State Social Services Contracting: Exploring the Determinants of Effective Contract Accountability

This article examines the effectiveness of contract accountability in social service contracts. The analysis is based on five case studies of Kansas contracts for selected welfare, Medicaid, and foster care and adoption services. Results indicate the state has achieved moderate to high levels of accountability effectiveness, especially in terms of specifying social service contracts and selecting appropriate accountability strategies. However, accountability is undermined by the use of risk shifting, reliance on a system of multiple competing providers, and the adoption of new information technologies. These conclusions contradict the conventional wisdom, theory, and existing research on contracting.     

Contracting Out Local Services: A Tale of Technical and Social Services

Governments face a fundamental choice between in‐house production and contracting out for the delivery of services to citizens. This article examines the importance of ideology, fiscal pressure, and size for contracting out in technical and social services. The analysis builds on a panel data set covering municipal spending on services in all 98 Danish municipalities. The authors find that contracting out is shaped by ideology in social services but not in technical services, which indicates that social services are the contemporary ideological battlefield of privatization. The analysis further reveals that economically prosperous municipalities are more likely to contract out social services, whereas contracting out of technical services is not influenced by economic affluence. Finally, larger municipalities contract out more in technical services but less in social services, demonstrating that the size effect is contingent on the transaction cost characteristics of the service.     

Contracting Revisited: Determinants and Consequences of Contracting Out for Public Education Services

The determinants and consequences of contracting are examined in more than 1,000 Texas school districts for 1997–2008. The results largely replicate prior research by O'Toole and Meier, showing that contracting is negatively related to spending on school districts’ core instructional functions and that the relationship between contracting and bureaucracy is reciprocal. The present findings, based on data from a longer period, indicate that contracting is positively related to school district performance. This article also finds support for an extended model of contracting determinants involving two environmental shocks: negative budget shocks and enrollment shocks.     

Caring, Controlling, Contracting and Counting: Governments and Non-profits in Community Services

Performance measurement and contracting out are central elements of new public management systems. At first sight these elements seem necessarily connected for reasons of accountability. However, for some kinds of services, implementation of conventional performance measurement systems may exacerbate tensions in contracting out. Using a case study of child and family welfare services in NSW, this paper shows that differences in the missions and operating modes of public and non-government community service providers are thrown into sharp relief by performance measurement, when observed from the perspective of practitioners in service-providing agencies. Practitioners perceive that their priorities in service provision differ sharply from those of the department funding their activities — and seeking to measure their performance. These findings pose challenges for the 'partnership' model now prevalent in community services provision.     

A Political Perspective on Contracting Out: The Politics of Good Times. Experiences from Danish Local Governments

Privatization has been on the political agenda for the last two decades. The literature points to two major explanations of privatization. One explanation is political-ideological, considering privatization to be a Liberal-Conservative strategy. Economic crisis or fiscal stress is the other main explanation of privatization. The two theses are investigated by evaluating the determinants of contracting out in Danish local governments. The analysis shows that fiscal stress is strongly, but inversely related to contracting out, while Liberal-Conservative political leadership is not associated with higher levels of contracting out than Social Democratic governance. Thus, the richer a local government becomes, the more it contracts out. Although party politics is not decisive for contracting out, the motivation seems to be political rather than economical. Specifically, it is argued that in a strongly decentralized public sector with influential public employees, contracting out is possible in good times when revenue and public expenditure are easier to increase, which reduces public employee resistance to contracting out.     

Public Sector Land Banking: A Decision Model for Local Governments

Local governments frequently face land banking decisions concerning real properties that they may acquire now in open market transactions or later via their power of eminent domain. After construction of a practical local government land banking example, a theoretically correct cash flow and cost-benefit analysis is presented. Then a buy-now or buy-later decision model is developed explaining when to exercise the free American Call Option provided to governments through their power of eminent domain.     

