Before There Was Enron,There Was Orange County: A Study of Local Government Financial‐Oversight Committees

Recent financial scandals in some of America's largest corporations have prompted popular speculation that a similar crisis may occur within the public sector and, therefore, that government and nonprofit organizations should be required to adopt financial oversight practices similar to those that are mandated of publicly‐traded corporations in the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act of 2002. One of those mandated practices—the use of financial‐oversight committees—is already a common practice in public organizations, though little is known about its effectiveness. This study uses a national sample of local governments to examine whether financial‐oversight committees improve financial control and strengthen stakeholder confidence in financial reporting. The findings provide preliminary support for the use of financial‐oversight committees as an effective tool to improve financial accountability in local government.     

Evaluating intelligence oversight committees: The UK Intelligence and Security Committee and the ‘war on terror’

After a brief introduction giving a short history of legislative oversight, a number of criteria by which committees can be evaluated are enumerated, including their mandate, membership, resources and access to information. The development of parliamentary oversight in the UK culminating in the creation of the Intelligence and Security Committee in 1994 is outlined. Its performance between 2001 and 2006 is described and assessed. It is concluded that, while it has made some appropriate criticisms of the agencies, it can be faulted in that both the style and substance of its reports are essentially managerialist and have paid inadequate attention to questions of human rights and the need for public education.     

Show Them Your Teeth First!

This paper investigates the choice of an interestgroup between lobbying (``words'') and pressure(``actions'') in order to influence a policymaker. Both lobbying and pressure are modeled asstrategic means of transmitting information that isrelevant to the policymaker. However, only pressure isdirectly costly to the policymaker. The interactionbetween the interest group and the policymaker isframed as a repeated signaling game. In equilibriumpressure – in contrast to lobbying – only occurswhen the interest group's reputation is sufficientlylow, and always improves its reputation. It is shownthat (repeated) lobbying cannot completely substitutefor pressure, and that the interest group may beforced to sustain its reputation through lobbying. Weconclude that pressure is typically used to build upa reputation, lobbying to maintain a reputation.     

Less Government, More Secrecy: Reinvention and the Weakening of Freedom of Information Law

Many critics have suggested that worldwide efforts to reinvent government could also weaken democratic control over public institutions, but few have considered how attempts to implement the "new paradigm" in public management might affect a widely used instrument for promoting accountability: freedom of information law (FOI). FOI laws give citizens and nongovernmental organizations the right of access to government information. However, recent Canadian experience shows that reinvention can weaken FOI laws in three ways. First, attempts to reduce "nonessential" spending may cause delays in handling FOI requests and weaken mechanisms for ensuring compliance. Second, governmental functions may be transferred to private contractors and not-for-profit organizations that are not required to comply with FOI laws. Third, governments' attempts to sell information and increase FOI fees may create new economic barriers to openness. Thus, restructuring provides an opportunity for political executives, public servants, and some well-organized business interests to weaken oversight mechanisms and increase their own autonomy within the policy process.     

Public critic or secretive monitor: party objectives and legislative oversight of the military in Canada

Abstract

This paper analyses how democratic legislatures oversee the military, using Canada as a case. The paper argues that the tendency to engage in intrusive oversight versus reactive oversight is shaped by institutional structures and party preferences. Canadian institutional structures discourage parliamentary defence committees from engaging in intrusive oversight of the armed forces to achieve policy influence, and encourage opposition parties to focus on reactive oversight efforts that complement their vote-seeking preferences. Vote-seeking, the paper argues, incentivises opposition parties to be public critics of the government’s handling of military affairs, rather than informed but secretive monitors of the armed forces. The paper then addresses a key case where the opposition was able to use an exceptional constitutional power of the House of Commons to force the executive to disclose classified information regarding the military: detainee transfers by the Canadian Armed Forces in Afghanistan. This case highlights the trade-offs that parliamentarians face when they demand information to perform more intrusive oversight of the armed forces. This suggests that party preferences are a significant, yet understudied, aspect of how legislatures vary in their oversight of the military.     

