Institutional veto players and cabinet formation: The veto control hypothesis reconsidered

Are potential cabinets more likely to form when they control institutional veto players such as symmetric second chambers or minority vetoes? Existing evidence for a causal effect of veto control has been weak. This article presents evidence for this effect on the basis of conditional and mixed logit analyses of government formations in 21 parliamentary and semi‐presidential democracies between 1955 and 2012. It also shows that the size of the effect varies systematically across political‐institutional contexts. The estimated causal effect was greater in countries that eventually abolished the relevant veto institutions. It is suggested that the incidence of constitutional reform is a proxy for context‐specific factors that increased the incentives for veto control and simultaneously provided a stimulus for the weakening of institutional veto power.     

E‐government and public service quality in Ghana

This article contributes to the growing discourse on the potential of e‐government to transform the operations of public sector institutions, thereby improving public services. It does so by conceptualizing public service quality into efficiency, economy (cost reduction), customer satisfaction, and service accessibility and draws on qualitative data from the Ghanaian narrative for illustration. As previous studies have demonstrated, this study also affirms the potential of e‐government in improving public services delivery by increasing efficiency, reducing the cost of operations, expanding access to services, and achieving customer satisfaction. Yet, there remains a repertoire of challenges such as weak ICT infrastructure especially in towns and villages, incessant power outages and illiteracy, which are drawbacks to fully harnessing the benefits of e‐government in Ghana. The study recommends that these challenges should feature prominently in e‐government policies to increase the chances of solving them.     

Bridge Over the River Qua: Using Simulations to Span the Divide Between Prelaw and Political Science Students

Undergraduate public law courses often attract students with competing expectations. Some students enroll in these courses to prepare for law school, while others enroll in the courses to gain a broader understanding of courts in the American system of government. These differing student constituencies can create a dilemma for instructors. A course designed to cater to students with a general interest in the judiciary may not afford prelaw students with an appreciation for the demands of the legal profession. Conversely, a course narrowly tailored toward prelaw students risks alienating the majority of students for whom this class may be their only look at the judiciary. As a means to promote pedagogical balance and to appeal to varied student constituencies, we profile five public law simulations in this article that engage students in active learning and promote a greater understanding of law and courts.     

警察院校大学生廉政意识教育长效机制的构建

警察院校大学生预备警官的特殊身份,决定了其廉政意识教育尤为重要。廉政意识教育是一个系统工程,需要建立科学的长效机制,文章着重从建立适合警察院校特点的学员思想政治工作管理体制、建立符合警察院校学员特点的教育体系和不断完善警校学员廉政意识教育的监防体系方面进行了探究。     

都市生态治理中党政干部领导力探讨

推进都市生态治理是促进区域经济社会协调可持续发展的应有之义.本文以A省S市都市生态治理中党政干部领导力为基点,阐释了S市党政干部在生态治理中发挥的核心作用,同时也发现其中面临领导动力弱化、领导效益损耗、领导协同失效、领导制度选择性执行等困局.因此,应从增强都市生态治理中党政干部领导自洽力、提升领导转换力、激活领导制度力...     

Does Gender Equality Affect Municipal Transparency: The Case of Spain

The influence of women in organizational transparency is an understudied vein of representative bureaucracy. Literature claims that the increase of women in formal political representation opened the opportunity to bring to public organizations gender diversity, experiences, and values different from those of men. It highlights the beneficial leadership styles and the legitimacy of public bureaucracies. Since gender equality in Spanish local government has increased in recent years, it was the trigger and the aim for this study: to understand the influence of women’s political representation on the level of Spanish municipalities’ transparency. The analysis draws on panel data econometric techniques. The results reinforce the discussion that the representation of women in local political life will increase information transparency and reduce information asymmetry in municipalities.     

External Pressures and Internal Dynamics in the Institutionalization of Performance-Based Budgeting: An Endless Process?

The well-known practice of performance-based budgeting (PBB) is a relevant component of the New Public Management (NPM) reform agenda and has become widespread, with varying approaches and results across countries. However, its variation within specific countries has remained largely unexplored. This study analyzes three organizations operating within the same context—three ministries in Italy—to contribute to a new understanding of PBB variation by illustrating why the same PBB practice can or cannot be implemented and internalized similarly across these organizations and thus become (or not) fully institutionalized. The study adopts and enriches the institutional approach by extending beyond isomorphic convergence toward PBB and explaining practice variation, linking the interactions between external pressures and internal dynamics at the organizational level to PBB institutionalization. The empirical analysis shows how a lack of alignment between external pressures and internal dynamics contributes to an unfinished and apparently endless process of institutionalization.     

Speaking Like Statesmen or Scientists: Differentiating Congressional and Administrative Views on Data

ABSTRACT

Do legislators and executives speak of data the same way when speaking about public sector data? Public management scholarship and public performance policies often emphasize data-driven decision making as the path to making government efficient and effective. Whether the public policy makers mean the same thing when they speak about data in discussions of data-driven performance and decision making is unknown. In this article, the authors present an analysis of the language of data in conversations about government performance. Two frameworks are identified for the role of data in public performance—the statesman’s and the scientist’s. A corpus-level analysis of over 30 years of government documents is used to demonstrate the differences between these two approaches. This research builds consciously on the work of previous scholars seeking to map the nuances of data-driven performance management policies in the U.S. federal government.     

Opening up to OERs: Electronic Original Sourcebook Versus Traditional Textbook in the Introduction to American Government Course

Traditional American Government textbooks are expensive and often unpopular with students. New technologies and Open Educational Resources (OERs) open up the potential for change, but questions of quality are ever present: can OERs really help students learn better, or are they just cheaper? I developed an OER based on original sources and compared student learning outcomes with the OER section to those in a free digital textbook section. While the OER I created did not work as well as I had hoped, I nonetheless developed a redesign of my course and my approach to teaching, which is the true benefit of adopting OERs.     

Challenges of Local Ownership: Understanding the Outcomes of the International Community’s ‘Light Footprint’ Approach to the Nepal Peace Process

This article investigates whether a ‘light footprint’ approach to peacekeeping and peacebuilding by the international community more effectively addresses local drivers of conflict than the dominant model of large, multidimensional peace operations. It considers international engagement in the Nepalese peace process through the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), and argues that the international community’s approach to local ownership became more focused on non-imposition and therefore less politically engaged over time as a result of both local and international factors. This facilitated local elite ownership of the process, which fundamentally undermined the international community’s capacity to support peace consolidation as elites moved away from key transformational pledges of the peace settlement.