Community in Public Policy: Fad or Foundation?

Both internationally and within Australia public policy is experiencing a rush back to the idea of community. After 15 years of discourse about the new public management and economic rationalism a much older discourse is slipping back into public policy. It is a normative discourse about changing relations between state democracy, market capitalism and civil society in which the idea of community is a central ‘new’ relation used to manage both state and market failures. Already new policy tools emerging from this discourse can be seen with innovations based on concepts such as partnerships, place management, and a raft of community consultation mechanisms. Much of the rhetoric about community as a new foundation for public policy, however, remains confused. The result is a muddle of ideas in which this potentially useful concept is in danger of becoming just another public policy reform fad. This article looks at what policy makers are saying about community, identifies problems in this current usage and offers ways of thinking about community with a view to establishing its policy utility.     

The Challenge of Strengthening Nonprofits and Civil Society

The Winter Commission Report was centrally concerned with improving the performance of state and local governments. Since the issuance of the commission’s report in 1993, the delivery of services by state and local government has been substantially changed by the growing role of nonprofit organizations in providing public services and representing citizen interests. As a result, state and local governments and nonprofit agencies are faced with complex governance challenges. The central argument of this paper is that despite the dramatic changes in the relationship between government and nonprofit organizations in recent years, the key tenets of the Winter Commission report—the need for improved training and education, greater transparency and accountability, more emphasis on performance, and improved citizen engagement—remain deeply relevant in improving the governance of the public services in an increasingly complex policy process and service delivery system at the state and local levels.     

The Quality of Management and Government Performance: An Empirical Analysis of the American States

Government performance is an enduring concern for students of public management, public administration, and political science. Government's administrative arrangements and managerial behavior can profoundly influence programmatic content, activities, and outcomes; therefore, considering public management's effects is necessary for a true understanding of public policy and government performance. This article uses data from the Maxwell School's Government Performance Project to examine the relationship between state governments' managerial capacity and a measure of government performance (specifically, state policy priorities). We find that state management capacity has direct effects on state policy commitments: States possessing higher levels of management capacity tend to favor programmatic areas that distribute societal benefits widely (that is, collective benefits) as opposed to narrowly (that is, particularized benefits). Our analysis demonstrates that public interest group activity, government ideology, and citizen ideology each have significant, predictable effects on state policy commitments. Thus, our findings place managerial capacity alongside other more commonly studied state characteristics as an important influence on government activities.     

Regulation,the Regulatory State and European Politics

For the past 15 years or so, the claim of a rise of the regulatory state in Europe has been a dominant theme in public policy research. This paper critically reflects on this claim and the associated scholarship by considering four key questions. First, what is the significance of the supposed rise of the regulatory state for the state in Europe and how can this trend be explained? Second, what insights have been gained from the study of phenomena associated with the regulatory state, both in terms of EU and national levels of government as well as in terms of process and organisational understandings of policy analysis? Third, does the regulatory state represent a stable arrangement or does it suffer from its own peculiar dilemmas that fundamentally affect the nature of European states? Fourth, and finally, this article develops three scenarios – those of withering away, plodding along, and rejuvenation – for the future of the (study of the) regulatory state in Europe.     

Reproductive responsibilities: Rethinking the fetal rights debate

The fetal rights debate has grown increasingly vitriolic in recent years. The animosity between those who attribute rights to the fetus from the moment of conception and those who argue that the rights of citizens can bestowed only upon those who have been born has created an impasse in a range of important public policy arenas. This article attempts to demonstrate that neither side of this debate provides a satisfactory answer to the question of what limits the state may legitimately place on the medical and behavioral choices of pregnant women. To move beyond the impasse created by the intransigent rhetoric of competing rights, this essay explores the related responsibilities of the expectant mother, the emergent family, and a liberal democratic state. It also applies this conception of reproductive responsibilities to policy issues pertaining to privacy, abortion, regulation of fertile women, and state intervention into parental decision-making.     

Does Institutional Structure Effect Public Health Expenditures?

