The Investment Approach to Public Service Provision

The investment approach to public service provision is now receiving considerable attention worldwide. By promoting data‐intensive assessments of baseline conditions and how government action can improve on them, the approach holds the potential to transform policy development, service implementation, and program evaluation. Recently, variations on the investment approach have been applied in Australia to explore the effectiveness of specific programs in employment training, criminal justice, and infrastructure development. This article reviews the investment approach, presents a Public Investment Checklist to guide such work, and discusses three examples. It concludes by considering the implications of investment thinking for the work of policy designers and public managers.     

The Penal Voluntary Sector in England and Wales: Adaptation to Unsettlement and Austerity

This article draws on some findings from research which investigated penal voluntary sector adaptation to the mixed market in criminal justice services. The article firstly reprises the main trends for aligning state relationships with the voluntary sector from the 1980s to the present. We then outline some findings about adaptive experiences, situations and practices of the voluntary sector in criminal justice resettlement in the light of considerable upheaval. The research found that service providing voluntary sector organisations (VSOs) either outwardly comply with, or, in a minority of cases, actively embrace, competitive marketised models of service delivery. Secondly, the sector has normalised commercial approaches to organisational efficiency as well as aligned with bureaucratic practices common to the statutory sector. Despite charges that they are effectively co‐opted by both state and market interests, many have reported conflicts between prioritising long‐term financial viability with their founding ‘ethos and values’. We conclude that while many VSOs have successfully adjusted to market and bureaucratic norms, aspects of that repositioning have been at a cost to their traditions of relative autonomy, localism and distinctiveness, to the possible detriment of a vigorous civil society.     

How mass media attract political elites’ attention

Political agenda‐setting research has shown that policy makers are responsive vis‐à‐vis media priorities. However, the mechanisms behind this effect have remained understudied so far. In particular, agenda‐setting scholars have difficulties determining to what extent politicians react to media coverage purely because of the information it contains (information effect), and to what extent the effect is driven not by what the media say but by the fact that certain information is in the media (media channel effect), which is valued for its own sake – for instance, because media coverage is considered to be a reflection of public opinion. By means of a survey‐embedded experiment with Belgian, Canadian and Israeli political elites (N = 410), this study tests whether the mere fact that an issue is covered by the news media causes politicians to pay attention to this issue. It shows that a piece of information gets more attention from politicians when it comes via the media rather than an identical piece of information coming via a personal e‐mail. This effect occurs largely across the board: it is not dependent on individual politician characteristics.     

Electoral volatility and parties’ ideological responsiveness

For a number of decades now, scholars have been indicating that ties between citizens and parties are eroding. As a consequence, electoral behaviour has become more volatile and also more unpredictable. The consequences of this process of change on parties’ strategic behaviour have, however, received little attention. In this article, the impact of dealignment on parties’ strategic behaviour is examined, with the focus being on the extent to which parties are responsive to the mean voter. The expectation of dealignment allowing parties ‘to move around more freely’ leads to the hypothesis that parties are more responsive in a context of dealignment. The analyses provide evidence that is in line with this expectation. Ideological responsiveness is conditioned by the level of volatility in the electorate. The conclusion to draw from these results is that dealignment, which profoundly affects voters’ behaviour, leads parties to become more responsive to the mean voter.     

Attitudes towards highly skilled and low‐skilled immigration in Europe: A survey experiment in 15 European countries

To what extent do economic concerns drive anti‐migrant attitudes? Key theoretical arguments extract two central motives: increased labour market competition and the fiscal burden linked to the influx of migrants. This article provides new evidence regarding the impact of material self‐interest on attitudes towards immigrants. It reports the results of a survey experiment embedded in representative surveys in 15 European countries before and after the European refugee crisis in 2014. As anticipated by the fiscal burden argument, it is found that rich natives prefer highly skilled over low‐skilled migration more than low‐income respondents do. Moreover, the study shows that these tax concerns among the wealthy are stronger if fiscal exposure to migration is high. No support is found for the labour market competition argument predicting that natives will be most opposed to migrants with similar skills. The results suggest that highly skilled migrants are preferred over low‐skilled migrants irrespective of natives’ skill levels.     