The Mythology of Privatization in Contracting for Social Services

States and municipalities have privatized services in an effort to improve their cost‐effectiveness and quality. Competition provides the logical foundation for an expectation of cost savings and quality improvements, but competition does not exist in many local marketplaces—especially in the social services, where governments contract primarily with nonprofit organizations. As government increases its use of contracting, it simultaneously reduces its own public‐management capacity, imperiling its ability to be a smart buyer of contracted goods and services. This article examines two questions about the privatization of social services based on interviews conducted with public and nonprofit managers in New York state: Does social services contracting exist in a competitive environment? And do county governments have enough public‐management capacity to contract effectively for social services? The findings suggest an absence of competition and public‐management capacity, raising the question of why governments contract when these conditions are not met.     

Contracting Public Sector Services: A Meta-Analytic Perspective of the International Evidence

The performance framework adopted for this review includes five dimensions — economic, social, democratic, legal and political issues. This article presents summary findings from a statistical (meta-analytic) review of the performance measurements found in the available international literature on privatisation and contracting-out government services… This enables an assessment to be made of the extent to which reform objectives appear to have been achieved in practice. The article discusses the gains which result from contracting reforms, and the extent to which these gains accrue to various stakeholders — whether community, customers, the organisation or government.     

Performance Measurement in Budgeting: A Study of County Governments

This article focuses on the use of performance measurement in public budgeting. Based on a national survey of county governments, it finds that governments use performance measurement in a wide range of budgeting areas. The results also show that performance measurement users are experiencing technical obstacles in conducting performance analysis and obtaining support from legislatures and citizens. The article concludes that analytical competency and political support increase the use of performance measurement in budgeting, which leads to a more efficient, effective, and accountablegovernment.     

The Political Economy of State Failure: A Social Contract Approach

By employing the contract approach of state theory, this article provides a conceptual framework for the analysis of state failure phenomena which puts the emphasis on structural conditions as the root cause of state fragility and state failure. The article argues that the deep social fragility of some post-colonial societies, augmented by self-serving external interventions by foreign powers, is at the heart of their failure. Deep social fragility makes societies unable to cooperate and thus renders them powerless to discipline their leaders. Meanwhile, by linking leadership survival to the decisions and policies of a self-serving foreign power, intervention provides flawed incentives to the state leaders, which increases their predatory behaviour. In such situations, state leaders, rather than strengthening formal state institutions, again intensify the collective action problem and increase social fragility as mechanisms for survival.     

Carving Out Policy Space for State Government in a Federation: The Role of Coordination

To be a player in federal negotiations, state governments needsophisticated internal coordination skills. The more intensethe federal agenda, the greater the demands made on state governmentmachinery to prepare comprehensive policy advice for those representingthe state. This study argues that moves in Australia to reformfederalism, by dealing with jurisdictional overlap, also produceda significant upgrading of state coordination capacity. A casestudy of one state, Queensland, in the Council of AustralianGovernments (COAG) experiment suggests how states carve outa space in negotiations by rethinking their internal governancearrangements.     

How Governments Respond to Business Demands for Tax Cuts: A Study of Corporate and Inheritance Tax Reforms in Austria and Sweden

How responsive are democratic governments to business demands for tax cuts? We research this question in comparative case studies of cuts in corporate taxes and inheritance taxes in Austria and Sweden. We find that governments, regardless of partisan composition, are responsive to business demands, but that fiscal and electoral goals attenuate responsiveness. In both countries, the limited revenues generated by inheritance taxation and greater alignment of business demands with middle‐class voter interests resulted in governments heading business demands for an abolition of this tax. Goal conflict were larger for corporate tax cuts. In both countries, governments tried to minimize these goal conflict by adopting compensatory policy measures, specifically measures to broaden the tax base and simultaneous tax cuts for low‐income groups. The findings suggest that the policy output of business‐friendly tax cuts reflect a balancing of conflicting goals, rather than outright business dominance.     

