New Public Management in Swiss municipalities

Swiss municipalities are being stretched to their limits. In the years from 1995 to 1997, 32% of all Swiss municipalities closed with a deficit. In response to this situation, numerous reforms have been introduced since the start of the 1990s in order to improve the performance capability of the municipalities. Aside from intermunicipal cooperation, New Public Management (NPM) is the reform project that is currently being discussed most in the Swiss municipalities. Recent data shows that every fourth municipality has already taken first steps with NPM. Many kinds of activities are understood as being encompassed by NPM, even when not all aspects of NPM are implemented. Only one fifth of the municipalities that have introduced NPM are already working with key elements such as product definitions, performance agreements, and global budgets, which are necessary for an orientation toward output and outcome. In municipalities of less than 1,000 inhabitants NPM is still hardly an issue, while a number of towns with over 10,000 inhabitants are looking into NPM quite intensively. NPM programs are being developed primarily in municipalities that are part of German-speaking Switzerland. Municipalities that offer a wide range of services consider new steering models, such as NPM, far more frequently than those with a narrower range. The financial situation has little influence on whether NPM is introduced.     

Local government reform in South Africa: An analysis of financial management legislative compliance by municipalities

South African local government has undergone radical transformation. The reform process included a local government financial management best‐practice technical assistance programme (MFMTAP) targeting financial management and especially budget quality reform. Dollery and Graves (2009) earlier examined the efficacy of the South African National Treasury (NT's) municipal budget funding compliance technique for measuring adherence to the Municipal Finance Management Act's (MFMA) budget funding requirements using a single metropolitan municipality case study. This article further evaluates the robustness and validity of the funding compliance instrument as a reform performance measurement tool by comparing the results of four geographically and demographically different municipalities. Also introduced is a performance ‘trend’ instrument similar to a ‘Likert scale’ for comparing municipal performance. Optimal tax revenue theory is invoked to examine this key revenue variable for producing a compliant budget. The article finds the ‘budget funding’ reform component of the Best‐Practice Technical Assistance (BPTA) programme presently ineffective and unsustainable. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An evaluation of the application of the new public management principles in the South African municipalities

New public management (NPM) was introduced in the western world with a sole purpose of reforming the public sector and its approaches in managing affairs of the state. These reforms were later adopted in some parts of the African continent including in the sub‐Saharan Africa trying to emulate the successes of the developed economies of the world. South Africa as one of the countries in Africa also sought to shift from its apartheid bureaucratic, inefficient and rule driven management of public affairs. To this end, the democratic South Africa aligned its constitutional provisions with the principles of NPM which include but are not limited to participatory planning, decentralisation, performance management, effectiveness and efficiency. These principles were introduced precisely to better manage the state and its resources including at the local sphere of government. Local government in South Africa is underpinned by its own sets of policy frameworks. This conceptual paper seeks to evaluate the application of NPM principles in the South African municipalities. The said evaluation was undertaken through a review of existing literature. The paper concludes that the application of the said principles in the South African municipalities is confronted by some challenges including lack of political will, corruption as well as lack of skills and capacities. Necessary recommendations have been developed to enhance the performance of municipalities so as to achieve the otherwise good intended provisions of the NPM.     

Consequences of an Anti-Corruption Experiment for Local Government Performance in Brazil

Decentralization reforms, implemented to improve efficiency and service provision, pose a challenge for federal governments that would like to ensure that federal resources are used appropriately by local governments. To overcome this challenge, some federal governments have implemented costly oversight programs aimed at improving municipal governance. For instance, in 2003, the Brazilian federal government introduced a randomized auditing program with the goal of improving municipal performance by exposing episodes of corruption and mismanagement. Yet, we know little about whether these types of programs actually lead to improvements in local outcomes, especially in terms of service delivery. We argue that audits provide opportunities for learning that should improve performance outcomes. To test this argument, we examine municipal performance in over 5,000 Brazilian municipalities from 2001 to 2012. We utilize the random assignment of audits and estimate difference-in-differences regressions. We find that audited municipalities experience greater improvements in performance overall compared to unaudited municipalities, though the effect size is modest. We also find evidence that the auditing program indirectly improves municipal performance. These results indicate that top-down oversight programs, such as the Brazilian one, are useful not only for improving transparency and accountability, but also for the provision of public services as well.     

