to understand influences on local government integrity development as a control of corruption. Using survey data from public managers in local governments in The Netherlands, Serbia, Montenegro, and the United States, we examined three main areas: integrity policy, leadership, and organizational ethical climate. An important finding was that integrity policy comes from an indirect leadership effect that remains focused on a structural response as the primary source of ethical reasoning more than normative control. Clarity of decisions, consistency in the process of decision-making, and support for anticorruption efforts can be enhanced with a balanced approach to corruption control.     

Chalk and Cheese: A Comparative Analysis of Local Government Reform Processes in New South Wales and Victoria

A substantial empirical literature exists on the consequences of local government reform programs. However, much less effort has been directed at examining how reform processes affect the outcomes of reform programs and little work has been invested in the comparative analysis of local government reform processes. To address this neglect in the literature, this article provides a comparative analysis of the contemporary municipal reform initiatives in the New South Wales and Victorian state local government systems. It is argued that the much more deliberative and inclusive Victorian approach represents a superior approach to the hurried “top-down” New South Wales method.     

A Public Administration Headache: An Evaluation Analysis of Prison Policy and Recidivism Toward Social Reintegration

We focus on discovering, describing, and understanding prison recidivism; secondly, we intend to know if the prison policy contributes to deterrence of crime; thirdly, we want to know if prison labor and vocational education and training influence the rate of prison recidivism by increasing social reintegration or decreasing prison recidivism. We use a sample of n = 1643 prisoners, multivariate clustering methods, focusing on latent class models, to trace the profile of prisoners, and we use the chi-square test to test dependence/independence of some variable pairs. Data support the heterogeneity of inmates, resulting in two clusters, recidivists (50%), and nonrecidivists.     

Local Government Reforms in (Seven) European Countries: Between Convergent and Divergent,Conflicting and Complementary Developments

In selecting the United Kingdom/England, Germany, Sweden, France, Italy, Spain and Hungary as comparative cases, and in focusing on three institutional tracks (local leadership, internal administration and external operation), this article first discusses, on the one hand, whether local government has been institutionally strengthened, and on the other, whether governance-type actor networks have expanded in the countries under consideration and whether, across-countries, this developments has shown convergence or divergence. Secondly, it addresses the question of whether the two currents (strengthening of traditional local government and expansion of local governance networks) are conflicting or complementary.     

Organizational Commitment,Job Satisfaction and Attitudes toward Organizational Change: A Study in the Local Government

The present study investigates the direct and indirect relationships among job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and attitudes toward organizational change and their dimensions. Results indicated that employees in the investigated departments are highly satisfied with supervision and coworkers, whereas they are slightly satisfied with work conditions and job security, but they have low satisfaction with pay and promotion facets of the job. Results further demonstrated that employees in the investigated departments are remaining with their current departments either because they want to do so, or because they have to do so, but not because they feel they ought to do so.