Q&A in legislative oversight: A framework for analysis

Parliamentary questions are an essential tool of legislative oversight. However, the extent to which they are effective in controlling the executive remains underspecified both theoretically and methodologically. This article advances a systematic framework for evaluating the effectiveness of parliamentary questions drawing on principal–agent theory, the public administration literature on accountability and communication research. The framework is called the ‘Q&A approach to legislative oversight’ based on the premise that the study of parliamentary questions (Q) needs to be linked to their respective answers (A) and examined together (Q&A) at the micro-level as an exchange of claims between legislative and executive actors. Methodologically, the Q&A approach to legislative oversight offers a step-by-step guide for qualitative content analysis of Q&A that can be applied to different legislative oversight contexts at different levels of governance. It is argued that the effectiveness of Q&A depends on the strength of the questions asked and the responsiveness of answers provided, which are correspondingly operationalised. To illustrate the merits of the approach, the article includes a systematic case study on the relationship between the European Parliament and the European Central Bank in banking supervision (2013–2018), showing the connection between specific institutional settings and the effectiveness of parliamentary questions.     

How “institutionalization” can work. Structuring governance for digital transformation in Italy

Public policy scholars have recently focused on the mechanisms accounting for the sustainability of major policy changes. Among the strategies by which policy entrepreneurs may try to avoid future backlash institutionalization is certainly one of the most used. Yet, it can foster ossification and eventually jeopardize policy effectiveness. Such a potential trade-off between institutionalization and long-term effectiveness is particularly intense in policies concerning technological innovation because the necessity to create winning coalitions can undermine the required absorption capacity needed by government to engage the innovation ecosystems. This paper explores such a trade-off with a case study on the Italian policy for public sector's digital transformation. The case is theoretically promising because over three decades institutionalization has always represented the main overall strategy adopted by policymaker, but only the 2016 initiative emerged as a “success.” In this sense, the case study can focus on the mechanisms activated by policy entrepreneurs to trigger and entrench change.     

THE POLITICS OF LEGISLATIVE OVERSIGHT: MONITORING EDUCATIONAL REFORM IN SIX STATES

Legislative oversight traditionally has been viewed as a rational tool for achieving democratic accountability. Legislators conduct oversight to ensure consistency between implementation and official policy directives. The major theme of this paper is t h a t oversight is best understood as an integral part of legislative-administrative politics. By examining how six states monitored recent educational reforms, the author finds that legislators conducted oversight in ways that minimized time commitments and maximized political benefits.
The paper concludes that legislative interest in controlling implementation often was secondary to political considerations. Oversight, therefore, may not really be effective as an accountability tool.     

Intelligence,Iraq and the limits of legislative accountability during political crisis

This article argues that there is an inherent tension in legislative intelligence oversight bodies between their responsibility to the voters who elect them and their political parties who select them to run for office. At a time of acute political crisis, the partisan interests of the legislators who sit on oversight bodies may override their other responsibilities. This can result in distorted and misleading investigations and reports. This hypothesis is examined against the evidence of precisely such a mode of failure in both the British and American legislative inquiries into intelligence on Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’. The authors conclude that any effective oversight must include a range of parallel legislative, judicial, executive and independent mechanisms to try and minimize the inherent weaknesses in each oversight model.     

Public Sector Collaboration: Are We Doing It Well and Could We Do It Better?

Improving collaboration by public sector agencies is an important element of many public sector reforms. Common approaches include introducing responsibilities under legislation and policy decisions, the provision of information and guidance, and strengthening third‐party oversight. To identify how collaboration is being practised, this paper reviews evidence from over one hundred reports by Auditors‐General and Ombudsmen in Australia and New Zealand to identify key attributes of collaboration, and assesses these further by examining three reports in detail. It concludes that problems that have been known for many years continue to constrain public sector effectiveness. Although continuing existing approaches may assist in improving collaboration, the paper argues that there is a need to adopt more systematic approaches to organisational capacity for collaboration. It further identifies that changes in the external environment such as technology‐based innovation may demand rapid progress and change in relation to collaboration.     

