Assessing the Impact of Bureaucracy Bashing by Electoral Campaigns

The literature on the implications of electoral "bureaucracy bashing" for public management is thin. This is partly because of the difficulty of defining basic terms and measuring results in meaningful ways. Using focus group data, this article explores how senior federal managers perceive campaign bureaucracy bashing and assess its consequences. The participants perceive that candidate-based bashing affects federal management on two levels: one emotional, the other programmatic. The emotional impact is pronounced, producing frustration and hostility from senior managers toward political candidates, political appointees, and the media. Senior managers report that bashing adversely affects policy implementation through low morale, poor recruitment, and training and by fostering an environment of distrust toward bureaucracy. Grounded in a diverse literature relating to public administration, the presidency, campaigns and elections, and political communication, this inquiry finds that senior managers confirm many of the speculations these works raise about how bashing affects public employees and public policy.     

“E” the People: Do U.S. Municipal Government Web Sites Support Public Involvement?

To what extent do local government Web sites support practical, meaningful public involvement? Fifteen years after the adoption and diffusion of the World Wide Web, the answer to this question remains cloudy and controversial. The promise—and peril—of Web‐based public involvement, known as e‐democracy, has been widely debated. Much of the debate has focused on theoretical abstractions or extrapolations of current political or technological trends. Empirical studies have been limited to reports on pilot projects, case studies, or special population surveys. This paper contributes to our empirical understanding of the question. It reports results of a recent comprehensive survey of official government Web sites in the principal cities of the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. In particular, it examines whether and how U.S. city government Web sites facilitate users’ involvement in local public issues.     

What Do We Know and Need to Know about the Environmental Outcomes of Collaborative Management?

Many tout the benefits of collaborative environmental management as an alternative to centralized planning and command and control regulation, but the excitement over collaborative processes has not been matched by evidence that these processes actually improve the environment. The most crucial question in collaborative environmental management remains unanswered and often unasked: To what extent does collaboration lead to improved environmental outcomes? We know much about why collaboration is occurring and how collaborative processes and outputs vary. The primary goal of future research on collaborative environmental management should be to demonstrate whether collaboration improves environmental conditions more than traditional processes and newer market-based processes. Collaboration is not a panacea; it is a choice that policy makers and public managers should make based on evidence about expected outcomes.     

Changing Sides or Changing Minds? Party Identification and Policy Preferences in the American Electorate

Scholars have long debated the individual-level relationship between partisanship and policy preferences. We argue that partisanship and issue attitudes cause changes in each other, but the pattern of influence varies systematically. Issue-based change in party identification should occur among individuals who are aware of party differences on an issue and find that issue to be salient. Individuals who are aware of party differences, but do not attach importance to the issue, should evidence party-based issue change. Those lacking awareness of party differences on an issue should show neither effect. We test our account by examining individuals' party identifications and their attitudes on abortion, government spending and provision of services, and government help for African Americans using the 1992-94-96 National Election Study panel study, finding strong support for our argument. We discuss the implications of our findings both for the microlevel study of party identification and the macrolevel analysis of partisan change.     

Voter satisfaction and electoral systems: Does preferential voting in candidate-centred systems make a difference?

Abstract.  Over the years, many scholars have examined the relationship between electoral systems and measures of voter satisfaction with democracy. The tendency in these studies has been to explore the traditional Proportional Representation/non-Proportional-Representation dichotomy, assessing whether more proportional systems produce higher levels of satisfaction. This article examines another dimension of electoral system variation – namely the degree to which the ballot structure incorporates ordinal, or preferential features. Given that proponents of such systems extol their virtues as offering voters 'greater choice', it is interesting to explore how this actually plays with the voters. The article makes use of cross-national data from the comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project to examine the relationship between preferential voting and levels of satisfaction with democracy.     

All voting is strategic

All voting is strategic because the shared outcomes are note within the choice set of any voter, the elements of which can only be strategies. Voting behavior need not re- flect the individual's ordering of outcomes, and the conventional distinction between sincere and sophisticated voting is misguided. In voting choice, the ordinal ranking of outcomes must be supplemented by intrapersonal evaluation of utility differences among these outcomes and also by predictions concerning the behavior of other participants in the nexus of interdependence.     

Does democracy “suffer” from diversity? Issue representation and diversity in senate elections

Several recent studies examine the degree to which congressional behavior affects candidates’ electoral fortunes (e.g., Carson, 2005). Research examining electoral competitiveness (Bond, Campbell, & Cottrill, 2001; Koetzle, 1998) and roll call voting (Bailey & Brady, 1998; Jones, 2003) finds that diversity in the electorate mediates the impact of numerous variables upon election outcomes and representation. However, the influence of diversity on other modes of representation – such as the policy positions taken by Senate candidates–remains unexplored. We investigate the link between representation and Senate candidates’ policy positions and thereby examine the degree to which voter diversity affects candidates’ policy responsiveness. We find that diversity significantly influences responsiveness, both directly and indirectly – candidates in homogenous states are more responsive to constituents than are candidates in heterogeneous states.