Local and Regional Governance: Back to Basics

Local government has been transformed in Victoria — forceably amalgamated, stripped for a time of its democratic basis, required by law to embrace contracting out and greater private provision of services. This article describes this dramatic process, considers the implications and identifies a positive future for local and regional government.     

Back to Basics: The Great Recession and the Narrowing of IMF Policy Advice

This article contributes to the literature on the dynamics of change and continuity in the International Monetary Fund's (IMF's) policy paradigm. The IMF embarked on a process of “streamlining conditionality” during the 2000s, but many observers have argued that the IMF's policy paradigm from the 1990s remains intact. This article examines whether the scope of the IMF's policy advice to borrowers during the Great Recession narrowed in comparison to its advice to borrowers during the heyday of the Washington consensus in the 1980s and 1990s. The article uses qualitative content analysis to establish the frequency of a series of policy dialogue indicators in four sample sets of countries requesting IMF stand‐by arrangements over three decades. The evidence suggests that contemporary IMF policy advice to borrowers continues to stress the importance of fiscal consolidation, with reduced emphasis on promoting the structural economic reforms associated with the Washington consensus era.     

Outsourcing Public Health Laboratory Services: A Blueprint for Determining Whether to Privatize and How

In a continuing effort to reform and reinvent the way public organizations do business, the outsourcing of services has become a popular tool, particularly as resource constraints limit options available to governments. All too often, the decision is made, for reasons of ideology or resource constraints, to outsource services without giving careful consideration to the impact of privatization on the core missions of an agency, or whether privatization, in fact, offers real cost savings. Purchasing tools designed for traditional commodity purchases are often grossly unsuited for making decisions on specialized technical services.
This article suggests a process for the evaluation of an option to outsource laboratory services. It suggests that, prior to contracting or privatizing services, the concerned agency should evaluate:
the impact on the agency's core mission
the availability, stability, and reliability of private sector service providers
the relative costs of internal and external (public or private sector) service providers
the potential impact on regulatory enforcement
the ability to monitor the performance of external providers
potential conflicts of interest
Based on this model, the ongoing internal evaluation of services offers public agencies management tools to obtain the best value for the taxpayer dollar, not only in terms of the raw cost per test, but also in managing the quality of the services.     

Temporal Selective Exposure: How Partisans Choose When to Follow Politics

Political Behavior - It is widely theorized that echo chambers contribute to polarization, yet behavioral evidence of partisan selective exposure in the real world is surprisingly tenuous. Why do...     

How Not to Increase Participation in Local Government: The Advantages of Experiments When Testing Policy Interventions

Local governments benefit from nonelected committees that provide citizen input on important issues. Although these committees offer a valuable tool for policy makers, they suffer from low participation and tend to underrepresent economically disadvantaged citizens. This article reports the results of a randomized survey experiment that evaluated the relative effectiveness of offering social recognition or skills training. The findings show that entreaties to participate premised on gaining social recognition had no effect on willingness to participate and that offers to provide training actually decreased citizens’ willingness to participate, especially among economically disadvantaged citizens. Even though these approaches may hold promise, this particular policy intervention did not live up to that promise. The article concludes with a discussion of the importance of testing policy interventions before wide‐scale implementation and the utility of randomized experiments in this process.     

Dynamics of Policymaking: Stepping Back to Leap Forward,Stepping Forward to Keep Back

We study dynamic policymaking when today's policy agreement becomes tomorrow's status quo, agents account for the consequences of today's policies for future policy outcomes, and there is uncertainty about who will hold future political power to propose and veto future policy changes. Today's agenda setter holds back from fully exploiting present opportunities to move policy toward her ideal point whenever future proposer and veto players are likely to be aligned either in favor of reform or against it. Otherwise, agenda setters advance their short‐run interests. Optimal proposals can vary discontinuously and nonmonotonically with political fundamentals.     

