DOES POLITICAL CHANGE AFFECT SENIOR MANAGEMENT TURNOVER? AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF TOP‐TIER LOCAL AUTHORITIES IN ENGLAND

In many political systems the political neutrality of senior managers' tenure is often cherished as a key part of the politics-administration dichotomy and is subject to formal safeguards. We test hypotheses about the impact of political change on senior management turnover drawn from political science, public administration and private sector management theory. Using panel data to control for unobserved heterogeneity between authorities, we find that changes in political party control and low organizational performance have both separate and joint positive effects on the turnover rate of senior managers. By contrast, the most senior manager, the chief executive, is more sheltered: the likelihood of a chief executive succession is higher only when party change and low performance occur together. Thus the arrival of a new ruling party reduces the tenure of senior managers, but chief executives are vulnerable to political change only when performance is perceived as weak.     

Purpose and practice in public administration education: The place of substantive public policy areas

Public administration's early identification with the concept of a strong executive has resulted in an emphasis on staff functions in its graduate education programs. In the practicing world, staff functions are viewed as tools employed in the actual practice of public administrators, namely the delivery of substantive public services. Although public administration is characterized as an applied field, it does not focus its theory building and educative efforts on that which practicing public administrators actually do. The field necessarily imports other disciplines, but it does not provide the unique focus that would justify this borrowing; its current research agenda and training curricula are available in other disciplines. Public administration graduate students should concentrate in individual substantive policy areas, and the field should focus on optimizing organizational arrangments for delivering societal knowledge as public services. Interorganizational theory can provide the common theoretical framework necessary to mitigate the centrifugal effects of a variety of “administrations” within the field. The approach developed by J. Kenneth Benson is outlined; it provides a unique theoretical niche for public administration, yields a framework for comparative analysis, and defines the field's relationship to political science.     

Collaborative Crisis Management and Leadership in the Public Sector

The goal of this article is to discover how leadership competencies affect the perceived effectiveness of crisis management. The study, based on a self-reported survey of executive public leaders in Turkey, found that the core leadership competencies have a positive relationship with the effectiveness of crisis management. Among task–oriented, people–oriented, and organization-oriented categories of leadership behaviors, task-oriented leadership behaviors were found with the highest level of impact on the effectiveness of crisis management. The study demonstrated the importance of the core leadership competencies in the effectiveness of crisis leadership. The hypothesis testing with the covariance structure model supported the positive impact of the core leadership competencies on the effectiveness of crisis management. This study contributes to the literature on leadership during crisis situations, and also provides proposals for public managers and practitioners to increase their effectiveness in leading their organizations during crises.     

How to grow a public executive: The federal executive institute experience

The symbol of excellence for executive development and managerial education throughout the world is The Federal Executive Institute (FEI) in the United States. In fact, the FEI became the model laboratory for growing public executives in the 1970s, as hundreds upon hundreds of visitors from around the world came to see the ”mecca of applied executive development.“ The FEI became a distinct culture and a genuine learning community that others attempted to model throughout the world. And yet, the failure of the ”FEI imitations“ was due mainly to academics who failed to understand the need for a ”PRAXIS, pracademic model of development,“ rather than a ”theory, academic framework of education.“ Hence, an analysis of this noted executive development success may help others to avoid the pitfalls that academics too often encounter when they attempt to train, develop, and/or educate the public administrators who do the work.     

INVOLVING STAKEHOLDERS IN ORGANIZATIONAL PROCESSES

Who should be included in efforts to develop accountability systems for public organizations? What is the impact of involving various internal and external stakeholders in a collaborative process to determine performance indicators? Involving a variety of participants can result in information that is perceived as being more useful; however, significant groups of stakeholders may be excluded from the collaborative process. The reasons for nonparticipation range from poor timing or oversight to deliberate decisions to forego involvement. This exploratory research suggests that the benefits from a collaborative process of identifying measures of program impact are minimal and the utility of including a large number of participants is questionable. Finding more effective methods to increase the impact and utility of stakeholder involvement may become increasingly important in meeting executive and legislative mandates to determine government performance. The implications for further study are discussed.     

