FEDERAL POLICY IN LOCAL CONTEXT:PUZZLING THROUGH THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PARADIGMATIC POLICY REFORM

Although comprehensive reform programs (CRPs) have been influenced by theories of government failure, they pose some puzzles for these theorists. My purpose is to address puzzles that relate to observed characteristics of the timing, radicalism, implementation, rhetoric and democratic consequences of reforms. The long period of paradigm stability which typically precede them is explained in terms of the institutional and political risks associated with radical policy reform while the reforms themselves are explained in terms of factors that generated opportunities for new sources of policy leadership. This leadership was collectively supplied by a network that sought to break the hold of a fragmented structure of policy communities over the policy process.     

WOLF'S MODEL: Government Failure and Public Sector Reform in Advanced Industrial Democracies

Many developed nations have embarked on public sector reform programs based on the New Public Management (NPM) paradigm. This article seeks to evaluate the efficacy of NPM reform strategies as a means of dealing with the problem of “government failure” in public sector hierarchies by examining these strategies through the analytical prism provided by Wolf's theory of nonmarket failure. Drawing on the New Zealand experience, we explore the potential for NPM reform initiatives to mitigate the problems of nonmarket supply. Moreover, we examine how “autonomous policy leadership” and “advocacy coalition networks” can overcome the various obstacles to the successful implementation of reform strategies delineated by Wolf under his “conditions of nonmarket demand”. The article then focusses on the efficacy of NPM in removing, or at least reducing, the various forms of government failure identified in Wolf's taxonomic catalogue of nonmarket failure. We conclude by assessing some of the likely tradeoffs involved in the application of NPM reform programs.     

Who Should Govern Political Parties? Organizational Values in Norwegian and Danish Political Parties

The article explores party member attitudes towards internal party democracy and party leadership in Danish and Norwegian parties. The focus is on the relationship between party members' public policy values (measured by means of 'old politics' and 'new politics' value dimensions) and their organizational values (i.e. ideas about internal democracy), but the members' educational and activism levels as well as indicators capturing factors specific to individual parties are also applied to explain party members' organizational values. We find that positions on the two policy value dimensions are related to party members' organizational values. But the relationships are not particularly strong, and their signs are contrary to expectations. One explanation may be that the 'new politics' literature draws a misleading picture of the organizational values of New Left and New Right party members – at least in the Danish and Norwegian cases. We also find that the social democratic parties in both countries differ considerably from the other parties in the sense that the dissatisfaction with the leadership was much stronger in these parties.     

Understanding the effects of perceived ethics failure,compassionate leadership,and communication strategy on anti-government sentiment

This study conceptualizes anti-government sentiment and tests the relationships between anti-government sentiment and three antecedents (i.e., ethics failure, compassionate leadership, and communication strategy). An online survey (n = 1,112) was conducted in South Korea. Exploratory factor analysis with principal component analysis and confirmatory factor analysis was conducted on the measures proposed for anti-government sentiment. The hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling. Results show that publics' perceptions of the government's ethics failure, lack of compassionate leadership, and use of a buffering strategy for communication are positively related to their anti-government sentiment toward the incumbent government.     

Do voters reward rebellion? The electoral accountability of MPs in Britain

To hold their Members of Parliament individually accountable for their legislative behaviour, British voters would need to base their decision to vote for an MP at least partially on the extent to which the MP's legislative voting behaviour deviated from that of the MP's party leadership. Voters should evaluate this deviation contingent on their views of the party leadership. MP rebellion can signal that voter–MP congruence is greater than that of the voter and the MP's party leadership. In this article it is found that only constituents with negative attitudes toward the Labour government reward rebellious Labour MPs, albeit to a limited extent. A similar conditional association is not observed on a single issue: Iraq. The policy accountability of MPs is relatively weak and general rather than issue‐specific.     

Tunnel vision: The regulation of endocrine disruptors

This study examines the failure of a small but significant element of U.S. chemical regulatory policy: the Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program (EDSP). A range of conditions are implicated in the failure of this program, but one condition, the scientific testing and regulation paradigm (STRP), seems particularly important and ties the failure of EDSP to the failure of other U.S. chemical regulatory programs. This paradigm is a group of assumptions that have driven pesticide (and other chemical) regulatory policy since World War II. This study investigates the relationship between STRP and the failure of EDSP, the potential efficacy of alternatives to this program, and one alternative that broke from this paradigm. Ultimately, this study suggests that we must revise the role of science in regulation in order to find effective alternatives to modern chemical regulatory policy.     

