Analysing Choice in Australian Individual Funding Disability Policies

The Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) will allocate funding packages to people with disability who are assessed as needing paid support. The NDIS is an example of individual funding, which is currently not the dominant way of organising disability support in Australia. Individual funding aims to increase opportunities for personal choice. We present a framework for understanding current individual funding policies in each Australian jurisdiction according to two policy dimensions that potentially enable greater personal choice for people with disability: who holds their allocated funds and where support can be purchased. The findings show wide disparities in choice across the country, particularly due to constrained funds and the shortage of support to purchase in regional areas. The analysis demonstrates that NDIS implementation will need to consider that, while individual funding can be empowering for some people with disability, enabling choice can be challenging for administrators and service providers.     

Childcare Policies and the Politics of Choice

Governments have intervened in two basic ways on childcare: via the provision of leaves to care (usually taken by mothers) and the provision or (often only partial) financing of childcare services. These policy options reflect the fundamental debate on how young children should be cared for. Labour has developed both policy areas since 1997, but there is a question mark over how far mothers and fathers have a ‘real choice’ to work and/or to care. Parents' choice in this policy area is a sensitive political issue and, this article suggests, requires a careful balancing of policy instruments. Policy goals may conflict with preferences and there is also the difficult issue that parents' choices may prejudice their future welfare in a work/welfare system that is tending to assume that there will be increasing capacity for self‐provisioning.     

Citizenship, Consumerism and Local Government in Sweden

Recent developments in Swedish local government and central-local government relations have been characterized by re-regulation and cut-back strategies on the one hand and decentralization and deregulation on the other. In this article these developments are analysed as a dynamic process with contradictory features. Swedish society is becoming more and more differentiated and specialized with fewer mechanisms of collective socialization, but with more economic and strategic calculations on the part of central and local authorities, interest organizations and individuals. New formal rules are developed in order to handle conflicts and enhance public sector legitimacy. In the communes we can identify an ideological shift from viewing the commune as a political institution to regarding it as a service-producing company. In addition, citizens are increasingly looked upon as individual consumers rather than political citizens. Corresponding organizational solutions such as depoliticization, privatization and freedom of choice have been developed. However, as a reaction to communal consumerism there is also a growing interest in communitarian values. There is an increasing number of examples of people participating in matters of common nature and expressing their belonging to a community. An interesting question for future research is whether the observed contradictory tendencies will increase or decrease the legitimacy of the traditional democratic institutions at the communal level.     

Choice in Public Services: Crying 'Wolf' in the School Choice Debate

Choice, diversity and personalisation have been key to the New Labour project in public services. With the emergence of a reinvigorated Conservative party as a credible electoral threat, and the end of the Blair era, it seems appropriate to consider the continuing viability and longevity of the New Labour public service project. In this article, I approach the issue of choice in public services through an examination of the long-running controversy over choice in the English secondary school system. I argue that the opponents of choice have been reluctant to engage with the notion of choice in public services due to concerns over the supposed negative effect that consumer choice has on the equity and quality of service provision. This paper aims to challenge the claim that any element of choice in education necessarily has deleterious effects on social justice. I argue that the case against school choice has not been decisively made and that school choice can, in principle, form part of a socially progressive educational project by redistributing power to service users and helping to maintain popular support for public provision of education.     

Choice in a World of New School Types

As school choice options have evolved over recent years, it is important to understand what family and school factors are associated with the enrollment decisions families make. Use of restricted‐access data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study allowed us to identify household location from a nationally representative sample of students and to match households to the actual schools attended and other nearby schools. This matching is significant as previous research generally has not been able to link individual households to school enrollment decisions. Using these data, we examined the role that socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity play in school enrollment decisions. One of our more interesting results suggests that the newest public alternative, charter schools, attracts families with higher socioeconomic status than those that traditional public schools attract. The attraction of charter schools, however, unlike traditional public schools, appears to be racially and ethnically neutral. Families do not choose a charter school because of its racial or ethnic composition, nor do race and ethnicity within a household influence its choice of charter schools. Other socioeconomic factors influencing charter school choice are more similar to factors explaining private school choice than to those factors explaining the choice of traditional public schools. The findings suggest that policies governing the design of charter schools should focus on broader socioeconomic diversity rather than race only.     

