Problems,politics, and policy streams in policy implementation

We apply Kingdon's multiple streams framework (MSF) to policy implementation to reflect a nested process separate from but interdependent with policymaking. Then, we generate a hypothesis concerning the conditional nature of problems, policies, and politics stream impacts on policy implementation. We test our hypotheses with state‐level implementation of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, using a pooled data set of 10 years of toxic releases data. Findings suggest an important interaction occurs among problems, policies, and politics during the policy implementation process. More specifically, when any of the three is held at median levels, only marginal differences in outputs occur; however, when all three are increased to extreme levels, substantive differences emerge. Conclusions connect policy implementation to larger issues of MSF theoretical development and suggest implications for governance.     

The reputational basis of policy success in comparative perspective: Evidence from the education sector in Peru and Bolivia

This article, building on the emerging theoretical corpus of “reputation theory” provides an alternative explanation about how successful policies are obtained in contexts of bureaucratic weakness and volatile politics. The argument is that politicians choose to intervene in delivering successful policies based on how contributable such policies are to construct their political reputations. The findings suggest that in both countries, less tenured politicians face higher incentives to build their reputations, so they choose to deliver better policies to accumulate “successful experiences” as vitae for electoral purposes. Tenured politicians, in turn, opt for inaction or strategic delivery, to preserve their already won political reputations. The present article brings evidence from the education sector of Peru and Bolivia, a sector that has been at the core of these countries' priorities for decades. Through a mixed methods approach involving a panel regression and in-depth interviews, results obtained largely confirm this article's claims.     

Reputational leadership and preference similarity: Explaining organisational collaboration in bank policy networks

This article contributes to our understanding of the formation of policy networks. Research suggests that organisations collaborate with those that are perceived to be influential in order to access scarce political resources. Other studies show that organisations prefer to interact with those that share core policy beliefs on the basis of trust. This article seeks to develop new analytical tools for testing these alternative hypotheses. First, it measures whether perceptions of reputational leadership affect the likelihood of an organisation being the target or instigator of collaboration with others. Second, it tests whether the degree of preference similarity between two organisations makes them more or less likely to collaborate. The article adopts a mixed‐methods approach, combining exponential random graph models (ERGM) with qualitative interviews, to analyse and explain organisational collaboration around United Kingdom banking reform. It is found that reputational leadership and preference similarity exert a strong, positive and complementary effect on network formation. In particular, leadership is significant whether this is measured as an organisational attribute or as an individually held perception. Evidence is also found of closed or clique‐like network structures, and heterophily effects based on organisational type. These results offer significant new insights into the formation of policy networks in the banking sector and the drivers of collaboration between financial organisations.     

Water policy and environmental sustainability: the case of post‐colonial Namibia

In semi‐arid countries, particularly in Africa, governments have evolved water policies oriented toward ‘techno‐giantist,’ grand‐scale schemes that have generally accelerated the depletion of national water tables. In Namibia, such a techno‐giantist water management strategy was utilized to reinforce the privileges of white minority farmers prior to independence, and was subsequently expanded to provide modern water facilities to the black African majority in the post‐independence period. The government has pursued not only the construction of a massive new system of pipelines and boreholes, but also the development of giant dam‐building and river canal schemes that are likely to result in watershed depletion over the long term. This reflects state leaders' belief in the imagery of political potency projected by the government's ability to build macro‐scale water systems. However, a water supply approach focused on more micro‐level extraction techniques through which aquifer recharge is prioritized is more likely to assure both local‐level water access and water table sustainability. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Critiquing Food Security Inter‐governmental Partnership Approaches in Victoria,Australia

Food security is an issue, not only in developing countries but also in developed economies such as Australia where people from vulnerable groups cannot access affordable and appropriate food on a daily basis. Agencies emphasise the need for collaborative approaches to such complex, multi‐sectoral challenges. This article analyses two inter‐governmental partnership approaches facilitating local government's response to food insecurity in 12 municipalities within the state of Victoria. We focus on the partnership approaches to collaboration, processes and structures, and collective outcomes. The comparative data analysis from in‐depth interviews and document analysis of project‐associated materials and municipal policies provides insight into the different partnership approaches. Results suggest that while strategically designed and focused inter‐governmental partnerships can build local government capacity to respond to food security, there are systemic, regulatory, and resource barriers in play. In conclusion, the implications of these findings for future inter‐governmental approaches to address complex challenges are considered.     

