Authoritarian responsiveness: Online consultation with “issue publics” in China

In recent years, public consultation has become a standard feature of policymaking in authoritarian regimes. While previous studies found evidence of government responsiveness to citizens' demands, they did not measure responsiveness in terms of real policy change. This article presents the first systematic analysis of Chinese central government policy responsiveness to consultative input. In 2008, the Chinese government unveiled a blueprint for health‐care reform, inviting the public to post their opinions online. Having collected 27,899 online comments, the government subsequently published a revised draft. This article analyzes a random sample of 2% of this corpus of comments, assessing the effect of comments on revisions while controlling for both media content and bureaucratic preferences. The findings demonstrate that public comments have an impact upon policy revisions and suggest that the Chinese government is more responsive to street‐level implementers than to other social groups.     

“Promotion tournament 2.0”: Why local cadres expand health‐care provision in China

Previous research has attributed the delayed welfare development in China to the government's traditional obsession with GDP growth target as the principal criteria for cadre promotion. Yet why has health‐care provision significantly expanded since the 2000s? This article argues that as central policies adjusted to incorporate health care as a priority, the cadre assessment system subsequently made it a “hard target,” and thus the competition for office has compelled local cadres to implement health‐care expansion. Apart from the importance of local leaders in policy change as the literature suggests, this article elaborates on the pivotal role of technical bureaucrats by innovatively introducing the “promotion tournament 2.0” model, which emphasizes the knowledge–power coalition between these political actors. By investigating the case of health‐care expansion, this article illustrates the local politics of policy change with various forms of data collected from semi‐structured interviews, newspaper archives, political documents, and official statistics.     

The devil we know and the angel that did not fly: An examination of devil/angel shift in twitter fracking “debates” in NY 2008–2018

Recent work has applied the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to examine narrative strategies in policy debates on social media platforms. We contribute to the literature by applying the NPF to fracking policy debates in New York using well-established Natural Language Processing tools, including sentiment analysis. We combine this computational approach with a qualitative hand-coding of pro- and antifracking Twitter influentials. This approach allows us to consider a much larger corpus of tweets over a much longer time frame than has been done thus far. We adapt and test NPF propositions related to the use of the devil/angel shift strategies before and after a major state-wide policy change, that is, a state-wide moratorium on high volume hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Overall, we find evidence for the use of the devil shift narrative strategy by the pro-fracking coalition aimed at the Governor prior to the moratorium. After the moratorium, the relative percentage of Tweets containing devil shift sentiments decreases as the pro-fracking coalition generally downshifts in its use of angel shift language without a corresponding increase in devil shift language, whereas, conversely, the anti-fracking coalition generally downshifts in its use of devil shift language without a general increase in angel shift language. When we shifted our analysis to Tweets containing fracking and the Governor, we found a similar postban decrease in devil shift language among anti-fracking users. Our findings offer lessons for using computational tools in the NPF as an approach to expand analytic ability and for the operationalization of concepts such as narrative strategies and policy entrepreneurs.     

From Research Evidence to “Evidence by Proxy”? Organizational Enactment of Evidence‐Based Health Care in Four High‐Income Countries

Drawing on multiple qualitative case studies of evidence‐based health care conducted in Sweden, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, the authors systematically explore the composition, circulation, and role of codified knowledge deployed in the organizational enactment of evidence‐based practice. The article describes the “chain of codified knowledge,” which reflects the institutionalization of evidence‐based practice as organizational business as usual, and shows that it is dominated by performance standards, policies and procedures, and locally collected (improvement and audit) data. These interconnected forms of “evidence by proxy,” which are informed by research partly or indirectly, enable simplification, selective reinforcement, and contextualization of scientific knowledge. The analysis reveals the dual effects of this codification dynamic on evidence‐based practice and highlights the influence of macro‐level ideological, historical, and technological factors on the composition and circulation of codified knowledge in the organizational enactment of evidence‐based health care in different countries.     

