Limited research has been conducted to explore the mechanisms through which employee involvement affects organizational performance. This article furthers the research on the mechanisms by testing a new causal model based on the theoretical framework of high-involvement work systems. Based on data collected from a sample of civil servants in China, we used structural equation modeling to find that the direct effect of involvement practices on organizational performance is positive and statistically significant. However, the indirect path mediated by job satisfaction and organizational commitment are not statistically significant. In addition, we found that public service motivation exerts a positive and direct effect on organizational performance. PSM is more prominent than job commitment or satisfaction in motivating public employees to work towards organizational goals and to work harder.
Public managers should pay more attention to involving employees in management, which will not only improve organizational performance but also increase employees’ job satisfaction and affective commitment. Involvement can take a variety of forms such as sharing information with subordinates, providing performance evaluation feedback, and involving employees in decision-making.
This article aims to bring the accountability of the EU executive out of the shadows by tracing the development of the current accountability landscape around the main EU’s executive actors. It looks at the development and the diversification of accountability forums (and mechanisms) in the EU: what forums and arrangements have come into being for holding the EU executive powers accountable? Instead of focusing on single individual accountability branches, this article examines the development of accountability in the EU by treating it as a complex landscape. And rather than assuming equilibrium, a starting point is the evolving nature of this landscape. On the basis of this exploration, the article seeks to understand the way in which the EU's institutional accountability framework has evolved through a patchwork of arrangements, and how this contributes to the emergence of a complex, multilayered governance landscape in order to fit within today’s presumptions about how power should be controlled and accountability achieved.
The landscape of accountability institutions in the EU is slowly becoming denser. The shift from national, state-based policy-making to the EU level and the continuous expansion of the executive sphere in the EU is accompanied by a growing concern about how to organize democratic accountability in the complex multi-level web of European governance. The establishment of new watchdog institutions (such as an ombudsman, an anti-corruption office, ethical committees, auditors, a whistleblower protection act) and strengthened scrutiny points to the increased relevance of accountability and control over the EU executive.
The purpose of this research is to understand the paradoxical practices of territorial management and to look into ways of supporting the local actors of peri-urban agriculture. To do so, we conducted a case study into the policy implemented for the past 25 years by the urban community of the Pays d’Aubagne et de l’Etoile (Bouches-du-Rhône). Drawing on quantitative analyses of qualitative data, we demonstrate the relevance of these management practices in action. We go on to propose managerial tools that can be applied in the framework of public action in peri-urban agriculture.
The practical uses of the article are: first, to identify and understand the paradoxes, a recurring source of tension and deadlock in territorial public administration; and, second, to contribute concrete avenues of reflection and solutions to the territorial managers faced with these situations, especially in the management of peri-urban agricultural areas.
Although the percentage of women in Japan’s workforce has increased substantially over the last 30 years, gender inequality in terms of income and position has persisted. A major problem is the lack of consciousness around gender inequality in society. Our study aims to explore the factors, particularly the Japanese style of management and cultural norms, that prevent workers in the public and private sectors from recognizing gender inequality. The Working Life Survey data collected from 1999 to 2011 were used for empirical analysis. The research finds that while there are no significant differences in the perceptions of gender inequality between public workers and their private counterparts, the factors influencing their consciousness of gender inequality do differ. The article also discusses the implications of our findings for efforts to promote gender equality throughout the Japanese workforce.
Gender equality in the Japanese workplace is considerably low in a global context. Despite substantial gender gaps, the Working Life Survey of 1999–2011 reveals that 32.4% of 9231 workers answered that different treatment based on gender in Japanese workplaces is "fair" or "almost fair." Examining these data, the study finds that there are no significant differences in the consciousness of gender inequality between public workers and their private counterparts. In addition, while distinctive Japanese management practices are influential on private workers’ consciousness of gender inequality, they do not affect that of public workers.
