BUREAUCRATIC POLITICS AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP IN BRUSSELS

Political leadership offers an exceptionally important vehicle for democratic control in modem political systems. In national political systems this may be exercised by ministers. In the European Community the closest equivalent to a national minister is the commissioner. How well equipped are commissioners to exercise political leadership? This article examines the backgrounds and careers of all 76 commissioners, past and present, and argues that a ‘democratic deficit’ within the Commission is at least as important as the democratic deficit more conventionally associated with the demand for increased powers for the European Parliament.     

OF POLITICS AND PURPOSE: POLITICAL SALIENCE AND GOAL AMBIGUITY OF US FEDERAL AGENCIES

As scholars have observed, government agencies have ambiguous goals. Very few large sample empirical studies, however, have tested such assertions and analysed variations among organizations in the characteristics of their goals. Researchers have developed concepts of organizational goal ambiguity, including 'evaluative goal ambiguity', and 'priority goal ambiguity', and found that these goal ambiguity variables related meaningfully to financial publicness (the degree of government funding versus prices or user charges), regulatory responsibility, and other variables. This study analyses the influence of the external political environment (external political authorities and processes) on goal ambiguity in government agencies; many researchers have analysed external influences on government bureaucracies, but very few have examined the effects on the characteristics of the organizations, such as their goals. This analysis of 115 US federal agencies indicates that higher 'political salience' to Congress, the president, and the media, relates to higher levels of goal ambiguity. A newly developed analytical framework for the analysis includes components for external environmental influences, organizational characteristics, and managerial influences, with new variables that represent components of the framework. Higher levels of political salience relate to higher levels of both types of goal ambiguity; components of the framework, however, relate differently to evaluative goal ambiguity than to priority goal ambiguity. The results contribute evidence of the viability of the goal ambiguity variables and the political environment variables. The results also show the value of bringing together concepts from organization theory and political science to study the effects of political environments on characteristics of government agencies.     

THE POLITICAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE CONSEQUENCES OF JUDICIAL REVIEW

Academic analysis of judicial review is confined largely to juridical commentaries in legal journals. This article, written from an administrator's viewpoint, examines its consequences for the power of government, for administrative behaviour, for constitutional dynamics, and for the scientific study of policy-making. It distinguishes a four-fold effect on administrators, including a substantial element of inhibition, and highlights the uncertainty created by the incremental and inconsistent development of the principles of judicial review. In constitutional terms, while the courts eschew national security and economic policy, they have in other fields explicitly created a process of accountability parallel to that of Parliament, and have resisted statutory attempts to limit their jurisdiction. Analysed in terms of political science, judicial review imposes unrealistic standards of administrative conduct, entrenches the role of pressure groups, and places on public bodies legalistic requirements that they may not be equipped to fulfil. The combination of these pressures, exacerbated by further expansion of the scope of the judicial review, are likely to increase friction between judiciary and government, possibly precipitating a crisis.     

POLITICAL DISCOURSE AND PATH SHAPING IN PUBLIC POLICY: COMPARING PENSION REFORMS IN GREECE AND ITALY

Which factors account for successful policy reform and what role does discourse play in the process? This article examines this empirical puzzle with reference to the issue of Greek reform failure. A matched comparison with Italy in the area of pensions reveals the salience of path shaping and the use of political discourse in narrowing down reform options and facilitating change. The Greek case of limited public information, incoherent preparation of the problem, and inner‐circle decision‐making, is contrasted with the Italian government's information‐sharing and consensus‐building campaign for the establishment of a pro‐reformist discourse. Findings confirm the salience of institutional conditions but suggest that pure institutionalist accounts premised on rational choice thinking and the power of veto players should be complemented with more agency‐driven accounts of public policy.     

INSTITUTIONAL AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP DIMENSIONS OF CASCADING ECOLOGICAL CRISES

While some of the future impacts of global environmental change such as some aspects of climate change can be projected and prepared for in advance, other effects are likely to surface as surprises – that is situations in which the behaviour in a system, or across systems, differs qualitatively from expectations. Here we analyse a set of institutional and political leadership challenges posed by ‘cascading’ ecological crises: abrupt ecological changes that propagate into societal crises that move through systems and spatial scales. We illustrate their underlying social and ecological drivers, and a range of institutional and political leadership challenges, which have been insufficiently elaborated by either crisis management researchers or institutional scholars. We conclude that even though these sorts of crises have parallels to other contingencies, there are a number of major differences resulting from the combination of a lack of early warnings, abrupt ecological change, and the mismatch between decision‐making capabilities and the cross‐scale dynamics of social‐ecological change.     

