WOLF'S MODEL: Government Failure and Public Sector Reform in Advanced Industrial Democracies

Many developed nations have embarked on public sector reform programs based on the New Public Management (NPM) paradigm. This article seeks to evaluate the efficacy of NPM reform strategies as a means of dealing with the problem of “government failure” in public sector hierarchies by examining these strategies through the analytical prism provided by Wolf's theory of nonmarket failure. Drawing on the New Zealand experience, we explore the potential for NPM reform initiatives to mitigate the problems of nonmarket supply. Moreover, we examine how “autonomous policy leadership” and “advocacy coalition networks” can overcome the various obstacles to the successful implementation of reform strategies delineated by Wolf under his “conditions of nonmarket demand”. The article then focusses on the efficacy of NPM in removing, or at least reducing, the various forms of government failure identified in Wolf's taxonomic catalogue of nonmarket failure. We conclude by assessing some of the likely tradeoffs involved in the application of NPM reform programs.     

Buttery Guns and Welfare Hawks: The Politics of Defense Spending in Advanced Industrial Democracies

In this article, we present a new theory that, given the economic consequences of military spending, some governments may use military spending as a means of advancing their domestic non‐military objectives. Based on evidence that governments can use military spending as welfare policy in disguise, we argue that the role of ideology in shaping military spending is more complicated than simple left‐right politics. We also present a theory that strategic elites take advantage of opportunities presented by international events, leading us to expect governments that favor more hawkish foreign policy policies to use low‐level international conflicts as opportunities for increasing military spending. Using pooled time‐series data from 19 advanced democracies in the post–World War II period, we find that government ideology, measured as welfare and international positions, interacts with the international security environment to affect defense spending.     

Citizens' Blame of Politicians for Public Service Failure: Experimental Evidence about Blame Reduction through Delegation and Contracting

Theories of blame suggest that contracting out public service delivery reduces citizens’ blame of politicians for service failure. The authors use an online experiment with 1,000 citizen participants to estimate the effects of information cues summarizing service delivery arrangements on citizens’ blame of English local government politicians for poor street maintenance. Participants were randomized to one of four cues: no information about service delivery arrangements, politicians’ involvement in managing delivery, delegation to a unit inside government managing delivery, and delegation through a contract with a private firm managing delivery. The politicians managing delivery cue raises blame compared to citizens having no information. However, the contract with a private firm cue does not reduce blame compared to either no information or the politicians managing delivery cue. Instead, the delegation to a unit inside government cue reduces blame compared to politicians managing delivery, suggesting that delegation to public managers, not contracting, reduces blame in this context.     

Presidents Shaping Public Opinion in Parliamentary Democracies: A Survey Experiment in Turkey

Many parliamentary democracies feature a president alongside a prime minister. While these presidents have a nonpartisan status as head of state, they often have had long political careers with partisan affiliations before assuming office. How do voters react when such actors make issue statements to shape public opinion? Are such statements filtered through voters’ partisan lenses, provoked by the partisan background of these actors? Or perhaps partisan reactions are not invoked, owing to the nonpartisan status of the office? We argue that voters’ reactions depend on the issue domain. Partisan reactions will be invoked only when the statements are about issues outside the president’s prerogatives. We provide evidence for our argument from a population-based survey experiment in Turkey.     

The Boston Marathon Bombings: Who's to Blame and Why It Matters for Public Administration

This article examines how elite attributions of blame—statements from politicians and high‐level public administrators assigning responsibility for failure to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings—affect citizens’ beliefs regarding which government organizations, if any, are culpable for failing to prevent the bombings. The primary hypothesis is that public administrators, owing to their greater credibility relative to politicians, will more strongly influence citizens’ notions of who is to blame. Findings show that public administrators are viewed as significantly more credible among Democrats, and this credibility advantage translates into influence. Additionally, blame statements implicating the Federal Bureau of Investigation for failing to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings are particularly influential among Republicans, and exculpatory statements are particularly influential among Democrats. As discussed in the context of the Boston Marathon bombings, the public process of attributing blame for a perceived governmental failure has important implications for public administration.     

The Importance of Trust in Government for Public Administration: The Case of Zoning

Many scholars argue that citizens with higher levels of political trust are more likely to grant bureaucratic discretion to public administrators than citizens with lower levels of trust. Trust, therefore, can relieve the tension between managerial flexibility and political accountability in the modern administrative state. Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence showing that trust is actually associated with citizens' willingness to cede policy-making power to government. This article tests theories about political trust and citizen competence using the case of zoning. Trust in local government is found to be an important predictor of support for zoning, but trust in state government and trust in national government have no effect. These findings suggest that trust affects policy choice and helps determine how much power citizens grant to local administrators.     