In this study, we present a review of public agents’ job satisfaction in Africa between 1990 and 2014. Using the systematic review methodology, we analyse and put in perspective 22 English and French publications on this subject. Results suggest that work environment attributes are the most important antecedents of job satisfaction among African public servants, whereas the effects of personal and work characteristics are marginal. We also found that most of the research dedicated to job satisfaction in Africa relied primarily on theoretical frameworks developed in Western countries. This leads to unexpected results, indicating the need to fit the research models to local specificities. The consequences of job satisfaction in Africa and suggestions for future research are also discussed.
This contribution allows practitioners to obtain an overview of the factors that promote the satisfaction/dissatisfaction of public sector employees in Africa. It helps them identify factors on which to act for the implementation of effective personnel policies geared towards the officials’ performance and welfare. The results suggest paying attention to factors related to the working environment (such as the atmosphere at work, organisational support and working conditions) in order to enhance effectively job satisfaction in African public organisations. However, practices such as the establishment of clear objectives and procedures, autonomy, work content, and the recognition of effort are not to be overlooked.
This article examines relationships between historical administrative systems and civil service politicization across Europe. I argue that to appreciate when and how history matters, we need to consider public service bargains struck between politicians and senior bureaucrats. Doing so complicates the relationship between historical and current administrative systems: a bureaucratic, as opposed to patrimonial, 18th-century state infrastructure is necessary for the depoliticization of ministerial bureaucracies in present-day Western Europe. However, the relationship does not hold in East-Central Europe since administrative histories are tumultuous and fractured. Combining data from across the European continent, I provide evidence in support of these propositions.
This article addresses policymakers dealing with reforms of personnel policy regimes at the centre of government. It considers the importance of history for politically attractive reforms, as well as the limits of this importance. I argue that 18th-century state infrastructures shape the extent to which political appointments are politically attractive tools for administrative control. I show that only in countries that feature a bureaucratic, as opposed to patrimonial, 18th-century infrastructure are ministerial top management occupied by a permanent, as opposed to politically appointed, staff. However, in East-Central Europe, a ruptured administrative history ensures that the distant past does not similarly shape the extent of political appointments.
Transformational leaders work to clarify a vision, share it with their employees and sustain it in the long run, and this is expected to result in increased employee public service motivation (PSM), that is, orientation towards doing good for others and society. Based on 48 in-depth interviews with 16 childcare leaders and 32 of their employees combined with 16 days of observation in these childcare centers, this article investigates the association between transformational leadership and PSM. When the leaders clarify, share and maintain an organizational vision, their employees are more motivated to do good for society and others, and this motivation tends to be less paternalistic and slightly more society-oriented. This implies that it is relevant to ask not only whether transformational leadership increases PSM, but also how it affects the type of PSM.
Transformational leadership happens when leaders strive to develop a vision for the organization, share the vision with the employees and sustain the employees’ attention to the vision. Transformational leadership seems to increase PSM and make employees less paternalistic and more focused on contributing to society.
Policy-making in the EU has been depicted as being starkly fragmented: initiatives are drafted in separate Directorates-General of the EU Commission, discussed in specific policy communities and decided upon in sectoral European Parliament Committees and Council formations. At the same time, we see growing numbers of complex policy problems that require cross-sectorally integrated solutions. This article argues that there are good grounds to expect policy-making in the EU Commission to favour fragmented solutions, while diffuse public interests will tend to push for integrated policies. However, it is only under specific constellations that the EU Commission will respond to these interests. The argument will be demonstrated using case study material on three policy instruments that address trans-border healthcare policy. While the Coordination of Social Security Systems Regulation and the Services in the Internal Market Directive favour largely fragmented solutions, the Patient Mobility Directive takes a more integrated approach.
Today, complex policy problems often demand integrated policy solutions that cut across organizational borders and areas of responsibility. At the same time, decision-making is often easier if policy solutions remain fragmented.
Internal coordination is an important means for public administrations to reach integrated instead of fragmented policy solutions.
Periods with high public attention are more likely to lead to more integrated policy solutions, since policy-makers will seize internal coordination to anticipate the interests of a wider public that is following the policy-making process. Evidence is provided from drafting processes inside the EU Commission on trans-border healthcare acts.