Reinventing government and reformulating public administration

The National Performance Review is the most recent of a succession of major public sector reform initiatives. The conceptual base of the Review draws from Osborne and Gaebler and competitive market models of administration. This article discusses the relevance of the base and models, given the current responsibilities of the national government. An alternative concept, governing capacity, is proposed as the appropriate theoretical focus for the study of public administration.     

Networks, Management and Institutions: Public Administration as 'Normal Science'

How does network analysis fit into the development of public administration as an academic discipline? This article tries to bridge theoretical developments in public administration between the middle of the 1970s and the first half of the 1990s. The benchmarks being used are (1) the now classical account by Vincent Ostrom of The Intellectual Crisis in (American) Public Administration - published 25 years ago this year - and (2) Christopher Hood’s reconstruction of core values in (British) new public management. Rather than representing analytical developments as an endless succession of different or even mutually exclusive approaches, this contribution tries to reconcile different foci for analysing public administration. Administrative theory provides us with a rather stable meta-theoretical framework for studying the meaning of quality in government, governance and public administration at various levels of analysis. By relating the emergence of network analysis in PA to parallel developments such as the resurgence of (neo-)managerial and (neo-)institutional analysis, it also becomes clear that network analysis is useful as an analytical device, but that it needs to be linked to theoretical perspectives that provide us with operational assumptions about ‘networks’. Network analysis in itself only provides split ground for reinventing government and refounding public administration.     

Dynamic-opportunistic behaviour in local government contracting-out decisions during the electoral cycle

A major question for public managers is whether municipal services should be rendered in-house or contracted out. In view of the negative perceptions often aroused by contracting out, this political decision might be framed within a theoretical model that we term ‘dynamic-opportunistic behaviour’. According to this model, the probability of municipal services being contracted out is greater in the years immediately following elections; moreover, during this period the decision is taken more quickly. In this theoretical model, not all factors (budgetary, economic, political, service characteristics and socio-economic) have an equal impact on the contracting-out decision during each year of the electoral cycle. The model was applied to a sample of 2,274 Spanish municipalities, with respect to a broad time horizon (2002–2014), and the results obtained confirm our hypotheses regarding dynamic-opportunistic behaviour in the contracting out of local public services.     

Distributed leadership and performance-related employee outcomes in public sector organizations

Distributed leadership is the sharing of leadership tasks between managers and employees. This article demonstrates how a distributed leadership perspective adds to the public administration literature by including an important sensitivity to planned and nonplanned leadership. We propose a theoretical model that explains the impact of distributed leadership on employee outcomes which have a direct or indirect impact on organizational performance in public organizations contingent on alignment with individual leadership capacity and organizational goals. Our empirical analysis in the Danish hospital sector shows initial support for the expected relationships between distributed leadership and performance-related employee outcomes such as job satisfaction and innovative behavior. This indicates that the distributed leadership perspective holds the potential to strengthen service delivery in complex public service organizations while there is weaker support for the notion that the positive impact of distributed leadership depends on individual leadership capacity and their support for organizational goals.     

OUTCOME-BASED PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND THE BALANCE OF POWERS IN THE CONTEXT OF DIRECT DEMOCRACY

We argue that direct democracy forms a specific context for NPM reform, with the voting population as a third agent beside legislature and executive constituting a considerable limit to the legislature's political steering capacity. In this context we expect that NPM will lead to a shift in political power between sovereign, legislature and administration. This article investigates the possibilities of outcome-based public management to ameliorate public action under these circumstances. The findings of the analysis of the NPM reform in the Swiss city of Bern indicate that problems of outcome-based public management are accentuated in a direct democratic system. The puzzling finding is that while the political players themselves see a shift in power between the electorate, legislature and executive, they are doing nothing to compensate this shift.     

