Leaving the Australian Labor Force: An Extended Encounter with the State

This article seeks to demonstrate the way in which labor market choices are shaped by institutional arrangements devised by the state. Since these arrangements differ markedly from country to country, much that is distinctive about national labor market outcomes is a function of diverse encounters with the state. This argument is illustrated by an account that explains why Australia, a country which apparently devotes little in the way of public resources to the old, manifests an exceptionally high level of early retirement. This account shows that, in contrast to the standard European welfare state strategy of public pensions, the Australian state has over many decades tackled the need for provision for the old by encouraging retirement strategies that are not subsidized directly from the public purse. These strategies include the encouragement of widely dispersed home ownership and occupational pensions. Read broadly, the article suggests that the extremity of contrasts frequently made between the advanced welfare states of Western Europe and the miserable social policy outcomes in the democracies of the New World have been far too extreme. The article experiments with novel presentational techniques designed to focus attention on individual choices and on policy outcomes for the individual rather than policy outputs by governments.     

Economists and public policy: Chicago political economy versus conventional views

Both conventional welfare economics and public choice analysis suggest that economists have an important educational role to play in the public policy process — in improving the decision-making process. In sharp contrast, information and incentive problems related to voting rules, the bureaucracy, and the legislature do not arise in CPE because these processes are all perfect agents of interest groups. Consequently, the political process is efficient and there is no scope for beneficial economic analysis as it relates to the sugar program or other public policies. That is, the polity is efficient or it would be reordered by competing interest groups to make it so. But, as Mitchell (1989: 290) stresses, the important unanswered question in CPE remains: if there is no scope for improvement how and why does change occur?The analysis here suggests that the sugar program (and similar policies) may persist not because they are beneficial to the public at large but rather because information and incentive problems in the collective choice process lead to perverse results. Consequently, economic analysts can make a positive contribution to the public policy process by providing information about the responsiveness of alternative institutional arrangements to the values and choices of individual citizens (Wiseman, 1989). The Friedmans' Tide in the Affairs of Men view holds that economic analyses are important in changing public opinion, which is an important precursor to changes in public policy.     

The Coexistence of Different Welfare Regimes in the Same Country: A Comparative Analysis of the Brazilian Municipalities Heterogeneity

Abstract

This paper demonstrates that heterogeneous countries such as Brazil have vast differences in welfare arrangements at the sub-national level. A number of social policies (social insurance, education, health and social assistance) were analysed in 5,565 Brazilian municipalities along five dimensions: expenditure, coverage, share of private spending, family structure and poverty. The grade of membership method was used to cluster municipalities and identify the main differences in their welfare regimes. Factor analysis was also used to explore which dimensions are most relevant in characterizing these sub-national regimes. The results show highly heterogeneous institutional forms of social protection across municipalities, which are classified as social assistance, quasi-social assistance, corporative, quasi-corporative, family insurance and intermediary welfare regimes.     

Land tenurial dynamics and participatory forestry management in Bangladesh

Of late, participatory forestry management, more popularly known as ‘social forestry’ (SF), has acquired great significance in Bangladesh as a strategy for both forest resource management and rural development. However, research on the contextual factors such as social relations, institutional structures, forest policies and land tenurial arrangements which regulate SF's performance in the field has been limited. Land ownership and tenurial arrangement is one crucial factor which has remained virtually unexplored in the context of Bangladesh SF. This article examines the land use and tenure arrangements in selected SF projects in Bangladesh. It focuses on the perceptions and choice of the SF farmers regarding land ownership, tenure and use; implications of central land tenurial policy on farm productivity and farmers' motivation; and also on the difference between farmers' land use choice and the assumptions of the SF planners. It shows that land tenure is a complex issue for SF. Although tenurial security is a major motivating force for farmers, providing permanent land ownership alone has little impact on farm productivity or on the growth of collective effort among SF farmers. Farmers need institutional assurance and support (especially from the government) to fully utilize the potential rights and benefits associated with such ownership. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How Do “Organizational Designs” Influence Welfare Politics? A Study of the Nordic Pension Systems

The interplay between organizational structure and political behaviour is one of the focal points of political science. How and to what extent do existing organizational structures constrain and channel future political decision-making? One specific hypothesis from the welfare literature provides the starting-point for this article: Korpi's argument that “institutional” welfare arrangements grant the poor better welfare provisions than “marginal” welfare arrangements. By confronting Korpi with his critics, I argue that the interplay between welfare designs and political decision-making is more complex than Korpi's thesis suggests. Implications for the broader welfare debate are discussed.     

