Public Pensions and Collective Bargaining Rights: Evidence from State and Local Governments

An aging workforce and increasing retirement benefits are ongoing problems for states and municipalities. Unions are often blamed for governments offering too generous pension benefits. This contributes to budgetary pressures in some state and municipal governments. This article analyzes the impact of collective bargaining on pension benefit generosity under different economic conditions. The study finds that the impact of collective bargaining on pension benefits is not consistent over time or across pension plans. Collective bargaining has a positive effect on pension benefits under worsening economic conditions. Additionally, unions indirectly influence pension benefit generosity through campaign donations and unionization intensity. The findings suggest mixed impacts of collective bargaining on different groups of public employees regarding pension contributions. The article concludes with implications for the role of unions in public financial performance and strategic human resource management during fiscal austerity.     

The Role of Government in Collective Bargaining: Scandinavia and the Low Countries

This article compares the role of government in collective bargaining in five small West European countries. For the period until the second half of the 1970s, a distinction is made between countries in which government often interfered in wage bargaining, e. g. Denmark and The Netherlands, and countries in which government refrained from intervention, like Sweden. Belgium and, to a lesser degree, Norway. In all countries the tradition of (non)-intervention had already started before the Second World War. The article reviews some explanatory variables: in Scandinavia centralization of labour relations is crucial, in the Low Countries the nature of political verzuiling . Recent developments show that government intervention has become a characteristic of labour relations in all but one country.     

Public Opinion and Collective Obligations

This article attempts to identify the general principles that underlie public reasoning about collective obligations and that help explain when political parties can create new obligations or defend existing ones. I use these principles to President Clinton’s unsuccessful attempt to create government health-care plan and attempts by President Bush to privatize Social Security. The success of a party in selling – or defeating – an obligation depends upon what people believe about the competence and capacity of government and the value of autonomy – choices made by each citizen; whether people perceive the obligation as providing floors or establishing ceilings by limiting choice or otherwise restricting opportunities for the better-off; and whether the program is more like insurance or more like welfare. A party’s ability to maintain credibility with voters also depends upon whether party leaders can suppress issues that threaten intra-party elite pacts. When attempts to suppress “taboo” issues like “stem cells” or “black crime” fail, the party loses credibility with its voters and attempts to defend or sell obligations fail.

Collective Bargaining during Times of Crisis: Recommendations from the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically changed employment across sectors in 2020. This Viewpoint essay examines public sector labor relations during the pandemic and describes the impact bargaining process that is used to protect public employees. The authors draw on their own experience with impact bargaining negotiations and the public labor relations, conflict management, and civil service reform literatures to develop recommendations for public union labor leaders during times of crisis. They suggest that public unions have an important role in crisis management but must act strategically to develop good working relationships with leadership and successfully negotiate employee protections in uncertain times.     

New Public Management and ‘Photocopy’ Bargaining in the Australian Public Service

The industrial relations policy of the Federal Coalition Government is to encourage industrial bargaining to occur at the enterprise or individual level, free from ‘outside’ influences. While it encourages devolved bargaining at the agency and individual level within the Public Service (Australian Public Service) this policy creates tensions with its role as a centralized policy maker, economic manager and employer of the APS workforce. It also conflicts with the APS' adoption of New Public Management. In practice, the government retains considerable centralised control over agency bargaining outcomes, which is a de facto method of pattern bargaining. By analysing the substantive outcomes from nine APS agency level certified agreements (hours of work, pay and leave entitlements), the article discusses whether this one size fits all' model is evidence of an appreciation that public sector industrial relations is separate and distinct from private sector industrial relations, or another example of duplicity in the federal coalition government's ideology driven approach to industrial relations.     

Sinking Swann: Public School Choice and the Resegregation of Charlotte's Public Schools

Public school choice is a widely used tool for education reform and may be a way to improve school accountability and efficiency. This article examines what happened to student outcomes when Charlotte‐Mecklenburg Schools, a large and diverse urban school district located in North Carolina, changed its assignment policy to one of open enrollment with mandatory choice. The previous policy used a broad array of magnet schools and a limited amount of mandatory busing to achieve desegregation. The new policy required that all students choose a school, and it specifically avoided using race or ethnicity considerations in assigning students. The article examines the impacts of the new policy on the end‐of‐grade standardized tests in reading and math. The article uses regression analysis to discover whether the scores of various groups of students increased or decreased after the policy change. The analysis suggests that the “race‐neutral” assignment policy was neither neutral in the opportunity it provided students to attend their school of choice nor in its academic outcomes. Anglo students were more likely to receive their first choice of schools and to improve their scores. African American students were less likely to receive their first choice school and their scores declined.     

