Love Thy Neighbour: A Social Capital Approach to Local Government Partnerships

While controversy surrounds compulsory consolidation as a means of improving the operational efficiency of local government, the literature suggests that gains can accrue to groups of local councils which form voluntary alliances as platforms for shared service delivery. However, real‐world experience has demonstrated that voluntary alliances in local government are difficult to establish and do not always endure in the longer term. After reviewing the limited extant scholarly literature on shared services and local council voluntary alliances, as well as applications of the social capital approach to inter‐organisational endeavour, such as the Weber and Weber (2010) venture capital model, this article argues that the social capital approach can offer insights into local council cooperative alliance and shared service models.     

论社会资本如何提高政府绩效

提高政府绩效是政府的重要目标之一,社会资本作为一种具有巨大潜在功能的生产性社会资源,在政府绩效的提高中扮演着重要角色。文章在对社会资本及政府绩效的概念进行界定的基础上,从五个方面对社会资本对政府绩效的作用进行了分析。     

Social Capital and the Dynamics of Trust in Government

It is well understood that trust in government responds to the performance of the president, Congress, and the economy. Despite improved government performance, however, trust has never returned to the levels witnessed in the 1950s and 1960s. Social capital may be the force that has kept trust low. If so, we need to assess the relative contributions of both government performance and social capital at the macro level. Using macrolevel data, the analysis, here, is designed to capture the variation over time in both social capital and government performance and let them compete to explain the macro variation in trust. The empirical results demonstrate that both government performance and social capital matter, but that social capital appears to be the force which accounts for the decline in trust over the last 40 years.     

Social Equity and Evidence: Insights from Local Government

This article examines the role of evidence‐based decision making in social equity, with a particular focus on local government. It offers an assessment of the past, present, and future of such efforts by engaging themes from Matias Valenzuela's article based on King County, Washington. King County is one of more than 70 local governments that are members of the Government Alliance on Race and Equity, a growing national network of governments using an evidence‐based approach to achieve racial equity. In general, previous social equity measures have focused largely on measuring the extent to which disparities exist. More recently, tools and resources have become available to assist local governments in designing and evaluating their approach and performance in reducing social inequities. Future evidence should include more standardized measures to benchmark success, provide comparative analysis, and better support the identification of best practices.     

政府创新：社会资本视角

社会资本理论是研究政府与公民、民主与信任等之间关系的一种新范式。布迪厄从微观层面上将社会资本概括为一种资源集合;科尔曼从中观层面上将社会资本概括为一种社会结构;帕特南从宏观层面上将社会资本概括为一种价值规范。从本质上讲,政府创新是一个政府与社会互动的过程,与社会资本之间存在内在的结构性关联。社会资本是政府创新的基本变量,其中的信任因素是政府创新合法性的重要来源,支持信念因素是政府创新的基本条件,参与网络因素是政府创新的重要基础。在社会资本视角下进行政府创新的途径在于加强社会制度建设,实现传统社会资本的现代转型;支持公民参与网络建设,培育公共精神和发展基层民主;培育第三部门力量,以转变政府职能和增强政府能力。     

三方互动：规范我国地方政府间竞争的思考

在我国当前的制度环境下,地方政府在竞争中可以采取4种策略:约束“掠夺之手”、减少公共品的供给、将危机转嫁给不具流动性的要素、树立壁垒干预市场。规范地方政府间竞争应当避免地方政府采用第3、4种策略。为限制地方政府树立壁垒干预市场,从中央层面来看,需要建立全国统一大市场,推行以公平为基础的政策、制度化中央与地方的权力分配;从地方层面来看,需要转变地方政府职能,加强地方公共财政建设,构建地方特色;从社会层面来看,为限制地方政府转嫁竞争危机,需要充分发挥居民在地方政府间竞争中的裁决作用,发挥民营经济的力量以及发挥第三部门的力量。     

Social Capital and Local Governance: Exploring the Institutional Design Variable

This article argues that Robert Putnam's social capital thesis is too society-centred and undervalues state agency and associated political factors. It explores the role of institutional design in explaining how governments can shape the development of social capital and its potential influence upon democratic performance. New Labour's programme of 'democratic renewal' within British local government provides an excellent opportunity to assess the relevance of institutional design to arguments about social capital and democracy. We propose that prospects for the creation and mobilization of social capital may depend as much upon the process as the content of institutional design.     

Local Government and Welfare Generosity: Municipality Spending on Social Welfare

Although it is difficult for local governments to give support for social welfare recipients top political priority, there are huge variations in the support recipients actually receive among Norwegian municipalities. However, local governments representing different party ideologies may prefer to support different dimensions of generosity. Some municipalities could have a liberal attitude to eligibility rules but be strict on time limits and the amount of money provided. Others may be generous regarding time limits or amounts received once one is accepted as a welfare client. Data from the mid 1990s indicate the variation in support is related to different generosity dimensions for different party groups. While the total number of clients seems unrelated to politics and basically correlates with local social problems, the duration and amount of support are related to the political composition of the municipality assembly. Devoid of any large variation, both time limits and the amount of support increase in accordance with socialist leanings, and the total budget used for social welfare support also increases with the proportion of women in the municipality assembly.     