Digital Government: A Primer and Professional Perspectives

Digital technology is a critical enabler of public administration reforms. It can improve the efficiency and productivity of government agencies and allow citizens to transact with government anytime, anywhere. It can also deepen the democratic process, empowering citizens to participate in policy formulation. In this article Andrew Botros, the director of Expressive Engineering, and Maria Katsonis, from the Department of Premier and Cabinet (Victoria), explore the challenges of the digital world for the public sector. Katsonis presents a primer on digital government tracing its evolution from the e‐government movement of the 1990s to Government 2.0 in the 2000s to today's digital‐by‐default agenda. As technology and its role in public sector reform have progressed, so too have the governance, cultural, and leadership challenges deepened. Botros examines NSW approach to open innovation with the Premier's Innovation Initiative in NSW, the state's open data experience, and Transport for NSW and its management of public transport data. He argues NSW's approach involves a significant innovation trade‐off, requiring fresh thinking in digital‐era collaboration.     

A fresh look at a policy sciences methodology: collaborative modeling for more effective policy

Collaborative modeling offers a novel methodology that integrates core ideals in the policy sciences. The principles behind collaborative modeling enable policy researchers and decision makers to address interdisciplinarity, complex systems, and public input in the policy process. This approach ideally utilizes system dynamics to enable a multidisciplinary group to explore the relationships in a complex system. We propose that there is a spectrum of possibilities for applying collaborative modeling in the policy arena, ranging from the purely academic through full collaboration among subject matter experts, the general public, and decision makers. Likewise, there is a spectrum of options for invoking collaboration within the policy process. Results from our experiences suggest that participants in a collaborative modeling project develop a deeper level of understanding about the complexity in the policy issue being addressed; increase their agreement about root problems; and gain an appreciation for the uncertainty inherent in data and methods in studying complex systems. We conclude that these attributes of collaborative modeling make it an attractive option for improving the decision-making process as well as on-the-ground decisions.     

Recognition of innovation and diffusion of welfare policy: Alleviating urban poverty in Chinese cities during fiscal recentralization

This article explores the complicated triangular architecture among innovation diffusion, fiscal recentralization, and authoritarian welfare regimes. We argue that local governments' adoption of innovative welfare policies attracts the attention of central authorities who tend to recognize spontaneous local innovation by releasing central administrative signals. During the era of fiscal recentralization starting from the Chinese Tax‐Sharing System Reform in 1994, cities with higher fiscal dependency are more likely to behave innovatively by adopting a new welfare policy for potential fiscal transfer rewards. The central government's recognition of this innovation stimulates cities' adoption but would reverse the effects of fiscal dependency because of the loss of the “innovativeness” of the adoption and its effectiveness in attracting the attention of superior authorities. We test our theories on the dynamic diffusion with the case of China's Urban Minimum Living Standard Assistance system, an urban poverty‐alleviation policy implemented fully in 1999.     

