Political Control and Managerial Survival in State‐Owned Enterprises

This article explores the impact of political determinants on the survival of managers in state‐owned enterprises (SOEs). Drawing on theories of bureaucratic delegation, it is argued that preference divergence between principals and agents as well as among principals is a major driver of managerial turnover. More specifically, the partisan affiliation of SOE‐managers with the government, the opposition, or individual ministers can serve to explain the length of their tenure. The analysis employs Cox proportional hazard regressions to test these hypotheses on an original data set of 1,671 managers serving in 87 public corporations in Austria between 1995 and 2010, thus presenting one of the first large‐n analyses of political appointments in a parliamentary system. The results strongly support the proposition that partisan affiliation drives managerial survival.     

International Organizations ICTs Policies: E‐Democracy and E‐Government for Political Development

New technologies provide new channels of access to political information and participation in decision‐making processes. This assumption is clearly important in the action plans and policies of International Organizations (World Bank, Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development, United Nations), which have assumed a leadership role in the reform of political institutions. Starting from an analysis of the reasons that have brought the state and processes of institution building back into focus, this paper will reconstruct the International Organizations' vision of the transformative potential of new information technologies and their activity in this field. Particular attention will be devoted to e‐democracy and e‐government as policies to build democracy in developing countries.     

High‐Speed Rail: Lessons for Policy Makers from Experiences Abroad

In April 2009, the U.S. government unveiled its blueprint for a national network of high‐speed passenger rail (HSR) lines, aimed at reducing traffic congestion, cutting national dependence on foreign oil, and improving rural and urban environments. In implementing such a project, it is essential to identify the factors that might influence decision making and the eventual success of the HSR project, as well as to foresee the obstacles that must be overcome. The authors review, summarize, and analyze the most important HSR projects carried out to date around the globe, focusing on the main concerns of HSR projects: their impact on mobility, the environment, the economy, and urban centers. The authors identify lessons for policy makers and managers who are implementing HSR projects.     

Coproducing Responses to COVID-19 with Community-Based Organizations: Lessons from Zhejiang Province,China

Zhejiang Province achieved one of the best records in containing the COVID-19 pandemic in China. What lessons can the world learn from it? What roles do community-based organizations play in this success story? Based on more than 100 interviews during and after the outbreak in Zhejiang, this article provides a road map of how community-based organizations were involved in the three distinct stages of Zhejiang's response to COVID-19. The authors recommend that public sector leaders (1) strategically leverage the strengths of community-based organizations at multiple stages of the COVID-19 response; (2) incentivize volunteers to participate in epidemic prevention and control; (3) provide data infrastructure and digital tracking platforms; and (4) build trust and long-term capacity of community-based organizations.     

Learning from Second‐Hand Experience: Methodology for Extrapolation‐Oriented Case Research

Critics of public management reform complain that governments copy legitimated foreign practices. Recent work by Eugene Bardach helps to explain why: neither government analysts nor academic researchers possess an adequate methodology to examine practices in source sites, with a view toward adaptation in target sites. Rather than complain, Bardach takes steps to develop such a methodology, drawing analogies with reverse engineering. This article offers specific guidance about how researchers can effectively investigate practices in source sites to prepare the ground for disciplined and ingenious extrapolation of practices from source to target sites. The resulting translation is illustrated by an extrapolation‐oriented case study.     

Politics of E‐Government: E‐Government and the Political Control of Bureaucracy

This case study reports an innovative e‐government experiment by a local government in Seoul, South Korea—Gangnam‐gu. A new local political leadership in Gangnam made strategic use of e‐government applications to exert greater political control over the local civil service bureaucracy. The authors find that e‐government applications possess political properties that can be applied effectively by the political leadership as instruments to improve control over the government bureaucracy as well as to enhance essential government accountability and transparency. The political circumstances underlying e‐government development as well as its impact on local government are reported, along with key variables associated with this innovation and directions for future research.     

