Local Elections and Local Government Performance

Over the past couple of decades, the level of turnout in Norwegian local elections has shown a steady d. This decline is paralleled by a greater range of variation in turnout across Norwegian municipalities. Arguing from the perspective of rational utility-maximizing voters, the article examines to what extent such variations in the level of turnout may be accounted for by the policy performance of local authorities – in addition to certain structural features of the municipalities and local communities. Using aggregate data on turnout and measures of policy performance. the analysis testifies to the suggestion that policy exerts an influence in determining the level of turnout, indicating a turn in the direction of more rational voting behaviour as far as local elections arc concerned. It is also evident from the analysis that the appearance of smaller single-issue parties does have a mobilizing effect in local elections while the Downsian suggestion about the effect of party competition on turnout levels is not supported by the mule of the analysis.     

The ruthless Fed: A critique of the AST hypothesis

This paper examines the hypothesis that the Great Contraction was the result of rational rent-seeking by members of the Federal Reserve System. In contrast to the AST hypothesis, evidence on the share prices of member banks that survived the contraction suggests that the owners of these banks suffered an absolute decline in real wealth and a decline relative to a broad spectrum of other investment alternatives. Furthermore, monetary surprises had no statistically discernible effect on the share prices of these banks. This evidence conflicts with the notion that rational rent-seeking would lead the owners of member banks and their bureaucratic conspirators in the Federal Reserve System to unleash a policy with the goal of contracting the money supply by 35 percent.     

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.     

Beyond (and Within) City Limits: Climate Policy in an Intergovernmental System

This analysis explores the role of city‐level and state‐level variables to explain why some cities make more progress on climate‐related policy implementation than others. Using multilevel modeling, we find little support for the influence of state factors on local government leadership among the 812 cities in the dataset, but local government institutional and community variables are strongly associated with climate policy initiatives. We argue for a rethinking of the notion of the limited and constrained city and suggest that, in the realm of climate protection and environmental policy, cities are leading a bottom‐up federalism. Moreover, where some political analysts and scholars have argued that climate protection and environmental policies may not be economically rational for cities to pursue, we theorize that cities are acting locally to further their self‐interest in an increasingly global economy.     

Policy Transfer as a Form of Prospective Policy Evaluation: Challenges and Recommendations

This article focuses on policy transfer as a form of prospective policy analysis, which we define as policy makers' attempts to assess the effect of a policy or program before it is put in place. Despite a burgeoning literature on cross-national policy transfer, there has been little systematic comparison of cases to identify either common problems or potential strategies in the practice of policy transfer. This article sets forth a rational model of policy transfer and examines, in light of that model, case studies of cross-national policy transfer spanning different policy domains. Taking into account the constraints faced by policy makers, we relax standard rational decision-making criteria and make recommendations for improving the process of policy transfer as a form of prospective policy evaluation.     

Collaborative Procurement: A Relational View of Buyer–Buyer Relationships

Collaborative procurement is increasingly on the policy agenda in many countries, yet problems with collaboration occur. This article adopts a relational theory perspective to explore the enablers of and barriers to collaboration in purchasing, helping identify success factors. The authors adopted a mixed qualitative/quantitative methodology and interviewed 51 senior staffers in the United Kingdom. They found that collaborative public procurement is hindered by local politics and differing priorities, supplier resistance, reliance on suppliers for data, and a lack of common coding systems. Enabling factors for collaborating with local governments include dealing with local issues and buying from small and medium‐sized enterprises. For health care providers, important themes are product innovation and ensuring supply. The authors develop a list of enabling factors and show their effect on collaboration success. This may assist policy makers in identifying areas of guidance and help practitioners prevent problems in collaboration.     