“It's the Central Government's Fault”: Elected Regional Officials' Use of Blame‐Shifting Rhetoric

This article investigates regional officials' use of blame‐shifting rhetoric in times of heated public criticism of unpopular regional policy decisions. Based on a content coding of nearly 500 political accounts from elected regional officials it is shown that “it's the central government's fault” is the most frequently used excuse when regional officials publicly defend unpopular decisions to cut public health care. The article finds that this excuse is used more by regional leaders (mayors and chairmen of regional boards) than by other elected officials and that partisan competition affects how often this excuse is used.     

Europeanization and the “Needle's Eye”: The Transformation of Employment Policy in Germany1

What have been the impacts of Europeanization in European Union (EU) member states in the domain of employment policy from a gender perspective? The essay explores this question for one of the traditional “male breadwinner–female caretaker” gender policy regimes in the EU—the case of Germany. Since German women's employment status is behind the status of women in many other EU countries, it has been expected that the impact of European (EC) equal opportunity and equal treatment norms on domestic policy change has remained minimal (Ostner & Lewis, 1995). This, however, is not the case any more. On the contrary, it is argued that Europeanization, although against considerable domestic resistances and with delays, helps to “gender” German public employment policy, namely in three respects: with respect to underlying gender norms, regarding the distinction of gender specific target groups and scope, and the introduction of innovative gender‐sensitive policy instruments. This claim is illustrated by three examples. An explanation for these shifts is developed that accounts for member state change despite misfits with EU norms, not as a consequence of legal compliance mechanisms, but as an outcome of a combination of three mechanisms—the politicization of controversial issues, shifts in dominant discourses, and political advocacy building—conducive to the “gendering” of Europeanization.     

Examining Policy Implementation in Health Care: Rule Abidance and Deviation in Emergency Medical Services

Passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) has served to refocus attention on the complexity of health care delivery in the United States, with particular attention to concepts of quality, access, and outcomes. This article argues that our understanding of the ACA must be informed by an examination of policy implementation in health care, including the core public function of emergency medical services (EMS). Key concepts of implementation in frontline service—notably, rule abidance and deviation—are examined from the perspective of street‐level EMS workers. Results indicate that the intersection of rules, patient needs, and professional culture creates instances of both rule abidance and deviation, both of which contribute substantively to concepts of quality in a health care setting.     

Learning from the States? Federalism and National Health Policy

In its 1993 report, the Winter Commission gave direction to the federal government in the area of health policy and Medicaid: lead, follow, or get out of the way. This article examines how the federal government responded to that advice, specifically asking what has happened in the allocation of responsibility in health policies between 1993 and 2006. In short, unlike the suggestion that there be a better‐defined direction in federal–state policy assignments in health, the ensuing years have resulted in more of the same. The authors examine what has happened, particularly focusing on vertical diffusion—where the states have acted first—and on the role of policy learning in federal decision making. They find little recognition of policy learning in recent federal health laws—even in areas in which state experience was extensive. The federal government is leading in some health policies—but it is leading without learning.     

Managing Incentive Dynamics for Collaborative Governance in Land and Ecological Conservation

Public governance often involves policy tools and stakeholders from multiple sectors. How different policy tools are used may affect the chances that the values and interests of diverse stakeholders can be aligned in mutually supportive ways. Drawing on insights from behavioral and cognitive economics, this article uses the case of land and ecological conservation in Twin Lake, Taiwan, to illustrate how various interactive dynamics—hierarchical exclusion and preemptive effects—may affect efforts in land and ecological conservation involving stakeholders from multiple sectors. Such illustrations may inform the choice and sequencing of policy tools for facilitating collaborative governance.     

Public Policy and Behavior Change

Changing behavior is often necessary to tackle societal problems, such as obesity, alcohol abuse, and debt problems. This article has two goals. First, it aims to highlight how governments can try to change the behavior of citizens. Government can use policy instruments to do so, including incentives, bans and mandates, information campaigns, and nudges. However, the government should not be a manipulator that applies policy instruments without societal support. Therefore, the second goal of the article is to provide a conceptual framework that helps analyze whether public policies to stimulate behavior change are effective and supported by key stakeholders. This conceptual framework has five criteria indicating the extent to which there is effective and supported behavior change: the policy is (1) effective and (2) efficient, and there is support for the policy among (3) politicians, (4) implementing organizations, and (5) citizens. The article ends with suggestions to study public policy aimed at behavior change.     

