Responsive regulation in public‐private partnerships: Between deterrence and persuasion

Design‐Build‐Finance‐Maintain‐Operate (DBFMO) contracts are a particular type of public‐private partnership whereby governments transfer the responsibility for the design, construction, financing, maintenance, and operation of a public infrastructure or utility service building to a multi‐headed private consortium through a long‐term performance contract. These arrangements present a typical principal‐agent problem because they incorporate a “carrot and stick” approach in which the agent (consortium) has to fulfill the expectations of the principal (procurer). This article deals with a neglected aspect in the literature related to the actual use of “the sticks or sanctions” in DBFMOs and assesses to what extent and under which conditions contract managers adopt a deterrence‐based enforcement approach or switch to a persuasion‐based approach, specifically when the contract clauses require the use of (automatic) deterrence. An empirical analysis of four DBFMOs in the Netherlands shows that the continuation of service delivery, the need to build trust, and the lack of agreement on output specifications play a role in the willingness of the procurer to apply a more responsive behavior that uses persuasion, even when deterrence should be automatically applied. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd     

The public choice of “superior” sanctions

This paper analyzes the public choice of specific forms of sanctions. Current sanctions are essentially quantity constraints (“Q-sanctions”) which are like quotas in that they might bestow benefits on certain special interest groups in the target country. Revenue sanctions (“Rsanctions”) may be able to recapture such benefits in the form of sender government revenue which could either compensate for the costs of sanctions to the sending country or finance other sanction enhancing activities aimed at the target country. Hence, R-sanctions may be “superior” to Q-Sanctions in general or on the basis of “target efficiency”. However, public choice analysis suggests that Q-sanctions will generally be chosen over R-sanctions by democratic countries.     

Accepting Authoritative Decisions: Humans as Wary Cooperators

Why are people more willing to accept some governmental decisions than others? In this article, we present results from a series of original experiments showing that people's reactions to a given outcome are heavily influenced by the procedure employed to produce the outcome. We find that subjects react much less favorably when a decision maker intentionally keeps a large payoff, thereby leaving the subject with a small payoff, than when that same payoff results from a procedure based on chance or on desert. Moreover, subjects react less favorably to outcomes rendered by decision makers who want to be decision makers than they do to identical outcomes selected by reluctant decision makers. Our results are consistent with increasingly prominent theories of behavior emphasizing people's aversion to being played for a “sucker,” an attitude that makes perfect sense if people's main goal is not to acquire as many tangible goods as possible but to make sure they are a valued part of a viable group composed of cooperative individuals.     

Participation in welfare legislation—A poverty-aware paradigm

Public participation, responsive regulation, and other policy formulations are intended to draw governments down from their ivory towers and into engagement with the people. However, they paint at best, a hazy picture of who “the people” are. This superficial representation is felt, among other collectives, by people living in poverty, who not only face hunger, often accompanied by poorer health and lower life expectancy, but whose social exclusion typically goes unrecognized by the authorities. The legal framing of poverty—and, as a result, states' policy approaches to its alleviation—focuses on the material core, representing a very thin conceptualization that fails to address the social dimension. Furthermore, practical avenues for incorporating citizens' views into lawmaking—which might enrich understanding—are lacking when it comes to people in poverty. Combined with a blatantly hegemonic stance, the resulting ignorance around poverty and “the poor” generates welfare laws that are woefully out of touch with reality, and legislative thinking that perpetuates, rather than alleviates, poverty. This paper seeks to make a twofold contribution: (i) to demonstrate this situation with a deep empirical inquiry into the legislative process of one legal provision within the Israeli welfare law regime, juxtaposed against qualitative field-research findings and (ii) to introduce the inventive and groundbreaking “poverty-aware” paradigm, constructed in social-work discourse, to illuminate and explain the empirical findings and point to potential procedural–institutional reform, to pave the way for poverty-aware legislation.     

Financial Management Development in Spain: Who is Playing Sancho Panza?

