The Logic of Private and Collective Action

Since Mancur Olson's Logic of Collective Action (1965), it is impossible for political scientists to conceive of political participation without reference to his powerful argument linking numbers of participants, public goods, and participatory outcomes. What is puzzling is the poor empirical support for this argument in the domain where it should work best, namely explaining business political activity. Olson thought his arguments principally applicable to economic groups, and for the empirical development of his arguments Olson drew heavily on business interests, the most active segment of the interest group community. We explore these arguments with business political activities data by examining the statistical performance of various measures of market structure in determining business political activity, and find little empirical support. We do offer an alternative basis for business behavior lodged in both private and collective goods that preserves business rationality and also helps explain not only the amount of business political participation but the modes of business participation .     

The Tides of Reform Revisited: Patterns in Making Government Work, 1945–2002

The past six decades have witnessed acceleration in both the number and variety of major administrative reform statutes enacted by Congress. This increase can be explained partly by the increased involvement of Congress, a parallel decrease in activity and resistance by the presidency, and heightened public distrust toward government. At least part of the variation in the tides or philosophies of reform involves a "field of dreams" effect in which the creation of new governmental structure during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s generated increased interest in process reforms. However, part of the acceleration and variety of reform appears to be related to the lack of hard evidence of what actually works in improving government performance. Measured by federal employees' perceptions of organizational performance, what matters most is not whether organizations were reformed in the past, but whether organizations need reform in the future and can provide essential resources for achieving their mission.     

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.     

Meta‐Governance of Partnerships for Sustainable Development: Actors' Perspectives from Kenya

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development promotes multi‐stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) as a means of implementation while at the same time putting renewed focus on the need for national‐level ownership and implementation. Despite the fact that an ever growing body of literature on the merits and drawbacks of MSPs delineates several success conditions for partnerships, efforts to translate this knowledge into national‐level meta‐governance for MSPs remain marginal to date. This study outlines the benefits the literature alleges for such “meta‐governance” frameworks, before it uses a country‐level study with a series of stakeholder interviews to take a closer look at national‐level context conditions and lessons learned with regard to two water partnerships in Kenya. Our findings suggest that to date the existing meta‐governance for partnerships in Kenya is rather weak and fragmented. Yet respondents support the view that MSPs could benefit from such a framework, in particular regarding local ownership of MSPs and the potential to scale successful cases. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Which Public Goods are Endangered?: How Evolving Communication Technologies Affect The Logic of Collective Action

Public Choice - The theory in Mancur Olson's The Logicof Collective Action is built fromhistorically uncontroversial assumptionsabout interpersonal communication. Today,evolving technologies...     

The Public–Private Distinction: Insights for Public Administration from the State Action Doctrine

Public administration scholars continue to grapple with how and why public organizations differ from private organizations. The judiciary deals with similar questions in ruling on constitutional claims that apply exclusively to state actors. The authors consider similarities and differences between scholarly and judicial approaches, adding to the body of research attempting to capture the complexities of the public–private distinction. The application in this article includes the coding of seminal court decisions and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to find combinations of causal conditions that lead to state action rulings. The specifics revealed through QCA provide valuable lessons for extending public norms and preserving constitutional protections when outsourcing public services.     

Explaining Levels of Local Government Involvement in Service Delivery: The Dynamics of Cross‐Sector Partnerships in Malawi

This study explores how local governments and their development partners—that is, donors, non‐governmental organisations and private companies—structure their partnerships as they work together to provide services to communities. Cases of collaboration between four organisations working in the rural water supply sector and six local governments in Malawi are studied. Using a cross‐case qualitative methodology, we illustrate how power and control translate into practices, leading to different levels of local government involvement in service delivery. This study contributes to the literature on cross‐sector partnerships in particular by developing empirically‐based propositions that help explain the dynamic trajectories that partnerships between local governments and their development partners can take. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Politics of E‐Government: E‐Government and the Political Control of Bureaucracy

This case study reports an innovative e‐government experiment by a local government in Seoul, South Korea—Gangnam‐gu. A new local political leadership in Gangnam made strategic use of e‐government applications to exert greater political control over the local civil service bureaucracy. The authors find that e‐government applications possess political properties that can be applied effectively by the political leadership as instruments to improve control over the government bureaucracy as well as to enhance essential government accountability and transparency. The political circumstances underlying e‐government development as well as its impact on local government are reported, along with key variables associated with this innovation and directions for future research.     

The Consequences of Collective Action: An Incomplete-Contracts Approach

Public policy may be determined as much by what cannot be agreed to by politicians and organized interests as by what can. Focusing on the inability of organized groups to credibly promise that their members will fully report revenues to tax authorities, I develop an incomplete-contracts lobbying model that shows that the provision of collective goods may be influenced by the anticipated tax compliance of economic sectors as well as by the organization of interests. Data from a survey of firms in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are broadly supportive of the theory: the ability of firms to hide revenues from tax authorities rivals conventional collective-action variables in explaining variation in collective-goods provision, but only in that part of the postcommunist world where differences in revenue hiding across sectors are especially large.     

Making Government Accountable: Lessons from a Federal Job Training Program

This article describes the evolution of a performance measurement system in a government job training program. In this program, a federal agency establishes performance measures and standards for substate agencies. The performance measurement system's evolution is at least partly explained as a process of trial and error characterized by a feedback loop: The federal agency establishes performance measures, the local managers learn how to game them, the federal agency learns about gaming and reformulates the performance measures, possibly leading to new gaming, and so on. The dynamics suggest that implementing a performance measurement system in government is not a one-time challenge but benefits from careful monitoring and perhaps frequent revision.     

