Local Government and Welfare Generosity: Municipality Spending on Social Welfare

Although it is difficult for local governments to give support for social welfare recipients top political priority, there are huge variations in the support recipients actually receive among Norwegian municipalities. However, local governments representing different party ideologies may prefer to support different dimensions of generosity. Some municipalities could have a liberal attitude to eligibility rules but be strict on time limits and the amount of money provided. Others may be generous regarding time limits or amounts received once one is accepted as a welfare client. Data from the mid 1990s indicate the variation in support is related to different generosity dimensions for different party groups. While the total number of clients seems unrelated to politics and basically correlates with local social problems, the duration and amount of support are related to the political composition of the municipality assembly. Devoid of any large variation, both time limits and the amount of support increase in accordance with socialist leanings, and the total budget used for social welfare support also increases with the proportion of women in the municipality assembly.     

Social Equity and Evidence: Insights from Local Government

This article examines the role of evidence‐based decision making in social equity, with a particular focus on local government. It offers an assessment of the past, present, and future of such efforts by engaging themes from Matias Valenzuela's article based on King County, Washington. King County is one of more than 70 local governments that are members of the Government Alliance on Race and Equity, a growing national network of governments using an evidence‐based approach to achieve racial equity. In general, previous social equity measures have focused largely on measuring the extent to which disparities exist. More recently, tools and resources have become available to assist local governments in designing and evaluating their approach and performance in reducing social inequities. Future evidence should include more standardized measures to benchmark success, provide comparative analysis, and better support the identification of best practices.     

论社会资本如何提高政府绩效

提高政府绩效是政府的重要目标之一,社会资本作为一种具有巨大潜在功能的生产性社会资源,在政府绩效的提高中扮演着重要角色。文章在对社会资本及政府绩效的概念进行界定的基础上,从五个方面对社会资本对政府绩效的作用进行了分析。     

How Violence Breeds Violence: Some Utilitarian Considerations

Recent philosophical writing about war has focused upon just war theory, especially how best to construe the ius ad bellum and ius in bello tenets, and whether the distinction between combatants and non-combatants can be made in the modern world. Historically and politically, calls to war have often appealed to utilitarian considerations. In this article, I discuss important long-range consequences rarely mentioned in utilitarian defences of particular decisions to engage states in war. When consequences are weighed fully not only in the short term but with an eye to the future, bearing the destiny of all people in mind, it emerges that belligerent approaches to international conflict resolution will not maximise utility.     

Land Reform and Civil Conflict: Theory and Evidence from Peru

How does land reform impact civil conflict? This article examines this question in the prominent case of Peru by leveraging original data on all land expropriations under military rule from 1969 to 1980 and event-level data from the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission on rural killings during Peru's internal conflict from 1980 to 2000. Using a geographic regression discontinuity design that takes advantage of Peru's regional approach to land reform through zones that did not entirely map onto major preexisting administrative boundaries, I find that greater land reform dampened subsequent conflict. Districts in core areas of land reform zones that received intense land reform witnessed less conflict relative to comparable districts in adjacent peripheral areas where less land reform occurred. Further tests suggest that land reform mitigated conflict by facilitating counterinsurgency and intelligence gathering, building local organizational capacity later used to deter violence, undercutting the Marxist left, and increasing opportunity costs to supporting armed groups.     

Overestimating the Shift from Government to Governance: Evidence from Swiss Metropolitan Areas

There is an oft‐stated claim in political science research that public sector reforms in Western democracies are consistent with a shift from government to governance. This article challenges that claim. Based on a comparative analysis of governance reforms in Swiss metropolitan areas, the article reveals that what seems to be a shift to governance may turn out to be a path to government, however, including a change either from the local to the metropolitan level or from general‐purpose authorities to task‐specific jurisdictions. Further, the article analyzes the political dynamics behind governance reforms. It shows that exogenous pressures put existing governance schemes under strain. Its impact, however, is mediated by the initial institutional setting and the narratives responding to case‐specific political dilemmas.     

Multiple Dimensions of Bureaucratic Discrimination: Evidence from German Welfare Offices

A growing experimental literature uses response rates to fictional requests to measure discrimination against ethnic minorities. This article argues that restricting attention to response rates can lead to faulty inferences about substantive discrimination depending on how response dummies are correlated with other response characteristics. We illustrate the relevance of this problem by means of a conjoint experiment among all German welfare offices, in which we randomly varied five traits and designed requests to allow for a substantive coding of response quality. We find that response rates are statistically indistinguishable across treatment conditions. However, putative non‐Germans receive responses of significantly lower quality, potentially deterring them from applying for benefits. We also find observational evidence suggesting that discrimination is more pronounced in welfare offices run by local governments than in those embedded in the national bureaucracy. We discuss implications for the study of equality in the public sphere.     

