Dead Heat: The 2006 Public Choice Society Election

In 2006, the Public Choice Society chose a new president using approval voting. There were five candidates, and the election was extremely close. We indicate the sources of support of the different candidates, based in part on spectral analysis, by voters who cast between one and five votes. Using preference information that was also gathered, we show that two candidates different from the approval voting winner, including the apparent Condorcet winner, might have won under different voting systems. Because most voters did not indicate their complete preference rankings, however, these differences are hardly robust, especially since the outcome was essentially a dead heat.     

Organising for mutual advantage: municipal associations in Bulgaria

Networks of local government support organisations (LGSOs) are critical to successful intergovernmental relations and effective local governance in democratic societies. Bulgaria had no such network of municipal associations when it began the transition from communist rule in the early 1990s. Using US and other external technical assistance, Bulgaria over the next decade overcame the impediments to collective action and established what appears to be an effective and sustainable system to back up its cities and towns. Important factors in mobilising support included a long‐term focus on institutional development, non‐partisanship, flexibility in implementation and a pragmatic orientation that focused on learning by doing. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Does agency competition improve the quality of policy analysis? Evidence from OMB and CBO fiscal projections

Public management scholars often claim that agency competition provides an effective institutional check on monopoly authority, and hence, leads to improvement of administrative performance in public sector agencies. This logic was central for creating the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in 1975 to challenge the policy information provided by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). We challenge this conventional wisdom by demonstrating that CBO has failed to enhance the quality of U.S. fiscal policy analysis on its own terms; nor has it spurred improvements in OMB's performance. Our empirical results indicate that the quality of OMB's fiscal projections has often deteriorated since the establishment of CBO as a rival bureau. We also show that both public and private information is being shared by these agencies to produce a similar caliber of task outputs. The broader implications of our study indicate that although politicians face incentives to employ agency competition in governmental settings, this type of bureaucratic strategy does not necessarily enhance the quality of administrative performance. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Politikbeendigung als policyanalytisches Konzept

The article analyses the policy termination literature that originated during the 1970s in the USA. It discusses the value of the traditional termination concept and the (meagre) empirical results of now three decades of its application. The article argues that policy termination may still be a promising policy analytical tool ’ if appropriately revised and refocused. The final part of the article suggests possible ways of reviving the policy termination concept by concentrating seriously on policy content, ideology and the cohesion of potential losers of termination decisions.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Ansgar Klein,Ruud Koopmans,Heiko Geiling</Emphasis> (Hg.): Globalisierung,Partizipation, Protest

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Interministerielle Netzwerke: Formale und informelle Koordinationsstrukturen bei der Vorbereitung der deutschen Verhandlungspositionen zur Regierungskonferenz 1996

How do German ministries manage the preparation of national negotiation positions for EU intergovernmental conference? After a survey of the debate on organizational deficits of the interministerial coordination in Germany, we are consulting decision- and organization-theoretic approaches in IR. Drawing on organizational economics we concretise and supplement these older frameworks. We conceive the management of a governmental organization as a specific aggregation of heterogeneous preferences and information. Applying social network analysis we take into account formal as well as informal aspects of coordination channels. The objective of this article is to make visible the complex structures and processes that constitute foreign policy making, and to provide a preliminary assessment of its efficiency.