Public administration,executive power,and constitutional confusion

This article examines the ambiguity in the meaning of executive power in both the text of the U.S. Constitution and in subsequent judicial interpretations. This ambiguity has had a profound impact on the constitutional position of the public administration. In the recent independent counsel case, the U.S. Supreme Court offered a restrictive interpretation of the President's constitutional powers to remove subordinate officers. This new interpretation could lead to increased congressional control over administrative agencies.

The proper place and function of the public administration, unfortunately for the public administration, have been and remain inherently ambiguous because of the longstanding confusion about executive power in the Constitution of the United States. Richard Neustadt captured this ambiguity nicely when he noted that the two great themes that have characterized the American presidency have been “clerkship” and “leadership.”⁽¹⁾ There is no easy formula to bring clerks and leaders together to make them march in lock-step, and yet the President is clearly both. Today we may tend to emphasize his role as leader with imperial pretensions and Nixonian excesses still relatively fresh in our memories, but this is only a question of emphasis. No one denies that the President is a legally accountable officer who must do the bidding of the Congress. This is the clerkship side of the presidency.

Herbert Storing counsels against any effort to cut the Gordian knot and to try to determine once and for all just what it is our President is supposed to be: clerk or leader. “The beginning of wisdom about the American presidency,” Storing maintains, “is to see that it contains both principles and to reflect on their complex and subtle relation.”⁽²⁾ Following Storing's advice, this essay reflects on the inherent ambiguity of the executive power that provides the constitutional foundation of the public administration. First, we examine the text of the Constitution and the meaning of executive power at the time of the founding. Then we study the confusion that the Supreme Court has created in its efforts to draw practical conclusions for presidential personnel management from the constitutional grant of “the executive power” to the President in relation to the removal power. Third, we examine some of the recent problems of executive power that surfaced in Watergate and became salient in the important constitutional debate over the special prosecutors, those most unwelcome intruders into the inner precincts of the Reagan administration.     

Predicting executive vacancies: An organizational approach

When an executive departs, some organizations experience a vacancy while others do not. Recent research shows that the occurrence and length of vacancy instances within and across sectors varies widely. However, the causes of such variance in vacancies have yet to be carefully addressed by public management research. This study explores the determinants of executive vacancy, focusing specifically on organizational-level characteristics of size, performance, and sector as well as the role of anticipation of a departure. We use data from public and private US doctoral universities to identify 230 leadership transitions between 1993 and 2013. In this context, we find that anticipation of departure is an extremely strong predictor of vacancy. Moreover, private universities are significantly less likely than their public counterparts to experience executive vacancy while organizational performance and size do not appear to influence vacancy.     

Generalists and specialists in executive politics: Why ambitious meta‐policies so often fail

This article contributes to the politics of policy‐making in executive government. It introduces the analytical distinction between generalists and specialists as antagonistic players in executive politics and develops the claim that policy specialists are in a structurally advantaged position to succeed in executive politics and to fend off attempts by generalists to influence policy choices through cross‐cutting reform measures. Contrary to traditional textbook public administration, we explain the views of generalists and specialists not through their training but their positions within an organization. We combine established approaches from public policy and organization theory to substantiate this claim and to define the dilemma that generalists face when developing government‐wide reform policies (‘meta‐policies’) as well as strategies to address this problem. The article suggests that the conceptual distinction between generalists and specialists allows for a more precise analysis of the challenges for policy‐making across government organizations than established approaches.     

RETHINKING E‐GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT FROM A CITIZEN PERSPECTIVE

The use of information and communication technology (ICT), particularly that related to the consolidation of the internet as a social and business networking medium, has impelled governments towards enabling e‐government (e‐gov) programs to transform the future of the delivery of public services. E‐gov has a clear economic, social, and political impact that should be monitored in order to steer the design of effective public policies. In this article, we argue that evaluating the impact of e‐gov entails a complex process of e‐gov performance assessment that should take into account the perspective of citizens. Supported by a framework that combines two theoretical views, namely the structurationist view of technology and the social shaping of technology, we propose a model that consolidates nine performance dimensions. This model is the result of empirical work based on an in‐depth analysis of interviews with relevant social groups regarding their perceptions of the technological artefacts of e‐gov.     