When Doves Cry: International Rivalry, Unreciprocated Cooperation, and Leadership Turnover

Varied research traditions suggest that dovish leaders will be thrown out of office under harsh external circumstances. Below, I elaborate a model of rivalry maintenance that draws on and refines the insight from studies of leadership tenure and foreign policy. Specifically, I expect a leader who offers unreciprocated cooperation to a rival (a dove) to be more likely to be deselected from power than a leader that takes a harder line vis-à-vis the rival (a hawk). I test this expectation using event history techniques and data spanning the 1950–1990 time period and find strong evidence that dovish leaders pay an electoral price within a rivalry context. The findings suggest an internationally contingent domestic incentive to maintain rivalry and conflict over time .     

The domestic politics of international development in South Korea: stakeholders and competing policy discourses

Abstract

The paper examines the domestic politics surrounding South Korea's foreign aid policy. It delineates the institutional characteristics and strategic interests of key government and non-government stakeholders, and suggests an analytical framework to comprehend the country's aid policy regime. It suggests that two competing policy discourses exist – one emphasising ‘intellectual leadership’ and the other ‘ethical leadership’ as the key principle of aid policy. In practice, the country's political leadership promulgates a complex amalgam of these discourses in alignment with their own political imperatives and interests. The paper discusses ‘Global Saemaul Undong’ as such an example under the incumbent Park Geun-Hye administration.     

Mid-Level Officials as Policy Makers: Anti-Corporatist Policy Change in the Swedish Employers' Confederation, 1982–1985

The aim of the article is to provide an account of the process of policy change in the Swedish Employers' Confederation (SAF), 1982–1985, implying a shift from a pro-corporatist to an anti-corporatist view on interest representation within decision-making bodies of public authorities in the sphere of labour market and working life issues. In this respect, the study throws new light on the fall of the 'Swedish model' of industrial relations, by stressing the central policy-making role of a few individuals occupying their positions in the mid level, rather than in the leadership level, of the huge SAF hierarchy.
Given the formal structure of SAF and its statutes, SAF seems to be the least likely organisation to show signs of policy making in the mid level. Therefore, the case study also contributes to the general discourse about policy making in organisations, foremost by challenging mainstream rational choice theory assumptions of the role of the formal leadership in processes of policy change.
Being based on studies in the archives of SAF, the article reveals the mechanisms explaining why a few mid-level officials were successful in anchoring a minority standpoint into the basically 'model-friendly' leadership of SAF. The argument put forward is that the key to an understanding of this case of minority influence is to consider the mid-level officials' strategic use of different kinds of information-based persuasion and propaganda techniques. In fact, the policy-making mid-level officials belonged to a specific activist subgroup within SAF with its main base in SAF's department of information.     

Thinking alike: two pathways to leadership-candidate opinion congruence

This paper seeks to explain why party candidates and their party leadership have congruent policy positions or not. Despite its importance as a way through which parties are able to behave as a unitary actor, this congruence has never been studied as a dependent variable. We seek to fill this void in the literature. Our results suggest that leadership-candidate congruence comes about through two mechanisms: selection and learning. With selection, the party leadership aims to get those candidates elected whose policy preferences are congruent with the party line. Learning occurs through the process of socialization in which candidates assume the views of the party they work and candidate for as their own under. This happens under the pressure of cognitive dissonance. If a candidate learns about the position of the leadership and notices that they are incongruent, they may feel discomfort and change their opinion to be congruent with the party.     

