Leadership and Institutional Reform: Engineering Macroeconomic Policy Change in Australia

This article seeks to enhance the actor perspective on major policy reforms. It builds upon the literature on "policy entrepreneurs" and addresses its explanatory vagueness by specifying five hypotheses outlining the actions that proponents of major policy change need to take in order to be effective in forging departures from existing, path-dependent policies and to overcome entrenched opposition to reforms. These hypotheses on "reformist political leadership" (after Blondel) are applied to the four attempts to reform key aspects of macroeconomic policy in Australia under the first two Labor governments led by Robert J. Hawke.     

Public Members on Medical Licensing Boards and the Choice of Entry Barriers

This paper investigates the impact of medical and consumerinterests on the choice of physician licensing requirements inthe United States. Using data on licensing requirements in thefifty states between 1986 and 1993, we find that, in general,public members on licensing boards are associated withlicensing requirements that have educational justification. Incontrast, medical interests, measured in terms of licensingboard independence and campaign contributions by medicalassociations, are associated with licensing requirements thatare more difficult to justify with educational criteria.     

Governance, Management, and Performance: They Matter

Books reviewed in this article:
Carolyn J. Heinrich and Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., eds., Governance and Performance: New Perspectives
Patricia W. Ingraham, Philip G. Joyce, and Amy Kneedler Donahue, Government Performance: Why Management Matters
Janet M. Kelly and William C. Rivenbark, Performance Budgeting for State and Local Government     

Ethnicity,decentralisation and the fissile state in Georgia

This article addresses the problems entailed in decentralising a successor state of the former Soviet Union. On many different scales, Georgia should be a wealthy country. The population is well educated, there is rich agricultural land, a thriving wine industry, several mineral extraction industries and access to oil. The central argument of this article is that it is governance, or rather the failure of governance that is at the heart of many of Georgia's problems—in particular, a failure over a number of years to find a balance between the considerable ethnic diversity of the country and their aspirations regarding self‐government, and the need for the assertion of central power from Tblisi in occupying the power vacuum left by the demise of the Soviet Union. The structure of the article moves through an analysis of the context of decentralisation, into a brief survey of the major ethnic groups and the nature of the local government system, paying particular attention to the attempts by Tblisi to provide a coherent glue for a state that is liable to break apart. The concept of the ‘fissile state’ is used to convey this brittle context within which institutional reform needs to take place given the pressures from below and the pressures exerted by external actors as Georgia seeks to move closer to the European polity. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Is the Higher Public Service a Profession?

Professionalisation in the public services is regarded as essential but the concept is ambiguous and organisationally weak. Moreover, if not jeopardised by managerialism, public service professionalisation today faces some major barriers or limitations. Nonetheless, the public service may be able to maintain greater professional status with increased emphasis on job security, occupational closure and horizontal organisation. The prospects for such conditions may now seem remote, but with this criteria in mind Australia will neglect the professionalism of its public service very much to its cost.