Issue compensation and right‐wing government social spending

It is well‐established that prolonged left‐wing incumbency has a positive long‐term effect on welfare effort in terms of high levels of social spending and reduced levels of economic inequality and poverty. Prolonged left‐wing incumbency also influences the institutional set‐up of welfare states, in particular generating strong support for existing arrangements in countries with large welfare states. The issue ownership literature furthermore shows that the public comes to distrust right‐wing parties as defenders of the welfare state. In countries that have a tradition of left‐wing incumbency it is particularly important for right‐wing governments to compensate for the distrust of the public because of the popularity of the welfare state and strong vested interests. While right‐wing governments on average are negatively associated with social spending, there is a strong positive association between right‐wing government and social spending in traditionally left‐wing countries. It is even the case that right‐wing governments in these countries spend more on social welfare than left‐wing governments. This indicates that right‐wing governments are forced to compensate for the lack of public trust by being even more generous than the left.     

The feasibility of social policies

The notion that, given sufficient ingenuity and resources, any social problem can be solved, in a manner consistent with the announced policy objectives and with the accepted institutional framework, has been a major source of failures and frustrations. This paper suggests that policy analysis should concentrate on the investigation of the conditions of feasibility of public programs. Feasibility is defined in terms of all the relevant constraints: social, political, administrative, and institutional, as well as technical and economic. The emphasis on the pure logic of choice and optimal decision rules, so characteristic of normative theorizing in decision theory, management science, and welfare economics, has tended to obscure the fact that in the field of social policies, the range of feasible choices is severely limited by a variety of constraints. Most bad decisions are not just suboptimal; on closer examination, it usually turns out that they were not even feasible at the time they were made. Only by understanding the reasons why, under certain circumstances, a given goal cannot be achieved, can we hope to gain better knowledge about the working of social institutions. Just as the essence of the scientific method is the critical analysis and refutation of proposed theories, rather than the accumulation of evidence in favor of pet solutions, so the most important task of policy analysis consists in submitting plans and objectives to the most stringent tests of feasibility. Also in analytic case studies, the search for constraints that were ignored by the decisionmakers has considerable heuristic value, as I try to demonstrate with a critical discussion of some aspects of the British National Health Service.Paper presented at the Workshop on Models and Cases in Administration Decision Making, Joint Sessions of Workshops of the European Consortium for Political Research, Strasbourg, France, March 28–April 2, 1974.     

Approaching the EU and Reaching the US? Rival Narratives on Transforming Welfare Regimes in East-Central Europe

Post-communist welfare regimes are frequently portrayed as a hybrid consisting of the relics of communist social policy and a neophyte imitation of the US model of welfare. Both components of that hybrid are regarded as incompatible with the 'European social model'. At the same time, most welfare reformers in East-Central Europe try to avoid falling into the trap of first, conserving the statist, inefficient and pseudo-egalitarian character of the old system of social policy; second, seeking new forms of welfare collectivism along the national-conservative/populist 'third roads' between capitalism and communism; third, triggering popular discontent by dismantling the old welfare regimes too rapidly, or in a haphazard way; and fourth, targeting an end-state which has become unsustainable in the Western world during the past two decades. Meanwhile, the emerging welfare regimes in the region are far from being identical and the reformers do not find stable institutional arrangements in the West to copy. In an effort to make sense of this complex picture, the paper examines what has 'really' happened in the welfare sectors in the region during the past decade by presenting three dominant narratives of the social transformation: 'leaping in the dark', 'marking time' and 'muddling through'.     

Do Welfare State Regimes Determine Public Sector Reforms? Choice Reforms in American,Swedish and German Schools

The idea that modern welfare states can be grouped into distinct regimes dominates contemporary studies of welfare state restructuring, and several studies have concluded welfare state reforms to be correlated with regime structures. These studies build, however, on analyses of only cash-benefit programmes whereas social services are almost neglected in current welfare state research. Thus, the aim of this article is to test the explanatory capacity of the welfare state regime perspective in relation to reforms in the service dimension of advanced welfare states – normally termed 'public sector reforms'. For this purpose, the author has conducted a focused comparison of the degree to which archetypical examples of the liberal regime (United States), the social democratic regime (Sweden) and the conservative regime (Germany) have introduced vouchers and parental choice into their public primary schools. Schools and education have ranked high on the public sector reform agenda since the 1980s, while the school choice issue signifies core aspects of the rationale of the reform movement: re-arranging public provision of services into quasi-markets. The article identifies, however, a clear lack of correlation between adoption of the school-choice policy and welfare state regimes. Instead, the reforms undertaken in all three countries seem closely related to the institutional rules of political decision making.     

