Trust as an alternative to risk

Many students of trust see it as a way to mitigate risk through the development of strong institutions that create trust. I offer an alternative view of trust, moralistic or generalized trust, that depends upon a psychological foundation of optimism and control. This form of trust, in contrast to arguments by Paldam and others, has “value” independent of experience. Using data from a survey of metropolitan Philadelphia in 1996, I show that if you believe that “most people can be trusted,” you are substantially more likely to see your neighborhood as safe at night even controlling for both the objective level of crime as well having been the victim of a crime, having had parents who were the victims of crime, watching local television news (which exposes people to violent events), where you live (central city and suburb), and gender. Trust thus “reduces” perceptions of risk independently of personal experience.     

MANAGING WITH LESS: DIMENSIONS AND ISSUES

Thank you for inviting me to open the Institute's National Conference this year. Your program looks most interesting and relevant to modern public sector administration. I accepted your invitation on the basis that I would make personal observations – comments of a manager turned Minister. Nothing that I say should necessarily be identified with my Department or fellow Ministers. Rather, I speak as a person in government who is interested in and concerned with change, increased efficiency and improved national productivity.     

Shifting Boundaries between the Public and Private Sectors: Implications from the Economic Crisis

What are the differences between the public and private sectors as well as their interrelationships in light of the recent financial crisis? Has the global economic crisis fundamentally shifted the boundaries between the two sectors? This essay examines the nature and extent of the shift. The authors present an analysis of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to highlight the massive transformations that are taking place and to introduce lessons for future policy initiatives. Between financial rescue missions and the economic stimulus program, government spending accounts for a bigger share of the nation’s economy—26 percent—than at any time since World War II. The government is financing 9 out of 10 new mortgages in the United States. If you buy a car from General Motors, you are buying from a company that is 60 percent owned by the government. If you take out a car loan or run up your credit card, the chances are good that the government is financing both your debt and that of your bank. —Edmund Andrews and David Sanger, New York Times, 2009     

Exploring Public Sector Communication Performance: Testing a Model and Drawing Implications

Despite its importance to agency effectiveness, communication performance is an understudied topic. This is partly attributable to the "performance predicament," which arises because costs of communication are easier to measure than its benefits. In this study, we develop and test an exploratory model of public sector communication performance that is synthesized from the literature on public–private differences and organizational communication. This model is statistically significant and explains the variation in interpersonal, external, and internal communication performance. This is perhaps the largest empirical study on public sector communication to date. Our findings have two key implications for public managers. First, the constraints of red tape on communication performance can be overcome if key performance-enhancing conditions—goal clarity without rigidity and a culture that supports communication—are in place. Second, external communication poses more challenges and may require additional effort.     

Intelligently Designing Deliberative Health Care Forums: Dewey's Metaphysics,Cognitive Science and a Brazilian Example

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The Transparency President? The Obama Administration and Open Government

President Obama has trumpeted transparency as a major part of his agenda, promising "unprecedented" openness throughout the federal government. Although Obama benefits politically from the contrast with his predecessor's reputation for secrecy, in the long run an excessive emphasis on fishbowl governance can raise unrealistic expectations and ultimately backfire. After all, at some point transparency has its costs, such as when disclosure dampens internal deliberation or undermines privacy. The real issue, then, is how much transparency and what type. Despite its rhetoric, the Obama Administration has placed limits on transparency and will likely continue to do so. Yet members of the public and open government activists are unlikely to appreciate the need for such limits, leading to disappointment and charges of hypocrisy. It remains unclear whether Barack Obama will earn the mantle of the "transparency president"—or whether the hopes he has raised will, when unfulfilled, only reinforce public cynicism.     

Does the Love of Money Moderate the Relationship between Public Service Motivation and Job Satisfaction? The Case of Chinese Professionals in the Public Sector

To what extent do attitudes toward money—specifically, the love of money—moderate the relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction among public sector professionals in China? The authors collected data from full‐time public sector professionals who also were part‐time students in a master of public administration program in eastern China. After confirmatory factor analyses, the regression results show that a public servant’s love of money moderates the relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction—that is, individuals with a strong love of money have a significantly stronger relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction than those without, a finding that supports the “crowding‐in effect.” Alternatively, for high love‐of‐money civil servants with a “steel rice bowl” mentality, high job satisfaction is explained by the best offer (output) for the minimum amount of effort (input), at least within Chinese culture. Such findings are counterintuitive in light of Chinese personal values, equity theory, public servants’ institutional background, ethical organizational culture, and corruption.     