EXECUTIVE EDUCATION FOR STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT: A SURVEY

ABSTRACT

Executive education is a growth industry in the United States. Executive education programs and, more particularly, the variety of teaching techniques they use, promise to be key issues in the field of public administration in as much as they may be precursors of techniques and technology that will be used in more traditional teaching venues. This study reports the results of a survey of executive education programs conducted in 1998 under the auspices of the South Carolina Executive Institute. The survey covered four areas – curriculum, participants, faculty, and program administration. We conclude that the immediate future of executive education likely will be marked by a continuing emphasis on customization, experimental learning, and rigorous evaluation of the results. Two areas in which there are likely to be more significant departures from existing practices in public sector executive education are program alliances and the use of new communications and information technology.     

The politics of HIV/AIDS in South Africa: government action and public response

A decade ago it seemed likely that African governments would be destabilised by the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This article tests some of the presumptions in such forecasting with an examination of the South African case. It begins with an assessment of the effects on the public health system of the South African government’s efforts to cope with the illness. Efforts to implement universal treatment of people who are HIV-positive appear to have strengthened government, while the costs have been affordable. The efforts have extended the embrace of the public health system and prompted the engagement of civil society in policy formation and implementation. Survey evidence suggests that the government has gained public approval and that its health service delivery has become more socially accountable. Civil protest to engender political reforms in the treatment of AIDS patients has enhanced the role of constitutional checks on executive authority.     

Strategies used by Health Scrutiny Committees to Influence Decision-makers

The scrutiny function, designed to enhance and provide a counterbalance to executive decision-making, is a key element in the modernisation of public service delivery in England. Early research expressed concerns about the effectiveness of scrutiny however, with lack of responsiveness by local decision-makers being suggested as one of the main difficulties. This paper applies a model of political influence strategies drawn from the business sector to analyse the strategies which health scrutiny committees in eight local authorities adopted in order to influence decision-makers. The relevance of the model to health scrutiny is assessed, and possible implications for enhancing health scrutiny in the future are discussed.     

ADMINISTRATIVE THEORY IN THE 1980s: A VIEWPOINT

The last fifteen years or so saw a flourish and then the surprising collapse of implementation process theory and contingency theory. Despite the enormous popular (and international) impact of privatization in these years, there was oddly little British administrative research in that area, although other aspects of‘the Thatcherite Revolution’, especially‘the new public management’, cultural change, and the divestment of executive work by Whitehall departments, were well covered. Growth points were informational logic theory and institutional analysis, though British development of cultural theory was somewhat lacking. Emphasis which shifted from‘public administration’to‘public management’may shift again in the coming decade, to‘governance’.     

Political Parties in the UK

The modernisation of English local government has created new forms of executive leadership. These aim to deliver better management and greater public engagement. Drawing from a recent study of the views of elected councillors in a sample of contrasting councils, this paper considers how far the new political management has succeeded in enhancing public interest and involvement in local government. It is suggested that executive and non-executive councillors differ in their perceptions of the new arrangements and that public interest is still largely perceived as relating to issues of immediate and personal concern. Backbench councillors may feel relatively powerless in taking up issues. Stepping down from elected office could even provide greater opportunities to be involved in public and political affairs. Equally, there are many examples of positive initiatives to involve the public, including area-based organisation and the effective use of scrutiny. Elected mayors were more optimistic than councillors in their perception of public involvement, tending to see themselves as having a direct line to the public and serving to 'reconnect' council and public. Overall, however, public engagement remains the great unfinished business of local government modernisation.     

Search for identity: the impact of the “great books” in public administration

Do public administration scholars build upon seminal works by scholars in the field or do they still rely heavily upon other disciplines? This question is addressed by assessing the impact of the “great books” in public administration on research published in academic journals. It is found that the 1980's are characterized by an increasing importance of those classic books that are generic management in orientation, suggesting that scholars still rely heavily on other fields for theoretical direction. Implications for an interdisciplinary approach to public administration and the training of doctoral students is discussed.