THE DYNAMICS OF IRONY IN ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE: COPING WITH A SCHOOL MERGER

The potential of an ironic perspective for understanding public service change is portrayed through a re‐analysis of data on a merger between two English primary sector schools, an extreme change involving organizational termination alongside phoenix‐like emergence. The ironic perspective focuses on synchronic dissonance and diachronic divergence in meaning underlying verbal and situational forms of irony respectively, endemic sources of organizational ambiguity, its exacerbation by change which creates conditions favouring irony, and the dynamics of their relationship. The case illustrates how ironic consequences flowed iteratively from diverse sources of ambiguity for those managing the merger, often recursively generating further irony. It is suggested that an ironic perspective can deepen theoretical understanding of the relative unmanageability of public service change, within structural parameters delimiting its scope. This perspective also offers a generic heuristic for organizational analysis with potential to inform efforts to cope with ambiguity and consequent irony in the change process.     

THE IMPACT OF OPEN DATA IN THE UK: COMPLEX,UNPREDICTABLE, AND POLITICAL

This article examines the democratic impact of the UK coalition government's Transparency Agenda, focusing on the publication of all local government spending over £500 by councils in England. It looks at whether the new data have driven increased democratic accountability, public participation, and information transmission. The evidence suggests that the local government spending data have driven some accountability. However, rather than forging new ‘performance regimes’, creating ‘armchair auditors’, or bringing mass use and involvement, the publication creates a further element of political disruption. Assessment of the use and impact of the new spending data finds it is more complex, more unpredictable, and more political than the rhetoric around Open Data indicates. The danger is that the gap between aims and impact invites disappointment from supporters.     

POLITICAL ACCOUNTABILITY AND PERFORMANCE AUDIT: THE CASE OF THE AUDITOR GENERAL IN NORWAY

Performance audit is widely used in public administration, but, at present, little empirical evidence exists on its usefulness and contribution to accountability. Based on survey data from 353 civil servants in Norway, this article analyzes the auditees' perceptions of the audit. Performance audit was seen as useful by a majority of the auditees. If auditees agreed to audit criteria and assessments, were allowed to influence the process, had favourable opinions of the reports, and believed that the State Audit Institution contributed to accountability and improvement, then they regarded it as useful. Reports used for accountability purposes were not perceived as less useful. The auditees' administrative level, the use of the report to further interests, and attention from politicians, the media, and the Parliament impacted on the accountability dimension. These results indicate that performance audit can influence civil servants, but the influence is contingent on how the audited civil servants perceive the performance audit.     

NEW GOVERNANCE ARRANGEMENTS AT THE INTERSECTION OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND FOREST POLICY: INSTITUTIONAL,POLITICAL AND REGULATORY DIMENSIONS

This article investigates emerging governance arrangements at the intersection between forest management and climate policy. The authors deploy the symposium's three‐dimensional framework to describe and evaluate developments within two distinct policy sectors (forestry/climate change adaptation and mitigation) at several levels of governance (bi‐national, national, and sub‐national) to explore the nature and operation of the emerging governance arrangements, and assessing and measuring change within these arrangements over time. Drawing on four contemporary case studies from the US and Canada, New Zealand, British Columbia and Alaska, the authors discern little evidence of a generalized, linear trend from ‘government to governance’. Instead, they conclude, across institutional, political and regulatory dimensions of governance, a more variegated and diverse picture emerges. Their analysis also lends support for the Trubek and Trubek (2007) hypothesis that emerging governance arrangements typically interact with extant ones through modalities of rivalry, complementarity and transformation.     

DECISION-MAKING IN CENTRAL AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN THE ABSENCE OF POLITICAL MAJORITY

A possible outcome of the next general election is that no party will have a majority in the House of Commons, a situation experienced only briefly in recent central government. In local government, by contrast, more than half the county councils in England and Wales and many district councils have no overall political majority. Some have been so for many years. This paper examines the style of decision-making in one such local authority, Cheshire County Council, in terms of the roles of politicians and officials and the relationship between them. Recognizing the constitutional differences between central and local government, it goes on to discuss how much of this experience would be relevant to central government in the event of no overall parliamentary majority. The paper argues that many of the working practices developed in local authorities would be valid in a central government context, though they would not necessarily take the same form. To avoid value judgments, the absence of overall majority, whether in a local authority or in parliament, is referred to simply as 'no-majority'.     