Responsibility to Be Enthusiastic? Public Servants and the Public Face of “Promiscuous Partisanship”

Contemporary public service leaders are no longer the anonymous mandarins of Westminster folklore. Whether giving public speeches to outside organizations or communicating directly with the media, senior public servants are emerging from anonymity to become public actors in their own right. This article undertakes a comparative study across four Westminster jurisdictions—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom—to examine the formal rules and guidelines that apply to public servants when making public statements in their official capacity. Drawing on the late Peter Aucoin's notion of “promiscuous partisanship,” the article argues that public servants are expected to demonstrate a new level of enthusiasm when explaining or justifying government policy to the public. This has implications for the extent to which nonpartisanship can continue to effectively function within Westminster systems.     

We All Need Help: “Big Data” and the Mismeasure of Public Administration

Rapid advances in our ability to collect, analyze, and disseminate information are transforming public administration. This “big data” revolution presents opportunities for improving the management of public programs, but it also entails some risks. In addition to potentially magnifying well‐known problems with public sector performance management—particularly the problem of goal displacement—the widespread dissemination of administrative data and performance information increasingly enables external political actors to peer into and evaluate the administration of public programs. The latter trend is consequential because external actors may have little sense of the validity of performance metrics and little understanding of the policy priorities they capture. The author illustrates these potential problems using recent research on U.S. primary and secondary education and suggests that public administration scholars could help improve governance in the data‐rich future by informing the development and dissemination of organizational report cards that better capture the value that public agencies deliver.     

Exploring How Institutional Arrangements Shape Stakeholder Influence on Policy Decisions: A Comparative Analysis in the Energy Sector

In recent years, there has been an expansion of efforts to include stakeholders in administrative policy making. Despite significant potential to improve policy decisions, empirical evidence suggests that not all participatory processes provide meaningful opportunities for stakeholders to shape policy and may even give the most powerful stakeholder groups disproportionate influence over policy decisions. This article argues that the institutional arrangements for stakeholder engagement—the rules and norms that determine which stakeholders can participate and how—affect stakeholders’ influence on policy decisions. This article uses state energy efficiency policy making as a context in which to compare how different institutional arrangements shape the ways in which stakeholders engage in and influence the policy process across two states, Connecticut and Maryland. Findings highlight that institutional arrangements can be used to increase participation, mitigate undue influence of industrial stakeholders, and increase the influence of public interest stakeholder organizations.     

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.     

Right-Libertarian Parties and the “New Values”: A Re-examination*

Among the most noted and studied societal tendencies of recent decades have been those associated with structural change in industrial societies becoming postindustrial. Within political science, much attention has been focused on the behavioural and institutional effects of value change accompanying that transition, and especially on the diminishing impact of class and ideology on politics. Among the institutional effects have been (at times and in some places) decline in support for “established” parties and the rise of alternative political organizations, including new parties on both the left and right. Many of the new parties of the left, and especially those labelled “left-libertarian”, are generally viewed as harbingers of things-to-come in the “new” politics - progressive vehicles, driven along by the tides of change. In contrast, the new parties of the right are generally viewed as conservative, authoritarian, materialist reactions to change - representing transitional efforts to stop change and its effects. The latter parties presumably tell more about the past, the present, and efforts to preserve them, than about the “new” in politics. The purpose of this article is to explore the possibility that some of the new right-wing parties - especially those in social democracies - might themselves be viewed more accurately (or at least as justifiably, based on reinterpretation of the available evidence) as reflections of new values and as vehicles of forward-looking change. If so, then those parties, like their left-libertarian counterparts, may tell us something about the future of postindustrial politics.     

Evidence‐Based Policy‐Making: The Elusive Search for Rational Public Administration

Evidence‐based policy making has been criticised as a revival of the ‘rationality project’ in which democratic politics is regarded as rent‐seeking and a deadweight loss to society. In response, the evidence‐based policy movement has failed to articulate a defence in which the rationality animating the policy process is situational and contextual rather than unique and authoritative. This article traces the movement's motto –‘what works?’– to the American pragmatist movement, whose influence on Harold Lasswell and New Labour in the UK was substantial. This article argues that the ambition for evidence‐based policy‐making should be seen in terms of the transition from a single, unique and universal rationality toward multiple rationalities that vary according to different policy making contexts. Interpreted in such terms, evidence‐based policy making can avoid several of the main criticisms, and offer strong potential to contribute to solving policy problems.     

