Federalism and Competing Values In The Reagan Administration

Ronald Reagan has made revitalizing federalism a central componentof his domestic agenda. Although this goal has sometimes complementedhis other policy aims, this article focuses on cases where conflictshave arisen between the president's devolutionary goals andother primary objectives of his administration, such as deregulatingthe private sector and reducing domestic expenditures. Judgedfrom this perspective, policies supportive of federalism, asdefined by the president, have fared less well in his administration.After a series of brief case studies analyzing such policy decisions,the implications for the future of federalism are discussed.     

Comparing Public and Private Managers' Leadership Styles: Understanding the Role of Job Context

ABSTRACT

Comparing public and private managers is a major subject in the public management literature, but there have been only a few empirical studies of the differences in their respective leadership styles. Traditionally, leadership style is explained by the characteristics of the manager, the employees, and their job. This study explains leadership by the manager's job context: the degree of job complexity, role clarity, and job autonomy. We argue that differences in job context explain the use of different leadership styles in the public and private sector. To clearly specify the importance of sector, the study investigates direct, mediating, and moderating effects. Based on a survey of Danish public and private managers with 949 respondents, this article shows that job context variables vary significantly between public and private sector managers. The article provides some explanations for why public managers use more participative leadership, while private ones use more directive leadership.     

Managing the Entanglement: Complexity Leadership in Public Sector Systems

Complexity in public sector systems requires leaders to balance the administrative practices necessary to be aligned and efficient in the management of routine challenges and the adaptive practices required to respond to dynamic circumstances. Conventional notions of leadership in the field of public administration do not fully explain the role of leadership in balancing the entanglement of formal, top‐down, administrative functions and informal, emergent, adaptive functions within public sector settings with different levels of complexity. Drawing on and extending existing complexity leadership constructs, this article explores how leadership is enacted over the duration of six urban regeneration projects representing high, medium, and low levels of project complexity. The article suggests that greater attention needs to be paid to the tensions inherent in enabling leadership if actors are to cope with the complex, collaborative, cross‐boundary, adaptive work in which they are increasingly engaged.     

Bureaucratic Neutrality among Competing Bureaucratic Values in an Ethnic Federalism: The Case of Ethiopia

This article uses Kaufman's theory of competing bureaucratic values as a foundation for studying bureaucratic values in a developing society. It discusses civil service reform within a socio-bureaucratic-political exchange, as well as characteristics associated with bureaucratic values and ethnic federalism. The inherent conflicts between a civil service grounded in the values of bureaucratic neutrality, representativeness, or executive leadership and practices within a government structured on the basis of ethnicity are explored. Factors related to Ethiopia's postconflict status, which further complicate the governance environment, are identified, and building blocks for postconflict governance are suggested.     

Full Range Leadership Styles and Government IT Team Performance: The Critical Roles of Follower and Team Competence

Abstract

In this study, we explore how leadership affects team performance from a team and follower competence perspective. We base our study on the Full Range Leadership (FRL) model, which proposes three different leadership styles: passive/avoidant, transactional, and transformational. The FRL has been well-studied outside the public administration environment, but rarely considering the three leadership styles simultaneously, or with team level outcomes. We propose a sequential mediation model in which leadership styles relate to follower competencies, which in turn relate to team competence, and then team performance. Our research design is distinctive in that we study all three FRL styles simultaneously, examine team performance as opposed to individual performance, and utilize data from three levels of a municipal government IT department. We found that transformational leadership was directly and indirectly related to team performance in the expected positive directions. Transactional leadership was mostly ineffective, while passive/avoidant leadership had complicated relationships with team performance that were both positive (direct) and negative (indirect through competence). We conclude that the three FRL styles have varying degrees of effectiveness as direct and indirect predictors of team performance. We discuss the implications of our results for leadership of public administration organizations.     

Incongruity in 360-Degree Feedback Ratings and Competing Managerial Values: Evidence from a Public Agency Setting

ABSTRACT

This study examined the sources, patterns, and implications of incongruence in 360-degree feedback ratings in public organizations using the Competing Values Framework for organizational effectiveness. Performance self-ratings from 68 high-performing, middle-level public sector managers, as well as parallel ratings provided by their supervisors, peers, and subordinates, were assembled and analyzed. Results indicated that rating incongruence existed across organizational roles and resulted from raters' unique role perspectives. Implications of incongruence in 360-degree feedback ratings with respect to developing effective systems for management development in public organizations are discussed in detail.     