A comparison of management adaptations for joined‐up government: Lessons from New Zealand

Despite considerable attention, helping agencies to work more effectively together is one of the most important contemporary challenges of public administration theory and practice. The New Zealand Better Public Services (BPS) Results program has been an unexpected success in this area and provides a positive case study. In 2012, the New Zealand government set targets for solving 11 important social problems where responsibility crossed agency boundaries and has made significant measurable progress in all 11 problems. This paper explores the conditions that may have enabled the most progress and possible management adaptations when these initial conditions are not fully met. In particular, the case demonstrates how goal commitment can be supported where there exist a large number of potential actors and how interagency trust can be built in the absence of existing relationships.     

Regulation‐by‐information in areas of limited statehood: Lessons from the Philippines' environmental regulation

This research examines conditions under which environmental regulatory disclosure is more versus less likely to work, with focus on the case of the Philippines. Two major findings arise out of a case study. First, we observe a mismatch between the nature of information and the main addressees of the disclosed information, which led the operation of the subject disclosure program to deviate from its targets. Second, this institutional deficiency has to do with the organizational culture and routine practice of the implementing agency. The second finding challenges a major justification of information‐based environmental regulation (IBER) administered in weak states and underscores the role that administrative capacity plays in making novel regulations come into effect. Contrary to the popular belief that IBER creates non‐governmental forces that offset a limited statehood, it may be less likely to work where state administrative capacity is weak.     

Implementing Joined‐Up Government: Lessons from the Australian Social Inclusion Agenda

‘Joined‐up government’ (JUG) approaches have emerged in many industrialized countries as a means to tackle persistent ‘wicked’ public and social policy problems (Pollit 2003 ). Despite this, limited evidence exists concerning their implementation or effectiveness. ‘JUG’ was popularized by the Blair Government (UK) with its focus on addressing social exclusion. Following in these footsteps, in 2007 the Australian Government launched the Social Inclusion Agenda: a joined‐up approach to improving the wellbeing of all Australians and addressing disadvantage. This paper focuses on findings from a study that examined the SIA as a natural experiment in JUG. Drawing on the implementation experiences of federal policy makers, our findings lend weight to emerging research into JUG that suggests that compatibility and consistency between goals, instruments, and processes is critical to success. We argue that closer attention needs to be given to developing ‘supportive architecture’ around joined‐up initiatives to facilitate implementation.     

Linking program implementation and effectiveness: Lessons from a pooled sample of welfare‐to‐work experiments

This paper addresses the question: How does implementation influence the effectiveness of mandatory welfare‐to‐work programs? Data from three large‐scale, multi‐site random assignment experiments were pooled; quantitative measures of program implementation were constructed; and multilevel statistical modeling was used to examine the relationship between program implementation and effects on short‐term client earnings. Individual‐level data were analyzed for 69,399 sample members and group‐level implementation data were analyzed for 59 local programs. Findings indicate that, other things being equal, earnings effects are increased by: an emphasis on quick client employment, an emphasis on personalized client attention, staff caseloads that do not get too large, and limited use of basic education. Findings also show that mandatory welfare‐to‐work programs can be effective for many types of people, and that focusing on clients who are especially job‐ready (or not) does not have a consistent influence on a program's effectiveness. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Political Institutions and Pollution: Evidence from Coal‐Fired Power Generation

What is the relationship between political institutions and air pollution generated by the power sector? Here we focus on the association between democracy and power generated from coal, the most polluting of all fossil fuels. Using a new dataset on coal‐fired power plants commissioned between 1980 and 2016 in 71 countries, we find that the relationship between democracy and coal varies according to the environmental Kuznets curve logic. Democratic political institutions at lower levels of economic development are correlated with increased commissioning of coal power plants, as governments seek to appeal to an electorate prioritizing economic growth and affordable energy access. As a country becomes richer, democracy comes to have a negative association with coal power, as clean air becomes a more salient issue for the public.     

Taking a Closer Look at the Empowerment‐Performance Relationship: Evidence from Law Enforcement Organizations

This article examines the influence of empowering leadership practices on police officers' job performance, perceptions of managerial effectiveness, and unit performance. These relationships are examined using multisource survey data collected from 100 law enforcement managers, 446 of their subordinates, and 98 of their direct supervisors. The analysis shows that empowering leadership contributes positively to subordinate officers' job performance and unit effectiveness. Empowering leadership is also positively associated with subordinate but not with supervisor ratings of managerial effectiveness. Task‐oriented leadership, however, is positively associated with both subordinate and supervisor ratings of managerial effectiveness. Implications of these results for managerial leadership in law enforcement organizations are discussed.     