The Evolution of E-Government among Municipalities: Rhetoric or Reality?

Information technology has become one of the core elements of managerial reform, and electronic government (e-government) may figure prominently in future governance. This study is designed to examine the rhetoric and reality of e-government at the municipal level. Using data obtained from the 2000 E-government Survey conducted by International City/County Management Association and Public Technologies Inc., the article examines the current state of municipal e-government implementation and assesses its perceptual effectiveness. This study also explores two institutional factors (size and type of government) that contribute to the adoption of e-government among municipalities. Overall, this study concludes that e-government has been adopted by many municipal governments, but it is still at an early stage and has not obtained many of expected outcomes (cost savings, downsizing, etc.) that the rhetoric of e-government has promised. The study suggests there are some widely shared barriers (lack of financial, technical, and personnel capacities) and legal issues (such as privacy) to the progress of municipal e-government. This study also indicates that city size and manager-council government are positively associated with the adoption of a municipal Web site as well as the longevity of the Web site.     

Managerialism, Politics and Legal Bureaucratic Rationality in Immigration Policy

Against claims that public sector reforms have made the functions of managers similar to those in private firms, critics of the managerialist model point to constraints on public sector managers that make their decisions on resource allocation and policy development different from those affecting corporations. Through an examination of policy formulation, program management and decision-making in the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, this article demonstrates that managerialist program planning, outcome orientation and performance measurement have been introduced, but that this has not precluded an expansion in non-market oriented routine, non-discretionary decision-making involving bureaucratic legal rationality within a legislative and regulatory framework. While some clients have been defined and assessed in terms of economic criteria, they access departmental processing not in terms of market signals, but according to their compliance with the Migration Act and Migration Regulations. Managerialism has not occurred at the expense of classical administrative practices, rather managerialist and legal bureaucratic forms have both grown and influenced political calculations on policy-making.     

Employment Laws and the Public Sector Employer: Lessons to Be Learned from a Review of Lawsuits Filed against Local Governments

Numerous aspects of the day-to-day operations of local governments are subject to legal scrutiny; public managers and officials must be keenly aware of the legal rights and protections that extend to both citizens and employees of local governments. This research evaluates several areas of concern in the human resource administration of municipal governments with respect to the management of public employees within the protections set forth by the legislative and judicial branches of the federal government. Sample cases filed from 2000 to 2007 against local governments in Tennessee involving Title VII violations, retaliation, hostile work environment, Family and Medical Leave Act violations, and other employee grievances are detailed. The intent of this analysis is to highlight many of the laws and legal principles that relate to municipal human resources management and to provide scholars and practitioners with a brief overview of the liabilities that may arise from the employment relationship between local governments and their employees.     

Recentralization and vertical alignment in the French health‐care system

In foreign exemplars, key new public management (NPM) features such as decentralization and devolution of health‐care responsibilities had outcomes below expectations. Other NPM traits such as the patient as overseer of reforms or the empowerment of patient remained elusive. In France, the integration of public values such as greater participation of patients and local actors (NGOs and elected officials) and NPM‐driven private values such as performance evaluation has yet to be seen. Taking advantage of NPM's failings and austerity agenda, a French welfare elite regained control over health‐care policy decisions at the expense of regions and other local actors. NPM outcomes were below expectations. Austerity cures led to weakening of the regional decision spaces, which can be explained under the principal–agent relationship. Accountability shifted to managerial (the professionalization of hospital managers) and legal (governance via regulations) forms in a bid to restore central government control. A democratic recess results from the lack of public engagement in recent health reforms.     

Evaluating California’s Housing Element Law,Housing Equity,and Housing Production (1990–2007)

Since 1969, California’s Housing Element Law has required that municipalities address housing equity and housing production. In California, housing equity means that a municipality has planned for the future production of low-income housing that is priced from 0 to 120% of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s median family income, and market-rate housing that is priced higher than 121%. For a purposive sample of municipalities (Sacramento and Los Angeles regions, 1990 to 2007, n = 53), this research found that as compliance with the law increased, the sample experienced deficient low-income housing production but surplus market-rate housing production. Mixed-effects models indicated that compliant municipalities were associated not only with increased low-income housing production but also with decreased annual housing production in comparison to noncompliant municipalities. While these associations contrast with Lewis, they suggest that municipal compliance may support California’s goal of providing housing equity but may also constrain California’s overall housing production.     