Governance through civil society? An Anglo-Italian comparison of democratic renewal and local regeneration

Abstract

The UK has become a prime case for the implementation of the ‘new governance’ of partnership between central government and civil society. This perspective has become central to New Labour policies for both local socio-economic regeneration and democratic renewal in the United Kingdom. However, limitations in its redistribution of power, its transparency in the policy-making process, including the representativeness of civil society participants, and, in the effectiveness of its outcomes have all been alleged by academic critics. These issues are explored by contrasting a robust, British case of local, participatory governance in Bristol with a quite different, and more conventional approach to democratic renewal in the Italian city of Naples. Despite similar problems of socio-economic dereliction and similar schemes of regeneration in the two cases, the Italian approach emphasized the exclusive role of a renewed constitutional democracy, while in Bristol central government agencies promoted an accentuation of local trends to participation by local civil society organizations. Applying an analytical framework composed of national policies and regulations, institutional rules and norms, and the collective ‘identity’ factors identified by social capital theory, governance changes are here treated as ‘exogenous shocks’ and/or as opportunities for choice. However, over and above differences in these institutional frameworks the key factors are shown to be the longer-standing political cultures influencing local actors and their own repertoires of action; with repertoires influenced by objective validations of previous policy choices, or economic or electoral successes. The study finds that the achievements of the ‘inclusive’, participative governance approach do not significantly exceed those of an exclusivist, ‘neo-constitutionalism’, as practised by a more autonomous local government in Naples. Thus, on this evidence, enhanced civil society engagement still requires greater freedom from central government direction.     

Differences That Matter: Overcoming Methodological Nationalism in Comparative Social Policy Research

Abstract

Welfare states are often discussed as if they were territorially homogeneous state-wide institutions measurable by state-wide expenditure averages and explained by country-level variables. It is rare in comparative policy studies to investigate the role of territorial politics in the outcomes of even federal countries. This article argues, using social policy examples in the UK and US, that the impact of intergovernmental finance and division of labour profoundly shapes social investment and redistribution – producing almost as much expenditure variance within the US as within the OECD. The findings show the importance of incorporating territorial politics and intergovernmental arrangements into comparative welfare state and policy analysis.     

Rational Choice and Dysfunctional Institutions

As stated elsewhere in this issue, we cannot claim to explain an institution's origin just by the functions it serves. In part thismay be because of the cognitive limitations of those actors who are instrumental in institutional formation and institutional change. But even more clearly, it is the case that rational instrumental choice does not imply functional institutions. Just as rational choice in a prisoner's dilemma may result in inefficient policies, rational choice by actors with conflicting preferencesfor institutions may result in institutions that are suboptimal. Examples of rational choice explanations of dysfunctional institutions are provided in the area of bureaucracy, regulation, healthcare, and budgeting. I argue that the paradoxes and impossibility results of rational choice theory offer the best insights currently available into the persistent inefficiencies of the world ofpolitics.     

公共政策研究的新进展

近年来,公共政策研究正变得越来越多样化,出现了大量方法和理论,也表现为这些研究分散在各种特定领域的政策中。国家概念是政策理论的中心,但要将国家理论应用于政策研究却不容易“。阶段”方法是政策研究中长期以来占主导地位的研究方法之一,但它只是一种初级方法。新制度主义方法将政策制定过程推向了一种重要的比较分析方式,为解释政策的异同提供了制度解释维度,但它太笼统,考虑范围过于宽泛。而新制度主义者经常选择特定政策领域或部门进行分析,这是一个重要进展,因为政策制定是在特定部门或领域中进行的,仅仅集中关注国家及其行政、立法、司法机构是不够的。政策网络方法体现了研究者对于政策制定中国家与社会组织之间更普遍、更早的兴趣,但它除了描述外并不能帮助我们在理论发展中走得更远。理性方法是一个很有用的方法,当然它不能把理性选择作为对决策的惟一解释。在合作模式中,国家及其各个层次不再被看作合作的惟一机制,它表明市场和网络作为合作的另一种机制或原则正越来越受到重视。而时下十分流行的治理理论并没有形成真正行之有效的手段和方法,它可能仅仅是一个时髦词汇。如果把治理的要点放在使国家、市民社会、市场、网络这些不同工具和机制的互相协作上,治理就会成为一个有创造性的和深刻的分析方法。     