Surviving local government policy intervention: the case of embedded markets within a historical cultural cluster

China's name derives from “china” (porcelain), and “China” (pronounced as “Changnan”) is the former name of Jingdezhen, the capital city of porcelain—through whose exports of “blue‐and‐white” china the country gained international renown. The 2200‐year‐old porcelain cluster in Jingdezhen has survived through multiple empires with distinct policies towards the development of the city's dominant industry. This in‐depth case study examines interactions between local government and the business community to discover the effectiveness of policies and the perception of those policies by entrepreneurs through qualitative research employing Grounded Theory methodology. The centralized institutional structure in China contributes significantly to the findings of a total split of “government action” from “public perception” and leads to new considerations for policy‐makers to redesign their economic development strategies and plans to engender real effects in the desired direction. This paper also provides an exemplary lesson for historical cultural clusters seeking to escape from unfavorable policy interference. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How voters' perceptions of junior coalition partners depend on the prime minister's position

Recent studies document that voters infer parties' left‐right policy agreement based on governing coalition arrangements. This article extends this research to present theoretical and empirical evidence that European citizens update their perceptions of junior coalition partners' left‐right policies to reflect the policies of the prime minister's party, but that citizens do not reciprocally project junior coalition partners' policies onto the prime minister's party. These findings illuminate the simple rules that citizens employ to infer parties' policy positions, broaden understanding of how citizens perceive coalition governance and imply that ‘niche’ parties, whose electoral appeal depends upon maintaining a distinctive policy profile, assume electoral risks when they enter government.     

Leadership,regime security,and China's policy toward Taiwan: prospect theory and Taiwan crises

Abstract

Traditional analyses of Taiwan crises have relied mainly on deterrence theory for their explanatory power. This approach fails to account for China's risk-taking behavior, which can be explained by prospect theory. We suggest that Chinese leaders are more likely to use more risky military coercion against Taiwan's pro-independence movements within a domain of losses, i.e., when their regime faces serious domestic and international challenges to its security. Conversely, Chinese leaders are more likely to employ less risky political pressure to oppose Taiwan's pro-independence forces if their decision making takes place in a domain of gains, i.e., when the security of China's regime is not challenged. We conclude that maintaining a good US–China relationship is the best strategy for the United States to help prevent military crises in the Taiwan Strait.     

Debt,democratization, and development in Latin America: How policy can affect global warming

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis conjectures a nonlinear relationship between pollution and economic growth, such that pollution per capita initially increases as countries economically develop, but then reaches a maximum point before ultimately declining. Much of the EKC literature has focused on testing this basic hypothesis and, in studies that find evidence of an EKC, estimating the “turning point” level of development at which the per capita pollution‐growth relationship changes sign. This approach has not emphasized the policy relevance of specification issues or the potential role of policy variables. This research explores a modified EKC specification which conditions the pollution‐growth relationship on a country's level of debt and degree of democratization. These variables turn out to be significant, implying that different political and economic contexts can shift EKCs and their turning points. These findings suggest that policies to relieve debt burdens and institute political reform, in addition to their usual justifications, also could be used as a strategy to reduce carbon emissions from developing countries. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Measuring dynamic collaborations: Collaborative health assessment tool

The changing nature of organisations in the public sector means that collaboration has become an imperative for many. Notwithstanding considerable scholarly agreement about factors contributing to successful collaboration, a broadly accepted model of collaborative practice has not coalesced. In this paper, we put forward an augmented collaboration assessment tool. Building on existing research, we argue that systems thinking can help us better account for the dynamic and multidimensional nature of collaboration – a process in which partner organisations are interconnected and organised in a way that seeks to achieve a common purpose that they could not have achieved alone. We tested the validity of our tool using a three‐stage, iterative mixed‐methods approach. Our research confirms the value of a diagnostic tool to assist collaboration partners navigate an often uncertain terrain. It further establishes the value of our tool in illuminating a collaboration's dynamic interactions as a means to evaluate ‘collaboration health’.     

Maternal employment and teenage childbearing: Evidence from the PSID

Over the last 30 years, the tenet of promoting self‐sufficiency through work has become one of the primary objectives of many social welfare policies in the United States. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the author asks if a mother's work hours influence her daughter's teenage fertility. The findings suggest a negative relationship, with the largest effects for the daughters of mothers who work more than 1,000 hours per year. Results among AFDC recipients suggest that an increase in a mother's work hours from zero to 20 hours per week reduces her daughter's probability of a teen birth by 33 percent. © 2005 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

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.     

