Does agency competition improve the quality of policy analysis? Evidence from OMB and CBO fiscal projections

Public management scholars often claim that agency competition provides an effective institutional check on monopoly authority, and hence, leads to improvement of administrative performance in public sector agencies. This logic was central for creating the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in 1975 to challenge the policy information provided by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). We challenge this conventional wisdom by demonstrating that CBO has failed to enhance the quality of U.S. fiscal policy analysis on its own terms; nor has it spurred improvements in OMB's performance. Our empirical results indicate that the quality of OMB's fiscal projections has often deteriorated since the establishment of CBO as a rival bureau. We also show that both public and private information is being shared by these agencies to produce a similar caliber of task outputs. The broader implications of our study indicate that although politicians face incentives to employ agency competition in governmental settings, this type of bureaucratic strategy does not necessarily enhance the quality of administrative performance. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Particularism versus Universalism in the Brazilian Public Administration Literature

The author draws on the Brazilian public administration literature to discuss the conflict between the need to remain open to lessons from elsewhere, while at the same time remaining grounded in a particular local context. The article begins by presenting calls by a number of Brazilian public administration scholars for what might be termed an "administrative particularism," or an assertion that universal lessons do not apply in the discipline. This is followed by a discussion of the challenges that these and other Brazilian public administration scholars identify. Further discussion will suggest these challenges, and many of the solutions most commonly offered for them, imply that, far from a uniquely Brazilian public administration, the country seeks to move closer to the model of public administration practiced elsewhere, especially in the developed world.     

The dynamics of coalition politics in Japan

Over the past seven years, Japan's party system has undergone a transition from single-party rule to multi-party coalitions, albeit under continuing LDP dominance. The LDP's propensity for coalition politics has been influenced not only by the loss of its Diet majorities but by a number of other factors including the end of the polarized party politics of the Cold War period. In this article, Aurelia George Mulgan, Associate Professor of Politics at the University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy, explains the LDP's complex Diet management strategy underlying its choice of coalition partners. At the same time, Dr. George Mulgan argues that these strategies represent just a more developed form of the deal-making politics the LDP pursued during periods of evenly balanced Diet forces in the 1970s and 1980s. The key difference is the greater level of transparency and Diet-centered nature of inter-party negotiations.     

The Dynamics of Change: Class, Politics and Civil Society—From Marx to post-Marxism

This paper discusses how Marxist understandings of politics and civil society, particularly Marx's own work, can contribute to understanding the dynamics of political change in contemporary capitalist democracies. While briefly exploring the conceptual problems contained in the political-philosophical agenda set out in Marx's earliest works, the paper argues that his subsequent examinations of civil society and class relations are grounded in a political economy of capitalist development which retains considerable salience. The possibilities of a post-Marxist politics of civil society are assessed in this light, using the example of recent neo-liberal and neo-conservative assaults on the welfare state to indicate the ways in which membership of civil society is itself a critical focus of political contestation. A politics of civil society (for example, contemporary 'third way' strategies) lacks any substantive democratic potential, without the type of radical political economy developed by Marx.