“What giants?” said Sancho Panza. “Those thou seest there,” answered his master, “with the long arms, and some have them nearly two leagues long.” “Look, your worship,” said Sancho, “what we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned by the wind make the millstone go.” “It is easy to see,” replied Don Quixote, “that thou are not used to this business of adventures; those are giants; and if thou art afraid, away with thee out of this and betake thyself to prayer while I engage them in fierce and unequal combat.” So saying, he gave the spur to his steed Rocinante, heedless of the cries his squire Sancho sent after him, warning him that most certainly they were windmills and not giants he was going to attack. He, however, was so positive they were giants that he neither heard the cries of Sancho nor perceived, near as he was, what they were, but made at them shouting.     

Policy Analysis in Thailand: Comparing the Roles of Expert and Local Knowledge

Abstract

This essay aims to compare the roles of different forms of knowledge in analysing public policy in Thailand. It reveals that modern policy studies in Thailand were introduced during the Cold War. “Public policy” became a subject for teaching to policy makers, with studies in this area influenced by American universities. However, the roles of local knowledge and spiritual leaders have shown themselves to still be very important. To espouse different forms of knowledge, Thailand needs to call for more collaborative leaders, policy analysts and think tanks that go beyond taking a critical attitude to policy technocrats and challenging local knowledge.     

“Our biggest killer”: multimodal discourse representations of dementia in the British press

A recent (2016) Office for National Statistics report stated that dementia is now “the leading cause of death” in England and Wales. Ever fixated with the syndrome (an unfailingly newsworthy topic), the British press was quick to respond to the bulletin, consistently headlining that dementia was the nation’s “biggest killer,” while (re)formulating other aspects of the report in distorting and emotive metaphorical terms. In this paper we examine how the media, through use of a recurring set of linguistic and visual semiotic tropes, portrayed dementia as an agentive entity, a “killer,” which remorselessly attacks its “victims.” Such a broadly loaded and sensationalist representation, we argue, not only construed dementia as a direful and pernicious disease, but also, crucially, obscured the personal and social contexts in which the syndrome is understood and experienced (not least by people with dementia themselves). This intensely lurid type of representation not only fails to address the ageist misinformation and common misunderstandings that all too commonly surround dementia, but is also likely to exacerbate the stress and depression frequently experienced by people with dementia and their families.     

How to argue about the new public management

Hood and Jackson's (1991) distinction between administrative argument and administrative philosophy has been largely overlooked in writings on NPM. This seemingly subtle distinction flows from the more obvious one between “practical argument” and “social scientific explanation.” These terms refer to different scholarly practices. Practical reasoning is a highly-developed form of scholarship in law, public policy, and political theory. Explanation is a highly-developed scholarly activity in political science and related disciplines. The fact that practical argument and explanation are, in principle, complementary scholarly activities in practically-oriented fields such as public management is not a reason to overlook the distinction between them. If scholars writing on NPM made more of this distinction, it might prove easier for their readers to see precisely how social science explanations and practical arguments are interrelated. Discussion of how well claims have been supported would then be facilitated. Also, it would be easier for writers to decide how to engage the NPM literature. Not only would the issues be clearer, but it would also be easier to discuss the merits of alternative approaches to tackling them. If more weight is given to the distinction between practical argumentation and social scientific research by scholars of NPM, an urgent question is: how should the scholarly practice of practical argumentation be characterized?     

Political will and government anti‐corruption efforts: What does the evidence say?

“Political will” is oft‐cited as the major obstacle to government's anti‐corruption efforts. Notwithstanding, there is remarkably little systematic analysis of the concept, with some scholars describing it as the “slipperiest concept in the policy lexicon,” whereas others are calling for its empirical relevance. This paper tries to unpack the “black box” of political will by making it an empirically relevant concept drawing on evidence from two Asian countries; Singapore and Bangladesh. Four key indicators based on the works of earlier scholars are used including origin of the initiative; comprehension and extent of analysis; credible sanctions; and resource dedication and sustenance are used. The paper also uses Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index, World Bank's World Governance Indicators (Control of Corruption and Government Effectiveness), and Political, Economic and Risk Consultancy's annual survey in Asia, as outcome measures. Based on the empirical evidence from the two countries, the paper shows that political will indeed has a positive influence on government's anti‐corruption efforts. Although political will may not be sufficient, it is a necessary condition to fight corruption, and that the difference between the positions of Singapore and Bangladesh on various global corruption league tables may be attributed to political will.     