Benefiting from Public Sector Innovation: The Moderating Role of Customer and Learning Orientation

This article examines whether the payoff from engaging in innovation‐generating activities is contingent on an organization's level of customer and learning orientation. The authors suggest that innovative activity is associated with higher public service quality when the level of customer and learning orientation within the focal organization is high. They test this hypothesis by drawing on a novel panel data set covering all public nonspecialist hospital organizations in England. Using dynamic panel data estimation techniques, the authors find strong support for a direct relationship between innovative activity and public service quality and for a moderating role of both customer and learning orientation. These findings call for a contingency perspective on public sector innovation and highlight some of the boundary conditions that need to be in place if public service organizations are to benefit fully from their innovative activities.     

Determinants of Pro‐Fracking Measure Adoption by New York Southern Tier Municipalities

New York municipalities passed more than 60 measures promoting high‐volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF), 2008–12. These policies and resolutions signaled to state officials that municipalities desired HVHF's promised economic benefits and were anxious for an end to the state's HVHF moratorium. They also may be evidence of municipalities proactively preparing for a drilling boom. Why did some jurisdictions adopt these measures while others did not? While scholarship suggests that policy adoption is facilitated when jurisdictions and citizens possess more resources, capacity appears to have a negative or negligible impact on pro‐HVHF action. Such action appears more likely when local actors anticipate HVHF's potential gains but have not previously experienced substantial drilling, perceive that the industry could be viable locally, and can access relevant policy examples. Some lessons from conventional adoption scholarship may not apply when policies are symbolic, advocacy may be elite‐driven, and mimicry is an important diffusion mechanism.     

Exploring the Role of Nonprofits in Public Service Provision: Moving from Coproduction to Cogovernance

This article investigates the determinants of nonprofits' involvement in cogovernance, or the planning and design of public services, using a unique data set of park‐supporting nonprofit organizations in large U.S. cities. The results indicate that nonprofits are more likely to get involved in cogovernance when they are younger, larger, and operate in communities that are more resourceful and stable. In addition, the likelihood of nonprofits' involvement in cogovernance is negatively associated with the level of social capital and government capacity to provide corresponding public services. The article points to an emerging mode of government‐nonprofit collaboration that goes beyond the production and delivery of public services. As public managers face extensive challenges in sustaining the desired level of public services, these findings have important policy implications for efforts to promote citizen participation and cross‐sector solutions to complex social problems.     

Of time,leadership, and governance: Elite incentives and stability maintenance in China

China's party‐controlled elite appointment system has been praised for contributing to growth and order in recent decades. Inspired by Mancur Olson's insight into elite incentives and governance, we examine how the Chinese practices of elite management affect the character of governance using unique survey and interview data on township leaders and social contention. We find that, first, externally appointed party secretaries experience more petitions and mass incidents during their tenure and are more likely to use coercion to deal with petitions than internally appointed secretaries. Second, these tendencies are moderated when externally appointed party secretaries are paired with internally appointed township heads We explore the implications of such behavioral differences and suggest our findings are of broad significance for understanding governance in China.     

The impact of child support enforcement policy on nonmarital childbearing

The interaction of welfare and child support regulations has created a situation in which child support policy's incentives that discourage unwed fatherhood tend to be stronger than its incentives that encourage unwed motherhood. This suggests that more stringent child support enforcement creates incentives that reduce the likelihood of nonmarital childbearing, particularly among women with a significant chance of needing public assistance in the event of a nonmarital birth and their male partners. We investigate this hypothesis with a sample of women from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, to which we add information on state child support enforcement. We examine childbearing behavior between the ages of 15 and 44 before marriage and during periods of non‐marriage following divorce or widowhood. The estimates indicate that women living in states with more effective child support enforcement are less likely to bear children when unmarried, especially if they are young, never‐married, or black. The findings suggest that improved child support enforcement may be a potent intervention for reducing nonmarital childbearing. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.