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.     

Cooperation,not cost savings: explaining duration of shared service agreements

Among local governments, inter-municipal cooperation is the growing reform; but the literature is silent regarding the determinants of longer-term shared service agreements. We conducted a survey of all local governments in New York State in 2013 to assess the level of sharing across 29 public services. The duration of shared service agreements varies from 1 to 80 years. What explains this difference? Our hierarchical linear model shows that service sharing agreements fall along a cooperation continuum, where cost savings are a determinant of shorter agreements, while the public values of service quality and cross-jurisdictional coordination explain longer-term agreements. We also find that positive past experience with sharing partners increases the duration of sharing agreements. Our analysis lays the foundation for new theories of shared services that build directly from the benefits of improved regional coordination, inter-municipal reciprocity and service quality, not from theories based solely on competition and costs.     

Sustainability reporting by Australian local government authorities

This qualitative study investigates the Western Australian (WA) local government authorities’ sustainability reporting practices, in the absence of mandatory reporting guidelines, through content analysis of their websites. Calculations from comparing the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)’s disclosures with those of 140 local council websites were used to develop a sustainability reporting disclosure index. The findings indicate that sustainability reporting remains moderately practised by local government authorities, despite stakeholder demand for proactive disclosures. The discourse analysis shows that Western Australia’s strategic planning for sustainable development is the key force propelling councils towards sustainability reporting practices. The findings also suggest that WA local government authorities are increasing sustainability disclosures to legitimate their social and environmental initiatives. The findings have policy implications for regulators and/or government in Western Australia, with practical implications for local council authorities and/or managers in developing awareness of sustainable operations. The study also contributes to local government authorities’ growing awareness of sustainable service operations.     

Preventing Dysfunction and Improving Policy Advice: The Role of Intra‐Departmental Boundary Spanners

It is well established in the public management literature that boundary spanners – people or groups that work across departments or sectors – are critical to the success of whole of government and joined‐up working. In studying recent unprecedented change to central government agencies in the Australian context, our research identified that intra‐departmental boundary spanners also play a critical role in the functioning of government departments, particularly during restructuring. Although most contemporary literature in public management concentrates on boundaries across formal organisational entities (departments, agencies, sectors), boundaries also exist within departments. Our research has found that without dedicated intra‐departmental boundary spanners, significant role confusion and dysfunctional practices arise. In turn, this has serious implications for the quality of policy advice given to Cabinet. Further research needs to be undertaken into both the role of intra‐departmental boundary spanners and how to nurture and manage the practice of intra‐departmental boundary spanners. This is especially the case if changes in Australia represent a fundamental shift more broadly in the way central government agencies operate.     

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.     

How the City of London lost at Brexit: a historical perspective

The nature of the City of London as an offshore financial centre has long made London dependent on the British state providing protection from external political regulation, even as London’s foreign currency business separated its interests from British governments’ economic policy preoccupations. Since the 2008 crash and the onset of the eurozone crisis, London has faced threats to both its autonomy from external regulatory demands and to its offshore business interests at the same time as the long-standing external statecraft of British governments around EU membership has broken down. The Cameron governments’ efforts to protect the City within the European Union under political conditions that were transformed by the eurozone crisis exposed the limits of Britain’s position as a member of the European Union. When David Cameron then tried to resolve the problem of EU membership through a referendum he made it extremely difficult to defend the City’s broader commercial interests in the Single European Market because freedom of movement issues weighed significantly more in British domestic politics than financial services.     

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.     

If territorial fragmentation is a problem,is amalgamation a solution? – Ten years later

ABSTRACT

Over the last decade, municipal territorial amalgamation has occurred in 15 European countries. The same period has seen spectacular progress in research on the relationship between municipal size and the functioning of local governments, as well as the impacts of territorial reforms on economic performance and local democracy. Quasi-experimental designs treating territorial reforms as specific “research laboratories” have constituted an important part of that trend. However, there are still important gaps in the knowledge and the study results are often inconclusive. These observations call for a research agenda for the future.