This paper explores supply‐side costs and institutional structure in a shared authority state public health system. It is found that in a shared governance public health system, intermediary district structure influences the movement of limited resources to serve populations and persons most in need. This early empirical test suggests that policy making and public administration concerning public health expenditures in a shared governance system are in a practical sense local, but decisions made at the intermediary level by regional district administration are an important influence on local public health expenditures.     

Public choice theory and petroleum policies in Canada, Britain and Norway

Abstract. It is assumed that the development of an economically promising resource such as petroleum would be amenable to analysis from an economic viewpoint, and that government initiatives in this area might reveal the essential economic interests of the state. If governments are assumed to have similar economic and political objectives (i.e., to attain the greatest revenues possible from the exploitation of a depleting natural resource and to maintain public office), then it is to be expected that the petroleum policy outputs in various states would likewise be similar. Such differences as do exist should be amenable to explanation by examining the differences in the political constraints and economic situations of the states in question. The study models petroleum policy in four areas: state participation, pricing, depletion (including exploration and production policies), and fiscal arrangements, based on assumptions central to public choice theory. A comparison of policy outputs in the three case states illustrates the usefulness of the public choice approach to comparative policy analysis.     

Revising Road Safety Policy: The Role of Systematic Evidence in Switzerland

In recent years, interest has grown in promoting and employing “evidence‐based policymaking.” This has been accompanied by an increase in available information about the performance of public policies. While existing research concludes that evidence about “what works” rarely prevails in democratic politics, it is inconclusive about which conditions affect the relevance of such evidence in decision‐making processes. This article aims first to clarify these conditions, and second, to present empirical findings from two case studies of road safety policy revision. The findings show how the creation and diffusion, as well as the political context, affect the role evidence plays in legislative policy revision in Switzerland.     

The Quiet Revolution? The Labour Party and Welfare Conditionality

Labour's 2017 general election manifesto contained a pledge to ‘end the punitive sanctions regime’ in the British welfare state. Whilst the specific implications of this pledge were not elaborated, such a policy would nevertheless constitute a profound break with a welfare consensus spanning over twenty years. The depth of the suggested changes on welfare are also evident in the scale of reform proposed to disability benefits, as well as plans—confirmed in August 2018 by the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell—to pilot universal basic income. Collectively, these policies would seemingly be deeply at odds with public opinion on the benefits system, which over the course of the last two decades has significantly hardened. Yet despite the seemingly radical and controversial nature of the policy, it received very little media or public attention during the election campaign. This article explores Labour's ‘quiet revolution’ on welfare, examining whether Labour's new welfare approach is indeed a bold attempt to reshape public opinion on welfare or, alternatively, a mostly pragmatic reaction to changing social attitudes. The argument presented is that whilst there are persuasive explanations that Labour is responding to a change in the public mood, there is also evidence of a more ambitious goal at stake: the aim of reshaping, not simply responding to, public opinion on the welfare state.     

Corruption,Trust and their Public Sector Consequences: Introduction to the Special Edition

Abstract

Corruption and trust are two important determinants of the quality of public sectors. Empirical studies in different literatures suggest that corruption and trust have effects on factors such as economic growth, the quality of democratic institutions, life quality, the size and effectiveness of the public sector and much more. The purpose of this special issue – one that goes to the heart of the comparative policy ethos which is central to the journal's mission – is to draw on a number of country examples to shed light on the state of the literature on the connection between corruption and trust. The aim is to show that these two concepts are highly relevant to each other, and that their interconnections are important to understand the public sector consequences of corruption and trust. By focusing on these concepts, we hope that this special issue can pave the road for further comparative research.     

