The role of group interest,identity, and stigma in determining mental health policy preferences

Public attitudes toward mental health present an interesting puzzle. While mental health is one aspect of general health and well-being, it receives less support for government spending increases than does health care. One explanation lies with the stigma that is attached to mental illness. This stigma produces more negative attitudes on policy issues related to persons with mental illness such as government spending for mental health. However, group identification, as defined by personal experience or a family member who has experienced a mental illness, may have a strong effect on these attitudes. Using data from the 1996 General Social Survey's module on mental health. I examine this and other hypotheses and find evidence that group identification increases the likelihood of increased support for government spending for mental health. These robust findings exist even in quantitative models, which include politically relevant variables and measure identification with mental illness in two different ways. These findings suggest that mental health is policy for the few because those most supportive of government spending increases are persons who share the common identity of experiencing mental illness.     

The effectiveness of regulatory disclosure policies

Regulatory transparency—mandatory disclosure of information by private or public institutions with a regulatory intent—has become an important frontier of government innovation. This paper assesses the effectiveness of such transparency systems by examining the design and impact of financial disclosure, nutritional labeling, workplace hazard communication, and five other diverse systems in the United States. We argue that transparency policies are effective only when the information they produce becomes “embedded” in the everyday decision‐making routines of information users and information disclosers. This double‐sided embeddedness is the most important condition for transparency systems' effectiveness. Based on detailed case analyses, we evaluate the user and discloser embeddedness of the eight major transparency policies. We then draw on a comprehensive inventory of prior studies of regulatory effectiveness to assess whether predictions about effectiveness based on characteristics of embeddedness are consistent with those evaluations. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Ethics revisited in a society in transition: the case of the former East Germany

Since 1990, the German government has been demanding from the civil servants of the former East Germany a new adaptability and creativity that was never promoted in the GDR bureaucracy. The article analyses the change of ethics in the former East Germany after 1990. It looks at the development of the German civil service, discusses the economic disparity between East and West, and examines the ethical tradition in the former socialist country. It uses the case of the selection in 2001 of the city of Leipzig by BMW as the location of a new manufacturing plant as an illustration of the new goal‐oriented activities of the present Eastern bureaucracy. More than 250 European cities were competing for the new plant, which will create over 10,000 jobs. The level of performance of the Leipzig bureaucracy in the BMW case reveals the new efficiency and professionalism of the former Eastern civil service. In addition to Leipzig, virtually all the local and state administrations from the former East Germany have developed a sense of the necessities of the time, including globalization. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.