Economic openness, policy uncertainty, and the dynamics of government support

Does globalization affect popular support for national governments? This article contends that exposure to the world economy obscures mass–elite linkages in developed democracies. Market interdependence, I argue, sends a signal to citizens that the policymaking environment has become more complex. As a consequence, publics are less certain of how to evaluate policymaker performance when exposure to the world economy increases. Informed by research on the role of uncertainty in public evaluations, I test this proposition by modeling the volatility of aggregate government popularity as a function of economic openness in four advanced industrial democracies. Results show that globalization increases the volatility—and, hence, the uncertainty—of public assessments of government performance. The implications for the political economy of advanced capitalist democracies and for models of collective public opinion are discussed.     

Rules and Flexibility in Public Budgeting: The Case of Budget Modernisation in Australia

This paper explores the features of public budgeting that make it resistant to efforts to balance central oversight and situational flexibility. Its aim is to help explain why systemic efforts at budget modernisation in the name of ‘devolution’ may have failed to deliver expanded budget flexibility. After defining flexibility, and briefly surveying how it can be inhibited by budget practices using the example of collaboration, the paper applies a taxonomy of general ‘budget rules’ to illustrate the trade‐offs between control and flexibility. It uses an analysis of budget reform in the Australian federal government over the last 30 years to identify a key set of ‘legacy reforms’ – all intended primarily to enable budget flexibility – to show how their design and redesign were purposed as modification to the general rules, and how, ultimately, they were constrained by them.     

Banking on Accountability? Strengthening Budget Oversight and Public Sector Auditing in Emerging Economies

This study reviews a decade of support by the World Bank and the Inter‐American Development Bank to parliaments and external audit agencies in Latin America. It underscores recent developments in development finance reflecting a broader understanding of the determinants of fiscal credibility and financial integrity. It reveals a learning curve in multilateral assistance to budget oversight institutions. It argues that there exists unexplored potential to improve the effectiveness of multilateral assistance to budget oversight institutions, including in the choice of strategies and instruments. More fundamentally, it underscores the need to tackle the underlying political economy of public finance accountability.     

Unpackaging synthetic biology: Identification of oversight policy problems and options

The emerging field of synthetic biology (SB) is just entering policy debates. Reports from non-governmental organizations, such as the ETC Group and the International Risk Governance Council, have recently been issued, but there have been few systematic analyses of the policy problems that we will likely face as this area develops. Biosecurity issues are the most defined; other societal oversight issues and implications have not been well explored. Although SB could assist in addressing pressing global challenges, such as sustainable and renewable energy, there are considerable societal concerns that accompany its development and applications. This article is designed to anticipate and prepare for these concerns by identifying policy problems associated with SB oversight, upstream of its development. Projected applications of SB are reviewed and a typology of them is developed. Key oversight policy problems are then identified based on historical experiences with other emerging technologies, such as nanotechnology and biotechnology. Problems associated with biosecurity, biosafety, intellectual property, and ethics are discussed in relation to the typology of SB applications to identify applications of the highest potential concern. Finally, policy options for SB oversight are considered, preventative to promotional. We propose that different categories of SB application may warrant different oversight regimes: there might not be an appropriate “one size fits all” approach. We stop short of making specific recommendations, but suggest that the typology, problems, and oversight options identified in this article be used as a starting point for deliberative, democratic decisionmaking processes that take into account a wide range of perspectives about risk, economic impact, scientific progress, and moral reasoning in the design of oversight systems.     

Public administration planning in developing countries a Bayesian decision theory approach

Decisionmaking under uncertainty is visualized as a game against nature. The policymaker is the player and has a set of alternatives or strategies from which he desires to choose the most effective. He is confronted with a variety of possible states of nature that may evolve after his decision is made. The key states of nature are identified and their interactive relationship to the strategy options are specified. Important roles in the resulting analysis are played by the probabilities of successful project initiation and implementation. It is shown that neglect of the inherent uncertainty aspects leads to evaluations (benefit-cost ratios) of proposed reforms and projects which can be seriously upward biased.     