Paradigms and Paradox: The Politics of Economic Ideas in Two Moments of Crisis

This article argues that there is a paradox at the heart of Hall's “Policy Paradigms” framework stemming from the desire to see both state and society as generative of social learning while employing two different logics to explain how such learning takes place: what I term the “Bayesian” and “constructivist” versions of the policy paradigms causal story. This creates a paradox as both logics cannot be simultaneously true. However, it is a generative paradox insofar as the power of the policy paradigms framework emerges, in part, from this attempt to straddle these distinct positions, producing an argument that is greater than the sum of its parts. In the second part of the article, I discuss the recent global financial crisis, an area where we should see third‐order change, but we do no not. That we do not strengthens the case for the constructivist causal story.     

The Advent of Space Weapons

Constellations of observation satellites resemble the “Panopticon” system imagined by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham in his 18th century project for an ideal jailhouse — a system that Michel Foucault analyzed in Discipline and Punish (1975). Just as the warden in the central tower watches the prisoners without their being able to see him, satellites watch the Earth while observed countries cannot escape or monitor the extent of the observation.

Will observed countries factor in the control exerted by observing countries, just as prisoners will eventually interiorize the warden's discipline? This may indeed have been the goal of the U.S. satellite observation policy during the Cold War (1950's–1980's). The U.S. at the time sought to exert a new form of power on the international scene, resorting to persuasion and deterrence rather than all-out aggression.

U.S. satellite surveillance was at work vis-a-vis the USSR through different policies linked to nuclear deterrence; and vis-a-vis U.S. Allies (NATO, Great-Britain, France and Israel), then subject to a U.S. information monopoly. The intended panoptical power was not totally efficient, however. Regarding the USSR, its exercise depended ultimately on the political climate between the two Superpowers. Allied countries succeeded repeatedly in warding off U.S. attempts at control through information.     

Regulating ethics in financial services: Engaging industry to achieve regulatory objectives

This article addresses the issue of renewing a sense of vocation in finance. Drawing on experiences in the UK, Australia, and Ireland, three common law jurisdictions at various phases of developing “an ethical esprit de corps” to professionalize the banking industry, it argues that adopting some aspects of a profession, a “trajectory towards professionalization” of the banking industry, could serve, at least to some extent, to improve the industry-wide norms that influence firms' cultures and individual behaviors. It contends that professionalization could help to develop bankers with a professional, pro-social identity, in which there is a recognition of broader obligations to society, that exists independently of the profit-driven nature of banking and the hierarchy of their own firms. This analysis is informed by an integration of regulatory theory, which casts doubt on the utility of sanctions except as a last resort, behavioral science, which offers insights into how ethics and culture, not just law and markets, can constrain irresponsible behavior in the financial services sector, and criminological theory, which emphasizes that particular types of controls, including individual attachments to groups, build “stakes in conformity” which encourage law abiding and responsible behaviors.     

Témoignage and Responsibility in Photo/Graphic Narratives of Médecins Sans Frontières

This article analyzes photographic and graphic narratives of missions conducted by MSF in the Sahel (1984–1985), Afghanistan (1986), and Democratic Republic of the Congo (2005) for the ways in which the narratives construe the responsibility of their readers toward what they see as well as of MSF's missions toward those they serve, particularly in relation to MSF's official policy of témoignage or witnessing as advocacy. I read the chronotopes (space-time) within these books for how they represent suffering and position the reader as voyeur, philanthropist, or protester (Chouliaraki 2006). In their distinctive forms, these texts bridge the presence of immediate crisis and the larger historical framework through which it may be understood. As simultaneously visual and literary media, photo/graphic narratives work through the dual compulsions to show and to tell, both of which manifest through their formal manipulations of the structure of a humanitarian crisis. In their framing devices, these books play with constructions of temporality and distance (moral, intersubjective, and geographical) that govern “the ethics of mediation[,] the humanization of vulnerable others” (Chouliaraki 2011: 363) upon which humanitarian responsibility depends.     

