Does Performance Budgeting Work? An Examination of the Office of Management and Budget’s PART Scores

In this paper, the authors use the Bush administration's management grades from the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) to evaluate performance budgeting in the federal government—in particular, the role of merit and political considerations in formulating recommendations for 234 programs in the president's fiscal year 2004 budget. PART scores and political support were found to influence budget choices in expected ways, and the impact of management scores on budget decisions diminished as the political component was taken into account. The Bush administration's management scores were positively correlated with proposed budgets for programs housed in traditionally Democratic departments but not in other departments. The federal government's most ambitious effort to use performance budgeting to date shows both the promise and the problems of this endeavor.     

Collaboration and Leadership for Effective Emergency Management

Collaboration is a necessary foundation for dealing with both natural and technological hazards and disasters and the consequences of terrorism. This analysis describes the structure of the American emergency management system, the charts development of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and identifies conflicts arising from the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the attempt to impose a command and control system on a very collaborative organizational culture in a very collaborative sociopolitical and legal context. The importance of collaboration is stressed, and recommendations are offered on how to improve the amount and value of collaborative activities. New leadership strategies are recommended that derive their power from effective strategies and the transformational power of a compelling vision, rather than from hierarchy, rank, or standard operating procedures.     

Politics of Environmental Law: Political Ideology, Elitism or Urban-Rural Interests?

This paper examines a number of demographic aspects in congressional districts and states that played important roles in a series of Congressional votes on environmental issues in 2000. These characteristics include urbanization or population density, education, income, race, and employment. Our findings are mixed. While we find some evidence (at least in Senate votes) that population density is a positive predictor of “pro-environment” votes, we also find that things commensurate with the Environmental Kuznets Curve such as income, education, and lifestyle also play an important role in environmental voting.     

Coming to Terms with Intramural Differences Over Policy Frameworks: How Policy Researchers Accommodate Rival Claims Among their Peers

Although we readily scrutinize conflicts among political stakeholders, similar attention is seldom paid to how we deal with contestable understandings within our own field of inquiry. Debates over competing scholarly perspectives and contested models are rarely subject to any systematic postmortem or attempts to account for differential survival. Given the indeterminacy of many of our conceptual schemes, empirical data seldom carry the day to a resolution all can accept. Accordingly, there are eventually many different versions of any given dispute, each offering a different path to resolution or equanimity. Disputants retire and conflicts fade, providing a demographic resolution of sorts, but not a scientific or a conceptual one. The work presented here claims that there is much to be gained from systematic scrutiny of our conceptual disputes, especially as a means to access the different perspectives we assume to handle them. We argue that there is an internal logic to the different perspectives on any given dispute. It is not the dispute per se that draws our interest; but rather, how any given dispute generates multiple interpretations and reconstructed versions. We propose and illustrate an approach to analyzing disputes that makes their internal logic more transparent and attends to the pathways that emerge for resolution. We will find, in the process, that there are some reliable routes to conciliation and some fault lines that remain unstable.     

Newspapers and Budgeting: The Effects of Media Coverage on Local Expenditure Decisions

The media play an important role for the political agenda. It is less clear, however, how strong the media impact is on political decisions. This article pursues a different approach from the one commonly used in the media–policy research tradition. Instead of focusing on the relationship between the content of the media agenda and the political agenda, it is argued here that from a broader policy perspective, media pressure on the incumbents is a more relevant variable. Media pressure is measured as media competition and media coverage. Furthermore, the article investigates the effect of media variables on budgetary decisions in different spending areas, and compares the relationships between media pressure and policy under various economic, political and institutional conditions. This allows the authors to investigate which factors hinder and promote media influence on policy. The units of analysis are the Danish municipalities, which are similar political units with different newspaper coverage. Coverage by local newspapers is intense in some municipalities, but absent in others. As expected, the authors find that in municipalities with intensive coverage from local newspapers, local politicians do feel a stronger media pressure. However, when it comes to budgetary decisions, almost no observable effects of media pressure are found, either generally or in favourable political, economic or institutional settings.