Toward a New Era of Administrative Reform? The Myth of Post‐NPM in New Zealand

This article explores the supposed shift from New Public Management (NPM) to a new era of “post‐NPM” by looking at one critical case, New Zealand. It finds limited evidence of such a shift, suggesting that the wider literature needs to move to a more careful methodological treatment of empirical patterns. To contribute to such a move, this article applies a three‐pronged approach to the study of changing doctrines in executive government. After setting out the broad contours of what NPM and post‐NPM supposedly constitute, the article proceeds to a documentary analysis of State Services Commission doctrines; this is followed by an analysis of “Public Service Bargains” based on elite interviews and finally a case‐study approach of the Crown Entities Act 2004. Far from a new era of administrative reform, the “messy” patterns that emerge suggest a continuation of traditional understandings and ad hoc and politically driven adjustments, leading to diversification.     

The "Best Place" Debate: A Comparison of Graduate Education Programs for Nonprofit Managers

This article presents a critical examination of the curricular elements of nonprofit management degree programs in colleges of business, public administration, and social work. What are the major curricular elements in each type of program? How do the curricular elements of these programs compare with generic management degree programs? What are the central challenges facing managers of nonprofit organizations, and how are these challenges addressed in each program? Based on the curricular review, is one setting more favorable for students of nonprofit management? What are the views of stakeholders regarding the “best place” to educate managers? Data collected from focus groups and surveys of stakeholders in each of these academic settings are presented. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the future of nonprofit management education in the United States.     

Municipalities’ Choices of Service Delivery Modes: The Influence of Service,Political, Governance,and Financial Characteristics

This study investigates the influence of service, political, governance, and financial characteristics on municipalities’ choices of four service delivery modes (in-house, inter-municipal cooperation, municipality-owned firm, and private firm) in the Dutch local government setting. The results show that as a service involves more asset specificity and more measurement difficulty, the likelihood that municipalities contract this service out is lower. Also, although some differences in preferences are found between boards of aldermen and municipal councils, for both political bodies a more right-wing political orientation is shown to be positively related to privatization of services. Furthermore, contracting out is also shown to be related to the governance model of municipalities, as services of municipalities that (in general) put relatively less emphasis on input, process, and output performance indicators, and more on outcome performance indicators, are more likely to be privatized. Finally, the results also show that services of municipalities that have a better financial position are less likely to be contracted out to a private firm.     

Transparency by Conformity: A Field Experiment Evaluating Openness in Local Governments

Sunshine laws establishing government transparency are ubiquitous in the United States; however, the intended degree of openness is often unclear or unrealized. Although researchers have identified characteristics of government organizations or officials that affect the fulfillment of public records requests, they have not considered the influence that government organizations have on one another. This picture of independently acting organizations does not accord with the literature on diffusion in public policy and administration. This article presents a field experiment testing whether a county government's fulfillment of a public records request is influenced by the knowledge that its peers have already complied. The authors propose that knowledge of peer compliance should induce competitive pressures to comply and resolve legal ambiguity in favor of compliance. Findings indicate peer conformity affects both in the time to initial response and in the rate of complete request fulfillment.     

Do Municipal Mergers Improve Fiscal Outcomes?

Improved fiscal management is a frequent justification for promoting boundary consolidations. However, whether or not this is actually the case is rarely placed under rigorous empirical scrutiny. Hence, this article investigates if fiscal outcomes are improved when municipalities are merged. The basic argument is that the conceptualisation of fiscal management in political science is often too narrow as it focuses on the budget and pays hardly any attention to balances in the final accounts and debts – elements of management which are central to policy making. On this background, the causal relationship between municipal mergers and fiscal outcomes is analysed. Measured on the balance between revenues and expenses, liquid assets and debts, municipal mergers improve the fiscal outcomes of the municipalities in a five‐year perspective, although the pre‐reform effects tend to be negative. For liquidity and debt, however, the improvement only entails re‐establishing the levels prior to the reform. The testing ground is the recent mergers of Danish municipalities, which, it is argued, constitute a quasi‐experiment. This forms the basis of a Difference‐in‐Difference design, allowing the alleviation of endogeneity problems and enabling causal inference. The analysis is based on administrative data from the Danish municipalities in the period 2003–11.     