Governmentalities without policy capacity

The professional community of policy experts takes it for granted that all governments seek to strengthen their policy capacity, considering it a key indicator and requisite of their success. Yet this assumption is far from universal, even in some European Union countries with long and complex institutional histories. If we look at the informed and explicit use of policy analysis tools in France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, we have to conclude that this paradigm is not completely integrated into their governmentality. In these countries, three disciplinary approaches warrant especial attention as generators of competencies recognized as usable knowledge for public decisions: ‘law,’ ‘public finance’ and ‘public administration.’ Where the standard operating procedures of democratic institutions appear to be fully defined on the basis of these three categories, the inclusion of the policy perspective encounters major difficulties. In these contexts, the most important obstacle is the fear that the new paradigm will threaten the balance among the constitutional bodies, especially to the detriment of the legislature, and that it will constrict the political leadership. This explains why some countries, such as France and, most recently, Italy, have attempted to resolve the impasse by resorting to the strongest of legitimations: inclusion in their constitutions of public policy evaluation as a function of Parliament. This choice is certainly important, but in itself it does not guarantee recognition of the policy paradigm as a science for democratic institutions.     

Who's the chef? Economic voting under a dual executive

Abstract. Standard economic voting models assume a dominant locus of policy responsibility, a single chief executive whose powers are fixed by certain inviolate institutional rules. The president-centred US system serves as the paradigm here. However, economic voting may occur under a dual executive, whose powers change in response to the institutional rules themselves. France represents this second scenario. There are two executives, the President and the Prime Minister. Under conditions of cohabitation, with a partisan division of the power between the two offices, economic voting becomes more sophisticated. According to data from the 1993–1995 cohabitation, voters perceived that the Prime Minister, not the President, was responsible for the economy. Therefore, in the 1995 presidential contest, they directed their economic evaluations at the Gaullist party of the Prime Minister, not the Socialist party of the President.     

Political Myths in Climate Leadership: The Case of Danish Climate and Energy Pioneership

Climate leadership is important for the transition to a low‐carbon economy, where some countries are seen as leaders because of their ambitious climate and energy policies. Climate leadership is dynamic and evolves over time to become a political myth, however, which governments use in their policy strategies. Changes in governments lead to new climate and energy strategies that affect the respective countries' leadership positions. This article links the growing literature on environmental/climate leadership and the political myth literature. Specifically, it draws on the environmental/climate leadership framework to analyse the connection between political myths and the climate and energy policy strategies of governments to understand how the changing interpretation of the political myth influences leadership. The article uses Denmark as a case study because of the consensus in the literature on it being a climate and energy policy pioneer. This article analyses how Danish governments interpret the political myth of Danish climate and energy pioneership and how their policies influence the Danish leadership position, concluding that whilst the continued reinterpretations of the political myth of leadership do not always reflect the original myth, the myth remains important for government claims to leadership.     

Does domestic politics limit the influence of external actors on ethnic politics?

Conclusion Domestic politics is naturally important in ethnic policies. However, in spite of their potency, domestic political factors are not always the most decisive. International organizations have influenced the Latvian and Estonian governments, and at times the Slovak and Romanian governments. However, the ability of different organizational strategies to overcome domestic opposition and thus bring about their desired policy varies widely. In most cases, actors need to use conditionality and aim it at the appropriate decision makers. In spite of their widespread use, efforts that rely solely on persuasion and diplomacy tend only to work when the domestic opposition is initially quite low or when ethnic minorities themselves have some bargaining power in the government. The key policy implication is that domestic factors do not make failure, or success for that matter, a foregone conclusion. For example, ethnic minority representation within the government coalition is not in itself a guarantee of passage of the policy preferences of the minorities. Conversely, the presence of authoritarian-style leadership does not automatically mean a rejection ethnic minority accommodation either, if organizations present their suggestions so that such leaders view it as being in their greater interests to maintain power. Conditionality that targets incentives to fit goals of the leadership can work. External actors are thus not justified in backing off from action based purely on a domestic analysis.     

Learning and Change in 20th-Century British Economic Policy

Despite considerable interest in the means by which policy learning occurs, and in how it is that the framework of policy may be subject to radical change, the "black box" of economic policy making remains surprisingly murky. This article utilizes Peter Hall's concept of "social learning" to develop a more sophisticated model of policy learning; one in which paradigm failure does not necessarily lead to wholesale paradigm replacement, and in which an administrative battle of ideas may be just as important a determinant of paradigm change as a political struggle. It then applies this model in a survey of U.K. economic policy making since the 1930s: examining the shift to "Keynesianism" during the 1930s and 1940s; the substantial revision of this framework in the 1960s; the collapse of the "Keynesian-plus" framework in the 1970s; and the major revisions to the new "neoliberal" policy framework in the 1980s and 1990s.     