The rational behavior theory of voting participation: Evidence from the 1970 and 1982 elections

In recent years a substantial literature on the determinants of voting participation has been developed. In many of these studies voting is assumed to be an expression of rational behavior. That is, people vote when they expect that the benefits will exceed the related costs. Voting is largely an act of consumption based upon the widely held belief that one should vote to fulfill a civic duty or upon some combination of personal characteristics which is sufficiently vague to make precise measurement impossible. The rational behavior theory, however, holds that voting is influenced at the margin by personal and environmental factors which incrementally affect expected benefits and costs, making the act of voting more or less rational. Those factors which increase expected benefits will, ceteris paribus, enhance the probability that one will vote. Those factors which increase expected costs will, of course, have the opposite effect. This study is presented as a primarily empirical contribution to the literature which assumes that, since voting is an expression of rational behavior, it can be modeled and tested using standard economic analysis and methodology. The study is designed to fulfill several purposes. First, we update previous empirical work using data from the 1980 census and from the 1982 congressional elections. The results of our regressions strongly support the rational behavior theory. In addition, we test to determine whether it is less rational for southern blacks to vote as compared to their white counterparts. Our results suggest that the answer is affirmative. Tests of parameter equivalency between the 1970 and 1982 congressional elections are performed with some interesting results. Finally, tests for specification error provide evidence that the rational behavior model and congressional district data generate statistically valid estimates of the determinants of voting participation.     

‘Nothing but Survival?’ On David Easton's Concept of Political Persistence

How do you catch the fish you are after in a text-analysis, and what are the effects of your world-view upon your abilities to fish? Although the analytic positivists can indeed help us to answer these questions, their world-view has nevertheless functioned as a constraint upon the development of political theory by ignoring (more or less) the methods of the understanding traditions. Because, if you fail to understand the complex of problems in a given text-system, you are also in danger of analysing and criticizing nothing but your own misunderstandings - of kidding no-one but yourself. In the case of David Easton's concept of political persistence, such analytic misunderstandings have helped to produce a one-dimensional picture of the systems model, which, however, can be dissolved by uniting world-view, metascience, and science of respectively the analysts and the interpreters within the framework of the critical traditions.     

Optimal voting rules under uncertainty

The theory of ‘constitutional’ choice of voting rules developed by Buchanan and Tullock is an extended to an explicit decision-theoretic form. Voters in the ‘constitutional’ position choose what they believe will be their optimal share or majority rule for making social decisions, by maximizing their individual expected utility from the anticipated social decisions, under conditions of uncertainty. The rule that maximizes expected social benefits depends upon (1) the expected distribution and intensity of preferences on future issues, and (2) the decisionmaking procedures and costs. ‘Decisionmaking’ and ‘external’ costs are shown to be interrelated. Following this analysis, failure to pass laws imposes ‘external’ costs in the same way that passing them does, so that the optimal majority may be lower when desirable laws are viewed as changing over time. Decisionmaking costs depend upon the way in which voters are persuaded to support or oppose bills, upon the distribution of preferences on bills, and on vote-trading possibilities. If vote-trading is almost costless, a wide range of decision rules has nearly equal social benefits. Finally, the model is used to discuss optimal voting rules for several decisionmaking bodies.     

Chameleon voters and public choice

A model is presented of an open-voting public choice process that features pressure groups vying for society's support. Individuals choose what policy to advocate on the basis of their private preferences, which are those they would express in a secret ballot; endogenous social pressures; and the utility they gain from integrity. They falsify their preferences when the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs. An implication is that a policy advocated by few people in private might receive strong public support. The paper goes on to explore why secret voting, which eliminates this possibility, might not be adopted.     