When Government Subsidizes Its Own: Collective Bargaining Laws as Agents of Political Mobilization

Government policies can activate a political constituency not only by providing material resources to, or altering the interpretive experiences of, individual citizens, but also by directly subsidizing established interest groups. We argue that state laws mandating collective bargaining for public employees provided organizational subsidies to public sector labor unions that lowered the costs of mobilizing their members to political action. Exploiting variation in the timing of laws across the states and using data on the political participation of public school teachers from 1956 to 2004, we find that the enactment of a mandatory bargaining law significantly boosted subsequent political participation among teachers. We also identify increased contact from organized groups seeking to mobilize teachers as a likely mechanism that explains this finding. These results have important implications for the current debate over collective bargaining rights and for our understanding of policy feedback, political parties and interest groups, and the bureaucracy.     

The Influence of High Schools on Developing Public Service Motivation

ABSTRACT: Despite the theoretical importance of public service motivation (PSM) for the public sector, little is known about the malleability and causal determinants of PSM. Formal schooling is one possible determinant of PSM. Using longitudinal data, this study analyzes the effects of civics courses and school-based community service in high school on PSM-related values. A propensity score matching strategy that compares observationally similar individuals finds that participation in school-based service activities for credit increases students’ reported prosocial values, such as helping others in the community, one underlying component of PSM-related values. However, taking a civics course does not affect PSM or associated values. The results suggest that PSM-related values are malleable and responsive to early service experiences. The values underlying PSM may evolve over time. That is, the development of prosocial values in adolescence may lead to the future development of other values important to PSM.     

The Literary Interview as Public Performance

The interview is a genre “coming of age,” maturing into a serious art form. This essay presents a typology for understanding this growth and how diverse patterns of literary performance have contributed to it. Five types of interviewees are discussed at length: traditionalist, raconteur, advertiser, provocateur, and prevaricator. Some speculations about national and cultural types of interviewees are also broached.     

The Public Nature of Personal Opinion: The Impact of Collective Sentiment on Individual Appraisal

This paper examines the impact of the public on individual opinion. Employing survey-based experiments, I demonstrate public influence to be considerable, yet the magnitude, direction, and significance of effect depends critically on the target of public sentiment and the political predispositions of the perceiver. A theoretical model is developed to delineate and examine such effects, guiding the analyses throughout. Central to this framework is the interplay between opinion context and individual, reflecting the often fluid and complex relationship between aggregate and individual judgment. The specific findings that representations of public opinion can alter the distribution of opinion through assimilation, contrast, or reinforcement are emphasized and given context within the voting and public opinion literature.     

Political Culture and Corporal Punishment in Public Schools

The use of corporal punishment in public elementary and secondaryschools was found to correlate with Sharkansky's political cultureindex. This is true not only for the simple correlation forwhich Pearson's r = 0.749 but also for correlations obtainedafter controlling for region.     

Collective Leadership and Context in Public Administration: Bridging Public Leadership Research and Leadership Studies

This article challenges the view that public leadership research should maintain a separate perspective in the study of public leadership. It discusses the benefits of further embedding the public leadership research domain within leadership studies, constructing a cross‐fertilization that contributes to advance both. The article maps key concerns in relational leadership theories, contrasting them with current work in the public leadership research domain and offering suggestions to close the gap. It highlights public leadership scholarship's competitive advantage to contribute to theorizing about leadership, given the importance of context for building contemporary theories of relational leadership.     