Can corruption foster regulatory compliance?

The legal and economic literatures overwhelmingly support the notion that regulatory compliance is always less in the presence of corruption. This paper departs from those literatures and shows that, whenever public officials are paid fixed wages, an increase in corruption may actually foster compliance. The conditions that make this possible are laid down in a theoretical model. Empirical evidence that corroborates the theoretical findings is provided using firm-level data for 26 transition economies.     

New public management and the reform of French public hospitals

New public management (NPM) is not only an Anglo‐Saxon debate but also a French one, with some of its elements constituting structural components of the French state apparatus. How did it make its way into French hospitals? What core mechanism was at the center of NPM implementation in hospitals? We discuss the redisorganization of the health system under NPM, as it attempted to reassert the central government's power over regions and how it alienated the medical profession. The paper highlights inherent contradictions and other false promises within NPM. It was unable to contained cost, could no enhance accountability or increase civil participation. We then investigate post‐NPM reforms in French healthcare. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The role of tax preparers in tax compliance

This paper assesses the influence of tax preparers on tax compliance. Using data from the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) Taxpayer Compliance Measurement Program and an index of legal ambiguity based on Revenue Rulings, the impact of preparation mode (paid third party vs. self) on compliance at the level of the return line item is probed. The results suggest that preparers contribute to compliance by enforcing legally clear requirements but also contribute to noncompliance, as measured by the IRS, by helping taxpayers take advantage of legal ambiguity. Furthermore, an analysis of a campaign to enforce estimated tax requirements conducted by the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue suggests that tax preparers are also an important network for communicating tax agency enforcement priorities to taxpayers.An earlier version of this paper was prepared for the conference on Federal/State Research sponsored by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.     

Inertia and Neighboring Effects in Local Tax Policy: Illinois' Experience with a Local Option Tax on Telecommunications

Illinois reconfigured the legal basis and constraints for municipal telecommunications taxes in 2003. We use data on municipalities' initial (assigned) tax rate, fiscal condition, population, changes in tax rates of neighboring municipalities and neighbors' initial (assigned) tax rates to explain changes in telecommunications tax rates between 2003 and 2008. We find clear evidence of an important and statistically significant inertia effect—municipalities initially assigned a zero tax rate continued to stay tax free—and important and statistically significant neighboring effects—municipalities whose neighbors changed tax rates did the same, and municipalities whose neighbors were assigned relatively high initial rates increased their own rates faster.     

Decoupling practical and legal compliance: Analysis of member states’ implementation of EU policy

Despite the vast literature on policy implementation, systematic cross‐national research focusing on implementers’ performance regarding different policy issues is still in its infancy. The European Union policies are conducive to examining this relationship in a comparative setting, as the EU member states need to implement various EU directives both legally and in practice. In this study, a first attempt is made to analyse the relationship between legal conformity and practical implementation and the conditions for practical deviations in 27 member states across issues from four policy areas (Internal Market, Environment, Justice and Home Affairs and Social Policy). In line with existing approaches to EU compliance, it is expected that the policy preferences of domestic political elites (‘enforcement’) affect their incentives to ‘decouple’ practical from legal compliance. Instead, administrative and institutional capacities (‘management’) and societal constraints (‘legitimacy’) are likely to limit the ability of policy makers to exert control over the implementation process. The findings suggest that practical deviations arise from policy makers’ inability to steer the implementation process, regardless of their predispositions towards internationally agreed policies. The results have strong implications for the effective application of international rules in domestic settings, as they illustrate that political support for the implementation of ‘external’ policy does not ensure effective implementation in practice.     

From politics to good management? Transforming the local welfare state in Italy

In light of recent welfare reforms associated with new forms of managerial and financial accountability, this paper analyses the significance for the construction of new legitimate forms of governance of the relationship between public managers of welfare provider units and local elected politicians. The shift from local government as democratic representative institutions to depoliticised efficient agent of welfare provision has created in Italy the opportunity for the emergence of a new cadre of managers, less subject to interference by the parties. The increasingly problematic relationship between managers and politicians reflects the dynamics of a shifting game, originally intended for sector-specific interests, that was later transformed into a struggle between political elites across territory and about territorial politics. Any set of alternatives juxtaposing efficient management and politics is best viewed by taking account of the significance of local welfare institutions for political legitimacy.