Mayor vs. manager revisited: an archival approach to comparing efficiency

The efficiency of municipal government is defined as a function of two factors: financial indicators such as per capita spending and taxation, and quality of life. If the financial indicators differ between cities without a corresponding change in quality of life, then the city with the lower value can be said to be better managed. An analysis of data from the County and City Data Book and the Places Rated Almanac found that large cities managed by city managers are more efficient than those managed by mayors. There was no significant difference in efficiency between mayors and managers of small cities; theoretically, mayors of small cities are unable to tax, spend, and borrow in relative anonymity. A cluster analysis of 114 large U.S. cities suggested that they may be classified into one of four categories: (1) Drunken Sailors; (2) High rollers; (3) Prudent Big Boys; and (4) Solvent Citizens.     

Attention Getters: Diaspora Support for Ethno–Political Organizations in the Middle East

Why do some ethno-political organizations get support from their diaspora while others do not? There is little analysis that examines why some organizations (both violent and nonviolent) get support. Using data on 112 organizations in the Middle East we examine how factors like the power of the organization, ideology, political behavior, and government treatment might impact the likelihood of an organization getting support from its diaspora. We argue that contentious political behavior should have the largest impact on such support. We find that those that do the best job of getting attention through visible action get the most support.     

Measuring Meritocracy in the Public Sector in Europe: a New National and Sub-National Indicator

Since the late nineteenth century, the presence of an independent and meritocratic bureaucracy has been posited as an advantage for effective bureaucratic behaviour and a means of limiting patrimonial networks and corruption, among other benefits. There is little consensus on how the features of an independent and meritocratic bureaucracy should be measured across countries, however, and broad empirical studies are therefore rare. What is more, the few such studies that exist have advanced measures which are constructed exclusively on expert surveys. Although these have indeed contributed to the knowledge in the field, the data on which they are built come with problems. This paper proposes a set of novel measures that complement existing measures and thus fill important gaps in this burgeoning literature. The measures we present are not based on expert assessments but on perceptions of public sector employees’ and citizens’. We create two measures—that can be combined into one—from a recent survey (2013) of over 85,000 citizens in 24 European countries. One is purely based on the assessments from public sector employees’ and the other is based on perceptions of citizens working outside the public sector. The paper also discusses the survey and explores the external validity of the measures provided here, showing correlations with alternative measures based on expert opinions, as well as variables from the literature that we would expect to correlate highly with a meritocratic bureaucracy.     

Politicization,Bureaucratic Legalism,and Innovative Attitudes in the Public Sector

Previous studies have identified institutional, organizational, and individual factors that promote innovation in public organizations. Yet they have overlooked how the type of public administration—and the type of administrators—is associated with innovative attitudes. Using two large, unique comparative data sets on public bureaucracies and public managers, this article examines how bureaucratic politicization and legalistic features are associated with senior public managers’ attitudes toward innovation in 19 European countries. Results of multilevel analysis indicate that the bureaucratic politicization of an administration and the law background of public managers matter. Public managers working in politicized administrations and those whose education includes a law degree exhibit lower pro-innovation attitudes (i.e., receptiveness to new ideas and creative solutions and change orientation).     

Random timing of elections and the political business cycle

In his 1975 paper, Nordhaus formally proves that governments whose aim is to be reelected, will generate ‘political’ business cycles. Empirical results do not confirm this proposition, especially in countries used to early elections. We show that if there is a non-zero probability for elections to be called before the legal term, the political business cycle will be less pronounced, even if no early election actually takes place; moreover, if the normal electoral cycle is interrupted before the legal term, one might observe an inversion of the business cycle, or no cycle at all.