Ministerial Advisers and the Politics of Policy‐Making: Bureaucratic Permanence and Popular Control

The advent of ministerial advisers of the partisan variety – a third element interposing itself into Westminster's bilateral monopoly – has been acknowledged as a significant development in a number of jurisdictions. While there are commonalities across contexts, the New Zealand experience provides an opportunity to explore the extent to which the advent of ministerial advisers is consistent with rational choice accounts of relations between political and administrative actors in executive government. Public administration reform in New Zealand since the mid 1980s – and in particular machinery of government design – was quite explicitly informed by rational choice accounts, and normative Public Choice in particular. This article reflects on the role of ministerial advisers in the policy‐making process and, on the basis of assessments by a variety of political and policy actors, examines the extent to which the institutional and relational aspects of executive government are indeed consistent with rational choice accounts of the ‘politics of policy‐making’. The reader is offered a new perspective through which to view the advent, and the contribution of ministerial advisers to policy‐making in executive government.     

Explaining Less Accountability: the Growth of Local Quangos

There has been substantial growth in the number of non-elected public bodies – or quangos – operating at the local level. This development presents a marked change from the model of elected local authorities as the main focus for the governance and delivery of local public services. Four interpretations of this change are examined: agency-type, ideological control, managerial restructuring and regulationist explanations. Agency-type explanations recognize a plurality of factors, but lack theoretical or predictive rigour. Ideological and managerial explanations have a stronger theoretical basis but fail to recognize the wider structural context. Regulationist explanations offer, but also suffer from the problems of, structuralist analysis. An integrating framework is developed. Three phases in the development of local quangos are presented as a process by which government has resolved tensions in the British state. A consequence, however, has been to raise questions about the state's longer term legitimacy.     

Local politics, national policy, and the taxpayer-payback of manufacturing extension

Expansion of the manufacturing extension system, and consequent diversification of center models and services, suggest the evaluation system may need to expand its focus to take into account diverse program features and outcomes and the need to use evaluation data in different state political economy contexts. In the Wisconsin environment detailed here, demonstrating hard “taxpayer-payback” and shaping the politician's view of manufacturing extension as an “investment,” rather than as an “expenditure” item, may be important requirements for future in-state manufacturing extension funding. This article attempts to demonstrate empirically the taxpayer-payback outcomes to manufacturing extension activities, using representative corporation financial balance sheet data, along with field-credible scenarios about simulated extension service impacts on the balance sheets, and actual program service costs and fee levels. The implications of the analysis are explored both for program evaluation and the broader economic and political justification of manufacturing extension at state and national levels. the views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect official policy of the National Institute for Standards and Technology. The author would like to thank Philip Shapira, Jan Youtie, Betsy Bury, Dan Luria, and participants at the 1996 NIST/Georgia Tech workshop on manufacturing modernization, for their comments and assistance.     

Interacting with Consumer Advocates

This article explores the role of consumer advocacy. Those involved in public policy formation and administration – regulators, governments and other public policy makers – share an interest in effective consumer advocacy. Those who make our laws, as well as those who are custodians of its adjudication, compliance, monitoring and enforcement, share a common position with many consumer advocates – they all work to advance the long‐term interests of consumers.     

From the ashes of the Great Kantō Earthquake: the Tokyo imperial university settlement

Abstract:

In 1884, an Anglican clergyman and staff and students from Oxford University set up a ‘settlement house’ in the East End of London. Conceiving poverty in moral and aspirational terms, their goal was to live with the poor to raise their cultural standards, and thus pull them out of the cycle of destitution. The idea soon spread to the United States. That the Settlement movement would travel across the Atlantic is no surprise: there was rich exchange between the UK and US in the late nineteenth century, and the values underpinning the movement were shared. But what is perhaps less expected is that the Settlement movement also travelled to Japan where it was put into practice by a range of governmental and non-government actors including students at Tokyo Imperial University in the wake of the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. The movement then flourished for almost a decade, before coming to an end in 1938. How was it adapted to the Japanese context? What were its goals, methods, successes and failures? And what can this example tell us about the global circulation of ideas regarding social responsibility, the state and welfare in the inter-war period?