The Role of Citizen Participation and the Use of Social Media Platforms in the Participatory Budgeting Process

In the United States participatory budgeting (PB) is a relatively new and innovative approach to municipal budgeting that has implications for improving the role of citizen participation in the budgetary process. The research is based on personal interviews with local community leaders involved in the PB process in the 49th Ward of Chicago, Illinois; the 6th Ward of St. Louis, Missouri; and the City of Boston, Massachusetts. Highlights are provided of the specific experiences and perceptions of these community leaders with a particular emphasis on the use of social media platforms in engaging citizens in the PB process. This article concludes with recommendations for creating a PB infrastructure, for increasing citizen participation in the PB process, and for assessing and increasing the impact of PB in cities within the United States.     

Measuring Policy Success: Evaluating Public Sector Reform in Bhutan

There has been resurgence in evaluation of policy, reflected mostly by an increase in ex ante studies. Although there is a shift towards ex post evaluation, this has been gradual, resulting in a paucity of ex post evaluation literature. To address this gap, we apply a revisionist approach to evaluate a major public sector reform in the Bhutanese civil service. We conclude that it provides a more holistic approach for ex post evaluation policy, and also a more nuanced evaluation which moves us beyond the narrow binary view of success or failure in reform.     

The use of intergovernmental grants to municipalities for electoral purposes by subnational governments

Subnational governments devote a significant share of their financial resources to help municipalities provide local public services to their citizens. Compared to the large number of studies on national governments, little effort has been devoted to the influence of distributive politics on the use of intergovernmental grants by subnational governments. To fill this gap, this study uses a data set covering the period 2001–2011 to verify to what extent the Québec government used conditional grants to municipalities for electoral purposes. The results of this study show that the allocation of grants to municipalities is not exempt from electoral politics as municipalities located in districts held by governing parties or in high electoral competition districts receive more grants than other municipalities. However, the influence of electoral politics decreases substantially when the management of intergovernmental grants is under tight scrutiny by the opposition parties, mass media and the population. These findings suggest that distributive politics can be conceptualised as a political agency problem whose prevalence is seriously constrained by the improvement of the transparency of public policies management.     

Big change,little change? Punctuation,increments and multi-layer institutional change for English local authorities under austerity

This paper draws on new institutionalist theories to consider how we might characterise the process and outcomes of change occurring in English local government as a result of the UK’s austerity policies. It uses national and local empirical data to argue that changes are best understood as multi-layer processes, whereby radical ‘punctuated’ shifts in national funding can be mitigated to incremental adjustments in service delivery at a local level. However, the paper also suggests that the incremental appearance of change may be temporary, and that diminishing institutional resilience and emergent discursive shifts potentially prefigure a paradigm change in local governance.     

Ten years after: revisiting the determinants of the adoption of municipal corporations for local service delivery

Research on the use of municipal corporations to deliver local and regional public services has evolved significantly in the past decade. Most of this work addresses the performance of this service-delivery mode in relation to local bureaucracies. However, much less is known about the drivers for the adoption of municipal corporations in the first place. This article reviews the main determinants of adoption – service characteristics, institutional and regulatory settings, political constraints and financial conditions – and highlights the need for comparative research across countries.     

Meeting development goals: evidence from the Civil Society Education Fund

In recent years, the Civil Society Education Fund has supported national education civil society coalitions (NECs) in low-income countries so that they put pressure on governments and donors to implement the Education for All agenda and the Millennium Development Goal on education. This article draws on literature on global governance as well as on an extensive evaluation of the CSEF to explore the actual contribution of this initiative to the activity of NECs. The article highlights the achievements and shortcomings of the CSEF and includes a set of practical recommendations on the role of global civil society in international development processes.     

Organizational Citizenship Levels of Physicians in Public Hospitals

The aim of this study is to define organizational citizenship levels of physicians working in public hospitals. The population of the study consists of the physicians employed in the hospitals run by the Ministry of Health in Istanbul. The Organizational Citizenship Level Scale was used for the collection of data. It was found that the participants’ organizational citizenship levels were the highest in the “conscience” subsection and the lowest in the “praising the organization” subsection. Findings of this study provide clear information for the decision-makers and hospital managers in developing working conditions of physicians in public hospitals.     

Administrative Styles in the OECD: Bureaucratic Policy-Making beyond Formal Rules

As we know from comparative public policy, bureaucracies contribute to a considerable degree to the contents and the ways of policy-making. One important driver of administrative policy-making are their specific “styles” or “cultures”. “Administrative styles” are understood here as the standard operating procedures and routines that characterize the behavior and activities of administrative bodies in initiating, drafting and implementing policy. In this article, we convey the concept of Administrative Styles to the level of International Organizations (IOs) and apply it to the Organization for Economic Development and Co-Operation (OECD). The article proceeds in three steps: First, the concept of administrative styles is introduced and refined. Drawing on expert interviews with OECD staff, we secondly show that consideration of OECD administrative styles significantly advances the literature’s understanding of the organization. Finally, we give an outlook on new research avenues and the relevance of our findings for the study of International Public Administrations (IPAs) more generally.     

The Design and Execution of Performance Management Systems at State Level: A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Malaysia

This comparative study analyses the experience of Italy and Malaysia in the design and execution of performance management systems at the state level. The article investigates how performance management systems have changed over the past decades, the motivations behind their metamorphoses, their common elements across the two countries, and what accounts for the respective progress. It also investigates the role that the institutional framework plays in making performance management systems robust. The study presents policy recommendations on how governments can create more robust performance management systems for enhanced accountability and transparency in an age of resource constraint.     

Forget “Blind Leading the Seeing” – Improving Public Service Management

The aim of this research is to identify the most effective public service management approaches for outsourced services. Our focus is on the phases of transition and service management post provider selection. To reach this aim, comparative case studies across sectors were conducted. The studied cases indicate that managing an outsourced service should not be a separate area of public management research nor practice, but rather a part of service management. Best practices in (outsourced) public service management are provided. Management focus on transition phase after provider selection, performance measurement, and evaluation will bring efficiency to public sector service production.