London's ULEZ: Where Next for Curbing Emissions?

If opposition to ULEZ really did tip the Uxbridge by-election result, we should be surprised. Most voters drive compliant vehicles and might benefit from cleaner air. But the adversely-affected minority had loud voices, and opposition was mobilised against the very principle of road pricing, with substantial input from home counties Conservatives outside Greater London. It didn't help that the scientific case for ULEZ is not straightforward, although it certainly exists. Especially when a lot of people are giving ‘don't know’ responses to pollsters, public opinion may be swayed by noisy dissent.     

How Lasting Is Voter Gratitude? An Analysis of the Short‐ and Long‐Term Electoral Returns to Beneficial Policy

Dominant theories of electoral behavior emphasize that voters myopically evaluate policy performance and that this shortsightedness may obstruct the welfare‐improving effect of democratic accountability. However, we know little about how long governments receive electoral credit for beneficial policies. We exploit the massive policy response to a major natural disaster, the 2002 Elbe flooding in Germany, to provide an upper bound for the short‐ and long‐term electoral returns to targeted policy benefits. We estimate that the flood response increased vote shares for the incumbent party by 7 percentage points in affected areas in the 2002 election. Twenty‐five percent of this short‐term reward carried over to the 2005 election before the gains vanished in the 2009 election. We conclude that, given favorable circumstances, policy makers can generate voter gratitude that persists longer than scholarship has acknowledged so far, and elaborate on the implications for theories of electoral behavior, democratic accountability, and public policy.     

Does Earmarked Revenue Provide Property Tax Relief? Long‐Term Budgetary Effects of Georgia's Local Option Sales Tax*

This study examines the long‐term effects of the 1% General‐purpose Local Option Sales Tax (LOST) on the level of property tax in Georgia counties with a pooled interrupted time‐series analysis. The LOST has been earmarked for property tax relief in Georgia counties since 1976, but debates remain on whether the proceeds have been used as additional revenues. We find that the adoption of LOST brought short‐term property tax relief but not long‐term property tax reduction. The result suggests that long‐term property tax relief would not be realized by earmarked revenue without careful policy design to safeguard fungibility.     

Does Financial Slack Reduce Municipal Short‐Term Borrowing?

Many municipal governments face the challenge of temporary cash deficits due to the mismatched schedules of cash flow‐ins and flow‐outs. To smooth the temporary deficits, they can use either internal financial resources such as financial slack or external financial resources such as short‐term borrowing. This paper applies the pecking order theory to examine municipal governments' financial preference when they experience cash flow problems. Results show that municipal governments prefer accumulated financial slack to short‐term borrowing when both options are available. This finding demonstrates financial slack's role as a convenient cash management tool in municipal financial management. It also suggests the applicability of the pecking order theory in future public financial management research.     

When Do Regression‐Adjusted Performance Measures Track Longer‐Term Program Impacts? A Case Study for Job Corps

The use of performance management systems has increased since the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993. While these systems share the goal of trying to improve service delivery and participant outcomes, they do not necessarily provide information on the causal (value‐added) effects of a program, which requires a rigorous impact evaluation. One approach for potentially improving the association between program performance measures and impacts is to adjust performance measures for differences across performance units in participant characteristics and local economic conditions. This article develops a statistical model that describes the conditions under which regression adjustment improves the performance–impact correlation. We then use the model to examine the performance–impact association using extensive data from a large‐scale random assignment evaluation of Job Corps, the nation's largest training program for disadvantaged youths. We find that while regression adjustment changes the Job Corps center performance measures, the adjusted performance measures are not correlated with the impact estimates. The main reasons are the weak associations between the unadjusted Job Corps performance measures and participants’ longer‐term outcomes as measured by the evaluation, as well as the likely presence of unobserved factors across centers that are correlated with outcomes.     

Who Will Pay for Better Care?