Implementing Joined‐Up Government: Lessons from the Australian Social Inclusion Agenda

‘Joined‐up government’ (JUG) approaches have emerged in many industrialized countries as a means to tackle persistent ‘wicked’ public and social policy problems (Pollit 2003 ). Despite this, limited evidence exists concerning their implementation or effectiveness. ‘JUG’ was popularized by the Blair Government (UK) with its focus on addressing social exclusion. Following in these footsteps, in 2007 the Australian Government launched the Social Inclusion Agenda: a joined‐up approach to improving the wellbeing of all Australians and addressing disadvantage. This paper focuses on findings from a study that examined the SIA as a natural experiment in JUG. Drawing on the implementation experiences of federal policy makers, our findings lend weight to emerging research into JUG that suggests that compatibility and consistency between goals, instruments, and processes is critical to success. We argue that closer attention needs to be given to developing ‘supportive architecture’ around joined‐up initiatives to facilitate implementation.     

官僚式外包:政府购买公共服务中利益相关者的行动逻辑及其对绩效的影响

"官僚式外包"是目前我国推进政府购买公共服务中出现的一种异化现象,既消解了社会组织作为基本公共服务生产主体的能动积极性,也抑制了公众作为基本公共服务享有主体的积极参与。通过对政府购买公共服务中利益相关者的行动逻辑以及对绩效的影响机理透析发现,不仅社会组织与公众被政府行动逻辑裹挟,还改变了政府购买的项目决策、合同过程、绩效控制机制等关键环节,导致官僚目标对公众需求的忽略与替代,行政权力越界甚至挤占了社会的空间,严重抑制了政府购买的绩效。只有缓解官僚目标与公众偏好之间的冲突、加强行政权力规制与社会组织培育,才能不断改进政府购买基本公共服务的绩效。     

Conditional Party Government and Campaign Contributions: Insights from the Tobacco and Alcoholic Beverage Industries

I examine whether tobacco and alcoholic beverage PAC giving in the 1975-to-2000 period has followed trends inferred by the conditional party government (CPG) model. I look specifically at these PACs because they should be especially sensitive to shifting veto points in the legislative process and, consistent with CPG, contribute increasingly more to the majority party and its leadership and relatively less to members of relevant standing committees. My results show both sectors to give more to leadership as party becomes more important. Increasing CPG, however, generally results in greater giving by tobacco to members of the majority party and relatively larger contributions from alcoholic beverages to committee members and their chairs. I reveal a principal cause of this difference to be issue salience and conclude by arguing that contributions from some PACs are reacting to increased partisanship in the House but PACs interested in issues of relatively low salience still behave as if dealing with a chamber organized along distributive lines—a development that is consistent with CPG.     

The Logic of Collective Inaction: Senatorial Delay in Executive Nominations

While most executive nominees are successfully confirmed, this success masks wide variation in how long it takes the Senate to decide. Delay of critical nominees influences the character and effectiveness of agencies while hampering the policy ambitions of presidents. The exact logic of which nominees are targeted for delay and why, however, remains difficult to uncover. Building on prior literature, this project suggests that delay can be used to protect allied agencies from presidential politicization. Using a data set of several thousand executive nominations from 1987 to 2012, the ideological predisposition of an agency relative to the president is demonstrated to influence senatorial delay. Ultimately, these findings help explain why some nominees are delayed while other, seemingly similar, nominees are not.     

小区居民自治的集体行动逻辑及其适应性分析——以青岛市镇泰花园小区为例

自主治理机制是行政机制与市场机制之外的第三种治理机制,作为公共事务治理的集体行动理论,自主治理需要解决制度供给、可信承诺与相互监督等三个基本问题。青岛市镇泰花园小区2003年被物业管理公司弃管后,在小区精英的带领下成立两委进行自主治理,解决小区公共物品供给、社会规范提供与小区冲突的化解,成功克服集体行动的困境。镇泰花园小区成功自治的经验是:重视挖掘、发挥小区领袖及小区积极分子的作用,重视制度设计中决策的民主化以及积极培育小区自组织与小区社会资本等。     

论建构责任政府的逻辑

责任政府是民主政治时代的产物,是目前世界各国普遍追求的行政目标。责任政府构建的具体过程各不相同,但所依据的内在逻辑是一致的,即沿着“对谁负责”、“对何事负责”、“由谁负责”、“如何负责”的逻辑主线来构架责任政府的不同模式。我们应该从客观意义上来剖析责任政府实现的基本规律,并从共性到个性,以比较的视角分析我国在责任政府实现途径上与发达国家的差异性,为我国责任行政实践起到抛砖引玉的作用。     

The Role of Budget and Financial Reform in Making Government Work Better and Cost Less

Budgeting and Financial Management play a crucial role in organizing and disciplining the federal management culture. Consequently, addressing improvements in their practice is essential in the National Performance Review's examination of government-wide management systems. This article briefly describes the recommendations and anticipated implementing actions relating to budgeting and financial management within the context of the National Performance Review's themes of cutting red tape, putting customers first, empowering employees to get results, and cutting back to basics. External factors, such as innovations in private sector management practices, rapid changes in information technology, and statutory reforms such as the Government Performance and Results Act, also influence needed changes in budgetary and financial management practices.