Reinventing the Proverbs of Government

The field of public administration has a long history of popular reform movements. Many of these reforms have failed to deliver the improvements promised. The current "reinventing government" reforms, which follow largely from the writings of David Osborne and his coauthors, claim to establish a new governmental paradigm based on liberating employees and citizens to do their best and using new management methods to get the most out of what government does. However, a careful analysis of Osborne's chief works, Reinventing Government and Banishing Bureaucracy, reveals that their advice cannot be applied because it is inconsistent. No new paradigm is established, and, more importantly, because of the ahistorical nature of these texts, Osborne proposes discredited ideas for administrative reform and misleads the reader concerning the significance of his observations.     

Reinventing Government: The Case of National Service

When Bill Clinton embraced national service as one of his administration's priorities, he took a step forward on two of his key initiatives. Not only was national service a new initiative in its own right, but Clinton also held it up as a model of his efforts to reinvent government. It would be an exemplar of government that is catalytic, competitive, decentralized, and results oriented. This case study examines the theory and reality of reinvention. The Corporation for National Service and its programs have come under fire for being more political than catalytic, being simultaneously too centralized and too decentralized, and pursuing too many unclear goals. This article seeks to identify discontinuities between the rhetoric and the reality of reinvention in this instance and draw lessons for public-sector reform.     

电子化政府:政府再造新范式

电子化政府不仅是一个新概念,而且是一种新的政府管理模式,其内涵在于建立一个虚拟政府,为公民提供方便、 高质量的公共服务。电子化政府的建立成为世界范围内政府再造的新趋势。本文分析了电子政府对政府治理和服务的创 新,进一步提出了我国构建电子政府的政策选择。     

The Adoption and Abandonment of Council‐Manager Government

What accounts for patterns of city adoption and abandonment of council‐manager government? Despite dozens of empirical studies, we lack a systematic understanding of these forces over time because previous work has relied on cross‐sectional designs or analysis of change over short periods. This article begins to fill this lacuna by constructing a historical data set spanning 75 years for the 191 largest cities with either mayor‐council or council‐manager governments in 1930. Event history analysis is applied to isolate adoption and abandonment trends and to provide new evidence revealing the forces that have shaped the trajectory of institutional change in U.S. cities. This analysis reveals that social context factors—in particular, economic conditions—generate both adoptions and abandonments.     

Public Administration, the History of Ideas, and the Reinventing Government Movement

Public administration writers, with some notable exceptions, generally have not paid a great deal of attention to the history of ideas. However, public administration inquiry is profoundly affected by longstanding political and social ideas. This article shows how the idea of the state as a purposive association—that is to say, a collective enterprise that is driven by some set of substantive ends or purposes—has helped to shape the thinking and discourse of some public administration writers, particularly those of the reinventing government movement. The implications of this for public administration inquiry and education are examined.     

转型期政府行政模式重构的生态分析

当前,我国正处在从传统向现代转型的时期,经济、政治、社会、文化结构发生了整体性变迁。与此相应,政府行政模式也经历着一个重新构建的过程。实现政府行政模式的转型与重构,应该把握与行政模式相关的基本生态要素的影响与作用,构建以服务、有限、引导、公开、满意为特征的全新行政模式。     

论政府行为的价值取向与构建和谐社会

和谐社会的构建与维持是由多种因素决定的,而政府行为的价值取向就是诸多因素中的一种具有决定性的因素。因为政府行为的价值取向如何这是能否构建和谐社会的基本前提。其中,政府机关对外交往行为的价值取向是构建和谐社会的基本条件,政府机关对内治理行为的价值取向是构建和谐社会的核心内容,政府机关自我约束行为的价值取向是构建和谐社会的关键因素。     

经济增长中政府行为的制度分析

制度因素是经济增长动态过程中的内生变量,它构成经济增长中合作与竞争的基本秩序;而作为国家意志的代理人,政府用以交换和服务于委托者的基本形式,就在于制度供给.     

