Evaluating public expenditure management systems: An experimental methodology with an application to the Australia and New Zealand reforms

This article examines how institutional arrangements affect the size, allocation, and use of public expenditures. It identifies a set of arrangements that can address underlying problems and affect three levels of expenditure outcomes - aggregate fiscal discipline, strategic prioritization, and technical efficiency in the use of resources. A diagnostic questionnaire is constructed which produces index values for each arrangement. This methodology is used to analyze the radical reforms introduced by New Zealand and Australia. The results show that New Zealand sought to achieve aggregate fiscal discipline and enhance technical efficiency through formal mechanisms for transparency and accountability. The Australian reforms sought to improve strategic prioritization through transparency of the medium-term costs of competing policies, and the devolution of detailed program decisions to line ministries within hard budgets.     

Book reviews

Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy PHILIP GOODCHILD London: Associated University Presses, 1996

Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism EUGENE HOLLAND Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993

Australian Television and International Mediascapes STUART CUNNINGHAM & ELIZABETH JACKA Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996

Sociolingwistics and Language History: Studies based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence TERTTU NEVALAINEN & HELENA RAUMOLIN‐BRUNBERG (Eds) Language and Computers: Studies in Practical Linguistics No 15, Amsterdam/Atlanta., GA: Rodopi, 1996

Fear of the Dark. ‘Race’, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema LOLA YOUNG London and New York: Routledge, 1996

Deleuze: A Critical Reader PAUL PATTON (Ed.) Oxford: Blackwell, 1996

A Guattari Reader GARY GENOSKO (Ed.) Oxford: Blackwell, 1996

Counterworks. Managing the Diversity of Knowledge R. FARDON (Ed.) London: Routledge, 1995     

The Role of Organizations in Fostering Public Service Motivation

In seeking to explain the antecedents of public service motivation, James Perry focuses on the formative role of sociohistorical context. This study tests Perry's theory and examines the role that organizational factors play in shaping public service motivation, based on responses from a national survey of state government health and human service managers. The findings support the role of sociohistorical context, showing that public service motivation is strongly and positively related to level of education and membership in professional organizations. The results also underscore the significant influence of organizational institutions, indicating that red tape and length of organizational membership are negatively related to public service motivation, whereas hierarchical authority and reform efforts have a positive relationship. Therefore, public organizations have both an opportunity and a responsibility to create an environment that allows employees to feel they are contributing to the public good.     

City Managers,Career Incentives,and Municipal Service Decisions: The Effects of Managerial Progressive Ambition on Interlocal Service Delivery

City managers play an influential role in brokering intergovernmental service arrangements on behalf of their jurisdiction, yet their motivations for doing so are not well understood. One argument, drawn from theories of bureaucratic entrepreneurship and ambition theory, suggests that cities with managers who are motivated to advance their careers will parlay more interlocal service delivery as means of capturing economic efficiencies. Such strategies serve to build their personal resumes of career achievements. An alternative argument suggests more altruistic motives, including a desire for increased social equity and valuing the common good of the region, compel city managers to pursue interlocal service arrangements. These competing theories are tested on 134 large municipalities, using survey data from the city managers of these jurisdictions, coupled with interlocal revenue and expenditure data for these cities. Results yield greater support for the first theory. However, progressive ambition possesses complex consequences for interlocal service delivery choices. Jurisdictions managed by city managers with career‐enhancement ambitions are more likely to sell services to other local governments. Yet, they are significantly less inclined to buy services from other jurisdictions, thereby underscoring entrepreneurship in shaping managers’ professional trajectories.     

Immigrant Health Care Access and the Affordable Care Act

In spite of major coverage expansions under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), a large proportion of immigrants will continue to remain outside the scope of coverage. Because various provisions of the ACA seek to enhance access, advancing knowledge about immigrant access to health care is necessary. The authors apply the well‐known Andersen model on health care access to two measures—one focusing on perceptions of unmet health care needs and the other on physician visits during the last year. Using data from the New Jersey Family Health Survey, the authors find that prior to implementation of the ACA coverage expansions, immigrants in New Jersey reported lower levels of unmet health care needs despite poorer self‐rated health compared with U.S.‐born residents. The article concludes with a discussion of the use of Andersen model for studying immigrant health care access and the broader implications of the findings.     

Public Management Decision Making: Effects of Decision Content

One obvious aspect of public management decisions and decision making has largely escaped attention—decision content. We examine the effects of decision content by asking the following questions for budget cutback and information technology decisions: How does content affect the time required for decision making? How does content affect who participates? How does content affect the decision criteria employed? How does content affect the information quality used in the decision-making process and red tape? The results suggest that information technology and budget cutback decisions differ in important ways. For information technology decisions, cost-effectiveness is not a significant criterion, average decision time is much longer, and decisions are generally viewed as permanent and stable. For cutback decisions, cost-effectiveness is a significant criterion, decisions are made much more quickly, and they are viewed as unstable and changeable. Surprisingly, decision content does not appear to affect the number of participants.     

How the Politics of Recognition Enabled India’s Democratic Exceptionalism

This article explores a significant puzzle: the persistence of modern representative democracy in post-independent India. It demonstrates how a politics of recognition, based on identities of caste, language, and religion, is crucial for understanding the origins, character, and trajectory of modern Indian democracy. These politics suffer various infirmities. Yet liberal, Marxist, and republican critiques of the politics of recognition in India, while offering valid theoretical alternatives and powerful moral visions, also suffer their own limitations. Perhaps more importantly, they evade questions of historical possibility, political efficacy, and practical reason that confront every political theory. The relative historical predominance of the politics of recognition in post-independent India, in contrast, reflects its capacity to engage powerful social imaginaries that enabled the realization of democratic norms, institutions, and practices. The general argument put forward develops several key themes that distinguish Charles Taylor’s philosophical vision of alternative modernities—the power of social imaginaries, nature of explanation in the human sciences, and vicissitudes of culture, politics, and history—to explain the trajectory of modern Indian democracy.