The Implementation of Welfare Reform Policy: The Role of Public Managers in Front-Line Practices

This study examines the extent to which staff in local welfare systems have embraced new welfare reform goals and, if so, the extent to which local management practices contribute to the alignment of staff priorities with policy objectives. It looks at agency structure and several aspects of public management from a microperspective that prior research has linked to agency performance including training, performance monitoring, staff resources, leadership characteristics, and personnel characteristics. The research indicates that front-line workers in welfare offices continue to believe that traditional eligibility determination concerns are the most important goals at their agencies. It also finds that management practices and the structuring of agency responsibilities matter: To the extent that public managers want to redirect local staff to focus their attention on the new goals associated with welfare reform, they can create the conditions under which staff have clear signals about what is expected and could provide them with the resources and incentives to realign their priorities.     

Improving large-scale implementations by applying research and data analysis: A case study on First 5 LA's implementation of PCIT in Los Angeles County

This paper presents the case of First 5 LA's 5-year countywide implementation of the Parent–Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) program. Enthusiasts of PCIT point to it as a high-quality parenting program with the potential to positively influence child behavior, reduce recidivism into the child welfare system, and increase caregiver's confidence and self-esteem. In September 2012, First 5 LA, an independent County agency in Los Angeles that advocates on behalf of parents with young children, began a $20 million countywide implementation of PCIT. The collaborative effort between First 5 LA, the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, and the University of California, Davis demonstrates the role that research and data analysis can play in improving large-scale implementations. The authors of this paper were contracted to conduct an evaluation of the implementation of the countywide PCIT program, and preliminary outcomes were analyzed after the first round of data collection in early 2015. This paper will discuss this case and provide examples of how research and data analysis were used effectively to make key improvements to the design and implementation of the program. The paper will then discuss bureaucratic challenges and constraints with the collaborative use of research and data. The paper will conclude with some recommendations on how research and data can effectively be used to influence policy implementation in large-scale implementations involving collaboration among multiple organizations.     

The Contingencies of Societal Accountability: Examining the Link Between Civil Society and Good Government

Corruption interferes with and distorts the processes of political decision making and implementation, often to the disadvantage of the already disadvantaged. Yet our understanding of the factors that might propel a political system from lower to higher levels of probity remains speculative. This article examines the role of one category of actors often touted as an important countervailing force to political power: civil society. Existing case study research provides evidence that civil society can play a decisive role in holding public officials accountable, but that the success of such societal accountability is contingent upon a number of favorable contextual and institutional conditions. The analyses presented here use panel country data to examine whether the strength of civil society affects corruption. The results corroborate the findings of existing case studies; a vibrant civil society mitigates corruption but only provided that conditions such as political competition, press freedom, and government transparency exist in the country.     

Cooperation among egoists in Prisoners' Dilemma and Chicken games

Axelrod has developed an evolutionary approach to the study of repeated games and applied that approach to the Prisoners' Dilemma. We apply this approach, with some modifications in the treatment of clustering, to a game that has the Prisoners' Dilemma and Chicken as special cases, to analyze how the evolution of cooperation differs in the two games. We find that the main barrier to the evolution of cooperation in Chicken is that cooperation may not always be correctly thought of as socially optimal, but that strong forces do push the players toward socially optimal action. We derive some of the results on mixed populations for any game with pairwise interaction.     

Private provision of public goods can be efficient

Economists have long believed that private provision of public goods will be inefficient, though recently some have argued that altruism may mitigate the inefficiencies. Without altruism, agents contribute to the point where marginal cost equals their private marginal benefits. With altruism, they contribute more and hence are closer to the point where marginal cost and total marginal benefits are equated. In an earlier paper (Bagnoli and Lipman, 1989), we showed that private provision need not be inefficient. In a very natural model of private provision without altruism, we showed that the set of (undominated perfect) equilibrium outcomes is identical to the core. Here we consider the effect of altruism on private provision. Altruism essentially creates more public goods because the well-being of others becomes a public good. We show that our model of private provision still has efficient equilibria under a wide variety of circumstances. Interestingly, the equilibria may be inefficient when agents are concerned about the effect of private provision on the distribution of wealth. Intuitively, the game we consider is a very powerful instrument for efficient private provision, but must be supported by other instruments if the set of public goods is expanded too far.We wish to thank Jim Andreoni, Ted Bergstrom, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments and to acknowledge financial support from the National Science Foundation through NSF Grant SES-8520296. Of course, any remaining errors are our responsibility.