A Case Study: Sale of Railway Consulting Services

Queensland Rail has developed a market niche in South East Asia, where it advises on profitable narrow-guage rail operations. This article outlines the extent of Queensland Rail involvement with the region and offers practical advice for commercial dealings with one important customer, Vietnam.     

Analyzing the Fiscal Health of State Governments in India: Evidence from the 14 Major States

The paper seeks to assess the fiscal sustainability of the 14 major State (subnational) governments in India employing the deficit indicators approach. Evidence from the 14 States indicates to a deep fiscal stress across rich and poor States with just a third of the States showing a sustainable revenue account and primary revenue balance and even fewer States showing a sustainable primary deficit thereby reinforcing the serious concern for State‐level (subnational) fiscal health as weak State finances can have an impact on the stability of overall government finances.     

Pathways to the Enabling State: Changing Modes of Social Provision in Western Australian Community Services

This investigation of reform of Western Australian community services problematises assumptions about the enabling state. The investigation is distinctive by virtue of its attention to the departure points as well as the destinations in pathways of policy change and its unpacking of three modes of public provision into their three constituent policy elements (funder-provider mix; the nature of agreements between policy actors; and the type of funding relationships). We find first that government had long adopted some aspects of the model of governance associated with the enabling state. Second, we find some path dependency in policy change towards marketisation. Third, we find highly nuanced policy outcomes combining government exploitation of its authority, market innovations and the maintenance of basic network features of the programs.     

Use of State Police Services for Local Policing: The Case of New Jersey

All states in the New England and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States provide State Police services without charge to municipalities without full-time local police departments. Efficiency and equity issues have resulted from this tradition and the development of local police departments or shared departments across neighboring municipalities in rural and exurban areas has been discouraged. These problems will diminish in scope as municipalities receiving the State Police subsidy opt out of the program and adopt local policing. We examine this potential by estimating models of the municipal decision to use the State Police for local policing among New Jersey municipalities with less than 15,000 population. We find that the elasticities of the decision to use the State Police for local policing with respect to population and median family income to be −1.1 and −2.3, respectively. If recent income and population trends in New Jersey municipalities using the State Police continue, our upper range estimate is that about 20 of the 90 municipalities using the State Police will opt out of the program in the next decade.     

资源依赖、关系合同与组织能力——政府购买公共服务中的社会组织发展研究

对于社会组织而言,组织能力的重要性并不亚于组织自主。随着政府购买公共服务的兴起,社会组织对政府的资源依赖程度正日渐加深。这种资源依赖对社会组织的组织能力产生非线性影响,关系合同在二者之间起到中间变量的作用,能够化解因资源依赖而设立的正式监控带来的一些负面影响。通过多案例的比较分析,发现两个结论:一是在资源依赖的背景下社会组织能力发展可能会出现两种异化现象,要么过度强调非正式关系,要么过度强调合同指标;二是关系合同的建立有助于减少正式监控的弊端,但并不一定能促进组织能力的提升。     

Developing Conceptualisations of Europeanisation: A Study of Financial Services

In its most explicit form Europeanisation is conceptualised as the process of downloading European Union (EU) directives, regulations and institutional structures to the domestic level. However, this conceptualisation of Europeanisation has been extended in the literature in terms of up-loading to the EU shared beliefs, informal and formal rules, discourse, identities and vertical and horizontal policy transfer. This article undertakes a study of banking, investment and insurance directives to analyse the impact of Europeanisation on the UK financial services sector.     

Looking Forward to Cuts: A Simulation Decision Tool for Cutback Management

This study addresses managerial strategies to adapt public spending in anticipation of fiscal stress. It simulates a cutback to a federal agency, providing a decision tool that applies normative recommendations from the cutback management literature. Using agency data, we develop a menu of options that illustrate how different distributions of budget reductions affect organizational goals. We show five alternatives that consider the political, legal, and fiscal implications of the agency's responses to anticipated budgetary pressure. This simulation demonstrates that public agencies can apply existing data to generate rational and viable strategic plans for weathering fiscal stress.