Madison on the Meaning of the "General Welfare," the "Purpose" of Enumerated Powers, and the "Definition" of Constitutional Government

According to James Madison, "the most important and fundamentalquestion" he ever addressed was the meaning of and relationbetween the general welfare clause and the enumeration of particularpowers. This question is the most "fundamental" because theanswer determines the very "idea" or "nature" of the U.S. Constitution.Commentators virtually agree on the answer Madison proposedand defended in Federalist 41, namely, that the general welfareclause is neither a statement of ends nor a substantive grantof power. It is a mere "synonym" for the enumeration of particularpowers, which are limited and wholly define its content. Fromthis answer, it follows that the primary meaning of the nationaldimension of the federal Constitution is limited government,understood as a government with a limited number of powers ormeans. The thesis of this essay, however, is that, contraryto the commentators' claims, Madison argued that the clausewas a substantive grant of power for the generally stated endand that the primary purpose of the ensuing enumeration wasto define more particularly the ends alluded to by the phrase"general welfare." Hence, the meaning of the general constitutionalgovernment in the American federal system is a government orientedto a limited number of limited ends.     

Scotland's Future Political System

Debates on Scottish constitutional reform go hand in hand with discussions of political reform. Its reformers use the image of ‘old Westminster’ to describe ‘control freakery’ within government and an adversarial political system. Many thought that the Scottish political system could diverge from the UK, to strengthen the parliamentary system, introduce consensus politics and further Scotland's alleged social and democratic tradition. Yet the experience of devolution suggests that Holyrood and Westminster politics share key features. Both systems are driven by government, making policy in ‘communities’ involving interest groups and governing bodies, with parliaments performing a limited role and public participation limited largely to elections. The Scottish government's style of policy‐making is distinctive, but new reforms are in their infancy and their effects have not been examined in depth. In this context, the article identifies Scotland's ability to make and implement policy in a new way, based on its current trajectory rather than the hopes of reformers.     

Restructuring non‐metropolitan local government in South Africa

South Africa's first local government elections held in November 1995 and June 1996 cemented the transition from apartheid to democratic local government. The focus at that time was on the deracialization and democratization of local governance, which was successfully achieved. Local government since then, however, has failed to fulfil its mandate as the delivery arm of government, nor has the hoped‐for rapid transformation of the local sphere of government materialized. In seeking an explanation for this perceived inadequacy, attention has tended to focus on the limited financial and administrative capacity of newly elected councillors and council staff. Although the lack of capacity does present a barrier to the achievement of effective local government, the constraints municipalities encounter in their geographic composition and administrative formation provide the structural dimension of municipal constraint. The White Paper on Local Government published in March 1998 seeks to address these structural constraints and, through an ambitious legislative process, chart a path to ‘developmental’ local government. This article identifies the constraints experienced by non‐metropolitan municipalities and analyses the likely impact of the government's restructuring programme for the achievement of viable and sustainable local government in South Africa. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The 2019 Greek parliamentary election: retour à la normale

Abstract

The July 2019 parliamentary election was the first national election since Greece officially exited the eight-year bailout programmes in August 2018. It was preceded by three ballots on European Parliament, regional and municipal elections in May 2019, which served as a decompression valve for the electorate to punish the incumbent government and indicate a clear will for governmental change, since the conservative party ND won by a landslide. Whereas ND’s victory in the parliamentary election was anticipated, it was its scale that would define the shape of the new government. Increasing its score by 11.76 points since September 2015, ND won 39.85% of the vote, securing a comfortable majority of 158 out of 300 seats. This is the first majority government in Greece since 2011, marking the return of the country to a new normality. Even if SYRIZA failed to deliver the anti-bailout programme which had initially brought the party to the centre of electoral competition, it still gathered 31.53% of the vote, losing just 3.93 points since its last victory in 2015, hence securing its place as one of the two key actors in the new two-partyism. Party fragmentation was limited to six parliamentary parties instead of eight, with the neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn, having lost its parliamentary representation.     

Privatisation in France 1993–94: New departures,or a case of plus ça change?