Participation, Fragmentation and Union Response: The 1998–2000 ACT Public Sector Bargaining Round and the Workplace Relations Act

The current Australian Capital Territory (ACT) public sector workplace bargaining round lasted more than two years with most agreements involving a trade-off between low wage outcomes and protection of job security within performance improvement measures. The main focus of this paper is on government and agency experiments with bargaining structures and processes. The first was a limited and largely unsuccessful attempt in 1998 and 1999 at participative agreement making without the involvement of the key unions. The second, a selective decentralisation of bargaining to parts of a single business, was more successful: of 50 agreements, over 40 have been achieved. The procedural success of the decentralisation strategy is a significant outcome. However, the fragmentation strategy contained internal contradictions and required strong centralised policy control of bargaining agendas and outcomes, leading to delays and breeding distrust. Unions conducted effective defensive campaigns against non-union agreements and involuntary redundancies, but face their own dilemmas in finalising this round and preparing for the next.     

Rhetoric and Action in Regulating the Public Schools in Norway and Sweden

In the past few decades, Norway and Sweden, like the rest of the Western world, have attempted to restructure and deregulate education. In both countries, the established governing models were threatened due to lack of legitimacy and efficiency. This article discusses the extent to which the different explanations of stability and institutional change address what happened when Management by Objectives and Results (MbOR) was introduced in Norway and Sweden. However, both the content and the course of change were different in the two countries. More specifically, one can talk about processes combining lock‐in mechanism and layering in the Norwegian course of development. In Sweden, the process of change was characterized by sudden and radical decisions. A decision made in 1991 could be explained as a state of punctuated equilibrium, as strong forces produced a situation where nothing else was to be done except make a radical change, turning the centralized system into a decentralized one. The period has parallels to the concept of ‘critical juncture’, representing a moment of openness to and possibility for different and new actors to influence a new constitution. In Norway, the transformation of policy tools for education purposes has thus far dominated the process and direction of change. In Sweden, through processes of conversion, the policy tool has gained a more dominating influence over education policy. Accordingly, there was a stronger emphasis on MbOR in its original version in Sweden than in Norway, which has transformed and defined the concept in line with educational purposes. This article outlines two cases of institutional change that combine elements of lock in with new developments. In neither Norway nor Sweden was the development pushed further in the same trajectory, rather it was transformed and, in the case of Sweden, radically changed within a larger nationally specific framework of sequence of events, values, norms and traditions of policy making.     

Bargaining and voting

Government by majority rule voting is a mixture of voting and bargaining. Bargaining among people with moderately different objectives is indispensable for the passage of laws and the formation of public policy. Little of the nation’s business could be transacted without an ability on the part of the legislators and members of political parties to strike bargains, but that same ability to strike bargains makes possible the exploitation of minorities by majorities which, beyond some limit, destroys democratic government. Rules and customs are designed to foster bargaining in the one context and to thwart bargaining in the other.     

Collective Action,Civil Society,and Public Policy in Turkey

Abstract

Understanding policy change mechanisms has been a key question for scholars of public policy and collective action. However, policy scholarship mostly ignores civil society-based explanations of policy processes. In order to address this gap, this study combines the Advocacy Coalition Framework with networked collective action perspectives and analyzes a successful case of mobilization of women’s rights organizations in Turkey to reverse a bill on child marriage. Study findings suggest that advocacy coalitions are not static entities. When different issues in a policy subsystem are invoked, the structure of inter-coalition networks can change substantially and these variations in inter-coalition interactions may have consequences for influencing policy change. Moreover, this paper argues that extensive street protests and online campaigns by civil society organizations have the capacity to boost the bargaining power of minority coalitions, especially in contexts that lack multiple formal venues for making policy claims.     

The Public Eye and the Citizen-Voyeur: Photography as a Performance of Power

This paper argues that photography is best grasped not as a medium of visual communication, but as a manifest performance of the power to make visible. As such, photographic practices are central to the experience and demarcation of private/public boundaries in advanced media cultures. In the private domain, photography is both a ritualized domestic activity and provides conventional and definitive representations of the domestic. These functions are ostensibly opposed to photography's role in the public realm: the same visual technology becomes, in the mass media, both the index and agent of publicness itself, with the paparazzi?especially in the aftermath of Princess Diana's death?symbolizing the violation of the private. The paper explores the ways in which photographic performance at the public/private boundary dramatizes power relations through forms of social transparency, voyeurism and memoralization. It also asks whether momentary crises in the dominant scopic regime can provide the basis for alternative ‘uncanny’ visual practices that are tenable and empowering.