The role of authentic leadership on healthcare Street-Level Bureaucrats’ well-being during the pandemic

This study uses Conservation of Resources Theory, to explain Street-Level Bureaucrats’ (SLBs) workplace behavioural responses to threats to their well-being. We examine whether authentic leadership within street-level organisations positively impacts employee well-being by increasing SLBs’ perception of personal resources, and reducing their perceptions of work harassment. The research design comprises a survey that solicited quantitative and qualitative data from 163 healthcare SLBs working in Australian hospitals during the pandemic in April 2020. Analysis of the means indicates low levels of satisfaction with leadership and low levels of well-being for SLBs. The structural equation modelling findings show that poor leadership is associated with higher levels of work harassment and lower levels of employee well-being. Qualitative data support these findings. As healthcare workers were already listed as over-represented in the stress-related workers compensation statistics, one strategy may be to improve the level of organisational support by upskilling managers in authentic leadership behaviours with the aim of increasing their perception of support so as to increase employee well-being. This will benefit employees and their families, and the community they service.

Points for practitioners

• Street-Level Bureaucrats (SLBs) have been increasingly experiencing the public sector gap (demand outstripping supply of resources) because of the dominance of the austerity-driven managerialist paradigm.
• The recent COVID-19 crisis amplified the severity and impact of the public sector gap causing increased perceptions of work harassment and reductions in SLBs’ well-being.
• However, SLBs with high levels of Psychological Capital had a natural buffer in place to protect their well-being, and as such, they perceived less work harassment and erosion of their well-being.
• The way forward is to complement the austerity-driven managerialist paradigm in management decision-making with authentic leadership behaviours focused on maximising the well-being of SLBs and the public.

     

Implementation of Aged Care Policy in the Australian Federal System

In 1983–84 the Commonwealth and state governments trialled the introduction of the geriatric assessment team (GAT) program. Twenty years of Australian Health Ministers' Conference (AHMC)¹ minutes and records (1969–88), files within the Queensland and Commonwealth health departments (1983–88) and interviews with major stakeholders revealed that implementation can extend over many years and can require a confluence of factors for a policy idea to come to fruition. This article examines the dynamics involved in the implementation of the GAT policy and reveals that expert advisers played a central role in policy innovation and implementation and that the federal system could both obstruct and facilitate policy implementation. While there was evidence of delay and conflict, the Australian states through their expert advisers were significant contributors to the development and implementation of aged care policies. Many of the intergovernmental relations were often characterised by a high degree of cooperation at least at the officer to officer level. The 'coercive' nature of the federal system may need to be revisited.     

Market failure,government failure,and the private supply of public goods: The case of climate-controlled walkway networks

Two opposing models of public-goods undersupply are those of “market failure” and “government failure”. Empirical work on the relative explanatory power of these two frameworks has been limited by the scarcity of acceptable data. The case of climate-controlled walkways in major urban cores is a rare instance where such difficulties can be overcome. We investigate the supply of CCWs in 55 large city-cores in North America. We find that (1) CCW networks are well-supplied by market forces, when (2) such forces are not frustrated by government policy. We also find evidence that (3) rules-based regimes dominate discretion-based regimes. These results are consistent with the position that the “government-failure” paradigm is a viable alternative to the traditional “market failure” paradigm.     

Ideas, Paradigms and Institutions: Agricultural Exceptionalism in the European Union and the United States

The differing trajectory of agricultural policy reforms in the 1990s in the world's two most important agricultural powers, the United States and the European Community/Union (EC/EU), can only be fully understood by appreciating the role that ideas play in policy outcomes. The idea of agricultural exceptionalism underwrote a paradigm of state assistance in the US and the EC/EU. By the mid-1980s, the state assistance paradigm was under stress, and subject to a number of anomalies in both the US and the EC. But while the paradigm was overthrown and replaced with a market liberal model in the US grain sector in the 1990s, it remained intact in the European Union. Explaining why agricultural exceptionalism and the state assistance paradigm has endured in the EU while it has withered in the US highlights three factors: the importance of the political institutional framework in locking in—or not—policy principles and instruments; the degree of fit of a sectoral policy paradigm with the broader societal ideational framework regarding appropriate relations between the state, the market, and the individual; and the capacity of a paradigm to adjust in the face of challenges and anomalies.