The present article focuses on the privatisation programme currently being implemented in France. It seeks to isolate the principal ways in which this programme differs from its predecessor of 1986–88, and to consider its likely impact on the French corporate landscape. This study finds the latest round of privatisations to be budget‐driven and ideologically spent, as the convergence criteria for economic and monetary union specified by the Maastricht Treaty become top government priorities in the countdown to 1997 (or 1999). The interest the programme has generated is almost entirely restricted to which purposes are to be served (and which are not) by its receipts. Those who look to it for new departures may well be disappointed: all the signs are that dirigisme is alive and well in France, with establishment solidarity representing as powerful a force in French capitalism as it ever did.     

The Prime Minister's Office in France: A Changing Role in a Semi-presidential System

In France since 1958, it is possible to identify three different types of political leadership: pure presidential government, limited presidential government, and prime ministerial government. These three leadership types are the result of the semi-presidential nature of the Fifth Republic. Under each of the three different forms of leadership, the role of the prime minister's office has changed. Following a brief presentation of the functions of the two components of the prime minister's office, his cabinet and the General Secretariat of the Government, the changes which the office has undergone are identified. While the role of both of the components of the office varied according to the different types of political leadership, it is concluded that, because of its distinctive structure and functions, the role of prime minister's cabinet has been subject to the greatest amount of variation.     

REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN QUEENSLAND

In 1974–75 the Queensland Government will spend approximately $1 million on the co-ordination of activities directed towards development of the State. Each year the Co-ordinator-General is required by the government to furnish to the Minister—in this case the Premier—a plan for a co-ordinated programme of works, which programme, if approved by 'the Minister, is submitted for approval to the Governor in Council. This programme includes not only those works carried out by government departments but also the loan works proposals of local authorities and semi-government bodies such as Harbour Boards, River Improvement Trusts and Abattoir Boards which borrow on the debenture loan market or are granted Treasury loans.     

Special Issue on electronic media,markets and civil society in East and Southeast Asia: Introduction

Abstract

The government of Hong Kong has been trying to reform the territory's health care financing system since the early 1990s and is finally on the verge of succeeding. The objective of this paper is to assess the reform efforts and explain the causes of repeated failures and eventual success. It will argue that the government's fortunes changed only after it abandoned the core reform goal and decided to pursue peripheral objectives. It will explain the abandonment with reference to the peculiar political system in Hong Kong that makes it difficult for the government to adopt substantial policy reforms in the face of even moderate opposition. The reason for the government's policy incapacity is the existence of liberalism in a non-democratic setting, which allows the government to neither suppress opposition nor mobilize popular support. This has been illustratively evident in its health care reforms when its proposals to improve the system's fiscal sustainability invariably met an early death because they imposed costs on employers, the population or both. The current proposal has fared better not only because it addresses a simpler peripheral problem but also because it offends almost no one and pleases many among the powerful.     

Major Players: Bureaucracies In American Government

For more than 50 years, Herbert Kaufman has been an astute observer of public bureaucracies. In this essay, Kaufman draws on his extensive experience in explaining the role of public bureaucracies in the American political system. Kaufman was motivated to write the essay because of his concern that public bureaucracies are not given adequate attention in American government textbooks. We hope that PAR readers will use the essay to educate students and others about the important role of public bureaucracies in American government.—LDT     

COMRADES OR CULPRITS? DONOR ENGAGEMENT AND BUDGET TRANSPARENCY IN AID‐DEPENDENT COUNTRIES

Budget transparency has come to be considered a key aspect of governance. Over the past decade, donors have invested increasing resources in strengthening processes through which budget transparency in developing countries can be enhanced. According to the 2008 Open Budget Index (OBI) Report, however, aid dependency and budget transparency appear to be inversely correlated. This article looks at the role of donor agencies in promoting or preventing budget transparency in aid‐dependent countries. It looks at significant correlations across the whole sample of 84 countries covered in the 2008 OBI, and analyzes more specific data for a sub‐sample of 16 aid‐dependent countries, before selecting six countries for which more detailed findings are then presented. All of these countries have implemented reforms aimed at enhancing budget transparency, with substantial donor support. These, however, often had only limited success, partly because they were not well adapted to the local context, and partly because donors put limited emphasis on improving public access to budget information. Donor efforts were also often offset by other characteristics of donor interventions, namely their fragmentation, lack of transparency, and limited use of programme aid modalities such as budget support and pooled sector funding. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Building horizontal coordination in Sri Lanka