Political business cycles at the municipal level

The present article tests predictions of rational political business cycle models using a large and previously unexplored data set of Portuguese municipalities. This data allows for a clean test of these predictions due to the high level of detail on expenditure items, an exogenous fixed election schedule, and homogeneity of Portuguese local governments with respect to policy instruments and institutions. Estimation results clearly reveal the opportunistic behaviour of local governments. In pre-electoral periods, they increase total expenditures and change their composition favouring items that are highly visible to the electorate. This behaviour is consistent with an effort to signal competence and increase chances of re-election.     

Committee structure and political preferences: The case of Norwegian local government

Abstract.  In Norway, as in the other Nordic countries, sector-based policy making in local government is considered a problem as it is alleged to take place at the expense of a more integrated approach. Inspired by American rational choice theories on committee power, this article first sets out to establish whether the distributive rationale of the present committee system actually does promote sector-orientation among local politicians. This approach is challenged by alternative theories on committee power, focusing on the informational rationale in specialisation and the relevance of partisanship . The findings suggest that all the three theories explain in part committee member' preferences, but partisanship is most important for explaining both spending preferences and preferences on organisational forms. The article goes on to explore whether recent local council reforms, intended to replace the sector-oriented system with strong committees by a new de-specialised system with weaker committees, are likely to curb the effect of sector on committee members' preferences. The conclusion here is not easy to draw, but it is clear that sector-orientation is not encouraged by the reforms; in fact, the opposite seems to be the case. What local councils may have overlooked, however, is the influence of the informational rationale on committees and their members. The analyses are based on data obtained from a random sample of 119 of Norway's 435 municipalities.     

Bureaucratic Job Mobility and The Diffusion of Innovations

In studies of innovation, policy entrepreneurs recognize latent demand for new policies and then expend resources to promote them. But studies of policy entrepreneurs have generally focused on the demand for innovation, while neglecting the supply side of policy entrepreneurship. This article argues that bureaucratic labor markets affect the emergence of policy entrepreneurs, and so affect the diffusion of policy innovations across local governments in the United States. Analysis of a survey of municipal police chiefs and water utility managers relates governments' hiring and promotion policies to their adoption of professionally fashionable innovations. Agency heads who advanced to their current positions diagonally (arriving from another organization) are more likely to initiate these innovations than are agency heads who were promoted from within. Bureaucratic policy entrepreneurs emerge where government demand for innovation meets a supply of mobile administrators, who carry the priorities of their professions into the agencies that they serve.     

When top‐down meets bottom‐up: Local adoption of social policy reform in China

Authoritarian local leaders face two driving forces in social policymaking: top‐down pressure from the regime and bottom‐up motivations derived from local conditions. Existing studies recognize the importance of both forces, but remain unclear as to how they interact and which of them is more influential in driving local policy adoption. Focusing on two health insurance integration policies in China, we find that when the policy entails substantial class or distributive conflicts and bureaucratic friction, top‐down pressure for compliance is a dominant driver for local policy adoption; when the policy does not entail such conflicts or bureaucratic infighting, bottom‐up motivations based on local economic geography together with top‐down pressure drive local adoption. We find support for this argument from an analysis of an original city‐level data set in China from 2004 to 2016. This study has implications for social policy reform, decentralization, and government responsiveness in authoritarian countries with multilevel governance.     

Uneven local implementation of federal policy after disaster: Policy conflict and goal ambiguity

As climate change continues to increase both the frequency and intensity of environmental hazards and disasters, the need for a cohesive national mitigation policy grows. As the environmental federalism scholarship indicates, the inherent tension in federal, state, and local policy implementation highlights that despite a national need, environmental quality is a local public good. To complicate matters, there is disagreement about the optimal level of decision-making regarding the adoption and implementation of environmental policy. This study addresses this gap by considering the role of policy ambiguity and conflict in policy implementation. The analysis relies on primary qualitative data collected from open-ended interviews with 22 local government officials in 12 municipalities following Hurricane Harvey. Through the lens of policy ambiguity and conflict, we find confirmatory support for the idea that policies with less ambiguous goals are more likely to be implemented. Furthermore, we find that policy conflict arises when local governments perceive there is little for the community to gain by implementing the federal program. Thus, the level of protection afforded to citizens varies greatly between communities and is influenced heavily by politics. This research supports the Ambiguity-Conflict Model of policy implementation, an oft-cited but rarely tested theoretical framework for assessing the intergovernmental politics of policy implementation. It also demonstrates the barriers to local implementation of federal environmental policy in a nested system of government.     