The Limits of Rational Choice: New Institutionalism in the Test Bed of Central Banking Politics in Australia

This paper tests the explanatory capacities of different versions of new institutionalism by examining the Australian case of a general transition in central banking practice and monetary politics: namely, the increased emphasis on low inflation and central bank independence. Standard versions of rational choice institutionalism largely dominate the literature on the politics of central banking, but this approach (here termed RC1) fails to account for Australian empirics. RC1 has a tendency to establish actor preferences exogenously to the analysis; actors' motives are also assumed a priori ; actor's preferences are depicted in relatively static, ahistorical terms. And there is the tendency, even a methodological requirement, to assume relatively simple motives and preference sets among actors, in part because of the game theoretic nature of RC1 reasoning. It is possible to build a more accurate rational choice model by re-specifying and essentially updating the context, incentives and choice sets that have driven rational choice in this case. Enter RC2. However, this move subtly introduces methodological shifts and new theoretical challenges. By contrast, historical institutionalism uses an inductive methodology. Compared with deduction, it is arguably better able to deal with complexity and nuance. It also utilises a dynamic, historical approach, and specifies (dynamically) endogenous preference formation by interpretive actors. Historical institutionalism is also able to more easily incorporate a wider set of key explanatory variables and incorporate wider social aggregates. Hence, it is argued that historical institutionalism is the preferred explanatory theory and methodology in this case.     

Explaining Privatization: Notes Towards a Predictive Theory

This article starts from the assumption that some of the theoretical work used to explain welfare-state expansion can be used 'in reverse' to explain privatization, here seen as welfare state contraction, i.e., the transfer from the public to the private sector of the responsibility for certain activities involved in welfare provision. To this end, valiants of the 'power resources' approach are examined. Finding that the 'labour movement' thesis does not have a strong predictive value, I then discuss the 'game theoretical' variant of the 'power resources' approach. Its usefulness for predicting privatization patterns seems limited because of the reductionism built into it. Following the neo-Institutionalists' argument that actor preferences and strategies both reflect and form institutional arrangements of the welfare state, some institutional typologies are developed which are relevant to the course and patterns of privatization. An ideal-type dichotomy between 'pluralist' and 'corporatist' institutions is discussed, in connection with a further delineation of decision-making, financing, and implementing structures. In conclusion, an effort is made to combine actor-oriented and institutional approaches to formulate some preliminary predictions about when and where certain patterns of privatization will occur.     

Regulation as a political question

There are at least two frameworks within which the debate on proper institutional arrangements for regulation can be carried out. One rests on seeing the various possibilities as instruments and its central concern is with the most efficient means for achieving regulatory objectives. The second framework views regulation as an essentially political act. It focuses on adapting our choice of institutional alternatives to take account of valued features of our existing political world. It also involves an understanding of how our choice of institutional alternatives actively shapes that world and thus helps to form our regime or the way of life to which we aspire. These two frameworks are examined with special attention being given to the political view.     

How Should Governments Make Risky Policy Decisions?

Public policy-making does not follow the long-established and well-recognised principles of rational decision analysis under risk. Public views of risk are often inconsistent and seemingly irrational, and a gulf exists between risk perceptions and attitudes of the public and those of 'experts'. On the other hand, experts often claim unjustifiably high levels of confidence in their predictions of policy choice outcomes, creating a lack of public faith in their recommendations. While risky policy choices deserve more systematic decision analysis, many challenges remain to effective implementation of such analyses. Among the suggestions for improvement that we offer is the need for more effective interaction between policy-makers, decision analysts and the public.     

Perceptions of policy choice in contemporary democracies

Though the concept of choice is essential to democracy, little is known about how citizens make sense of the diversity of policies offered by political elites. Research has found that institutional arrangements such as low electoral thresholds and multiple party competitors are associated with greater policy choice. Other work emphasises non‐institutional factors. No research, however, examines what the voters think. In this article these alternative explanations are assessed in terms of whether citizens believe parties to provide choice over policy. Evidence from 25 democracies reveals that electoral and party systems have no direct effect. Choice perceptions are instead affected by non‐policy factors: social heterogeneity and individual political dispositions. This result contrasts with analyses showing a strong connection between electoral rules and the diversity of messages communicated by parties during campaigns. The article also shows how choice perceptions matter for political behaviour. Overall, study findings imply that the promise of institutions for fostering representation is weaker than previously assumed.