Covenant of Mayors: Reasons for Being an Environmentally and Energy Friendly Municipality

The Covenant of Mayors (CM) is the mainstream European movement involving local authorities who voluntarily commit to increase energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources within their territories with the aim of reducing CO₂ emissions and meet the European Union objectives by 2020. One country that has a greater number of signatories of this agreement is Spain. This article analyzes which factors influence the decision of Spanish local authorities to join the ever‐growing movement. An empirical model is formulated to describe the behavior of Spanish local governments, this being a binary choice model which is a function of various political, economic, and technical factors. Among the prominent factors that influence this decision are population, availability of renewable energy, fiscal and environmental stress, citizens’ political preference, the contagion effect of neighboring municipalities, the existence of covenant coordinators, and finally, economic motivations.     

When Mayors Matter: Estimating the Impact of Mayoral Partisanship on City Policy

U.S. cities are limited in their ability to set policy. Can these constraints mute the impact of mayors’ partisanship on policy outcomes? We hypothesize that mayoral partisanship will more strongly affect outcomes in policy areas where there is less shared authority between local, state, and federal governments. To test this hypothesis, we create a novel dataset combining U.S. mayoral election returns from 1990 to 2006 with city fiscal data. Using regression discontinuity design, we find that cities that elect a Democratic mayor spend a smaller share of their budget on public safety, a policy area where local discretion is high, than otherwise similar cities that elect a Republican or an Independent. We find no differences on tax policy, social policy, and other areas that are characterized by significant overlapping authority. These results suggest that models of national policymaking are only partially applicable to U.S. cities. They also have implications for political accountability: mayors may not be able to influence the full range of policies that are nominally local responsibilities.     

Linehan,P. M., The Culture of Leadership in Contemporary China: Conflict,Values, and Perspectives for a New Generation

Journal of Chinese Political Science -     

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.     

Garcia: Of Federalism and Constitutional Values

In Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority (1985),a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court's justices did violenceto the principles of the U.S. Constitution by leaving the statesto take their Tenth Amendment complaints to the Congress. Inabdicating their proper constitutional role, the majority ofjustices ignored history, political realities, and constitutionalprinciple. The Constitution's institutional arrangements, ofwhich federalism is a key component, are an intrinsic part ofthe constitutional scheme by which government power is limitedand individual rights are protected.     

Liberal Democrat Leadership: The Cases of Ashdown and Kennedy

Effective leadership of the Liberal Democrats requires a combination of strengths: communications skills, a clear agenda, the ability to manage the party and personal abilities, including stamina, self-confidence and a love for the party itself. This article assesses Paddy Ashdown's and Charles Kennedy's periods as leader. It concludes that the first two phases of Ashdown's leadership were successful: he first ensured the party's survival and then positioned it so that it was able to benefit from the rise in support for the centre-left without being squeezed out by Labour. In the third phase, however, the attempt to deliver a common agenda with Labour was a failure, and Ashdown increasingly lost touch with his own party. Kennedy's first two years as leader were also relatively successful, but after that his leadership fell apart, suffering from a lack of an agenda, a failure of party management, a weakness in communication skills and a lack of self-confidence. His underlying problem was not alcoholism; it was that he was not capable of being an effective leader.     

Transformational Leadership and Organizational Processes: Influencing Public Performance

Leaders are essential actors in public performance improvement and organizational change. However, a key question has not been adequately addressed in prior literature on the topic: how do leadership processes make a difference? Using data on New York City public schools, this article explores the organizational mechanisms by which a specific form of principal's leadership—transformational leadership—influences objective organizational outcomes as measured by standardized test scores. The empirical results indicate that a principal's transformational leadership style affects student test scores through the mediating effects of purposeful performance information use and stakeholder engagement.     

Innovative Leadership and Policy Change: Lessons From Thatcher

This article employs the concept of Innovative Leadership to challenge the literature on policy change, particularly its skepticism about executive-led policy innovation. It examines evidence of innovative leadership under the Thatcher governments in the face of the social, governmental, and economic and secular factors normally believed to structure policy choice in democracies. On the basis of this it considers the opportunities/resources available to executives wishing to pursue innovative leadership. The conclusions are qualified by reference to system-specific and environmental factors which may circumscribe Innovative Leadership.     

Local Democracy and Political Leadership: Drawing a Map

Different concepts of local democracy imply different tasks, functions and reform strategies for local political leadership. This article draws a map of local democracy that entails four non-exclusive components: representative democracy, user democracy, network democracy and participatory democracy. After reflecting on the nature of local democracy in governance and the functions of political leadership generally, the article considers in turn the bases of constructing the common good within each form of democracy. Special attention is given to the role of political leadership within these forms.