Is Bigger Really Better? A Comparative Analysis of Municipal Mergers in Australian and Japanese Local Government

While structural reform by means of municipal mergers has been employed in many different countries, council consolidation has been especially marked in Australian and Japanese local government. This suggests that much can be learned by examining amalgamation through the analytical prism of comparative analysis. In this article, we investigate structural reform through municipal amalgamation in Australian and Japanese local government by examining the aims of amalgamation, the methods employed by public policy makers and the outcomes which were achieved. From this comparative analysis, we attempt to draw some broader lessons for local government policy making aimed at local government reform.     

How Should Governments Make Risky Policy Decisions?

Public policy-making does not follow the long-established and well-recognised principles of rational decision analysis under risk. Public views of risk are often inconsistent and seemingly irrational, and a gulf exists between risk perceptions and attitudes of the public and those of 'experts'. On the other hand, experts often claim unjustifiably high levels of confidence in their predictions of policy choice outcomes, creating a lack of public faith in their recommendations. While risky policy choices deserve more systematic decision analysis, many challenges remain to effective implementation of such analyses. Among the suggestions for improvement that we offer is the need for more effective interaction between policy-makers, decision analysts and the public.     

School Engagement Among Urban Adolescents of Color: Does Perception of Social Support and Neighborhood Safety Really Matter?

In this study we examined the effects of risk factors (perceived neighborhood crime/delinquency problems, neighborhood incivilities) and protective factors (teacher support, family support, peer support) on the school engagement of 123 urban adolescents of color. Age and gender were also examined to determine if different ages (younger or older) or genders (male or female) significantly modified the relationship between the risk factors and school engagement. Results indicated that perceived neighborhood incivilities was uniquely predictive of school engagement. Contrary to hypotheses, different levels of the perceived social support variables did not modify the effects of risky neighborhood conditions on adolescent’s perceived school engagement. Age, but not gender, significantly modified the relationship between perceived family social support and perceived neighborhood crime on adolescents’ reported levels of school engagement. The implications of the results for prevention and intervention programs that address school engagement among early adolescents of color are considered.

Inefficient redistribution and inefficient redistributive politics

This paper examines the effect of inefficient redistribution in Myerson’s (American Political Science Review 87:856–869, 1993) model of redistributive politics. Regardless of the absolute levels of the efficiency of political parties’ transfers to different voter segments, parties have incentive to (stochastically) shift resources away from voter segments with large relative efficiency gaps between the two parties’ transfers towards voter segments with smaller relative efficiency gaps. Because of this dependence on relative, and not absolute, levels of efficiency, the parties’ optimal strategies may lead to large discrepancies between the sum of the budgetary transfers and the sum of the effective transfers.     

The Role of Empowerment in Youth Development: A Study of Sociopolitical Control as Mediator of Ecological Systems’ Influence on Developmental Outcomes

Empowerment has become an influential concept and theoretical framework for social policy and practice. Still, relatively little is known about the roles that empowerment plays in the ecology of human development, particularly among young people. This article reports results of a study of psychological empowerment among young people, using data from 629 high school students (65.8% female; 96.5% non-white). Using a path analysis, we examined the role of perceived sociopolitical control—an indicator of the intrapersonal component of psychological empowerment—as a mediator between ecological support systems and developmental outcomes. Findings confirmed that social support in family, peer, and school settings, and family cohesion positively predict self-esteem and perceived school importance, which, in turn, have protective effects on psychological symptoms, violent behaviors and substance use. Sociopolitical control was found to mediate the relationships between ecological supports and risk factors and developmental outcomes, leading to the conclusion that perceived efficacy in the sociopolitical domain, and youth empowerment, more generally, should be considered as core elements of the ecology of human development. Policy and practice aimed at promoting positive developmental outcomes and preventing risk behaviors should take their relationship to sociopolitical control into account.     

Compromise and religious freedom

Compromise is surprisingly common in the context of religious freedom. In Holt v. Hobbs, for example, a Muslim prison inmate challenged his prison’s no-beards policy on religious freedom grounds. He proposed, and was eventually granted, a compromise that allowed him to grow a half-inch beard rather than the full beard normally required by his beliefs. Some have argued that such a compromise is inconsistent with the purpose of religious freedom, which is to guard against interference with an individual’s religious practices. Accepting a compromise, after all, may require a significant modification to one’s default practices. But this paper argues that compromise can be appropriate if the purpose of religious freedom is to foster the inclusion and acceptance of all people in a diverse political community. Moreover, the benefits of compromise may lend support to the inclusion-based conception of religious freedom as against the more traditional non-interference conception.

     

Navigating tensions in co‐production: A missing link in leadership for public value

New forms of public leadership are needed to design and implement co‐production of public value. We draw on narrative analysis to explore the barriers to developing the capacity for co‐production of public value in disadvantaged and vulnerable Indigenous communities and find that existing norms not only crowd out efforts at reform, but can work against them. In particular, we find that upward accountability and a focus on expert knowledge are the most problematic for co‐production of public value. We focus on how more traditional practices of public administration mediated the achievements of public leaders in their co‐production efforts when Australian governments introduced strategies for partnership with Indigenous communities for services design and delivery. The analysis suggests that creating a broader enabling environment of supportive logics would allow public leaders to engage more productively with inherent tensions between old and new ways of working.     

Good to share? The pecuniary implications of moving to shared service production for local government services

Shared services are often lauded as an efficacious means of reducing municipal expenditure and thereby improving waning financial sustainability. However, most of the extant theoretical and empirical work only considers costs and benefits at the level of the specific service in question and, hence, fails to capture many of the wider benefits and costs that might accrue to local governments. In this article we first build a schema to illustrate the benefits and costs of moving from separate to collaborative production at the level of individual local authorities. We then test two hypotheses drawn from the schema against a five‐year panel of expenditure data. We find evidence of increased expenditure in the order of 8 per cent that prima facie runs counter to the objectives of many municipal managers engaged with shared services. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for cooperative ventures between local authorities.     

The Liverpool Dock Strike, 1995–98: a resurgence of solidarity in the age of globalisation

As the 20th anniversary of the 1995–1998 Liverpool Dockers’ Strike approaches, this case of industrial action should not be dismissed as a reminder of yet another nail in the coffin of organised labour. Rather, this event needs to be viewed more optimistically in hindsight as a symbol that working-class consciousness and systems of solidarity had not vanished entirely from Britain after the crushing collapse of domestic manufacturing and the fall of the miners in 1985. Indeed, the Liverpool dockers invented a fresh campaign of industrial action at this time, led more from the ‘bottom-up’ than most other labour protests in the past. Fuelled by a cognisant awareness of both community and workplace experience within the context of popular historical memory, this industrial action played significant roles in reconfiguring and adapting solidarity in this new era of rentier, global capitalism. It is appropriate we recall working-class militancy in a city whose own historical narrative is often described as ‘exceptional’ when one reflects upon Liverpool’s long entrenched culture of opposition.