This study deals with the Need for Future Managerial Reforms (NFMR) in public administration as perceived by university professors from around the globe. We explore and validate a new NFMR scale based on traditional principles of the New Public Management (NPM) doctrine (e.g. downsizing government, debureaucratization, decentralization, managerialism, and privatization). We also propose a global professional selection (GPS) approach to the study of need for future managerial reforms, validating it with a theoretical model, eight propositions, and four hypotheses. According to the model, managerial quality, satisfaction with public services, trust in public services and NFMR are mutually related but should be considered within the cultural dimensions of each nation. Using data from a sample of 2995 faculty members in 191 major universities from 45 nations, we demonstrate the validity of the NFMR scale and of several direct and indirect hypotheses based on the theoretical model, as well as the advantage of the GPS-controlled mediating model over a simple mediating model. The findings are discussed theoretically and practically, with their implications for the study of future NPM-style reforms and the recent trends in modern governance.
This study suggests that greater calls for managerial reforms, especially from the knowledgeable community, are valuable inputs that should be heard and echoed in government halls. Improving managerial quality may reduce calls for managerial reforms. Public managers should invest in increasing citizens’ satisfaction and trust as they reduce pressures on policy makers to initiate expensive reforms. Cross-country transitions of lessons and knowledge about managerial reforms should be carried out with caution as values and traditions affect the type of required reforms and their meaning for the public.
This article proposes a new conceptual framework for assessing transparency at the country level. It identifies three distinct interpretations of transparency: access to information; two-way communication; and predictability, or decision-making based on clear and publicly known rules. Each represents an increasingly demanding form of transparency, but all are tied to democratic accountability and the rule of law. Using the case of Romania, the article illustrates how such a framework can be employed to assess the evolution of transparency in a relatively recent democracy.
The virtues of transparency have been advocated by international organizations, governments, and civil society. The focus has primarily been on access to information—whether through freedom of information acts or open data. However, realizing the democratizing potential of transparency requires a multifaceted approach. This article suggests that transparency advocates should pay more attention to issues such as increasing citizen participation, opening up decision-making rather than just data, strengthening the rule of law, and fighting corruption. In other words, it argues for a more holistic discourse and practice of transparency.
As a field of knowledge, strategy has been taught and practised for over half a century. However, there is still a distinct lack of consensus surrounding the effectiveness of strategy in public administrations. This thematic issue of the International Review of Administrative Sciences is devoted to advanced research which claims that in the age of results-based management, public leaders must opt for a process-based approach to strategy. In doing so, the emphasis is put on the complexity of strategic processes that make it possible to support and maintain the institutions that serve the common good and the general interest and that deliver public services using the results of public action. From a process-based point of view, the strategy of public administration then assumes that analysts and public leaders need to be more aware of the specificities of state institutions. In particular, a thorough knowledge of the ways in which public officials interact with the fundamental values, structures, regulatory frameworks and administrative tools of public administrations is necessary.
Public procurement in defence includes the supplier selection issue. The purpose of this article is to suggest a model that combines Analytic Hierarchy Process with Voronoi Diagrams/Thiessen Polygons and Reilly’s law in order to propose a way to effectively use European Directive 2009/81/article 23. It also endeavours to expand the model by providing tools that increase its applicability, as well as providing a flexible and cost-effective tool for supplier selection to public procurement managers, allowing quick decision-making. It is also applicable in the correspondent private sector.
The model attempts to enrich supplier selection methods in the public procurement of defence. Its analysis may assist in: assessing potential suppliers more objectively, using a combination of well-established tools; presenting results to management that may reduce budgetary planning and avoid supply disruptions; enhancing the spirit of cooperation among departments of an organization/agency. It allows the joining of mathematics with experience and an important aspect of the legal frame in the public procurement of defence. Practitioners may also conclude that it is expandable to other sectors due to its flexibility.