Horizontal coordination is a focal topic in contemporary public management. However, greater attention has been given to developed states while developing countries struggle to improve the quality of public service delivery amidst skills shortages and siloed organisations. This article presents a foreign‐funded training programme designed to promote horizontal coordination at the most local level of government in a developing country, Sri Lanka, and analyses the factors that contributed to its success. Using data collected through participant surveys, focus groups, and programme‐related projects, the article shows how the formation of a “locally directed, donor‐supported” programme aligned with national development priorities that enabled the country‐level partner institution to deliver a programme that improved horizontal coordination and enhanced delivery of public services. Although findings confirm the importance of contextualising programme design, content, and delivery for achieving aid effectiveness, a novel conclusion was that the participation of elected officials alongside career public servants greatly contributed to the programme's success by creating new levels of trust and facilitating more productive working relationships between key stakeholders, culminating in improved outcomes for local communities. This suggests that elected officials can play a key role in building horizontal coordination in developing nations.     

Constitutional,legal and political problems of local government in Nigeria

The new Nigerian local government system was clearly intended by its creators to be a representative and democractic system of devolution. The speed with which elected councils have been dissolved and replaced by caretaker committees and state appointees contrasts strangely with the constitutional provision that there should be a system of local government by democratically elected local councils. The constitutionality of dissolution has been confused with the constitutionality of further local government reform. Dissolution should be seen as an emergency measure to be used rarely in cases of proven maladministration by a local government. Further reform and reorganization of a state's system of local government should be regarded as a legitimate power of the state legislature. The role given by the Constitution to local government should not be interpreted as entrenching the system. Constitutional amendment is not required should further reform be necessary.     

走向服务政府:洛克有限政府理论及其启示

随着国家治理现代化建设的推进,我国政府治理模式经历了管理型政府向服务型政府的转变.洛克有限政府理论在保护公民权利、实现政治国家与市民社会互动等方面具有积极的现实意义,但有限政府不一定等同于服务政府,在面对不同时期、不同国情下的市场失灵问题以及权衡德治与法治、自由与平等、作为与不作为等现实问题时,有限政府理论具有自身的局限性.而服务型政府必然是一个有限政府,洛克所提出的自然权利、社会契约以及权利让渡所构成的有限政府理论,对于新时代构建服务政府仍然有很强的借鉴意义.     

Indigenous governance

The governmentality literature's focus on mentalities of rule, and its aversion to sociological analysis, tends to produce a programmatic vision of governance. From this perspective, politics appears primarily as a mentality of rule, and resistance appears primarily as a negative – as a source of programme failure. This paper explores aspects of Australian policies of self-determination for Aboriginal peoples, in order to examine ways in which resistance (in the form of indigenous governance) plays a constitutive role in the formation of rule. Government and resistance articulate, mingle and hybridize, so that resistance cannot readily be thought of as external to rule. In this way, liberalism's governmental relations with resisstance are characterized by incorporation of resistant, ‘indigenous’, governances. In turn, this is a source of its innovativeness and flexibility, becoming part of its strategy of government at a distance. However, this incorporation creates tensions and contradictions within the liberal project itself, instabilities which cannot be reduced to the status of external sources of programme failure.     

Is the state social or the computer inhuman? Claims for state support and citizenship in post-socialist Georgia

In the discussions of citizenship in post-socialist Georgia, the topic of social entitlements predominates. Soviet social citizenship, which granted the full range of social rights, significantly shaped the people's current expectations of social rights in Georgia. In order to address the external and internal pressure for poverty alleviation, the Georgian government started reforming the social support system of the country. The cornerstone of Georgia's current social policy is a new social assistance programme, the main principle of which is to provide social benefits to the poorest families as identified by an evaluation system. This paper explores the enactment of the ‘targeted social assistance’ (TSA) programme in a village in north-western Georgia. By participating in the TSA programme, Georgian citizens exercise social citizenship as a practice of bargaining for universal social rights that at present are not achievable for all as the state provides social security only to extremely needy families. The category of social citizenship described by T.H. Marshall helps us to understand the claims of Georgian citizens for state support. The discrepancy between social security and social citizenship causes people to misunderstand the goals of the TSA programme and this ultimately leads to dissatisfaction among Georgia's citizenry.     