Who’s afraid of a world state? A global sovereign and the statist-cosmopolitan debate

Wary of quick statist dismissal of their proposals, cosmopolitans have been careful not to associate themselves with a world state. I argue that this caution is mistaken: cosmopolitans should see the vision of a world state as strategically valuable in exposing weaknesses in statist accounts, particularly of the Rawlsian variety. This strategic value follows if the only cogent arguments against a world state belong to non-ideal theory which assumes non-compliance, rather than to ideal theory with its core assumption of full compliance. If our only convincing reasons to reject a world state are non-ideal, then any liberal theory revolving around separate states must itself be considered a non-ideal theory. As a non-ideal theory, a statist law of peoples cannot be presented as an end-state, but is rather a transitional stage. Yet once seen as a transitional theory, the statist “realistic utopia” can no longer dodge the cosmopolitan charge that it is neither sufficiently realistic nor sufficiently utopian.     

The Capitalist Peace: a New Way Forward for American Foreign Policy

Since the beginning of the republic, Americans have viewed their state as a “beacon of liberty.” This self-conception has caused Americans to think that they can be a force for positive change in the world. Over time, their outlook has facilitated increasingly aggressive efforts to democratization other countries, leading many to see America as an imperial power. It is my contention that regardless of other factors, Americans become the most invasive when liberal ideology, the very thing that makes them a “beacon of liberty” overpowers other ideological forces. Only by restoring a balanced debate about the merits of democratization by reintegrating other perspectives on America’s role in the world can they be the force for good they believe themselves to be.     

Voters' wrath? Policy change and government popularity

Recent research suggests that voters are bad at responding in a meaningful way to policy events when deciding for whom to vote. Voters rely on so‐called “blind retrospection”, punishing governments for events outside politicians' control. However, another core aspect of the blind retrospection perspective has not been put to the test: are voters unable to respond to policy decisions that clearly are under the politicians' control? We construct a unique large‐N dataset on legislative changes in German old age pensions and unemployment protection to see if cutbacks and expansions lead to lower/higher support for the government. Our data are exceptionally fine‐grained and allow us to track the policy‐vote link for 416 months from 1977 to 2013 with a total of 329,167 respondents. We find substantial support for the notion that voters react in a meaningful way to policy changes, but also that they can be distracted by high‐profile, extreme events.     

Assessing Governance: The Importance of Evaluating Policy Outcomes in National Mission Areas

This commentary responds to Fukuyama's (2013) rejection of “final outputs” as measures of government quality. It argues that public administration research should address policy outcomes in “national mission areas.” But public administration scholars should not simply become policy analysts. Rather, they should become policy analysts for policy areas that can benefit from expertise in organizations and management.     

Viewing The Biggest Loser: modes of reception and reflexivity among obese people

This article builds on previous reception research and scholarship on makeover TV through an analysis of obese people's views of The Biggest Loser (TBL). TBL involves obese people competing to lose weight as personal trainers push them through dietary and physical activity regimes. We articulate four themes characterizing responses to TBL: “That's not reality,” “Public ownership and judgment of the fat body,” “The lure of the transformation,” and “A guilty pleasure.” We consider how these themes are reflected in participants' movement between mediated, discursive, transparent, and referential modes of reception. While some were adamant in their rejection of the program, others were ambivalent in accepting and identifying with the desire for weight loss but questioning TBL's aesthetic dimensions and moralizing undertones. We argue that the reflexivity of viewers complicates appraisals of TBL as governing at a distance and offer some alternative readings of the impact and appeal of the program.