试论西部大开发的政策选择及实施

１９９９年６月江泽民总书记发出了西部大开发的号令 ,给西部各省（区）市人民以极大的鼓舞。西部大开发战略表明党和国家把西部地区经济的发展摆到了更加突出的地位。这次大开发的最大特点就在于它的社会主义市场经济这个大背景 :这次大开发不是在指令性计划下进行的 ,而是靠市场机制发挥作用 ,采用宏观调控下的市场机制来推进的。这一机制就是要在社会主义国家的总体部署和以间接手段为主的宏观调控下 ,以市场作为在西部大开发中资源配置的基础性手段 ,使各种生产要素自由流动和重组 ,实现提高劳动生产率和经济效益的目的。为真正实现社会…     

An Examination of Local Climate Change Policies in the Great Plains

As the United States struggles with national solutions to address climate change, state and local governments have become leaders in both mitigation and adaptation policy. Although a significant and growing body of research targets these policies, most studies have assumed common factors motivating both adaptation and mitigation policy adoption. There remains a need for more research on cities of all sizes, their adoption of specific local policies, the factors motivating those choices, and whether the influences for mitigation differ from those that motivate adaptation. The paper uses data from a new survey of over 200 local governments in eleven states of the Great Plains region, including measures distinguishing between mitigation and adaptation policies. These data are employed to test the relative influence of factors from three areas: the policy environment, the attitudes of governmental actors, and community atmosphere, in explaining observed variation in the adoption of climate change policies.     

What Research Can Tell Policymakers about School Choice

American school systems have implemented several different kinds of school choice policies, and most of them are controversial. The research literature on various forms of school choice reveals some areas of consensus, but other areas where the results of studies diverge. Consensus results show that parents are more satisfied with choice, that they report using academic preferences to make choices, and that they tend to be more involved with their child's education as a consequence of choice. There is some, though mixed, evidence of improved test scores for children involved with various forms of choice. Actual parental use of choice and gathering of information, however, show some evidence of stratification, not always by race or income, but often by the level of parental involvement and motivation. These results provide considerable evidence about the effects on students whose parents have made an active choice, but more policy research is needed on the effects of competition on students in schools that have not been chosen. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

明代地方学校生员考试制度考述

学校生员学业，可分课、试二法。本从学校教官的日课、月考，府、州、县提调官的季考，提学院道官的岁考、科考、类考或吊考等几个方面，对明代地方学校的考试制度给以综合的考辨与梳理，藉此说明明代建立了一套相当完善的地方教育与考试制度，进而指出自明代个期以后，这套考试制度已逐渐流于形式。     

Policy Innovation of Local Officials in China: the Administrative Choice

Local policy innovation is considered one of the major drives for China’s rapid economic development, especially during the first 35 years of reform in China. Given the new central policies and constant anti-corruption campaigns under the Xi administration, this article examines a timely question of why and how local officials continue to develop new innovative policies and projects. Based on previous theoretical building, the article analyzes such key institutional factors as new rules of game and their impact on local officials’ competition for survival and career advancement. Selecting cases across all the districts from a typical city in China, this article compares and identifies the changing patterns in local policy innovation. Policy innovations are administrative choices made by local officials in response to new and changing institutional opportunities and constraints. The discussion in this article makes significant contributions both theoretically and empirically to the China studies.

     

Political Trust and the Local Business Climate: Evidence from Sweden

A re‐analysis of three Swedish studies of political trust at local level shows that the extent to which citizens trust the system of democracy in municipalities correlates strongly with how the employers in that area assess the state of the local business climate. This article deals with the question of how this can be understood. Three sets of underlying explanations are tested: social capital theory, a theory of local well‐being and political‐institutional conditions. The empirical analysis shows that only the theory of local well‐being can explain consistently why political trust and a flourishing local business climate occur in concert. The study emphasises the need to expand research on political trust to also take into account the role played by the business climate. This has been completely ignored in previous research on political trust. Such knowledge would be highly relevant to local policy making. In order to capture the specific mechanisms at work, qualitative case studies of municipalities are suggested as the next step of research.     

