Politicisation of Senior Appointments in the Australian Public Service

The vexed question of politicisation and patronage in the Australian Public Service is explored in this article. Recent dismissals and appointments of department secretaries have raised concerns about political convenience, trends towards partisanship and the erosion of ‘frank and fearless’ advice. Alternatively, governments have come to insist on ‘partnership’ arrangements between ministers and secretaries, to enhance ‘political accountability’ and install new management teams to better implement government policy. But do such forms of politicisation risk drifting toward a new ‘spoils system’ most would want to avoid?     

Intergovernmental Growth Management: A Partnership Framework for State-Local Relations

Growth management receives strong support as a policy concept.However, there are serious political reservations concerningits implementation. The Florida Growth Management Act is anexample of a well constructed policy that relies on a partnershipapproach to state-local relations. Its implementation during1989 has brought to light the difficulties in maintaining thatpartnership, mainly due to disagreements over responsibilityfor funding the infrastructure needed to manage growth. Statewillingness to negotiate revenue sources and responsibilityis essential to strong state-local relations. The complexitiesof financing growth management threaten the viability of strongplanning policy, regardless of its rationality.     

Back to the Future? Senior Federal Executives in the United States

Based on findings from the 1970s, research literature on senior government executives emphasized a growing integration of politics and administration. This integration was reflected in what we called the "Image IV" bureaucrat wherein political role traits combined with those of traditional bureaucratic ones. Although this was by no means a dominant trend, we were led to speculate that traditional divisions between political and bureaucratic roles were eroding. Data gathered from the 1980s and 1990s, however, lead us to infer that divisions between political and bureaucratic roles have reasserted themselves and that integration between them is being diminished rather than strengthened. We conclude that this may be because in an era of governmental austerity the demand for executive policy entrepreneurs has slackened while the political needs have shifted to those of managerial control over an inertial or even contracting state.     

Influencing Policy at the Top of the Federal Bureaucracy: A Comparison of Career and Political Senior Executives

Although we commonly assume that bureaucrats influence the policies which govern public behavior, we know very little about the individuals who occupy executive positions in the federal bureaucracy. Following the creation of the Senior Executive Service (SES) in 1978, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) published guidelines detailing the skills and responsibilities required among both career and noncareer members of the SES. Although scholars have focused much attention on relations between these two groups within the federal bureaucracy, their day-to-day responsibilities remain understudied. This study reports results of a survey that was administered to 1,000 members of the Senior Executive Service to determine whether career and noncareer members of the SES have significantly different job responsibilities. Although both groups perform a variety of activities which provide them with numerous avenues to affect government policy, the research findings indicate that noncareer executives are more engaged in carrying out political liaison tasks and that career executives have slightly greater personnel responsibilities.     

The New Partnership for Africa's Development: Social,Economic and Environmental Contradictions

Richard D. North: Life on a Modern Planet: A Manifesto for Progress. Manchester University Press, 1995.     

Innovative Governance and Development in the New Ireland: Social Partnership and the Integrated Approach

Since the mid‐1980s, the economy of the Republic of Ireland has displayed a remarkable turnaround. Its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has grown at a faster rate than any developed country in the world. The government's deficit has been cut severely and the debt‐to‐GDP ration sharply reduced. Average incomes have risen significantly, and the unemployment rate reduced dramatically. This article documents these changes. Its main purpose, however, is to provide a plausible explanation for the “Irish miracle.” While many factors have been important—support for the Economic Union's regional development programs, a favorable tax structure, locational and language advantages for attracting multinational corporations, strong education and training programs—these factors in themselves do not explain the emergence of the “Celtic tiger.” They were in place before the mid‐1980s when Ireland was suffering from a fiscal, economic, and political crisis. Instead, the article argues, it was the creative and innovative response of Irish leaders in government, industry, and labor movement and community organizations to the crisis, and the subsequent institutionalization of this response in a new form of governance, that has been the catalyst for the Irish success story. Based on the thorough background research of the Economic and Social Research Council, a farsighted group of leaders developed a strategic plan in 1987 that provided a blueprint for constructive economic and social change. This was then formally instituted for wage restraint on the part of labor in return for income tax and social supposed provisions by government. Irish social Partnership is modeled to some extent on Northern European corporatism. The article reviews corporatism as an early form of innovative governance, using classical corporatism in Sweden and competitive corporatism in the Netherlands to illustrate how this approach has evolved over the years. Dutch economic success in recent years is due in part to its new form of corporatism that has helped it become globally competitive. It is argued, however, that Irish social partnership goes beyond continental corporatism in several important ways. It is more inclusive, covering a large array of social interests; it is more strategic, with a well‐articulated integrated approach to social and economic development that is self‐corrective and articulated in a new national agreement every three years; and it is more firmly institutionalized in both government and nongovernment agencies in the country. Social partnership and the integrated approach have become part of the culture of the new Ireland. This innovative form of governance underlies the Irish turnaround and augurs well for the future. It can also serve as a model, with appropriate modification tailor‐made to each case, for other jurisdictions hoping to emulate Ireland's success.     

The Job Training Partnership Act: New Federalism in Transition

The Job Training Partnership Act of 1982 (JTPA) constitutedthe most recent, successful attempt by the Reagan administrationto devolve increased domestic program authority to the statesusing the block grant approach. Because of its heavy relianceon the participation of state governments and the private sector,JTPA may prove to be the real "acid test" of the Reagan NewFederalism. This article examines the implementation of JTPAin broad perspective. While preparations for the JTPA programbegan in most states during the early part of 1983, the programdid not really begin its first official program year until 1July 1984. After describing the major features of the act, thearticle focuses on the program's implementation. The analysisis based largely on the results of a nationwide study conductedunder the direction of the authors during 1984. The articleconcludes that, in terms of its legislative provisions and effectiveimplementation, JTPA has proved to be a "quasi-block grant"to the states.     