How Policy Rules Shape the Structure and Performance of Collaborative Governance Arrangements

Local food system governance increasingly occurs in collaborative venues at the local, state, and regional levels. Prominent examples of such are food policy councils (FPCs). FPCs take a systemic approach to improve local food systems by including diverse stakeholders to advise on policy development. The authors study public FPCs to understand how policies structure the stakeholder composition and goals of FPCs and how FPCs’ stakeholder composition facilitates and/or impedes performance. Data come from a content analysis of policies that mandate the structure and functions of public FPCs and interviews with FPC representatives. Findings indicate that FPCs connected to a broader array of food policy actors in their communities produce more diverse policy outputs, but this outcome is tempered by whether council members represent personal or organizational interests.     

Gubernatorial elections and attitudes toward the police: State elections as focusing events

Traditional views hold that citizens’ attitudes toward the police are driven by local concerns. We contend that public attitudes toward the police are also responsive to systematic and periodic state-level political factors. We show that state elections as a focusing event alter periodically the determinants of attitudes toward the police. Using an ordered logistic regression model and data from national public policy surveys from 1998 and 1999, we find that gubernatorial elections have a significant effect on the state/police relationship. State elections create conditions that separate the bureaucratic and partisan functions of the state government. In turn, the bureaucratic performance of the state government is less related to police approval, while partisan contestation for control of the governor office (control of the state) is significantly and positively related to police approval. During gubernatorial election years, attitudes toward the state government account for more of the variation in police attitudes.     

Leaving the Australian Labor Force: An Extended Encounter with the State

This article seeks to demonstrate the way in which labor market choices are shaped by institutional arrangements devised by the state. Since these arrangements differ markedly from country to country, much that is distinctive about national labor market outcomes is a function of diverse encounters with the state. This argument is illustrated by an account that explains why Australia, a country which apparently devotes little in the way of public resources to the old, manifests an exceptionally high level of early retirement. This account shows that, in contrast to the standard European welfare state strategy of public pensions, the Australian state has over many decades tackled the need for provision for the old by encouraging retirement strategies that are not subsidized directly from the public purse. These strategies include the encouragement of widely dispersed home ownership and occupational pensions. Read broadly, the article suggests that the extremity of contrasts frequently made between the advanced welfare states of Western Europe and the miserable social policy outcomes in the democracies of the New World have been far too extreme. The article experiments with novel presentational techniques designed to focus attention on individual choices and on policy outcomes for the individual rather than policy outputs by governments.     

Effects of Public Opinion and Political System Characteristics on State Policy Outputs

Rather than competing with socioeconomic variables as directdeterminants of state policy, political system characteristicsmay operate as mediating factors that either facilitate or impedethe translation of constituency preferences into policy. Inthis study, the state opinion liberalism index presented byGerald Wright, Robert Erikson, and John Mclver is incorporatedin multiplicative regression models as a measure of citizenpreferences to address this theoretical reformulation. Althoughpervasive empirical corroboration is not found for the reconceptualizedrole for political variables, political system characteristicsdo demonstrate significant effects on state policy. In addition,suggesting that public officials responddirectly to citizenpreferences, evidence ispresentedon democratic representationwithin the states.     

Estimating Tax Evasion Losses: The Road Fund Case

Federal, state, and local government concern about the loss of state revenues from tax evasion has increased in recent years. In order for policymakers to address this issue effectively, more information regarding the nature and magnitude of the problem is needed. This article reports on research that focuses on estimating the level of road fund tax evasion for several states. Estimates of road fund tax evasion are developed from previous research regarding individual state evasion levels, perceptions of road fund tax evasion by state revenue officials, and a statistical estimate of road fund tax evasion.     

The Era of State Energy Policy Innovation: A Review of Policy Instruments

U.S. energy and climate policy has evolved from the bottom‐up, led by state governments, and internationally recognized for the use of unconventional and innovative policy instruments. This study focuses on policy instruments adopted throughout the era of state energy policy innovation that aim to diversify, decentralize, and decarbonize the electricity sector. Specific attention is devoted to the renewable portfolio standard, net metering, interconnection standards, tax incentives, public benefit funds, and energy efficiency resource standards. This analysis synthesizes the findings from the energy policy literature and provides a summary of the current state of understanding about the effects of various state energy policy instruments, and concludes with a discussion of broader trends that have emerged from the use of policy instruments in the state energy policy innovation era.     

