Measuring Street Cleanliness: A Comparison of New York City's Scorecard and Results from a Citizen Survey

Public administrators at the local level often rely on citizen surveys to measure the outcomes or accomplishments of their service delivery efforts. However, many remain skeptical about the value of survey-based measures of local government performance, in large part because of the low empirical correlation between objective and subjective performance measures reported in the literature. Using data from New York City's street cleanliness scorecard, a well-established outcome measure, combined with responses from more than 4,000 respondents to a citizen survey, the authors find a clear and consistent correlation between the scorecard and citizen ratings of street cleanliness in their neighborhoods. Moreover, the street cleanliness scorecard is a much stronger predictor of citizen ratings than demographic factors, trust in government, or contextual effects. These results demonstrate that citizen judgments about government performance can correspond closely with more objectively measured outcomes—and that citizen surveys can provide valid and useful performance measures, at least for some local government services.     

Trending economic factors and the structure of Congress in the growth of government, 1930–2002

We investigate the role of Congress in the growth of federal public expenditure since 1930, building on the work of Kau and Rubin (Public Choice, 113:389–402, 2002). The model incorporates majority party strength and the extent of party control of Congress in addition to the median ideological position of elected representatives. We first provide estimates of the relative importance of the state of Congress and of trending supply and demand-side economic factors in the evolution of federal spending. The resulting models are then used to simulate the consequences of the radical and historically unprecedented shift to the right of Congress in 1994/95.     

Saving the league: V.K. Wellington Koo, the league of nations and Sino-Japanese conflict, 1931-39

In 1919, VK. Wellington Koo, the most famous Chinese diplomat of the early twentieth century, participated in the creation of the League of Nations at the Paris Peace Conference. Little over a decade later, as Japanese forces expanded into Manchuria and North China, Koo struggled to save the League he had helped found. He argued that inability or refusal to brand Japan as an aggressor would sound the League's death knell. In vain, Koo tried to convince European statesmen that the Far Eastern Crisis was a litmus test of the League's viability as a collective security organization. From 1936 on, League inaction in the face of Japanese, German and Italian expansion left Koo thoroughly disillusioned. The lessons of the League were not forgotten during World War II, when Koo argued that a more effective collective security organization, in the form of the United Nations, be created on a basis similar to Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Policemen concept.     

Partnering for e‐government: Challenges for public administrators

Abstract: Governments around the world are spending huge sums of money implementing electronic government. Public‐private partnerships with information and communication technology firms have emerged as the vehicle of choice for implementing e‐government strategies. Concerns are raised about the capacity of governments to manage these complex, multi‐year, often multi‐partner relationships that involve considerable sharing of authority, responsibility, financial resources, information and risks. The management challenges manifest themselves in the core partnering tasks: establishing a management framework for partnering; finding the right partners and making the right partnering arrangement; the management of relationships with partners in a network setting; and the measurement of the performance of e‐government partnerships. The article reviews progress being made by governments in building capacity to deal with these core partnering tasks. It concludes that many new initiatives at the central agency and departmental/ministry level seem designed to centralize control of e‐government projects and wrap them in a complex web of bureaucratic structures and processes that are, for the most part, antithetical or, at best, indifferent to the creation of strong partnerships and the business valuethat e‐government public‐private partnerships promise.     

Housing Management and the Comprehensive Housing Model in Hong Kong: A case study of colonial influence

This article contains an examination of the way in which the largely British model of professional comprehensive housing management became important in Hong Kong. It shows how a comparatively small number of pioneers, mainly women who were followers of the principles of Octavia Hill, a philanthropic social reformer who developed her ideas in 19th century London, had a considerable influence in the very different environment of Hong Kong. An examination of the comparatively small amount of literature on the housing management profession is followed by a detailed analysis of the way in which the housing management profession has developed in Hong Kong. A review of the origin of public housing programmes in Hong Kong highlights the influence which housing professionals had when the housing administration was radically restructured at the time of the formation of the Hong Kong Housing Authority in the early 1970s.     