Rebuilding Ukraine's hollow State: Developing a democratic public service in Ukraine

This article describes assistance that is being provided as part of an institution building project with a view to making a lasting impact on the development of a democratic public service of Ukraine. It explains the nature of the project and the strategies adopted to overcome difficulties. It compares and contrasts approaches adopted by technical assistance projects in assisting administrative reform. It also examines the special nature of the Ukraine project that arises out of the distinctive context and needs of Ukraine. The article continues by examining the role of external assistance in validating the Ukrainian Institute of Public Administration and Local Government's Masters in Public Administration and the contribution made to the development and delivery of the Masters programme. A special feature of the project is the series of one-month internships when IPALG students visit London. The internship programme allows students to identify aspects of UK experience relevant to changes that Ukraine wishes to make in its administrative culture. As part of this programme, students are placed in government organizations and NGOs. The placements are complemented by a series of change management seminars that enable students to evaluate options for change, to assess their own role in the change process and recognize the key stages in the change process. The project team has undertaken a full evaluation of the first presentation of the programme and the article presents the findings.     

Who benefits from demand‐driven distribution of HIV/AIDS services? An analysis of the emerging CBO sector in Malawi

Community‐based organisations (CBOs) play a key role in Malawi's multi‐sector programme for responding to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. In this programme they are funded in a demand‐driven manner—which means that only those areas that apply for funds to CBO services are blessed with programme benefits. This paper argues that this funding mechanism is not conducive to either distributing CBO services to areas most in need or enhancing downward accountability. Because areas most in need of services generally also lacked the capacity to attract project funding, the programme did not reach them. Instead, it tended to reach those areas with the greatest capacity to attract funding, though not necessarily the greatest need for it. Furthermore, those CBOs that were funded were unable to facilitate collective action in their communities because of elite capture of decision making. The programme, however, was relatively responsive to the communities' thematic demands. Thus, all in all, the elites were relatively more successful in representing the communities' wishes than in caring for all geographical areas in their constituencies. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The impact of governance on education inequality: Evidence from Bangladesh

Bangladesh has made remarkable progress in increasing education access in the last 20 years. However, substantial inequalities in educational attainment remain even though equity in education is a central government objective. The article argues that weaknesses in education sector governance are crucial to understanding these persistent inequalities. At the level of the budget, anti‐poor biases in allocation decisions are shown to be the result of the budget's role in political management and the lack of effective accountability mechanisms. The spearhead of government attempts to address education inequality at the primary level has been the conditional cash transfer programme for poor children. The article shows that the programme has failed to target the poor and suggests that this has been due to the weaknesses and contradictions in the governance of the programme. Strengthening the links between policy and implementation through improvements in the governance of the sector are crucial if inequality is to be addressed and national education goals achieved. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Policy reform and rural development assistance in Tanzania

Tanzania for a long time refused to reform its economic policies along the lines recommended by the World Bank and IMF. Eventually the foreign exchange crisis forced the government to make the changes advocated by its own pragmatic economists and the Western donor community. The reforms were necessary, but not a panacea for all the problems which had plagued rural development programmes over the past decade. Three big problems still face basic-needs programmes: the government administration has very little capacity to manage or back up programmes; neither the national nor district governments can afford them; and rural residents have not compensated for either of these deficiencies through their own participation and contributions. This article looks at two basic-needs programmes in the rural water supply sector to illustrate how these long-standing problems continue to affect implementation. Both programmes are funded and implemented by donors. The conclusion is that donors have not been sufficiently self-conscious and innovative in grappling with the more intractable problems facing rural programme assistance in Tanzania.     

The National Interest and the Federal Role in Education

The current discussion of national goals for education createsa predicament for the federal government. Political pressureis mounting for an increased federal role in education, butits ability to play this role is limited both by its own budgetand policy constraints and by the increase in education policyinitiatives of state and local government over the past tenyears. This predicament is not amenable to solution by resortto traditional doctrinal or functional views of federalism.It requires the formulation of a new federal strategy. Amongthe initiatives the federal government might take are raisingpublic discourse about educational performance, sponsoring collaborativeefforts to reduce the incoherence of current educational reformsat the high school level, and increased use of federal categoricalprograms as development projects for new approaches to teachingand learning. These initiatives have the advantage of beingconsistent with current federal budget and policy constraints,drawing upon traditional federal functions, and complementingstate and local reform efforts.