This article contributes to the literature on public sector reforms by proposing textual analysis as a useful research strategy to explore how reform archetypes and related ideas are deployed in the parliamentary debate and regulations advancing reforms. Public Administration (PA), New Public Management (NPM) and Public Governance (GOV) can be depicted as three different archetypes providing characteristic administrative ideas and concepts and related tools and practices, which lead reforms. We use textual analysis to look into more than 20 years of Italian central government accounting reforms and investigate how the three administrative archetypes have evolved, intertwined and replaced each other. Textual analysis proves a useful tool through which to investigate reform processes and allows us to show that in neo-Weberian countries, such as Italy, NPM and GOV, far from being revolutionary paradigms, may represent fashionable trends that have not left significant traces in the practice and rhetoric of reforms.
In contexts based on civil law traditions, the introduction of new reforms appears to be slow and difficult, and is often more successful when it respects extant PA systems, which remain well rooted in the public sector. Decision-makers may want to keep this into consideration when proposing or implementing new changes. From an organizational point of view, this underlines the importance of reassuring civil servants and politicians of the consistency of the ‘new’ proposed models with those they have been accustomed to, and of using the traditional language of PA to explain and introduce new ideas and tools and make them more acceptable. However, this has to be balanced by an actual change in the old systems and routines, using continuity to bring about change and avoiding the re-enactment of merely formalistic approaches.
The resurgence of New Right politics in the late 1970s and 1980s (e.g. ‘Reaganomics’ and ‘Thatcherism’), which were pro-market and pro-private sector (
Despite reiterated calls for devolution, the implementation of New Public Management in the French health-care system led to a greater re-centralization and rising regulations for efficiency purposes. It also allowed the French administrative elite to regain its prerogatives and regional health agencies to reform more rapidly than a multitude of local public organizations. The quest for greater accountability remains an ongoing process.
One of the most difficult and under-examined issues in the ethics research of developing countries is whether the establishment of codes of ethics in public service organizations leads to employees’ organizational commitment. This study investigates the link between codes of ethics and organizational commitment, as well as its three dimensions of affective, normative and continuance commitment, in Ghanaian public service organizations. Correlational, regression and descriptive statistics were used to study 228 participants conveniently sampled from selected public service organizations within the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. Empirical evidence showed that codes of ethics significantly and positively predicted employees’ organizational commitment, as well as the three dimensions of the affective, normative and continuance commitment of employees.
Codes are intended to educate the general public, and employees in particular, about the mission of an organization, to foster a good ethical climate, and to provide guidance for resolving ethical problems in an organization. To ensure employee commitment to the organization, the codes should be effectively implemented, well communicated and strictly enforced with impartiality; otherwise, the codes will appear merely as ‘cosmetic dressing’ to the organization.
Assessments of public administration research in the Global South are relatively scarce, although they are relevant in moving beyond a North–South dichotomy in understanding the knowledge-building process of public administration. In this article, we apply a content analysis to 592 Brazilian publications in order to assess the subjects of the studies, their cognitive orientations, their methodological strategies, and their institutional aspects, and compare these results with previous evaluations of North American publications. Our findings indicate that a "North American way of doing research" is gaining ground as the legitimate way of doing public administration research in Brazil, despite a research agenda that reflects subjects of practical relevance to the Brazilian public sector. Such intellectual mimesis, associated with the existence of a weak and unequal institutional network for academic research, may influence the "parochialism" of public administration research.
The research reveals that the subjects of public administration publications also reflect the dynamics of public administration as a field of practice, reflected in topics of empirical interest to the Brazilian public sector that are cognitively and, partly, methodologically discussed from a North American perspective. The similar trends in the cognitive dimensions that both regions share may also recursively reflect the diffusion of public sector reforms from developed to developing countries, particularly as a consequence of New Public Management, which has also taken place in countries like Brazil.
Today, the legitimacy of politicians and public confidence in public decision-making and administration are increasingly dependent on the way in which their ethics are appraised (
In practical terms, the aim of this article is to identify and characterise more precisely the variety of ethical values mobilised by public managers. To do so, we conducted a survey in two stages among public managers in Guangxi province in China, a country where the expression of personal or cultural ethics in the workplace is described in the literature as relatively natural. Our first results suggest a fairly clear distinction between the ethical values governing the performance of public action, which are relatively well formalised, and the ethical values governing public interaction, which are more informal and closer to cultural and social rituals.
