Democracy,public debt transparency,and sovereign creditworthiness

Democratic Advantage (DA) arguments explicitly and implicitly assume that democracies have more transparent public debt, enhancing sovereign creditworthiness. This study questions the assumed link between transparent public debt practices and democracy in developing countries. It finds that such practices, which are crucial for investors, (a) do not depend on democratic governance and (b) largely erase the effect that DA variables regime type, rule of law, and property rights have on creditworthiness. In other words, transparent public debt and democracy should not be assumed to go together, and transparent debt practices affect creditworthiness more than DA variables. The findings identify public debt transparency as a statistical and theoretical confounder for current iterations of the DA thesis, which must be addressed to better understand the relationship between democratic governance and sovereign creditworthiness. The policy implication is to not assume that transparent public debt practices are only available to democracies.     

New public management and the reform of French public hospitals

New public management (NPM) is not only an Anglo‐Saxon debate but also a French one, with some of its elements constituting structural components of the French state apparatus. How did it make its way into French hospitals? What core mechanism was at the center of NPM implementation in hospitals? We discuss the redisorganization of the health system under NPM, as it attempted to reassert the central government's power over regions and how it alienated the medical profession. The paper highlights inherent contradictions and other false promises within NPM. It was unable to contained cost, could no enhance accountability or increase civil participation. We then investigate post‐NPM reforms in French healthcare. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The new public management and its critics

It is possible to view the New Public Management as nothing more than the public management equivalent of a cake recipe, a set of practices that can be readily transferred from one culture and one political system to another. If such is the case, then discussions of principles and paradigms are academic; it is necessary only to identify best practices. It will then be up to politicians to realize that they have only to open the book, follow the instructions, and reap the rewards. However, even within the Oecd countries such a possibility is not plausible. Within Europe, there are substantial differences in the political and cultural traditions of Oecd countries. And diversity within the Oecd goes beyond to include Mexico, Japan and Korea but also the former communist countries of Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland. Since the applicability and effectiveness of New Public Management concepts will vary considerably from one country to another, we are left with a considerable challenge: How might we apply these concepts to new settings?     

新公共管理:质疑与反思

新公共管理是公共行政发展过程中的一个新阶段.然而,新公共管理的所有教义是否就是正确的和值得提倡的,则是一个值得令人深思的问题,本文从它的理论体系、人性假设、价值导向和实践操作效果对新公共管理进行了质疑与反思.     

Education and training for new public management

This article argues for a new approach to educate and train public managers. Several functional requirements regarding knowledge, skills and attitudes are discussed. The status and trends of public management education and training in several countries are reviewed. Situation and recent developments of public management education in Germany are subject of an exemplary case study. Elements of an effective curriculum with an international perspective and steps towards a common understanding of public management education are suggested.     

Paradoxes of public-sector managerialism,old public management and public service bargains

This chapter considers three paradoxes or apparent contradictions in contemporary public management reform–paradoxes of globalization or internationalization, malade imaginaire (or successful failure) paradoxes, and paradoxes of half-hearted managerialism. It suggests that these three paradoxes can be explained by a comparative historical institutionalism linked to a motive-and-opportunity analysis of what makes some public service systems more susceptible to reform than others. It further argues that such explanations can be usefully linked together by exploring public service reform from the perspective of ‘public service bargains’ or PSBs (that is, explicit or implicit bargains between public servants and other actors in the society). Accordingly, it seeks to account for the three paradoxes of public management reform by looking at the effect of different PSB starting-points on reform experience, and at the way politician calculations over institutional arrangements could account for PSB shifts in some circumstances but not others.     

Citizen perceptions of public management: Hybridisation and post‐new public management in Japan and New Zealand

An older body of research claims variously: a world‐wide transformation from new public management (NPM) to new public governance or post new public management (post‐NPM); a ‘layering’, where new management rhetoric and techniques are layered upon existing ones; or a ‘hybridisation’ synthesised from competing systems. More recent studies, particularly in central and Eastern Europe, suggest a nuanced and context‐specific degree of transformation. Influenced by a growing research interest in citizen perceptions of public management, this study expands this more nuanced approach by surveying local government public management perceptions of 1,140 New Zealand and 3,100 Japanese citizen online survey respondents. Using principal component analysis, we show both New Zealand and Japan exhibit degrees of hybridisation of public management paradigms, with Japan exhibiting a higher degree of eclecticism.     

International public management network symposium on administrative philosophies and management practice

Do administrative philosophies, however defined, lead or trail change in public sector organizations? How may we define administrative philosophy and is useful to distinguish between philosophy, doctrine and justification? To what extent does academic research and theory influence administrative practice? Do academics learn most of what they theorize about from practitioners? These and other questions are addressed in this first IPMN electronic symposium.     

论公共危机事件管理中的公众参与

近年来,我国公共危机事件频发,对我国政府应对危机的能力提出了严峻的挑战。危机事件的有效解决不仅需要提高政府自身的管理能力,还必须注重社会公众的有效参与。本文针对当前我国危机管理中公众参与的现实困境,从政府、制度和社会公众三方面寻求改善的途径,并提出相应的对策建议。     

Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime

In the intellectual confusion prevailing since the demise of Marxism and "marxism", the attempt is made to define democracy as a matter of pure procedure, explicitly avoiding and condemning any reference to substantive objectives. It can easily be shown, however, that the idea of a purely procedural "democracy" is incoherent and self-contradictory. No legal system whatsoever and no government can exist in the absence of substantive conditions which cannot be left to chance or to the workings of the "market" but must be posited as objectives of political activity. The confusion results from a deficient understanding of what makes a society and an empty idea of "freedom". The objective of politics is not happiness, an affair to be left to the individuals, but it certainly is liberty understood as participation in the governance of the polity; it is also the pursuit of the common good, defined as the sum of the prerequisites and facilitations of individual autonomy depending on collective action, and as the realization of commonly agreed collective goals.