An evaluation of the outsourcing IS/ICT activities in Turkish ministerial computer departments

Outsourcing an IS/ICT function has become fashionable in public administration reform. Through this modality, many organisations are cutting staff costs and increasing efficiency. Financial benefits can be great, public organisations can in fact expand IT usage and hence avoid obsolescence. Despite the benefits of outsourcing IT, there are risks involved. Public organisations need to weigh the benefits, risks and costs involved before making decisions to outsource. Recently, Turkish public organisations have been increasingly outsourcing functions such as facilities maintenance, catering, security and IS/ICT activities. This article, based on a field study, undertakes an evaluation of the experience of Chief Information Officers (CIO's) in outsourcing of IS/ICT activities in ministerial computer departments. The findings provide important lessons for outsourcing in Turkey and elsewhere. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The triumph of regulatory politics: Benefit–cost analysis and political salience

While benefit–cost analysis (BCA) is now a permanent part of the regulatory process in the United States, and many other countries around the world as well as the European Union have adopted it or are moving toward it, there have been few empirical attempts to assess either whether its use improves regulations or how BCA interacts with the political environment. We use a unique US database of the costs and benefits of 109 economically significant regulations issued between 2000 and 2009 to examine whether the amount of information provided in the BCA or political factors surrounding the regulation better correlate with the net benefits of the regulation. We find that there is little correlation between the information provided by the analysis and the net benefits. However, we find that regulations that receive few public comments and are not issued at the end of an administration, have the highest net benefits. These are the regulations that are the least politically salient. This interaction between the political environment and the economic performance of a regulation has been under‐examined and deserves further study.     

Liberal Democrat Leadership: The Cases of Ashdown and Kennedy

Effective leadership of the Liberal Democrats requires a combination of strengths: communications skills, a clear agenda, the ability to manage the party and personal abilities, including stamina, self-confidence and a love for the party itself. This article assesses Paddy Ashdown's and Charles Kennedy's periods as leader. It concludes that the first two phases of Ashdown's leadership were successful: he first ensured the party's survival and then positioned it so that it was able to benefit from the rise in support for the centre-left without being squeezed out by Labour. In the third phase, however, the attempt to deliver a common agenda with Labour was a failure, and Ashdown increasingly lost touch with his own party. Kennedy's first two years as leader were also relatively successful, but after that his leadership fell apart, suffering from a lack of an agenda, a failure of party management, a weakness in communication skills and a lack of self-confidence. His underlying problem was not alcoholism; it was that he was not capable of being an effective leader.     

Toward the usable recognition of individual benefits and costs in regulatory analysis and governance

Regulatory agencies in the United States and Europe have well‐deserved reputations for fixating on the total benefits and costs of proposed and final regulatory actions, without doing any more than anecdotally mentioning the subpopulations and individuals who may bear disproportionate costs or reap disproportionate benefits. This is especially true on the “cost” side of the cost–benefit ledger, where analysts exert little effort to even inform decisionmakers and the public that the costs of regulations might be distributed either regressively or progressively. Many scholars and advocates have observed that regulation can increase the efficiency of market outcomes, but caution about its untoward (or suboptimal) effects on equity. Here, we argue that without considering distributional information about costs and benefits, regulatory policies in fact can also cause violence to notions of efficiency, for two reasons: (i) society cannot hope to approach Pareto‐efficient outcomes without identifying those who must lose so that others can gain more; and (ii) because the harm experienced by involuntary risks and by imposed regulatory costs is likely non‐linear in its magnitude (at the individual level), efficiency is, in fact, a strong function of the shape of the distribution of these effects. This article reviews evidence about the distribution of regulatory costs and benefits, describes how agencies fail to incorporate readily available distributional information, and sketches a vision for how they could analyze costs and benefits to promote more efficient regulatory choices and outcomes.     

Institutions,distributional concerns,and public sector reform

Abstract. As in otherWestern countries, a wave of reform has swept the Danish public sector. The record of these reforms is mixed and paradoxical; an ambiguous delegation of executive authority and radical privatization have been successfully implemented, while other measures, especially contracting out and user democracy or the introduction of greater choice, turn out to have failed. The paper argues that this experience offers two general lessons. First, shortterm costs and benefits are decisive to those who enact and implement public sector reform. Second, institutional factors specific to each type of reorganization have a major impact on the political distribution of costs and benefits.     

