Can Transparency Foster More Understanding and Compliant Citizens?

Voluntary policy compliance is an important yet rarely studied topic in public administration. To address the paucity of research, this article proposes and empirically tests a conceptual framework that ties policy transparency and policy understanding to voluntary policy compliance intentions. The reasoning is that the extent to which citizens understand a policy contributes to their intentions to comply with that policy. Further, the authors argue that policy transparency indirectly influences voluntary policy compliance intentions through a positive effect on citizens’ levels of policy understanding. To enhance the validity of the findings, the authors assess these relationships across two policy domains. The findings reflect an indirect positive effect of transparency on voluntary compliance occurring through policy understanding. However, this emerged only for one policy domain. These results suggest that the effects of policy transparency on policy understanding and voluntary policy compliance intentions may depend on the policy domain.     

Evaluation of Theft,Lying, and Fighting in Adolescence

The nature of age and gender differences in the evaluation of three everyday immoral behaviors was analyzed with a 21-item questionnaire. The items included examples of theft, lying, and fighting expressed both as omissions and commissions, commissions further specified with positive motives, negative motives, duress, or provocation. Three age groups were included in the study: pre-adolescents, midadolescents, and late adolescents (N = 2594). The most important findings were that boys accepted all immoral acts better than girls, the immoral peak in midadolescence, the low differentiation between the different types of acts in preadolescence, and the flexible usage of different rationales in middle and late adolescence.     

Organisations as Epistemic Capital: the Case of Independent Children’s Rights Institutions

Why do national organisations proliferate in practically all areas of policymaking and organisational life, and why are they involved in supranational networks and organisations? The article approaches this mystery by exploring how organisations are built and used as authorities in domestic policymaking. The empirical focus is on the establishment of the institution of children’s ombudsman and its uses in influencing Finnish child policy. The theory developed in the article suggests that organisations are accumulations of authority, here termed epistemic capital, which is the primary reason that they are established and sustained. Once these are institutionalised, various actors can use the authority of organisations to legitimate their policy objectives. The case of independent children’s rights institutions shows how this mechanism operates in child policy. The Finnish office of the ombudsman for children has worked actively to become an established ontological and moral authority in child policy, and it has also attempted to utilise the mandate and authority of the United Nations and the Convention on the Rights of the Child to pressure the state into more child-friendly policy decisions.