Government Size and Unemployment: Evidence from Industrial Countries

Using data from 19 industrial countries for the period 1985 to 2002, this paper analyzes how the size of the government sector affects unemployment. Controlling for the impact of the business cycle as well as for the impact of all major labor market institutions and unobserved country effects, we find that a large government sector is likely to increase unemployment. It appears to have a particularly detrimental effect on women and the low skilled and to substantially increase long-term unemployment. It seems that dominant stateowned enterprises, a large share of public investment in total investment as well as high top marginal income tax rates and low income threshold levels at which they apply are particularly detrimental.     

Deciding to Provide: Local Decisions on Providing Social Welfare

Fiscal federalism predicts local governments will avoid social welfare expenditures, owing to capital mobility across local jurisdictions. Yet Census of Governments data consistently show that many local governments provide one or more social welfare functions, and moreover many jurisdictions provide these functions without federal or state intergovernmental support. This article finds evidence that, while local expenditures are largely driven by fiscal capacity and federal and state assistance, local decisions on providing social welfare functions and participating in intergovernmental revenues are primarily affected by degree of capital mobility and by local political factors. Consequently, local governments exercise much greater autonomy over social welfare policymaking than fiscal federalism suggests.     

Social Policy and Social Citizenship: Britain's Welfare States

In Britain the imagery and rhetoric of the postwar welfare stateremain powerful—citizens should have equal access to publicservices based on need not place of residence. Devolution issometimes depicted as a threat to this tradition. This articleshows that the immediate risk of a social policy race to thebottom is small. Moreover, because of the peculiarities of Britishterritorial politics the traditional imagery was never borneout in practice; the article traces policy variation beforeand after devolution. Finally, locating British social policywithin the comparative framework of "nationalization" and "citizenship,"I argue that Britain lost its status as an exemplary welfarestate partly because it failed to provide an adequate territorialframework for the development of social policy.     

Government Promotion of Corporate Social Responsibility: Evidence from the EU Eco‐Management and Audit Scheme

Governments play an active role in promoting corporate social responsibility and specifically environmental management system (EMS) programs, but few studies have examined the impact of such support on the decision of businesses to adopt EMS programs. We ask two questions in this paper: how does government support for EMS programs affect adoption of such programs? Second, what effect does this government support have on the pace of adoption of such programs? The answer to the first question can reveal how effective government programs are in boosting membership in EMS programs. The answer to the second reveals to what extent businesses within EU member states are converging upon particular EMS standards. We examine these questions in the context of the European Union’s Eco‐Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS), 2010–2014. There is significant variation in government support of EMAS across the EU and at the same time, EMAS competes for business attention with the more established ISO 14001. Our quantitative and qualitative analyses therefore reveal the effectiveness of government programs in boosting adoption, but also to the extent to which such programs cause convergence upon EMAS in the face of a competing standard such as ISO 14001.     

政府诚信的解读——以社会资本为视角

政府诚信是社会诚信的主心骨,在社会稳定和发展中起着重要的支撑作用。政府诚信作为一种社会资本,它是一种无形资产,具有可累积性、自行增值性和规模效应性。因此,有必要将政府诚信视为一种产出,从生产函数的角度深入了解如何建设和维护这两个生产要素来构建政府诚信。     

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.     

Jennifer Pan,Welfare for Autocrats: How Social Assistance in China Cares for its Rulers

Journal of Chinese Political Science -     

如何建设效率政府

建设效率政府,除了要建立公共管理的绩效管理制度,促进政府管理绩效的提高之外,还必须采取具体对策与措施提高政府行政效率。     

Listening to the Government: How Information Shapes Responsibility Attributions

Assigning credit and blame in systems of multilevel government, such as federal states, requires information. This paper examines how voters respond to information about policy outcomes when attributing responsibility to multiple levels of government in a European context. Using an experimental design, we show that the responsibility attributions of British voters are affected by perceptual biases, notably their feelings about the government and the European Union (EU). But interestingly, we also find that voters, regardless of their predispositions, are only responsive to information they receive from their national government, whereas they ignore information provided by EU officials. These findings have implications not only for our understanding of attribution in systems of multiple levels of government, but also for how voters use information selectively depending on the credibility of the source.     

降低政府运行成本的对策探讨

政府机构为了维持正常运转在一定时期内付出的费用称为政府运行成本。目前政府运行成本过高的问题很突出,严重影响政府形象,必须按照十六大要求,转变政府职能,改进管理方式,推行电子政务,提高行政效率,降低运行成本。