Cooperative justice and English as a lingua franca: the tension between optimism and Anglophones free riding

In Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World, Philippe Van Parijs proposes three principles of linguistic justice. The first one applies to the fair conditions of the creation of a lingua franca understood as a common good enabling global communication. According to Van Parijs, the actual situation is unfair. The benefits are distributed evenly among speakers mastering English, but the costs are born entirely by those investing resources in learning English as a second language. I want to challenge this argument and point to a dilemma in Van Parijs’ proposition. He can either accept that English as global lingua franca (EGLF) is a done deal such that only ‘‘apocalyptical events’’ could prevent English from becoming the first global lingua franca, in which case he will have to make peace with the fact that Anglophones can enjoy the benefits this produces without having to make any kind of contribution. Or, he can temper his optimism, find reasons why natural interactions could fail at producing EGLF so as to convince native Anglophones that without their contribution, without some form of an investment in the creation of EGLF, it will not happen, or at least, it will not happen in a way that is maximally beneficial to them. I propose some arguments pointing to some benefits that would only be accessible to native Anglophones through cooperation and therefore through contributing to the creation of EGLF. Without such an argument, native Anglophones are free to benefit from the impressive by-product of the decisions to learn English of all those interested to improve their social and economic prospects: a global lingua franca.     

Costly,Regressive, and Ineffective: How Sensitive Is Public Support for the Mortgage Interest Deduction in the United States?

ABSTRACT

Although the mortgage interest deduction enjoys broad public support, critics argue that the policy disproportionately benefits wealthy households, fails to expand homeownership opportunities to households on the margins, and costs the federal government an extraordinary amount of money in foregone tax revenue. Drawing on data collected through an online experiment, this analysis tests the sensitivity of public support to these critiques. The findings reveal that support for the mortgage interest deduction declines when respondents are presented with information about the cost, effectiveness, or distribution of benefits associated with the deduction. Support among renters is more sensitive to framing effects than that among homeowners. Republicans are less sensitive to framing effects than Democrats when the deduction is framed as distributing benefits unequally, but more sensitive to these effects when the issue is framed as costly. However, all groups register their lowest level of support when told that the mortgage interest deduction is not an effective tool for expanding ownership opportunities.     

The Push and Pull of Ministerial Resignations in Germany, 1969–2005

When and why are cabinet ministers forced out of office? We argue that ministerial resignations cannot be understood as mechanistic consequences of serious personal or departmental errors as the classical responsibility hypothesis implies. Rather, they follow a systematic political logic. Cabinet ministers have to resign whenever the prime minister perceives the political costs of a minister staying in office to be higher than the benefits of keeping the status quo. We test this argument with resignation events in Germany in the period 1969 to 2005. Based on detailed data collection, we find 111 resignation events, i.e. serious public discussions about a cabinet minister's future, 14 of which ended in resignation. These data are analysed employing statistical as well as Qualitative Comparative Analysis based on Boolean algebra to detect patterns of ministerial resignations.     

The effect of legislature size on public spending: evidence from a regression discontinuity design

What is the effect of legislature size on public spending? An answer to this question is provided by Weingast et al. (J Polit Econ 89(4):642–664, 1981), whose “law of 1/n” posits that an increase in the number of elected representatives always leads to an increase in public spending. Because elected politicians regard the tax base as a common pool from which they can finance specific projects for their constituencies, and these specific constituencies internalize the full benefits of the projects, but only bear a fraction of the costs (projects are financed from the common tax base), fiscal inefficiency will increase with the number of representatives. In this paper, I test the validity of the “law of 1/n” using a dataset of 9325 German municipalities between 2008 and 2010. Through the application of a regression discontinuity design, many of the methodological pitfalls of previous studies can be avoided and a valid estimation of the causal effect of legislature size on public spending for German municipalities can be determined. The results do not corroborate the positive findings of previous studies, which generally supported the implications of the “law of 1/n”. For the years 2008–2010, I find a negative effect of legislature size on public spending in German municipal councils.