Changing Balance: The Participation and Role of Voluntary Organisations in the Swedish Policy Process

This article focuses on the changing level of participation of voluntary organisations in the policy process between 1964 and 2009 and its implication for the role played by voluntary organisations to the state. Drawing on data from the remiss procedure – one of the most understudied parts of the Swedish policy‐making process – the results implicate a reduced role for voluntary organisations in formal arenas for policy making. While the number of participating voluntary organisations has remained stable, the relative share of participating organisations has declined and an increasing proportion of organisations have abstained from participating. In addition, the shares of conflict‐oriented and member‐benefit‐oriented organisations have decreased while consensus‐oriented and public‐benefit‐oriented organisations appear to have increased slightly. These findings are discussed in the context of changes in the coordination and implementation of public policies, implying that over time the role of voluntary organisations as arenas for deliberation and mediators of individual interests tend to have gradually lost ground in relation to the state while the share of organisations taking direct welfare responsibility has slightly increased. Although it may be premature to speak about a shifting role of voluntary organisations from input to output in the political system, the result suggest an emerging trend in that direction. Further research is needed to clarify whether this changing pattern of participation is evident in other arenas for policy making in Sweden or is an isolated feature explained from the outset of the remiss procedure.     

The paradox of deliberative democracy: The National Action Committee on the Status of Women and Canada's policy on reproductive technology

This article explores the relationship between inclusive and deliberative social movement organisations (SMOs) and state authorities. Three perspectives are presented. The first perspective argues in favour of an autonomous public sphere, in which SMOs establish only indirect relations with state authorities. This perspective suggests that direct relations are unnecessary to exert influence on policy choices. In contrast, the second perspective advocates an inclusive state, invested with SMOs. While direct cooperation guarantees policy influence, it does not necessarily lead to co-optation on the part of SMOs. The third perspective is primarily concerned with the impact of deliberative and strategic ideas and practices on power relations within SMOs. It argues that state authorities have expectations toward the public sphere that sometimes feed into the tension within SMOs between the proponents of deliberation and those in favour of strategic action. When this organisational strife reaches a critical point, the capacity of a SMO to contribute to both deliberation and policy-making are seriously undermined. Our empirical analysis of the contribution of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) on the issue of assisted reproductive technology (ART) in Canada during a period of 15 years provides strong support for this third perspective.     

New Governance, the Internet, and Country Code Top-Level Domains in Europe

Much academic work on governance in recent years has explored responses that states have made to sectors of the economy, usually historically well rooted nationally, that have been subject to globalizing pressures. Less work exists on responses that are being made to new parts of the economy emerging outside the nation state with inherently global characteristics. The Internet—and specifically its naming and addressing system—provides an example of how the state has aimed to assert public interest governance authority in a system initially absent of its influence. This article explores the nature and consequences of this activity in the process contributing to the study of the Internet and governance. Working within the limitations but also the opportunities created by policy norms developed at the global level, the article finds that the state has been instrumental in the development of novel public–private governance systems for Internet country code Top-Level Domains.     

Coordination in Youth Affairs: The Politics of Non-Decision-Making

One of the components associated with the widely heralded shift to 'new managerialism' in the public sector has been an increased emphasis on coordination between government departments as a means to enhance effective service provision. This article examines the capacity for coordination to fulfil this objective. Drawing upon a case study of coordination in youth affairs in Western Australia, the article examines the process by which the coordination mechanisms become enveloped in the 'politics of non-decision-making'. By this is meant that a set of power relationships create tensions at a number of levels — between commonwealth and state government agencies; between state government agencies and within individual agencies — which act to prevent effective decisions from being taken. The implications of this case study for the capacity of 'new managerialism' to produce effective policy outcomes in complex social policy areas is highlighted. Evidence from this study suggests that, in an era of restricted resources and heightened competition within the public sector, agencies are pushed to more clearly define their boundaries.