The Government Agenda in Parliamentary Democracies

Lawmaking is a challenge for coalition governments because it inherently demands cooperation and compromise by parties with divergent policy goals. The jurisdictional system of cabinet government exacerbates the problem by providing parties the means to undermine the coalition bargain in the pursuit of their own policy interests. In this article, I explore whether arrangements that allow partners to police one another induce compromise on one of the most important decisions taken by a government—the organization of the policy agenda. In an analysis of original data on the timing and policy content of over 800 government bills from four European democracies, I show that coalition governments pursue a largely "accommodative" agenda. Policy initiatives dealing with issues that are more attractive to all partners in the coalition are likely to be given priority on the agenda, while those dealing with relatively unattractive issues are likely to be postponed .     

Mobile Capital, Democratic Institutions, and the Public Economy in Advanced Industrial Societies

This article addresses the following questions. Is international capital mobility systematically related to reductions in the size of the public economy, as globalization theory suggests? Alternatively, do democratic institutions and processes shape the ways in which internationalization affects national policies? Specifically, I argue that the effects of capital mobility on the scope of the public economy should be conditioned by the institutional forms of societal interest representation and the formal organization of decision-making authority within the polity. Utilizing econometric analysis of 1964–1993 data from 16 nations, I find that international capital mobility has few direct effects on the scope of the public economy. However, configurations of democratic institutions fundamentally shape the domestic policy impacts of capital mobility. Where social corporatism and inclusive electoral institutions are strong and where decision-making authority within the polity is concentrated, international capital mobility is either unrelated to the scope of the public economy or positively associated with total public spending, social transfers, and public consumption. In institutional contexts of pluralist interest and exclusive electoral representation, and in polities where decision-making is dispersed, rises in capital mobility are systematically associated with rollbacks of the public sector.     

Coalition Government,Legislative Institutions,and Public Policy in Parliamentary Democracies

Most democracies are governed by coalitions, comprising multiple political parties with conflicting policy positions. The prevalence of these governments poses a significant question: Which parties' electoral commitments are ultimately reflected in government policy? Recent theories have challenged our understanding of multiparty government, arguing that the relative influence of coalition parties depends crucially on institutional context. Specifically, where institutions allow credible enforcement of bargains, policy should reflect a compromise among all governing parties; where such institutions are absent, the preferences of parties controlling the relevant ministries should prevail. Critically, empirical work has thus far failed to provide direct evidence for this conditional relationship. Analyzing changes in social protection policies in 15 parliamentary democracies, we provide the first systematic evidence that the strength of legislative institutions significantly shapes the relative policy influence of coalition parties. Our findings have implications for our understanding of coalition government, policymaking, and electoral responsiveness.     

Public Attitudes Toward Social Spending in the United States: The Differences Between Direct Spending and Tax Expenditures

This paper uses a survey experiment to examine differences in public attitudes toward ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ government spending. Federal social welfare spending in the USA has two components: the federal government spends money to directly provide social benefits to citizens, and also indirectly subsidizes the private provision of social benefits through tax expenditures. Though benefits provided through tax expenditures are considered spending for budgetary purposes, they differ from direct spending in several ways: in the mechanisms through which benefits are delivered to citizens, in how they distribute wealth across the income spectrum, and in the visibility of their policy consequences to the mass public. We develop and test a model explaining how these differences will affect public attitudes toward spending conducted through direct and indirect means. We find that support for otherwise identical social programs is generally higher when such programs are portrayed as being delivered through tax expenditures than when they are portrayed as being delivered by direct spending. In addition, support for tax expenditure programs which redistribute wealth upward drops when citizens are provided information about the redistributive effects. Both of these results are conditioned by partisanship, with the opinions of Republicans more sensitive to the mechanism through which benefits are delivered, and the opinions of Democrats more sensitive to information about their redistributive effects.     

Industrial Relations and Public Sector Reform: The Victorian Case

Few anticipated the radical program of public sector reform introduced by the Kennett government. A commitment to downsizing, markets and privatisation has transformed employment relations in the Victorian public sector. Familiar institutions have disappeared, major employment areas have been restructured, and jurisdiction for much public sector industrial relations has been transferred to the Commonwealth. Despite some industrial unrest, and occasional successes, public sector unions have been unable to fend off this ideological assault on traditional patterns of public sector employment.     

The Effectiveness of Administrative Reform in New Democracies

Practitioners and scholars of postcommunist politics disagree on the accomplishments of administrative reforms in new Eastern European democracies. The transformation of the public sector after 1989 has aimed to consolidate the democratic process and enhance economic development. Skeptics, however, argue that administrative reforms face serious challenges in the context of economic liberalization, insufficient capacity for modernization, and cultural legacies of the past. The authors judge reform effectiveness by testing the impact of civil service reform on government transparency and foreign direct investment. The results of the empirical analysis confirm that once reform is adopted, administrations become more effective at reducing corruption and attracting investment. Despite the delays and difficulties of implementation, the adoption of reform is important in and of itself, and countries can expect positive results sooner than skeptics predict.