In launching its review of adult social care in May 2008, the Government acknowledged that this is one of the biggest challenges for the 21^st century. With our ageing population and the increasing expectations of baby boomers, the current system simply isn't fit for the future. But what kind of care system do we want for this and future generations and critically how are we going to pay for it? There are no easy answers but what is certain is that we will all have to pay more for better care. In this article Stephen Burke examines the care crunch     

Are Parental Welfare Work Requirements Good for Disadvantaged Children? Evidence From Age‐of‐Youngest‐Child Exemptions

This paper assesses the impact of welfare reform's parental work requirements on low‐income children's cognitive and social‐emotional development. The identification strategy exploits an important feature of the work requirement rules—namely, age‐of‐youngest‐child exemptions—as a source of quasi‐experimental variation in first‐year maternal employment. The 1996 welfare reform law empowered states to exempt adult recipients from the work requirements until the youngest child reaches a certain age. This led to substantial variation in the amount of time that mothers can remain home with a newborn child. I use this variation to estimate the impact of work‐requirement‐induced increases in maternal employment. Using a sample of infants from the Birth cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, the reduced form and instrumental variables estimates reveal sizable negative effects of maternal employment. An auxiliary analysis of mechanisms finds that working mothers experience an increase in depressive symptoms, and are less likely to breastfeed and read to their children. In addition, such children are exposed to nonparental child care arrangements at a younger age, and they spend more time in these settings throughout the first year of life.     

Does the Motivation for Market‐Based Reform Matter? The Case of Responsibility‐Centered Management

Organizational theorists have long examined the implications of market‐oriented policies for public agencies. Current research often aims to understand the effects of policies imposed on organizations by external stakeholder groups, but few studies have attempted to gain a better understanding of what mechanisms cause agencies to select into these strategies. The purpose of this article is to understand, first, which factors make an organization more likely to adopt a decentralized, market‐based budgeting system—termed “responsibility‐centered management (RCM)—and, second, whether this type of system has implications for organizational performance. Using data on doctorate‐granting public and private nonprofit four‐year universities in the United States, the authors find that mission, resource dependence, and state party control influence the take‐up of RCM. In terms of effects, RCM creates winners for graduation rates (white students) and degree production (science, technology, engineering, and math departments), which raises questions of equity across groups.     

Sympathy for the ‘devil’? Voting for populists in the 2006 and 2010 Dutch general elections

What motivations do voters have to vote for populist parties? How do their motivations differ from those of voters for mainstream parties? Analyzing new empirical material – the Dutch elections of 2006 and 2010 – we demonstrate that policy preferences, protest attitudes and evaluations of party leaders are important reasons to vote for populist parties. Yet only protest attitudes distinguish voters for populist parties from voters for mainstream parties; evaluations of party leaders turn out to be equally important for both. We theorize how protest attitudes and party leader evaluations overlap and employ an exploratory simulation technique to test this. We find that populist parties differ strongly from each other with regard to the specific patchwork of motivations of their voters.     

Two Cheers for Richards and Smith: Beyond Anti‐Politics?

In a recent issue of The Political Quarterly, Richards and Smith critiqued Flinders’ work on anti‐politics, suggesting that there needs to be much more focus on supply‐side explanations and recognising that much of the problem lies with politicians, contra Flinders. Here, we argue instead that it is crucial to recognise how supply‐side and demand side explanations interact. For us, politicians need to be more responsive to citizens, but, at the same time, citizens need to recognise problems of contemporary governing. Overall, much is changing in the way in which citizens engage and it is crucial that these changes are understood.     

A Standard for Regulatory Compliance? Industry Self‐regulation,the Courts and AS3806‐1998

The primary objective of this article is to describe recent Australian moves to greater industry self-regulation and, within that context, to examine the development of AS3806, a voluntary standard developed by Standards Australia, which firms may use as a model or template for the design and management of their regulatory compliance systems. The article is divided into four sections. The first provides an outline of recent Australian developments regarding industry self-regulation and compliance. The second describes the growing interest in industry codes of conduct and the role of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). The third describes the main features of AS 3806. The fourth examines the question of compliance standards in relation to the legal process, focusing on two recent cases and is followed by a conclusion.     

The Institute for Fiscal Studies Report: English Council Funding: What’s Happened and What’s Next?

The article reviews the recent Institute for Fiscal Studies (IfFS) report, English Council Funding: What’s Happened and What’s Next. The article provides an overview of the main themes and findings of the report which examines the consequences of a sustained period of austerity for English local government and the impact of austerity on certain key council services. The article explores what the report has to say about the way councils have responded to reductions in government funding and the strategies they have developed to protect certain frontline services. The article reviews the suggestions made in the IfFS report for changing English local government funding and finds that they reflect a form of centralist thinking which lacks a radical edge when it comes to reform.     

