How Creating Semiautonomous Agencies Affects Staff Satisfaction

Abstract

Structural reforms such as the creation of autonomous agencies are a widely heralded solution for a multitude of problems in the public sector. These reforms have effects on public employees. This article shows how the structural disaggregation of ministries into autonomous agencies affects staff satisfaction with the organization. The article discusses three cases, where Dutch public organizations were either disaggregated from a ministry or reaggregated to the ministry. These structural reforms constitute a quasiexperimental setting where effects on agency staff and parent ministry staff are compared. In one case, creating the agency led to a decrease in staff satisfaction with the organization as compared to the staff that remained within the ministry. A second case showed that these negative effects linger and can last for more than eight years. An inverse organizational change—reaggregation—caused inverse effects: increasing satisfaction with the organization.     

A provocative event,media, and religious choice in post-Soviet Russia

This paper uses the famous events related to Pussy Riot as a natural experiment to examine the effect of alternative media on church membership. A difference-in-differences strategy is used to explore the effect in question. The hypothesis is that, given a lack of religious background in the majority of the population and strong temporary interest in religious issues promoted by a particular provocative event, mass media substantially affect religious choice. To check if this is the case, I compare the dynamics of religious choice of those exposed to alternative media reports on church topics and the rest of the population. As a proxy of familiarity with an alternative view, I use a dummy variable for using the Internet to obtain news. The main finding is that, during the experiment run over the year 2012, the growth of self-reported Orthodox believers was significantly lower in the treatment group than in the control group. Exposure to alternative media coverage turned out to heavily affect religious choice.     

Public Nursery School Costs and the Effects of the Funding Reforms in Japan

Using a panel dataset of 983 municipalities across Japan, this article investigates the impact of the funding reforms in 2004 on public nursery schools’ operating costs. We found that municipalities responded differently to the reforms, depending on their fiscal strength and city scale. In areas with relatively large populations, fiscally stronger municipalities were likely to spend less on public nursery schools in the wake of the reforms, while municipalities in smaller cities spent more. Besides, municipalities that were not compensated for the loss of the national subsidy reduced expenditures in large cities. In small cities, on the other hand, such municipalities actually increased expenditures.