Three Lenses of Evidence‐Based Policy

This article discusses recent trends to incorporate the results of systematic research (or ‘evidence’) into policy development, program evaluation and program improvement. This process is consistent with the New Public Management (NPM) emphasis on efficiency and effectiveness. Analysis of evidence helps to answer the questions ‘what works? and ‘what happens if we change these settings?’ Secondly, some of the well known challenges and limitations for ‘evidence‐based’ policy are outlined. Policy decisions emerge from politics, judgement and debate, rather than being deduced from empirical analysis. Policy debate and analysis involves an interplay between facts, norms and desired actions, in which ‘evidence’ is diverse and contestable. Thirdly, the article outlines a distinction between technical and negotiated approaches to problem‐solving. The latter is a prominent feature of policy domains rich in ‘network’ approaches, partnering and community engagement. Networks and partnerships bring to the negotiation table a diversity of stakeholder ‘evidence’, ie, relevant information, interpretations and priorities. Finally, it is suggested that three types of evidence/perspective are especially relevant in the modern era – systematic (‘scientific’) research, program management experience (‘practice’), and political judgement. What works for program clients is intrinsically connected to what works for managers and for political leaders. Thus, the practical craft of policy development and adjustment involves ‘weaving’ strands of information and values as seen through the lens of these three key stakeholder groups. There is not one evidence‐base but several bases. These disparate bodies of knowledge become multiple sets of evidence that inform and influence policy rather than determine it.     

It Takes an Outsider: Extralegislative Organization and Partisanship in the California Assembly, 1849–2006

Why are American politicians “single‐minded seekers of reelection” in some decades and fierce ideological warriors in others? This article argues that the key to understanding the behavior of members inside a legislative chamber is to follow the actions of key figures outside the chamber. These outsiders—activists, interest groups, and party bosses—use their control over party nominations, conditioned on institutional rules, to ensure ideological behavior among officeholders. To understand how vital these outsiders are to legislative partisanship, this article takes advantage of a particular natural experiment: the state of California's experience with cross‐filing (1914–59), under which institutional rules prevented outsiders from influencing party nominations. Under cross‐filing, legislative partisanship collapsed, demonstrating that incumbents tend to prefer nonpartisanship or fake partisanship to actual ideological combat. Partisanship quickly returned once these outsiders could again dominate nominations. Several other historical examples reveal extralegislative actors exerting considerably greater influence over members' voting behavior than intralegislative party institutions did. These results suggest that candidates and legislators are the agents of activists and others who coordinate at the community level to control party nominations.     

Putting the “Public” Back in Public Values Research: Designing Participation to Identify and Respond to Values

This article seeks to put the “public” back in public values research by theorizing about the potential of direct citizen participation to assist with identifying and understanding public values. Specifically, the article explores eight participatory design elements and offers nine propositions about how those elements are likely to affect the ability of administrators to identify and understand public values with regard to a policy conflict. The article concludes with a brief discussion about potential directions for future research.     

Does group engagement with members constitute a “beneficial inefficiency”?

This article explores the role of variations in organizational form in explaining levels of group access. Specifically, we test whether group forms incorporating more extensive engagement with members receive policy advantages. We develop and test a account of beneficial inefficiencies. Our account reasons that the costs of inefficient intraorganizational processes and practices associated with enhanced engagement with members are beneficial as they generate crucial “access goods”—specifically encompassing positions—that in turn receive enhanced policy benefits. The costs of intraorganizational practices allowing members to engage more thoroughly in decision making are thus beneficial inefficiencies. We test this proposition using data on the Australian interest group system. Using the tools of cluster analysis, we identify three forms, each varying in respect of the inefficiencies they embody. Our multivariate analysis finds strong support for the account of beneficial inefficiencies: groups with the most inefficient organizational model receiving the greatest policy access.