HOW TRADITIONAL ARE THE AMERICAN,FRENCH AND GERMAN TRADITIONS OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION? A RESEARCH AGENDA

Consistent with the notion of tradition, public administration scholars usually interpret and compare administrative developments in the US, France, and Germany as inheritance, assuming continuity. However, administrative traditions have thus far not been an object of systematic research. The present research agenda aims to address this research gap by introducing the transfer‐of‐ideas approach as a means to examine the empirical substance of national traditions. We claim that for current research, the benefits of this approach are twofold. First, the transfer‐of‐ideas approach contributes to comparative public administration since it reveals in how far intellectual traditions are hybrid instead of distinctively American, French or German developments. Second, the approach may help to address the polysemous meanings of and terminological difficulties within administrative concepts that prevail in Public Administration on both sides of the Atlantic.     

Voter turnout in direct democracy: A joint analysis of individual,referendum and community factors

In the context of an ever growing importance and usage of referendums around the globe, this article provides a comprehensive approach to analyse the determinants of participation in direct democratic votes. In the absence of conclusive empirical evidence about which factors drive direct democratic participation, studies tend to adopt election-specific findings and assume the determinants of electoral turnout to equally apply for referendums. Yet, a strict empirical test of these numerous determinants in a referendum context is still missing. By examining aspects stemming from both election-specific and referendum-specific contexts, this article aims to first test the applicability of common electoral theories of turnout for direct democratic participation and second to analyse the relevance of each factor when simultaneously examined with other contextual and individual factors. This holistic approach represents reality as adequate as possible, that is, to consider various factors that may simultaneously influence the individual decision to vote. Next to individual variables, the analysis particularly focuses on two contextual levels, the community a person lives in and factors linked to a given referendum. The discussion and joint analysis of competing factors addresses the problem of underspecified turnout models, which commonly prevents a detailed assessment of the relative importance of the determinants of turnout. The study uses registered data from the canton of Geneva, Switzerland, which provides official information about individual participation across 43 referendums in 45 communities. We match this individual data with referendum-related factors, such as campaign intensity and importance of the issues at stake, and community-level variables, such as wealth and urbanization. The results of our multilevel, cross-classified models show significant context-related effects, stemming mainly from the referendum and less from the community level. Still, the main driver of direct democratic participation is individual determinants, in particular citizens' past participation record.     

Legislating or rubber-stamping? Assessing parliament's influence on law-making with text reuse

Law-making is a core function of parliaments in democratic systems. Yet, we still know little about the extent to which parliaments influence legislation and the reasons why MPs modify some bills more than others. We analyse the degree of bill amendments operated by parliament, by comparing bills before and after parliamentary deliberations with a text reuse approach. We postulate that MPs attempt to overcome the problem of limited processing capacity by prioritising certain bills over others. To this end, they use considerations related to institutional rules, attention dynamics and partisan politics. Empirically, we apply zero-inflated beta regressions on a dataset covering about 1,700 bills adopted from 1995 to 2015 in the Swiss Parliament. Moreover, we address the problem of observational equivalence affecting analyses of parliament's impact on law-making, by taking into account the government's anticipation strategy. Results highlight a reasonably high amendment activity, but with strong variations across bills. MPs change bills more if they are subject to direct democracy, rank high on the parliamentary agenda or if they attract media attention. The influence of the electoral cycle and coalition politics is not confirmed.