Questioning Kaufman: How Cross‐Level Political Coalitions Interact with Organizational Structure

Herbert Kaufman's The Forest Ranger is considered a landmark study of how organizations can be structured to elicit compliance from field officials, yet there have been few attempts to validate Kaufman's claims. The author argues that the outcomes observed by Kaufman resulted from interplay between organizational structure and political context—a variable that Kaufman ignored. This argument is supported by case studies of two agencies with structures similar to Kaufman's U.S. Forest Service but poorer outcomes: the same agency today and India's forest departments. Both differences in organizational structure and poorer outcomes are found to be the result of political context. Specifically, coalitions assembled around agencies use the implementation process to shape outcomes in ways that could not be accomplished solely through changing laws or formal administrative structure. This points to the importance of building supportive field‐level coalitions to complement administrative reforms.     

Institutionalising a National Approach to Performance Reporting: Lessons from Two Decades of Experience with the Report on Government Services

The Report on Government Services (RoGS) to the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) is considered an exemplar of benchmarking in a federal system. Published annually since 1997, RoGS provides performance reporting in the form of cross jurisdictional benchmarking on an unprecedented scale and scope. This paper argues ROGS has institutionalised a national approach to performance measurement and reporting that is now at the centre of the COAG reform agenda. The paper examines the processes and institutional structures that explain how RoGS has transformed performance reporting for social infrastructure services. The final section provides a preliminary assessment of the impact of RoGS.     

Improving the Budget Process in Fragile and Conflict‐Ridden States: Two Modest Lessons from Afghanistan

Both the donor community and scholars have created a cottage industry studying “fragile” states. International nongovernmental organizations that have developed indexes measuring corruption or governance have been unkind to Afghanistan. One index suggests a different and more optimistic story. The International Budget Partnership measures transparency every two years with its Open Budget Index. Afghanistan demonstrated dramatic improvement on this index between 2008 and 2012. The authors use the improvement in Afghanistan's transparency score as an entry point to explore how donors try to intervene and promote transparency as part of broader efforts in public financial management development and how legislative strengthening has also contributed to budget reform. The analysis offers a modest corrective to the overly pessimistic assessments of fragile states by showing that a fragile state can improve its budgetary transparency and enhance governance by strengthening the legislature's involvement in the budget process.     

Civil Society Organizations in a Post‐Aid World: New Trends and Observations from the Andean Region

The objective of this article is to outline approaches taken by civil society organizations (CSOs) in order to advance their work in social development given the changes in the aid architecture. It focuses on the Latin American region, particularly Andean countries, but many of the challenges and opportunities in a “post‐aid world” are insights that might prove helpful to other regions as well. The article provides a comprehensive outline of approaches that CSOs are taking given the changes in aid grouped into three categories: aid models, organizational considerations and revenue sources and modes of fundraising. Many of these have been in practice for sometime but might need to be more strategically used as CSOs manage the changing contexts. CSOs in Latin America and the Andes are considering a multitude of options, and while the approaches considered in the article are not an exhaustive list, they provide an overview of viable directions, which might positively influence CSOs' sustainability and continued provision and promotion of a myriad of public goods and services. The article ends with observations about aid shifts and its implications for CSOs and social development more broadly. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Productivity Consequences of Political Turnover: Firm‐Level Evidence from Ukraine's Orange Revolution

We examine the impact of political turnover on economic performance in a setting of largely unanticipated political change and profoundly weak institutions: the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Exploiting census‐type panel data on over 7,000 manufacturing enterprises, we find that the productivity of firms in the regions most supportive of Viktor Yushchenko increased by more than 15 percentage points in the three years following his election, relative to that in the most anti‐Yushchenko regions. We conclude that this effect is driven primarily by particularistic rather than general economic policies that disproportionately increased output among large enterprises, government suppliers, and private enterprises—three types of firms that had much to gain or lose from turnover at the national level. Our results demonstrate that political turnover in the context of weak institutions can have substantial distributional effects that are reflected in economic productivity.