Reinventing Amtrak: The politics of survival

This article argues that Amtrak's design as a “quasi-public, for-profit” corporation was seriously flawed from its beginnings. The corporation was isolated from America's private railroads, and isolated from trust-funding financial mechanisms that supported highways, airports, and mass transit. It depended on powerful Democratic congressional patrons and labor union support for protection from Republican executive budget cuts. But these allies pushed Amtrak into running far more costly service than was good for its bottom line. The corporation was already engaged in an internal reorganization designed to bring it closer to its customers, when the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional election launched an external effort to reorient and restructure Amtrak. There are three possible outcomes of the two-sided reinvention process: status quo and continued slow decline; partnership based on new relationships between Amtrak, federal and state governments, and the private sector; and privatization which might still require substantial public expenditures for some time. Synchronizing the opportunities created by both the internal and the external reinvention efforts is the key to whether Amtrak can emerge as a viable and valuable provider of rail transportation in the 21st century.     

Corruption, Political Allegiances, and Attitudes Toward Government in Contemporary Democracies

Using surveys conducted in sixteen mature and newly established democracies around the globe, this study examines the effect of corruption on people's attitudes toward government. The analysis demonstrates that citizens in countries with higher levels of corruption express more negative evaluations of the performance of the political system and exhibit lower levels of trust in civil servants. However, the results also show that the negative effect of corruption on evaluations of the political system is significantly attenuated among supporters of the incumbent political authorities. These findings provide strong and systematic evidence that informal political practices, especially those that compromise important democratic principles, should be considered important indicators of political system performance. Moreover, they imply that, while corruption is a powerful determinant of political support across widely varying political, cultural, and economic contexts, it does not uniformly diminish support for political institutions across all segments of the electorate.     

The Howard Government: The Extent to which Public Attitudes Influenced Australia's Federal Policy Mix

This article focuses on the interaction between government policy and public attitudes in order to explain why the Howard government was reasonably pragmatic given that it maintained enough popular support to win four successive federal elections from 1996, and why such a relationship is crucial to evaluating policy trends in Australia's liberal democracy in terms of understanding both policy possibilities and limitations no matter how flawed or divisive certain policies may appear to be.     

Work-Family Balance and Job Satisfaction: The Impact of Family-Friendly Policies on Attitudes of Federal Government Employees

We use the 1991 Survey of Federal Government Employees to test a theoretical framework regarding the relationships between work and family demands, family-friendly policies, satisfaction with work-family balance, and job satisfaction for diverse groups of employees with different personal and family needs. We find that a variety of policies widely presumed to be "family friendly" were used to varying degrees by disparate groups of federal employees. The use of such policies had very diverse effects on both employee satisfaction with work-family balance and job satisfaction, within and across various groups of similarly situated employees. The assumptions underlying the provision of family-friendly policies and implications for the organization are examined.     

City Officials and General Revenue Sharing: Attitudes, Perceptions and Implications for Future Intergovernmental Policy

This article describes the 1972 State and Local Fiscal AssistanceAct(General Revenue Sharing), its perceived impact on city expenditures,its impact on the attitudes of city officials, and GRS's implicationfor future intergovernmental policy. Using data from nine yearsof an annual survey to chief executives in cities with over50,000 population, we conclude the program's most importantcontribution was in the general attitudes it fostered amonglocal officials. Our analysis indicates that GRS remains extremelypopular with urban chief executives and that its impact variesamong expenditure categories and cities. We conclude that theReagan administration may be able to develop viable policy alternativesbecause of the lack of consensus among many city officials whoalso exhibit varying degrees of support for the president'sproposed policies. In addition, the consensus which characterizedthe public interest groups in prior years may be eroding, andthis could create greater possibilities for policy change. ^* We would like to thank Tracey Gladstone and Eila Pakkanenfor their coding assist-ance. Ilese Hoyniak provided data processingassistance. We would like to thank Purdue University for providingcomputer time and other assistance.