Collaborative Public Management: Assessing What We Know and How We Know It

Collaborative public management research is flourishing. A great deal of attention is being paid to the process and impact of collaboration in the public sector, and the results are promising. This article reviews the literature on collaborative public management by synthesizing what we know from recent research and what we've known for quite some time. It addresses the prevalence of collaboration (both recently and historically), the components of emerging collaborative structures, the types of skills that are unique to collaborative management, and the effects of collaboration. Collaborative public management research offers a set of findings that contribute to an emerging knowledge base that supplements established public management theory.     

Homeowners Associations as Private Governments: What We Know,What We Don’t Know,and Why It Matters

Homeowners associations (HOAs) are private governments that are reshaping urban governance and service delivery in large parts of the United States. Despite the fact that millions of Americans are HOA members, the field of public affairs has paid scant attention to these new governance entities. The essays in this symposium call attention to HOAs’ potential effects on urban services and civic life in the hope of sparking interest among scholars and public managers to include HOAs in our understanding, research, and teaching of contemporary urban governance.     

The Politics of Social Welfare Reform in Urban China: Social Welfare Preferences and Reform Policies

China’s social welfare reform since the mid-1980s has been characterized as incremental and fragmented in three dimensions—social insurance, privatization, and targeting. This paper attempts to explore the micro-foundation of China’s urban social welfare reform by examining the diverse social welfare preferences and the cleavages among societal groups. It argues that the diversity of the societal groups’ preferences for social welfare has given rise to two lines of cleavage in urban China with respect to social welfare—between state sector and non-state sector employees and between labor market insiders and outsiders. The Chinese authoritarian regime’s political priority—economic growth with social stability—has induced the government to accommodate public social welfare preferences in social welfare policies. Therefore, the three dimensions of Chinese social welfare reform policies since the mid-1980s reflect and respond to the social cleavages derived from societal groups’ different preferences for social welfare.     

Welfare Reform: Revolution or Retrenchment?

This article introduces the two main themes of this specialissue of Publius: The Journal of Federalism, workfare and federalism.At this early stage in the history of the 1996 Welfare ReformAct, these themes must be stated as questions rather than answers,as hypotheses not conclusions. What does the new welfare policyseek to accomplish? What are the effects—intended andunintended—of its limited devolution of power to the states?     

Good Administration: Why We Need It More Than Ever

This article relates the concept of 'good administration' to a range of key constitutional issues, including The Governance of Britain , the debate about a British Bill of Rights, the creation of the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council, and the Law Commission's consultation on public law remedy. It argues that 'good administration', far from being remote from these issues, is a critical component of much that we value most in public life. By drawing upon, for example, the Parliamentary Ombudsman's publication of Principles of Good Administration and the Court of Appeal judgment in a case concerning the Ombudsman's report on occupational pensions, the article suggests that the principles of deliberative democracy, human rights and restorative justice combine to make the Parliamentary Ombudsman an effective instrument for 'humanising the bureaucracy', as first envisaged when the Office was created by the Wilson government in 1967.     

Affirmative Action and Its Alternatives in Public Universities: What Do We Know?

University administrators have made difficult choices in response to the changing policy context for the use of affirmative action in admissions. This paper synthesizes the empirical literature on affirmative action and evaluates the efficacy of alternative strategies, including top-percent programs, class-based affirmative action, and targeted recruiting. The analyses offer several findings of interest to officials who direct such programs: (1) Affirmative action preferences given by top-tier universities have been large; (2) affirmative action leads minorities to enroll in higher-quality institutions; and (3) affirmative action has mostly positive effects on minority students later in life. The evidence shows a decline in minorities' relative share of enrollment at flagship public universities after affirmative action was eliminated in several states, and the alternative strategies used by these universities have not offset these declines.     

A Holistic Theoretical Model for Examining Welfare Reform: Quality of Life

Policy makers, public administrators, the media, and others are celebrating the "success" of the latest version of welfare reform, codified into law by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Most often, success is defined in terms of declining case loads or some other economic measure—a practice that does not provide a true sense of the impact of policy changes such as welfare reform. Assessing the human impact of policy change requires more than evaluating economic outcomes; it requires knowing the resources of beneficiaries of social services and their conditions of life from various perspectives. Thus, we must strive for greater understanding about the sociocultural aspects of people's lives that create the whole person—aspects such as health, family and friendship networks, housing situations, public and private support service and program use, conditions of work, and so forth. This is how we come to understand one's quality of life. The present research creates a conceptual model of quality of life and illustrates the model using data from a follow–up study of former welfare recipients in a county in northern Virginia. Evaluation activities that are premised on a quality–of–life model will help policy actors understand the impact of policies and how public institutions can be managed strategically within their very complex contexts, especially in an era of welfare reform.     

What We Know,and What We Have Not Yet Learned: Triple Disasters and the Fukushima Nuclear Fiasco in Japan

Japan is the only country to suffer twice from the terrible consequences of atomic bombs. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are renowned internationally for experiencing the first twin devastating nuclear attacks in history. Unfortunately, Japan has witnessed several other serious nuclear‐related disasters in recent years. The much‐publicized Fukushima disaster in 2011 is one of them. How could such a serious accident occur in a modern, highly sensitive, nuclear‐conscious country?, The answer to that central question is complex, involving not only political and administrative issues but also technical and human dimensions. In retrospect, both government officials and private industry were far too lax with the operation and development of nuclear policies and facilities. The Fukushima debacle was the result of a lack of rigorous management and control of nuclear issues by both public authorities and private industry.     

Anti-corruption: What Do We Know? Research on Preventing Corruption in the Post-communist World

This review assesses the anti-corruption literature in a first attempt to identify systematically significant trends so far and challenges remaining to future political science research. Research on anti-corruption is a young métier. While reflecting on the field at large, the review focuses on two issues that have been central to its development: the role of post-communist Eastern Europe and of civil society involvement. Organised in a chronological way, the review distinguishes and discusses four phases, in order to trace how scholars have addressed these two issues in the context of a rapid evolution of anti-corruption debates, ongoing transformations in Eastern Europe and increasing insight into the controversial matter of anti-corruption efforts. It considers four crucial periods: (1) earlier scholarly debates on corruption (pre-1990s); (2) initial anti-corruption debates (1990s); (3) a period of reorientation (early 2000s); and (4) latest anti-corruption debates (mid-2000s). Changing perspectives on anti-corruption in relation to post-communism and civil society involvement are discussed for each of the four phases in order to delineate the different research trajectories. This leads to the conclusion that future research, while addressing the theory deficit, needs to take account of increasingly complex conceptual challenges posed by the (interrelated) changes in international and domestic governance.     

Wealth-Transfer Taxes in U.S. Fiscal Federalism: A Levy Still in Need of Reform

Wealth-transfer taxes are federal and state levies on the valueof estates, inheritances, and gifts. Because the federal governmentallows a limited tax credit, repeal of the federal tax has implicationsfor state governments. This article discusses the economic justificationof taxing wealth transfers and provides data on the importanceof the tax from 1977 to 1997. We measure the degree of variationin the use of the tax among the states and pinpoint those statesfor which death taxation is most important. Wealth-transfertaxation needs reform but, repeal of the federal tax is inappropriate.Instead, the state levies should be abandoned. We conclude byproposing to repeal the state taxes and reduce the federal taxby an amount equivalent to the value of the federal tax-credit.The resulting revenues, however, would not to be garnered bythe federal government but returned as revenue-sharing fundsto the resident state of the decedent.