School Choice and the Creation of Social Capital Reexamined

Scholars have argued that by spurring parental involvement in school activities, school choice creates social capital. While government policies may be able to create social capital, we doubt that school choice is such a policy and argue that participation in school activities is largely determined by individual-level attributes and the school context, rather than choice per se. To assess this claim we use the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study data. Unlike most school choice studies, this data set has a large, representative national sample. More importantly, the panel structure of the data allows us to examine the same parents both before and after the school choice decision has been made, permitting a true dynamic analysis. The results demonstrate that actively choosing a child's school does not make parents more likely to participate in school activities. Some institutional attributes of schools do appear to increase parental involvement in school activities, however.     

Local Government Complexity: Consequences for County Property-Tax and Debt Policies

This article examines the consequences of local government complexityon county revenue decisions in fourteen Texas counties comprisingthe Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston metropolitan areas. Thereare significant differences in the configuration of local governmentsin the two areas traceable to when cities, school districts,and special districts were created. County revenue decisionsare also affected by the different configuration of governmentsin the two areas. These findings challenge the conventionalwisdom that states create local governments. Local choices areinstrumental in shaping local government complexity. What government-typesare chosen, and when, produce distinctive patterns of governancefrom one metropolitan area to the next, even in the same state.Consequently, reforms aimed at making the county the "localgovernment of the future" would require perhaps insurmountablechanges in state and local structures     

The Influence of Finance Policies on Charter School Supply Decisions in Five States

This paper tests if charter school finance policies influence charter school location. I create a theoretical framework describing the location incentives created by charter school finance provisions and test their relevance empirically by applying a two-step approach consisting of negative binomial models and Wald tests. Using data from New York, North Carolina, Florida, Michigan, and Ohio, I provide evidence that states’ finance provisions are an important policy lever impacting charter school location. Several robustness checks corroborate the initial results.     

Political Partisanship and Welfare Service Privatization: Ideological Attitudes among Local Politicians in Sweden

This article ties in with a growing international literature examining the link between party politics and welfare service privatization in modern welfare states. In recent decades, a central aspect of policy change in Sweden is that private actors have come to produce publicly financed welfare services on a more regular basis. This overall privatization trend is furthermore characterized by substantial geographical variation across Sweden's 290 municipalities. The ideological attitudes of local politicians have been recognized as particularly important for understanding this development. This article examines the extent to which local politicians’ ideological attitudes regarding welfare service privatization are best explained with a partisan approach emphasizing between‐party polarization as opposed to a critical perspective that points to the proclaimed significance of ideological consensus between left and right parties in certain municipal contexts. Using multilevel modelling and survey data collected from elected politicians in municipal governments, the empirical findings show substantial differences in attitudes between Conservatives and Social Democrats, irrespective of municipal characteristics – most notably the degree of welfare service privatization. Hence, the results strongly indicate that the partisan approach is much more fruitful compared to the consensus approach as a general explanation for local politicians’ attitudes towards welfare service privatization in Sweden. Accordingly, a conclusion is that comparisons at the subnational level within countries are important as a complement to country‐comparative studies when attempting to understand the link between political partisanship and welfare service privatization in modern welfare states.     

The Impact of School Choice on Public School Budgets: Evidence From Open Enrollment in New York City

This paper examines budgetary responses of public schools to competition from school choice, exploiting a discrete change in the choice set available to New York City high school students in 2003–2004. Schools facing increased competition (zoned, unscreened, and those with few applicants) increase per-pupil expenditures on noninstructional functions, reducing resources for instruction. Thus, schools may face important tradeoffs when competing for applicants, including between quantity and academic quality of applicants and between incentives to reach capacity and to improve academic outcomes. While advocates claim that school choice improves academic achievement, these results may help explain mixed findings in the previous literature.     

Takeovers of Local Governments: An Overview and Evaluation of State Policies

This article examines state interventions, sometimes amountingto nearly total takeovers, into the affairs of financially distressedlocalities and "academically bankrupt" school districts. Drawingon several examples, this study suggests that state legislatorsand administrators have been cautious about intervening in theaffairs of specific local governments. However, the decisionsmade by state officials on how to approach intervention, particularlywhether to be reactive or proactive, and the assumptions theymake about the nature of the problems to be remedied, help determinewhether takeover is friendly or hostile and its effectiveness.