Decentralisation and corruption: evidence from drinking water sector

This article presents empirical findings regarding the relationship between decentralisation of provision of water supply and corruption in provision of services. The current policy advice from the international agencies of aiming for decentralisation as an end in itself is questioned. The conventional wisdom that decentralisation brings management closer to the service recipients and is therefore likely to reduce corruption is also disputed. Drawing on a large database from two large Indian states of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the interaction between various actors is analysed. We find that the level of corruption in water supply agencies run by local governments is higher than that in the agencies run by the regional government. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Newspapers and Budgeting: The Effects of Media Coverage on Local Expenditure Decisions

The media play an important role for the political agenda. It is less clear, however, how strong the media impact is on political decisions. This article pursues a different approach from the one commonly used in the media–policy research tradition. Instead of focusing on the relationship between the content of the media agenda and the political agenda, it is argued here that from a broader policy perspective, media pressure on the incumbents is a more relevant variable. Media pressure is measured as media competition and media coverage. Furthermore, the article investigates the effect of media variables on budgetary decisions in different spending areas, and compares the relationships between media pressure and policy under various economic, political and institutional conditions. This allows the authors to investigate which factors hinder and promote media influence on policy. The units of analysis are the Danish municipalities, which are similar political units with different newspaper coverage. Coverage by local newspapers is intense in some municipalities, but absent in others. As expected, the authors find that in municipalities with intensive coverage from local newspapers, local politicians do feel a stronger media pressure. However, when it comes to budgetary decisions, almost no observable effects of media pressure are found, either generally or in favourable political, economic or institutional settings.     

Comparative Local Economic Development: A Framework for Further Research

Recent research on local economic development does not provide an adequate framework for anticipating the consequences of cross national policy transfer and emulation. The research focuses on case specific analysis of one or another program within specific national or economic situations, but such analyses are not structured by a common understanding of the forces which shape policy formation or implementation. This article argues that we must rethink how we understand local policy by combining state-centered and class-centered theories of local policy outcomes. It suggests that such an approach would provide a better basis for both anticipating policy outcomes and predicting transferability.     

Electoral Backlash against Climate Policy: A Natural Experiment on Retrospective Voting and Local Resistance to Public Policy

Retrospective voting studies typically examine policies where the public has common interests. By contrast, climate policy has broad public support but concentrated opposition in communities where costs are imposed. This spatial distribution of weak supporters and strong local opponents mirrors opposition to other policies with diffuse public benefits and concentrated local costs. I use a natural experiment to investigate whether citizens living in proximity to wind energy projects retrospectively punished an incumbent government because of its climate policy. Using both fixed effects and instrumental variable estimators, I identify electoral losses for the incumbent party ranging from 4 to 10%, with the effect persisting 3 km from wind turbines. There is also evidence that voters are informed, only punishing the government responsible for the policy. I conclude that the spatial distribution of citizens' policy preferences can affect democratic accountability through ‘spatially distorted signalling’, which can exacerbate political barriers to addressing climate change.     

To Bridge the Divide between Evidence and Policy: Reduce Ambiguity as Much as Uncertainty

Policy makers cannot consider all evidence relevant to policy. They use two shortcuts—emotions and beliefs to understand problems and “rational” ways of establishing the best evidence on solutions—to act quickly in complex, multilevel policy‐making environments. Many studies only address one part of this problem. Improving the supply of evidence helps reduce scientific and policy maker uncertainty. However, policy makers also combine their beliefs with limited evidence to reduce ambiguity by choosing one of several possible ways to understand and solve a problem. We use this insight to consider solutions designed to “close the evidence–policy gap.”     