Commercial‐in‐Confidence: An Obituary to Transparency?

This article addresses the issue of accountability and transparency in relation to the use of commercial-in-confidence clauses to withhold information. The issue is contentious. On the one hand some like the Senate Finance and Public Administration Reference Committee (SFPARC) argue that: 'Put simply there can be no accountability if there is no information' (SFPARC 2000).
On the other hand, an alternative view is: 'I think that the sanctity of contract ... [is] a fundamental pillar of our legal system, and if private businesses enter into contracts with governments that specify confidentiality, then that ought to be respected' (Paterson 1999).
This paper is an abridged version of a keynote address to CPA Australia (Queensland Division) Audit Intensive Day 2000, Brisbane Hilton, 10 November 2000.     

Anti‐elitist cyber parties?

In the digital age, new ways of interaction provide a new type of public sphere, which dramatically changes party politics. This not only includes the modernisation and professionalisation of mainstream political parties but also paves the way for new challengers and a new dimension of campaigning. The current examples, the Pirate Party, especially in Germany, and the Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo, show at least short‐term potential. The Pirate Party caused a media hype about the young activists. Grillo transcended the borders between comedy and politics without the helping hand of the traditional media, which ignored him. The threat for representative democracies lies in the growing anti‐elitism, which combines the Pirates and Grillo. Mainstream political parties should indicate that the claim for a new participatory politics beyond right and left is a utopian one, while attacking the way that party politics works. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Where to Begin?

If what goes on in human societies are viewed as "institutionalfacts"rather than "brutefacts," then basic issues are raised withregard to the meaning of federalism. Institutional facts areconstituted by reference to rules and rule-ordered arrangements.Such arrangements turn upon design concepts and their placein the constitution of order in human societies. Constitutingsocieties through patterns of covenantal relationships impliesthat federal societies cannot be understood by placing primaryreliance on forms of government. The question "where to begin?"raises basic ontological and epistemological problems bearingon the place of language and culture in the constitution ofcovenanting societies.     

Has the Shift to Managed Care Reduced Medicaid Expenditures? Evidence from State and Local‐Level Mandates

From 1991 to 2009, the fraction of Medicaid recipients enrolled in HMOs and other forms of Medicaid managed care (MMC) increased from 11 percent to 71 percent. This increase was largely driven by state and local mandates that required most Medicaid recipients to enroll in an MMC plan. Theoretically, it is ambiguous whether the shift from fee‐for‐service into managed care would lead to an increase or a reduction in Medicaid spending. This paper investigates this effect using a data set on state‐ and local‐level MMC mandates and detailed data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on state Medicaid expenditures. The findings suggest that shifting Medicaid recipients from fee‐for‐service into MMC did not on average reduce Medicaid spending. If anything, our results suggest that the shift to MMC increased Medicaid spending and that this effect was especially present for risk‐based HMOs. However, the effects of the shift to MMC on Medicaid spending varied significantly across states as a function of the generosity of the state's baseline Medicaid provider reimbursement rates.     

‘New spaces’ for change?: Diamond governance reforms and the micro‐politics of participation in post‐war Sierra Leone

While the majority of research carried out on diamonds and development in Sierra Leone has focused on debates concerning the role that diamonds played in the country's civil war of the 1990s, little attention has been directed towards understanding how the emergence and consequences of ‘new spaces’ for citizen engagement in diamond governance are shaping relationships between mining and political economic change in the post‐war period. Recent fieldwork carried out in two communities in Kono District illustrates how the emergence of such spaces—although much celebrated by government, donors and development practitioners—may not necessarily be creating the ‘room for manoeuvre’ necessary to open up meaningful public engagement in resource governance. The analysis focuses on one recent governance initiative in the diamond sector—the Diamond Area Community Development Fund (DACDF)—which aims to strengthen citizen participation in decision‐making within the industry, but has frequently been at the centre of controversy. In framing and articulating socio‐environmental struggles over resource access and control in Sierra Leone's post‐war period of transition, the article highlights how the emerging geographies of participation continue to be shaped by unequal power relationships, in turn having an impact on livelihood options, decision‐making abilities and development outcomes in the country's diamondiferous communities. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.