PUBLIC VALUE AND POLITICAL ASTUTENESS IN THE WORK OF PUBLIC MANAGERS: THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE

The public value framework, with its call for more entrepreneurial activities by public managers, has attracted concern and criticism about its implicit breaching of the politics/administration dichotomy. This article explores the role of political astuteness not only in discerning and creating public value, but also in enabling public managers to be sensitive to the dichotomy. We employ a conceptual framework to identify the skills of political astuteness, and then articulate these in relation to identifying and generating public value. Drawing on a survey of 1,012 public managers in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, and in‐depth interviews with 42 of them, we examine the perceptions and capabilities of public managers in producing value for the public while traversing the line (or zone) between politics and administration. We conclude that political astuteness is essential to both creating value and maintaining allegiance to democratic principles.     

POLITICAL PRESSURES,ORGANIZATIONAL IDENTITY,AND ATTENTION TO TASKS: ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PRE‐CRISIS FINANCIAL REGULATION

Regulatory agencies, like most public organizations, typically operate with multiple tasks and goals, which requires them to prioritize some tasks over others. Such prioritization, while essential, engenders a risk of bureaucratic oversight of significant material problems. Despite the ubiquity and importance of these concerns, our understanding of agencies' allocation of attention across tasks is limited. This article develops a model of agencies' allocation of attention across tasks, which involves an interaction between external public and political pressures and agencies' distinct organizational identities. A brief comparison between two cases of pre‐crisis financial regulation illustrates the proposed model. The two cases suggest that the British Financial Services Authority's and the Israeli Supervisor of Banks' distinct identities conditioned their responses to similarly vigorous pressures to devote more attention to firms' alleged mistreatment of their customers, with important implications for these regulators' attention to firms' capitalization and liquidity.     

THE LIMITS OF JOINED-UP GOVERNMENT: TOWARDS A POLITICAL ANALYSIS

Joined-up government has featured prominently on the agenda of the New Labour government in the UK. However, the politics of joining-up remain under-explored, with disproportionate emphasis on the technical and managerial dimensions of the challenge. This paper argues that political value conflicts form an essential part of the explanation for the replication of 'silos' within city strategic partnerships, the joining-up institution of choice at the local scale. A study of the local politics of social inclusion in the British cities of Dundee and Hull revealed a strong partnership ethos. However, this ethos sustained only a shallow consensus over abstract goals, at the same time legitimating the avoidance of political value conflicts. Thematic partnerships comprising interest group clusters with different political values therefore tended to replicate silo practices. The paper argues, consequently, that the consensual partnership ethos caused the displacement of value conflicts, in turn causing fragmented governance. It concludes with three propositions for further research.     

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF REGULATION: INTERESTS, IDEOLOGY, VOTERS, AND THE UK REGULATION OF RAILWAYS ACT 1844

Government regulation of the railways in the United Kingdom dates back to the 1840s. Between 1840 and 1844 three regulatory Acts were passed, and a system of government inspection set up which has remained substantially unaltered to the present day. The principal Act, that of 1844, contained controversial powers of rate-capping, state purchase of railways, and detailed price and quantity regulation. It is still frequently held that the Victorian era marked the triumph of laissez-faire and that W. E. Gladstone, the promoter of the 1844 Act, was one of its leading spokesmen. The article therefore explores why regulation occurred at all and why it took the forms it did. Gladstone's actions are evaluated in relation to the standard hypotheses about the origins of regulation. Hypotheses on the motives of MPS voting for and against regulation are tested using the Aydelotte dataset which contains very full personal and ideological data on the Mps of the Parliament of 1841–7.     

DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE AND POLITICAL RATIONALITIES IN THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE WATER FRAMEWORK DIRECTIVE IN THE NETHERLANDS

Multi‐level governance, network governance, and, more recently, experimentalist governance are important analytical frameworks through which to understand democratic governance in the EU. However, these analytical frameworks carry normative assumptions that build on functionalist roots and undervalue political dynamics. This can result in a lack of understanding of the challenges that democratic governance faces in practice. This article proposes the analysis of democratic governance from the perspective of multiple political rationalities to correct such assumptions. It analyses the implementation of the Water Framework Directive in the Netherlands as a paradigmatic case study by showing how governmental, instrumental, and deliberative rationalities are at work in each of the governance elements that it introduces. The article concludes by discussing the implications of a perspective of multiple political rationalities for the understanding and promotion of democratic governance in practice.