The struggle for power and control: shifting policy‐making models and the Harris agenda for education in Ontario

Abstract: This article describes the evolution of three different models in educational policy‐making in Ontario. In the late 1960s, education policy moved away from reliance on a traditional, centralized, administrative‐agency approach and gravitated towards a decentralized, asymmetrical policy interdependence that dominated until the mid‐1990s. The ndp government erected a more centralized scaffolding, with the centre undertaking a greater tutelary role vis à vis local authorities. The aim was to make more transparent the rules and standards by which local authorities, trustees and educators would operate and be held accountable. The education minister also sought to bolster local democracy by widening local parental participation in decision‐making, Since 1995, the Conservative government has erected a politicized administrative agency that has adopted a confrontational stance towards stakeholders, reduced the powers of school board trustees, decimated middle‐level professional staffing, and muffled teacher union executives. Decision‐making now seems to reside with Harris advisers and key cabinet ministers, whose stance is driven by an amalgam of neo‐liberal and neo‐conservative ideology and by voter opinion. This neo‐conservative approach differs in its embrace of a social conservatism ‐ that government maintain social order and that excessive concern for individual choice and liberty not be allowed to undermine it. Harris' social conservatism, in its K‐12 reforms, includes an embrace of regulation, hierarchy, monopoly and uniformity in the design of public policy. Sommaire: Cet article décrit l'évolution de trois modèles différents d'élaboration de politiques en matière d'éducation en Ontario. Vers la fin des anébes 1960, ces politiques d'éducation ne suivaient plus l'approche classique et centralisée caractéristique d'un organisme administratif; elles tendaient plutôt vers une interdépendance décentralisée et asymétrique, qui prédomina jusqu'au milieu des années 1990. Le gouvemement néo‐démocrate érigea une structure plus centralisée qui accordait au centre un plus grand rôle tutelaire par rapport aux autorités locales. Ceci, aux fins d'une plus grande transparence des règles et normes de fonctionnement et de redev‐abilité pour les autorités locales, les conseillers scolaires et les enseignants. Le minis‐tre de l'Éducation s'est efforcé aussi de favoriser la démocratic locale en amplifiant la participation parentale dans la prise de décisions. Depuis 1995, le gouvemement conservateur a éigé un organisme administratif politicisé qui a adopté des positions conflictuelles envers les intervenants, qui a réduit les pouvoirs des conseillers scolaires et qui a sabré dans les rangs du personnel professionnel de niveau intermédi‐aire tout en muselant les dirigeants syndicaux des enseignants. II semblerait que les décisions sont maintenant prises par les conseillers de Harris et par certains de ses ministres ‐ clé, poussés par l'opinion des électeurs et une idélogie à la fois néo‐libérale et néo‐conservatrice. Cette approche néo‐conservatrice embrasse un certain conservatisme social: le gouvemement doit maintenir l'ordre social qui ne doit pas être sapé par une trop grande préocupation concemant la liberté et les choix personnels. Le conservatisme social de Harris dans le cadre des réformes scolaires fait appel à la réglementation, à la hiérarchie, au monopole et à l'uniformité dans l'élaboration des politiques gouvemementales.     

The influence of foreign direct investment on contracting confidence in developing countries

This paper examines whether foreign direct investment (FDI) influences confidence in commercial contracts in developing countries. While the research on how host countries’ policy environments encourage FDI inflows has flourished, scholars have paid less attention to how the policy environment and local actors’ beliefs might, in turn, be affected by FDI. This is surprising because multinational enterprises are well‐recognized political and economic actors across the world. We expect that their increasing economic salience will influence the policy environments in which they function. By employing an innovative measure of property rights protection – contract‐intensive money – we examine how foreign direct investment influences host countries’ contract‐intensive money ratio in a large panel time series of both developed and developing countries from 1980 to 2002. Our analysis suggests that higher levels of FDI inflows are associated with greater confidence in commercial contracts and, by extension, the protection of property rights in developing countries.