Holding Mayors Accountable: New York's Executives from Koch to Bloomberg

How do citizens evaluate the performance of their mayors? Previous studies have examined mayoral performance either with cross‐sectional surveys or by comparing pairs of consecutive elections. In this article, we use 150 surveys conducted in New York City between 1984 and 2009 to carry out the first time‐series analysis of mayoral approval. We show that fluctuations in crime and the economy affect mayors’ ratings and that black and white citizens react similarly to changing local conditions (although their initial evaluations of mayors often diverge sharply). We also show that how New Yorkers rate mayors in the polls is closely related to how they vote for mayors at the polls.     

The Creeping Politicisation of the World Bank: The Case of Corruption

This paper looks at the increasing politicisation of the World Bank through its work on corruption. Historically, the Bank's Articles of Agreement, which forbid it from involving itself in the politics of its recipient countries, have excluded work on corruption. In the 1990s, internal and external demands grew for the Bank to address the problem of corruption, despite earlier reticence. Much research done over the past decade, often commissioned by the Bank or done in-house, has worked to turn corruption into an economic and social issue, rather than a political one, in order to conduct anti-corruption work while evading accusations that it is violating this non-political mandate. Now this pretence is gradually slipping away and the Bank is becoming overtly political, despite its Articles and a lack of international consensus that this is the direction in which it should be heading.     

The Regulation of Government Advertising in Australia: The Politicisation of a Public Policy Issue

In Australia, there is a laissez faire approach to regulating government advertising but, over the past ten years as accusations of misuse for partisan purposes have grown, many external policy actors have tried to achieve a change in policy. This article traces the history of these (failed) reform attempts. This case study is of interest because it is an example of a government demonstrating long‐term resistance to reforms that are quite modest by international standards and despite attempts by usually influential policy actors to propel reform. This article draws particular attention to the role of the Auditor‐General and demonstrates the growing politicisation of the issue in an environment where those who seek to investigate and comment upon government advertising are severely discouraged.     

Reinventing Federalism: The Clinton/Gore Program for a New Partnership Among the Federal, State, Local, and Tribal Governments

This article presents the Clinton/Gore administration's philosophyon federalism and details specific improvements for servicesto citizens through strengthened intergovernmental partnershipsamong the federal, state, tribal, and local governments. Thearticle defines accomplishments toward achieving the NationalPerformance Review recommendations for new intergovernmentalpartnerships in delivering services to the public, and it providesa direction for federalism in the 104th Congress and beyond.     

Consultations with Interest Groups and the Empowerment of Executives: Evidence from the European Union

We examine how an executive's consultations with interest groups during the formative stage of the policy process affect its bargaining success during the decision‐making stage after it has proposed new policies to legislative actors. Our theory sets out how consultations with interest groups strengthen the executive by bolstering its formal and informal agenda‐setting power. The empirical testing ground for our theory is the European Union (EU), and in particular the consultations held by the European Commission. The analysis assesses the effects of these consultations on the congruence between the Commission's legislative proposals on controversial issues and EU laws. Our analysis incorporates detailed information on the type and scope of each consultation. In line with our theory, we find that the Commission had more success during the decision‐making stage after conducting open consultations with large numbers of interest groups during the policy formation stage.     

The Attitudes of Senior Public Servants in Australia and New Zealand: Administrative Reform and Technocratic Consequence?

This article is in the tradition of comparative international research conducted over recent years into changing political-bureaucratic role relations. Its focus is the attitudinal orientation held toward various dimensions of their work by senior public servants in Canberra and Wellington. In particular, it is concerned to gauge officials' tolerance for pluralistic politics, their programmatic commitment, democratic sensibilities, and identification with conventions of ministerial responsibility. The study draws on and develops into four the two categories of public servants identified by Robert D. Putnam during the early 1970s in Western Europe. The information generated may be used as a baseline for future surveys of a similar type, which could identify changing patterns of distribution among the four basic categories: Political Bureaucrats, Classical Bureaucrats, Traditional Bureaucrats, and Technocrats. The present survey shows some significant differences between senior public servants in the two cities. In particular, those in Canberra are less programmatically committed than their Wellington counterparts, and considerably more “elitist” in their attitudes to popular involvement in policymaking. In both capitals officials are proactively rather than reactively orientated, a finding that may run counter to reformers' beliefs in the predominance of “Sir Humphrey Applebys.” The article goes on to relate the survey findings to major public sector changes that have taken place in both cities since the data for this article was collected. It speculates that, especially in New Zealand (but perhaps less so in Australia), these changes will see the emergence of more strongly technocratic attitudes among top public officials. Such attitudes may not sit easily with expectations that senior public servants be both politically accountable and managerially orientated. Finally, the four categories used in this study are related to the “images” of political-bureaucratic role relations developed in other comparative research.     

新形势下警察危机公关工作初探

警察危机公关是警察公共关系的重要组成部分。在我国经济社会快速发展和互联网等新媒体影响力与日俱增的新形势下,公众对公安机关的社会管理服务和自身素质形象高度关注并监督甚严,公安机关稍有不慎不当,极易形成警察危机事件。要认真研究警察危机事件的成因和特点,正确把握相关原则和方法,切实提高预防处置的能力和水平。