Performance Measurement in U.S. Counties: Capacity for Reform

This study examines the capacity of U.S. counties to undertake performance measurement. Based on a national survey of counties with populations over 50,000, the authors address the following questions: To what extent do counties implement performance measurement? Which capacities must be present for different levels of implementation and success? What can counties do to increase their capacity for performance measurement? And, what is the effect of county structure and functions on the use of performance measurement? This study finds that the success of performance measurement is greatly affected by counties' underlying organizational capacities.     

New Labour and Government in Britain: Change or Continuity?

The 1997 British election marks a major change in British government. Eighteen years of Conservative rule had brought about growing inequality and social division and have generated powerful demands for new directions in public policy, especially in the areas of welfare and public administration. On welfare state reform Labour is constrained by election promises to restrain taxation and public expenditure. New Labour ministers influenced by the New Right have in any case largely rejected traditional social democratic redistributive strategies and are seeking instead new ways of reducing welfare dependency.
The virulent spread of quangos at all levels of government and a marked increase in the centralisation of power in Whitehall have given a new impetus to demands for constitutional reform. Labour's response to these demands is a major program of regional devolution, House of Lords reform and open government measures.
This article explains what 'New Labour' means and discusses New Labour policies on welfare and constitutional reform and their implications for the future of public administration in Britain.     

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.     

Enron/Andersen: Crisis in U.S. Accounting and Lessons for Government

Accounting and auditing play a key role in the belief of ordinary taxpayers and investors in their institutions. This is equally true of the private and governmental sectors. The Enron/Andersen scandal, regrettably, is not an isolated case, but rather merely indicative of underlying, structural flaws in our financial systems. Moreover, there is evidence that some of these flaws may be present in governmental accounting and auditing. The Sarbanes‐Oxley Act of 2002 is an attempt to address these problems in the private sector, but does not address concerns in the public sector. Public sector accounting issues that need to be addressed and monitored include substandard audit work and related liability issues, the appropriate funding of GASB so as to ensure its independence, auditor fees, and auditor independence questions including protection of elected and appointed state auditors.     

Party Government in Presidential Democracies: Extending Cartel Theory Beyond the U.S. Congress

Cartel Theory (and partisan theory more generally) expertly explains the functioning of the U.S. Congress. However, as a theory originally developed to study a single legislature where the institutional context differs greatly from that found in other presidential democracies, its applicability to these democracies has been questioned. Between one extreme represented by the United States (where legislators control their own political future) and the other represented by centralized party systems (where the national party leadership controls legislators' future) exists an intermediate group of democracies where subparty bosses are the key actors, controlling the future of subsets of a party's legislative delegation. We analyze one of these intermediate democracies, Argentina, and demonstrate the general applicability of Cartel Theory to an institutional context that differs notably from that found in the United States. We highlight how the theory can be adapted to a political system where subparty bosses, not individual legislators, are the most relevant political actors .     

Social Management or Social Governance: a Review of Party and Government Discourse and why it Matters in Understanding Chinese Politics

Journal of Chinese Political Science - The political report given by Xi Jinping at the 19th National Party Congress in late 2017 introduced the concept of “a social governance model based on...     

Long–Range Corporate Strategic Planning in Government Organizations: The Case of the U.S. Air Force

Since 1994, the United States Air Force has undertaken two major reviews of its long–range corporate strategy. Both exercises stretched very substantially beyond the previous horizons for such reviews. Through visioning forward as far as 30 years, the Air Force leadership sought to quicken support for substantial reassessments of core programmatic commitments. The availability of two iterations of strategic visioning of this sort affords a rare opportunity to track the effects of an innovative approach to planning under different leaders, institutional approaches, and circumstances. Along the way, the analysis uncovers a number of important issues that might find applicability to other government organizations, whether in the United States or elsewhere.     

The Impact of Restrictive Immigration Policies on Political Empowerment: Ethnic Organization Persistence in Early Twentieth Century St. Louis

Using evidence from early twentieth century St. Louis as an illustrative case, this paper examines the impact of restrictive immigration policies on organizational activity by and for foreign-born persons. A wide array of ethnic churches, nationalist societies, singing clubs and foreign language newspapers flourished in the city during the first decades of the 1900s. The particularities of St. Louis politics aided the longevity of such groups. Despite radical policy change, however, the persistence of these organizations helped preserve many distinctive characteristics of immigrant groups and fostered their ability to act collectively in the political sphere. The historical interpretation presented suggests that citizenship practices giving priority to liberalization of voting may not be the most obvious or effective strategy for immigrant political empowerment.     

Are Government Employees more Likely to Vote?: An Analysis of Turnout in the 1996 U.S. National Election

In this paper we develop and test a model of voter turnoutthat permits us to differentiate turnout rates for governmentemployees and other citizens, controlling for the effects of awide range of other variables relating to turnout. Using 1996ANES data, we find that there is a significant difference inturnout rates for bureaucrats and nonbureaucrats, both insimple bivariate analyses and in a full multivariate model.The magnitude and significance of the coefficient forgovernment employment, even in the face of controls, suggeststhere is something about government employment per sethat has an effect on turnout.