Motivating and Retaining Government Employees: The Role of Organizational Social Capital

While a great deal of attention has been given to the role of performance pay and extrinsic rewards in understanding how to motivate and retain employees, this study points towards the importance of organizational social capital, defined as the sum of collaboration, trust, and value congruence among employees. Using a four-year panel data set of 170 federal agencies, we find a positive effect of social capital on intrinsic motivation but contradicting effects on turnover. Changes in social capital across time mitigate turnover intention but are unrelated to turnover behavior. A cross-sectional analysis shows, however, that the relationship between social capital and turnover behavior is curvilinear and has an inverted u-shape. The findings suggest that social capital can be a double-edged sword, as it is harmful in lower doses but beneficial if a critical mass of employees can participate in the social network, thereby avoiding conflict-laden in- and out-group constellations.     

Devolution and Local Government

Devolution was introduced amid a rhetoric of democratic renewaland promised the active engagement of local government. Localgovernment has responded in different ways in different partsof the United Kingdom. In Scotland and Wales local authoritieshave built on their advocacy of devolution before 1997 to realizea close partnership with devolved government. In London, too,local authorities have come to engage closely with regionalgovernment. In the rest of England local authorities were atbest ambivalent about the possibility of regional government,preferring to work in a national context with UK governmentinstitutions. Northern Ireland local government is parochialand appears suspicious of engagement with devolved government.These differences express some of the wider relationships ofthe component societies of the United Kingdom to the UK stateand have helped to embed continued centralized government inEngland.     

论社会资本视野下的政府职能转变

从社会资本角度看,政府职能应是公民社会的培育与服务,政府职能的运行机制应该是多元化的,政府职能实现途径应该是制度和规则这一公共物品的提供。     

Social Capital and Public Policy – The Current Challenge Facing the Victorian Government

Social capital, since Putnam's 1993 work, has captured the imagination of policy‐makers the world over, and Australia is no exception. In 2005 the Department of Victorian Communities launched its Actions for Community Strengthening policy statement, which draws heavily on social capital theory. This article explores the theoretical underpinnings of the government's policy and critiques its failure to deal adequately with the causal relationship between social capital and its supposed community benefits. The article then seeks to isolate the missing factors through a look at recent research on volunteerism and argues that the institution of collaborative/interactive governance needs to be underpinned by sound socio‐economic reform.     

Integrity Systems and Local Government

Australia's third sphere of government is local government, consisting of about 675 councils nationally, responsible for an average of 6 percent of total public sector expenditure (around $18 billion) annually. This article reviews key integrity issues confronting local government, based on experience in NSW and Queensland. Current issues confirm integrity to be a significant concern manifesting in a large variety of forms, both in council administration and in local government politics. A new generation of responses are increasingly tailored to recognising local government as a permanent, elected sphere of government, accounting directly to the public, while, supported by state regulators, individual councils also pursue better practice in the management of their own administrations.     

Social Context,Institutional Capacity,and Police Services: A Local Public Economies Perspective

This article examines levels of policing services, focusing on an assessment of resources and their measurement for municipalities. Two measures of policing levels assess the reliability of the findings across alternative measurements. Social and institutional characteristics are explored to evaluate alternative explanations in policing efforts. The article presents four decades of census data for municipalities in metropolitan areas. The central finding is that unequal levels of policing are prevalent across American municipalities. An additional finding is that social and institutional contexts affect policing, based on a pooled time‐series analysis of municipal governments. Although its main contribution is to local public economies research, the research also integrates the social and institutional literatures to identify factors in the allocation of resources to policing.     

Economic Growth and Social Capital

Recent interdisciplinary theoretical work has suggested that social capital, or the interpersonal trust of citizens, plays an important role in explaining both the efficiency of political institutions, and in the economic performance of contemporary societies. This paper examines the relationship between social capital and economic growth in a sample of thirty-four countries over the period 1970 to 1992, within the framework of a modified neo-classical model of economic growth. The findings suggest that social capital has an impact on growth which is at least as strong as that of human capital or education, which has been the focus of much of the recent work on endogenous growth theory. It appears to have about the same impact on growth as catch-up or the ability of poorer nations to adopt technological innovations pioneered by their richer counterparts.     

Strategy in Local Government

One aspect of the study of local government organization is the role of consultants and the models they have introduced in order to help the local government reorganize. One of these models is "strategy", and this article sets out to consider the implication for these organizations if "the logic of strategy" were to be implemented. A common denominator of all the local governments studied is that "strategy" does not function, and the question is why this is so. Two distinctly different explanations can be considered. One states that "strategy" is difficult and that the politicians and administrators will need time to adjust to new ways of working. The other explanation, which is applied here, focuses on whether local government as an institution can be reconciled with the demands and premises inherent in "strategic thinking". My conclusions arc negative. "Strategy" is a model from the private sector and more specifically from the competitive sector of society and it is not appropriate for wider use. In this article the arguments are restricted to local government, and do not necessarily apply to other types of public organization.     

Social Capital and Endogenous Preferences

In this paper we analyze whether social capital can emerge endogenously from a process of preference evolution. We define social capital as preferences that promote voluntary cooperation in a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma game. We investigate how the endogenous preferences depend on the amount of information individuals have about each other’s preferences. When there is sufficiently much information, maximal social capital emerges. In general, the level of social capital varies positively with the amount of information. Our results may add to an understanding of the factors that determine a society’s ability to generate cooperative outcomes.     

社会资本理论与社会公正问题

社会资本理论的兴起为社会公正实现的研究提供了新思路。社会资本与社会公正之间存在着结构性依赖和制约的关系。目前,我国的社会资本存在诸多缺陷,制约着社会公正的普遍形成。为此,通过转变政府职能、界定政府权力,加强制度整合、推动法治化进程,培育公民社会的公民意识和公共精神以及促进民间组织的健康发展,进而实现社会资本从传统到现代的转型,是实现社会公正的重要前提和题中应有之义。