The Big Society: Back to the Future

This article contributes to the steady flow of critiques of the big society idea contained in The Political Quarterly. It focuses chiefly on two sets of parallels. The first is between the big society and the policies pursued by the Thatcher government which, despite their obvious rhetorical differences, contain many striking similarities, including their neoliberal origins, application of the ‘crowding out’ thesis and uncritically idealised notions of community. The second is between the big society and a policy with the same name pursued doggedly by the Chinese Communist Party for nearly 20 years until being abandoned as a failure. Lessons for the Prime Minister's flagship policy are drawn from the Chinese experience. The article concludes with a welcome for the rediscovery of the social by public policy and some suggestions as to how a more participative and democratic state could follow from this breakthrough.     

Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949: The Past,Present, and Future of Federal Housing and Urban Policy

Abstract

This article summarizes a special issue of Housing Policy Debate, which commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Housing Act of 1949. The act is best remembered for its declaration that every American deserves a “decent home and a suitable living environment.” The articles in this collection offer varying perspectives on how this act helped shape the postwar metropolis. The authors—urban planners, historians, and public officials—each consider a different part of the legacy.

The first three articles deal primarily with the act's creation and social and political ramifications, while the next three look at how Titles I, II, and III have influenced the past 50 years of housing and urban policy. The record of the Housing Act of 1949 is mixed, and so are its lessons. There remains an ongoing struggle to find the right mix of housing support to reach the goals first expressed in this landmark legislation.     

The Reconcentration of Poverty: Patterns of Housing Voucher Use, 2000 to 2008

In theory, housing choice vouchers provide low-income families with increased neighborhood options. However, previous research is mixed regarding whether the program promotes integration. Examining the 50 most populous U.S. metropolitan areas, I find that households using vouchers are more economically and racially segregated than an extremely low-income comparison group. However, voucher households in areas with source-of-income protection laws are less racially segregated than voucher households in areas without such laws.     

Barriers to Integrating New Urbanism in Mixed-Income Housing Plans in Chicago: Developer,Housing Official,and Consultant Perspectives

This article explores the barriers to implementing mixed-income development plans that incorporate the social (income) and physical (new urbanism) mixing goals of HOPE VI. I examine a comparative case study of three HOPE VI planning efforts in Chicago, Illinois, that exhibit different results. I draw from 25 in-depth interviews across three primary types of actors involved in the development process: developers, housing officials, and consultants. This research uses the perspectives of these key actors to identify the barriers that constrain the implementation of new urbanist designs. Current research indicates that mixed-income developments vary in their degree of income mixing and how new urbanist strategies are implemented. However, there is little consensus on why this is so. Findings indicate implementation of new urbanism is constrained by limited interagency coordination, restrictive design policies, low community buy-in, and exclusive marketing and occupancy practices. Overall, the research offers lessons learned from which I recommend changes in planning practices to assist actors in the consistent implementation of new urbanism in mixed-income developments.     

Why Place Really Matters: A Qualitative Approach to Housing Preferences and Neighborhood Effects

The idea that a person’s neighborhood or zip code can predict his or her life outcomes has motivated a host of housing policies aimed at redressing racial segregation and breaking up areas of concentrated poverty. This article critically examines underlying assumptions about high-poverty neighborhoods that motivate those policies. Using ethnographic methods, I present the location preferences of residents living in a low-income neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio, and show the ways in which their perceptions of their neighborhood run counter to common portrayals. This analysis provides clues as to why the underlying logic of dispersal and mobility may be flawed. I conclude that place matters very much to people living in this neighborhood, just not in the way commonly implied by dispersal and mobility policy advocates. The implication is that stability, rather than mobility, ought to be the focus of more housing discussions.     

Who Gets What, When, and How? The Contested Conceptual and Disciplinary Nature of Governance and Policy-Making in the European Union

The present essay seeks to review state of the art literature in the field of European Union (EU) policy-making and governance. In studying the nature of governance in the contemporary Union disciplinary parsimony is of limited utility. Increasingly, disparate disciplines employ different models in order to describe, explain, and hopefully understand the nature of governance and policy-making in the EU. To arrive at 'one' model for studying the EU implies both disciplinary formalism and the fruition of an intellectual 'endgame'. Alternative 'views' of EU governance – in the form of disparate models – are presented and critiqued. The essay begins with an assessment of policy networks, garbage can models, advocacy coalitions and epistemic communities. It sets out the main components of each model; then goes on to critique each model, and finally, makes a considered conclusion on the utility of each model as a tool for understanding the EU's policy process.