From Accountability to Assurance – Stakeholder Perspectives in Local Government

This article reports on research which sought to explore the understanding of accountability for performance amongst constituents of local government in Western Australia. Recent trends to increase the public accountability and financial reporting requirements for local governments underline the need to understand the value and use made of this performance information by local government constituents.     

Macroeconomic Policy and Government Popularity in Norway 1963–1986*

Following the mainstream modelling of ‘politico-economic interaction’, the author reviews the major analyses of the Scandinavian countries. Noting that empirical findings diverge, both for the reaction function and the popularity function, the article estimates these relations on Norwegian data. For the popularity function, the analysis suggests that rates of inflation have a weak, but statistically significant impact on the popularity of governments. For the recent non-socialist governments, the analysis suggests greater impact of unemployment and real wage growth as well. The results for the reaction function support the mainstream notion that declining rates of inflation and increasing unemployment tend to cause more expansionary government policies. The estimated equations do not support the proposition that the election cycle or governments position on the opinion polls influences economic decision-making. Finally, the findings are discussed in the light of traditional normative positions     

Why Solidarity Matters: The Political Strategy of Welfare Design

Reporting on our recent book, The Solidarity Society, this article explores the way in which the design of welfare programmes interacts with and shapes the underlying quality of social relations between members of society—and, through this, public attitudes to welfare. Given that sustaining generous welfare over long timescales requires the support of electorates, this ‘relational’ dimension of welfare policy is crucial for the long‐term strategy of tackling poverty and inequality. The article looks in particular at the ‘welfare dilemmas’ that can arise from tensions between targeting and universalism and between need and entitlement, where the distributional and relational elements of welfare policy work against one another. We conclude that entrenching a generous welfare settlement will require strong elements of both universalism and reciprocity in the design of welfare.     

Blowing Hot and Cold – Intergovernmental Relations Capacity in the Commonwealth Government

The role of the intergovernmental affairs specialist is to protect and extend the powers of the jurisdiction for which he works (Donald Smiley quoted in Warhurst 1987 ).     

Local Government and Welfare Generosity: Municipality Spending on Social Welfare

Although it is difficult for local governments to give support for social welfare recipients top political priority, there are huge variations in the support recipients actually receive among Norwegian municipalities. However, local governments representing different party ideologies may prefer to support different dimensions of generosity. Some municipalities could have a liberal attitude to eligibility rules but be strict on time limits and the amount of money provided. Others may be generous regarding time limits or amounts received once one is accepted as a welfare client. Data from the mid 1990s indicate the variation in support is related to different generosity dimensions for different party groups. While the total number of clients seems unrelated to politics and basically correlates with local social problems, the duration and amount of support are related to the political composition of the municipality assembly. Devoid of any large variation, both time limits and the amount of support increase in accordance with socialist leanings, and the total budget used for social welfare support also increases with the proportion of women in the municipality assembly.     

The Politics of Social Welfare Reform in Urban China: Social Welfare Preferences and Reform Policies

China’s social welfare reform since the mid-1980s has been characterized as incremental and fragmented in three dimensions—social insurance, privatization, and targeting. This paper attempts to explore the micro-foundation of China’s urban social welfare reform by examining the diverse social welfare preferences and the cleavages among societal groups. It argues that the diversity of the societal groups’ preferences for social welfare has given rise to two lines of cleavage in urban China with respect to social welfare—between state sector and non-state sector employees and between labor market insiders and outsiders. The Chinese authoritarian regime’s political priority—economic growth with social stability—has induced the government to accommodate public social welfare preferences in social welfare policies. Therefore, the three dimensions of Chinese social welfare reform policies since the mid-1980s reflect and respond to the social cleavages derived from societal groups’ different preferences for social welfare.     

The military and bureaucracy in Greece – 1967–1974

This article attempts to examine and analyse the Greek military regime's (1967-1974) relations with the country's administrative apparatus. After briefly tracing the historical and ecological dimensions of these two institutions the article analyses their relations during the 7-year period on the basis of Eckstein and Gurr's superordinate-subordinate theoretical framework. The relevant data, which include interviews with senior civil servants as well as military officers, indicate that due to the nature of their profession, which emphasizes discipline and strict subordination, the military as political governors create an atmosphere to which the less regimented and more give-and-take-oriented bureaucracies have difficulty becoming accustomed. Military regimes and administrators do not enjoy the best of relations.     

Negotiating Education Reform: Teacher Evaluations and Incentives in Chile (1990–2010)

Reforms designed to improve the quality of teaching by reforming personnel practices, such as pay for performance arrangements, usually run into opposition from well‐organized teacher unions that can either block reform in the short run or undermine it over the longer term. The experience of a series of reforms that introduced collective and individual pay incentives for teachers in Chile from 1990 to 2010 provide a rare example of ongoing negotiation with the teacher union that resulted in an institutionalized structure of incentive pay for teachers as well as widespread attitudes of sustained support among teachers for performance pay. Chile offers an important example of how sustained change in incentive pay can be achieved through ongoing negotiation.