Simulated foreign policy exchanges: A formal theory of foreign policy interaction (part II)

This article presents the underlying rationale for a theory of foreign policy dynamics, and is the second part of a two‐part series which specifies a theoretical perspective for explaining the exchanges between nations. The task of the first paper was to discuss the substantive thrust of the research, and to give a view of the Monte Carlo simulation which lies at its core. The theory deals with the relevance of such concepts as reciprocity, uncertainty, third party effects, bureaucratic politics and domestic events for explaining foreign policy. This article provides the axioms which structure our theory and formal theorems that follow from these axioms.     

Muted criticism in Egypt (Part 2)

Egypt, the heart of the Arab world, is the dominant player in Arab‐Israeli and inter‐Arab affairs. Close scrutiny of political and intellectual trends in Egypt tells us much about these trends throughout the Arab world. Reporting from a country such as Egypt, which has an authoritarian form of government, presents problems for journalists and researchers. There is much criticism of the government, but it is muted, often lying just below the surface. One must try to discern the underlying political reality without seeming to criticize the government. Journalists who are considered pro‐Israel are viewed with suspicion. Journalists who ask probing questions may be classified as pro‐Israel. This study examines the complex fabric of Egyptian political reality through interviews with prominent intellectuals and government leaders. The interviews focus on crucial areas of foreign policy.     

Cost‐Effectiveness of Early Childhood Interventions to Enhance Preschool: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Head Start Centers Enrolling Historically Underserved Populations

We evaluate the cost‐effectiveness of two early childhood interventions that use instructional coaching and parent coaching as levers for improvement. The study design allows us to compare the individual effects of each intervention as well as their combined effect on student outcomes. We find that teachers receiving instructional coaching improve their use of evidence‐based instructional practices, while families receiving parent coaching show increases in numerous responsive parenting behaviors associated with positive child outcomes. Both interventions demonstrate positive impacts on students, but only parent coaching shows statistically significant effects across a range of student outcomes. Instructional coaching alone is substantially less costly and may therefore be the most cost‐effective of the three treatment conditions; however, small sample sizes limit our ability to reach definitive conclusions. Policy simulations suggest that implementing these interventions could raise the overall cost‐effectiveness of Head Start by at least 16 percent.     

The Quiet Revolution? The Labour Party and Welfare Conditionality

Labour's 2017 general election manifesto contained a pledge to ‘end the punitive sanctions regime’ in the British welfare state. Whilst the specific implications of this pledge were not elaborated, such a policy would nevertheless constitute a profound break with a welfare consensus spanning over twenty years. The depth of the suggested changes on welfare are also evident in the scale of reform proposed to disability benefits, as well as plans—confirmed in August 2018 by the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell—to pilot universal basic income. Collectively, these policies would seemingly be deeply at odds with public opinion on the benefits system, which over the course of the last two decades has significantly hardened. Yet despite the seemingly radical and controversial nature of the policy, it received very little media or public attention during the election campaign. This article explores Labour's ‘quiet revolution’ on welfare, examining whether Labour's new welfare approach is indeed a bold attempt to reshape public opinion on welfare or, alternatively, a mostly pragmatic reaction to changing social attitudes. The argument presented is that whilst there are persuasive explanations that Labour is responding to a change in the public mood, there is also evidence of a more ambitious goal at stake: the aim of reshaping, not simply responding to, public opinion on the welfare state.     

Why Right‐Leaning Populism has Grown in the Most Advanced Liberal Democracies of Europe

Immigration and new class divisions, combined with a growing anti‐elitism and political correctness, are often used as explanations for the strong gains for right‐leaning populist parties in national elections across Europe in recent years. But contrary to what we might assume, such parties have been very successful in the most developed and comprehensive welfare states, in nations—such as the Nordic countries—with the best scores on economic equality and social inclusion and long established political and judicial institutions enjoying a high degree of popular legitimacy. As argued in this article, this seems to happen because a duopoly of the centre‐left and centre‐right political establishment has kept issues such as immigration and new class divisions off the public agenda and hence paved the way for right‐leaning ‘disruptor’ populist parties with an anti‐immigration agenda in times of increasing immigration.