Lobbying and asymmetric information

Informational lobbying — the use by interest groups of their (alleged) expertise or private information on matters of importance for policymakers in an attempt to persuade them to implement particular policies — is often regarded as an important means of influence. This paper analyzes this phenomenon in a game setting. On the one hand, the interest group is assumed to have private information which is relevant to the policymaker, whilst, on the other hand, the policymaker is assumed to be fully aware of the strategic incentives of the interest group to (mis)report or conceal its private information. It is shown that in a setting of partially conflicting interests a rationale for informational lobbying can only exist if messages bear a cost to the interest group and if the group's preferences carry information in the ‘right direction’. Furthermore, it is shown that it is not the content of the message as such, but rather the characteristics of the interest group that induces potential changes in the policymaker's behavior. In addition, the model reveals some interesting results on the relation between, on the one hand, the occurrence and impact of lobbying and, on the other hand, the cost of lobbying, the stake which an interest group has in persuading the policymaker, the similarity between the policymaker's and the group's preferences, and the initial beliefs of the policymaker. Moreover, we relate the results to some empirical findings on lobbying. qu]Much of the pressure placed upon government and its agencies takes the form of freely provided “objective” studies showing the important outcomes to be expected from the enactment of particular policies (Bartlett, 1973: 133, his quotation marks). qu]The analysis here is vague. What is needed is an equilibrium model in which lobbying activities have influence. Incomplete information ought to be the key to building such a model that would explain why lobbying occurs (information, collusion with decision makers, and so on) and whether lobbying expenses are socially wasteful. (Tirole, 1989: Ch. 1.3, p. 77, Rentseeking behavior).     

Steering Agencies with Short-Term Authorizations

After World War II, the U.S. Congress began a process of engaging in what David Rosenbloom refers to as Congress-centered public administration. In this article, the author argues that the use of short-term authorizations by Congress facilitates congressional oversight and co-management of public programs. Using data from three case studies, the author shows that Congress is able to systematically, on a regularized basis, shape the overall goals, structures, and decision rules that govern agency activities. It can also promote research and analysis that will inform the reauthorization of a program by funding studies and requiring specific reports to be produced. The agencies are, in turn, able to implement the new legislative requirements over a given timeframe—typically four to six years—and do so in an environment that is relatively free from other congressional changes to the legislation underlying the program in question. During this time, the agency and Congress are able to determine what works and what does not work and to formulate changes that should be considered in the next reauthorization legislation.     

Reforming Egyptian Intelligence: Precedents and Prospects

Abstract

In 2011 intelligence reform became a timely and pertinent topic in Egypt with the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak by mass demonstrations. Yet two outstanding questions persist: can Egyptian intelligence be reformed? What would intelligence reform entail in the Egyptian context? An examination of historical Egyptian intelligence reforms suggests that ‘reform’ in the Egyptian context usually means greater efficiency and centralization at the expense of public oversight and accountability. Prospects for fundamental intelligence reform are further hampered by Egypt's authoritarian traditions, its relatively weak legislature and judiciary, lack of an empowered civil society, censorship and an apparent official addiction to secrecy.     

Mapping the New South Wales Public Integrity System

This article summaries conclusions from the New South Wales public sector component of the National Integrity System Assessment. The evidence here suggests that the NSW public sector integrity activity is relatively complex and that the existence of multiple integrity agencies has disadvantages for complainants, integrity agencies and agencies under their scrutiny. The coherence of the NSW integrity system must therefore be questioned. The capacity of integrity agencies is hard to determine, with money and staffing levels not in themselves resolving debate over where capacity ought to be directed. The evidence suggests that the long‐running debate between those who want capacity directed to coercive investigations and those who want it aimed at systemic and cultural change is a false one, with the best strategies coupling the two types of activity. Judgements differ on the consequences of public sector integrity activity. Greater agreement exists that integrity has improved over the last decade or so, but while external integrity oversight appears to be responsible for some of that improvement, activities within public sector agencies appear to have been equally important.     

Of Toothless Windbags,Blind Guardians and Blunt Swords: The Ongoing Controversy about the Reform of Intelligence Services Oversight in Germany

Due to the course of European history, German intelligence services are not exactly renowned abroad for epitomizing the rule of law. This article, however, tries to leave the chamber of horrors called memories behind and discusses the question of how intelligence services oversight functions in Germany today. This will mainly be discussed from the perspective of a legal scholar. The article will examine whether, and to what extent, the existing legal framework allows for efficient oversight of the intelligence services. Where oversight deficits can be identified, recent reform proposals related to them will be discussed critically. The article concludes, not all proposals for reform are suitable for solving the problems at hand.