The innovative personality? Policy making and experimentation in an authoritarian bureaucracy

Why do local officials in an authoritarian bureaucracy experiment with policy, even when directed not to do so by central‐level officials? This study suggests that policy experimentation in this institutional environment can best be understood as an interaction between the structure in which local officials are embedded and individual‐level personality attributes. Leveraging a new data set from a series of original surveys with local policy makers in mainland China, conducted between 2016 and 2018, we discern three baseline personality types: authoritarian, consultative, and entrepreneurial. We thereafter examine the individual‐level characteristics of local officials who will innovate irrespective of a centralization of bureaucratic power and interests, as currently experienced under Chinese President Xi Jinping. We find that local policy makers engage in policy innovation when they are more focused on resolving governance problems and that increased risk reduces but does not eliminate their willingness to innovate. Based on these findings, we contend that future studies of policy innovation should use an evolutionary framework to examine the interaction between preferences and selection pressures.     

Bridging the Gap between Evidence and Policy Makers: A Case Study of the Pew‐MacArthur Results First Initiative

Developing ways to bridge the long‐recognized gap between researchers and policy makers is increasingly important in this age of constrained public resources. As noted by recent scholarship, progress toward evidence‐informed policy making requires both improving the supply of research that is reliable, timely, and relevant to the policy process and promoting demand and support for this information among decision makers. This article presents a case study of the Pew‐MacArthur Results First Initiative, which is working in a growing number of state and local governments to build systems that bring rigorous evidence on “what works” into their budget processes and to support its use in resource allocation decisions. The initiative's experience to date is promising, although creating lasting and dynamic evidence‐based policy‐making systems requires a long‐term commitment by both researchers and policy makers.     

Can a deportation policy backfire?

Drawing on a model in which utility is derived from consumption and effort (labor supply), we ask how the deportation of a number of undocumented migrants influences the decisions regarding labor supply, consumption, and savings of the remaining undocumented migrants. We assume that the intensity of deportation serves as an indicator to the remaining undocumented migrants when they assess the probability of being deported. We find that a higher rate of deportation induces undocumented migrants to work harder, consume less and, as a result of those responses, to save more. Assuming that the purpose of deportation policy is to reduce the aggregate labor supply of undocumented migrants in order to raise the wages of low-skilled native workers, we conclude that the policy can backfire: an increase in the labor supply of the remaining undocumented migrants can more than offset the reduction in the labor supply arising from the deportation of some undocumented migrants. Simulation shows that if the number of deportations in relation to the size of the undocumented migrant workforce is small, then the combined effect of the reduction in the labor supply of the deportees and the increase in the labor supply of the remaining undocumented migrants can be that the aggregate labor supply of undocumented migrants will increase. It follows that an effective deportation policy has to involve the expulsion of a substantial proportion of the total number of undocumented migrants in the workforce.

     

地方政府医药价格改革的时空演进机理——以政策创新扩散为视角

在我国单一制政体和复杂的府际关系下,社会政策的创新与扩散是一个涉面广泛、多元博弈的复杂政治过程。基于政策创新扩散理论,对中央、23个省级政府和4个直辖市的医药价格改革制度进行了案例追踪和文本比较分析。研究发现,地方医药价格改革政策扩散效应显著,随时间进程扩散呈现全国互动模型下的"S"型曲线;空间维度上,整体表现为由经济发达的东部沿海地区先行,逐步向中部、西部等其他地区推进;区域扩散和邻近效应显著,扩散存在势能差且具有一定的梯度性,沿动力源向周围政策势能低的省份扩散,呈现等级制模型;垂直影响和层级效应明显,体现政策变迁的互动性、动态性与复杂性;扩散内容以跟风模仿为主,学习性与创新能力不足。为提高地方政府政策持续创新力,中央政府应完善顶层设计并适当放权,拓展地方政府创新空间;地方政府应审时度势,积极提升再创新能力,发挥垂直影响的积极作用,加快政策扩散进程。