This article explores vertical and horizontal dimensions of the work of public, private and civic leaders involved in economic development in England, in particular, those working in the complex terrain of Local Enterprise Partnerships, a key partnership tool in the UK central government’s localism agenda for driving growth. It offers insights into innovative ways in which state, non-state and citizen agents navigate a complex set of vertical, legal authority structures within fragmented, horizontal and largely informal new ‘spaces’ of interactions/interrelationships to collaboratively co-produce strategies and plans for transforming local areas. To advance our knowledge of collaborative leadership requires new methodological approaches to investigating multi-accountabilities and how co-production works within ‘loosely coupled’ networks. It is imperative to appreciate the problems associated with leadership working across sectoral boundaries within complex networks of vertical, legal structures and horizontal, informal action spaces. In such networks, leaders, as institutional representatives, work collaboratively to achieve objectives not readily attainable by member organisations acting alone. They also need to compromise and negotiate their representative role back to a parent organisation while protecting and promoting the priorities, aims and interests of the new entity, in this case, a Local Enterprise Partnership. Theoretically, then, the article is located in recent debates on the theory and practice of New Public Governance, to show the inadequacies of New Public Management models for capturing the complexities between formal authority structures and fragmented informal sets of relationships. It also draws on accountability models, notably, from the Utrecht School, to identify social relations between collaborative leaders on Local Enterprise Partnerships, and to show how they assert agency and individual actions within the boundaries of participating institutions.
The findings should benefit professionals, public managers and policymakers in understanding formal and informal linkages on partnerships for economic development. The article should facilitate an appreciation of the importance of greater accountability for actions in cross-boundary working. Moreover, in exploring vertical and horizontal dimensions of public, private and civic leadership in the complex terrain of Local Enterprise Partnerships, the findings show their feasibility as key vehicles to develop collaborative, co-produced strategies in transforming sub-national localities.
Ireland is a latecomer to public–private partnerships, having only adopted them in 1998. Prior to the credit crisis, Ireland followed the UK model, with public–private partnerships being implemented in transport, education, housing/urban regeneration and water/wastewater. Having stalled during the credit crisis, public–private partnerships have recently been reactivated with the domestic infrastructure stimulus programme. The focus of this article is on Ireland as a younger participant in public–private partnerships and the nexus between adoption patterns and the sustainability characteristics of Irish public–private partnerships. Using document analysis and exploratory interviews, the article examines the reasons for Ireland's interest in public–private partnerships, which cannot be attributed to economic rationales alone. We consider three explanations: voluntary adoption – where the UK model was closely followed as part of a domestic modernisation agenda; coercive adoption – where public–private partnership policy was forced upon public sector organisations; and institutional isomorphism – where institutional creation and change around public–private partnerships were promoted to help public sector organisations gain institutional legitimacy. We find evidence of all three patterns, with coercive adoption becoming more relevant in recent years, which is likely to adversely affect sustainability unless incentives for voluntary adoption are strengthened and institutional capacity building is boosted.
There are many reasons why public sector organisations procure via public–private partnerships, and motivations can change over time. In Ireland, public–private partnership adoption changed from being largely voluntary to increasingly coercive. Irrespective of motives, public–private partnership procurement must be underpinned by incentives and institutional enabling mechanisms, which should be strengthened to make Ireland's public–private partnership strategy sustainable.
Since the early 1990s, discourse on ‘good governance’ has become more prevalent. What ‘good governance’ means and entails, however, and when we can speak of ‘good’ governance in this discourse, is not always clear. Many scholars in public administration and other social sciences writing about good governance have used visual interpretations of good governance from centuries ago to illustrate their case in point. Here, we also use pictures from the past – Lorenzetti’s Sienese frescoes to be more precise – yet, not as an illustration, but as the core of the argument. Our main research question is: how can Lorenzetti’s frescoes of Good Governance inspire our modern-day conception of good governance? We conclude that good governance is governance by good governors, and good governors are governors guided by benevolence. We end with a discussion of what that entails for modern-day governance practice.
Governance without integrity violations is not necessarily good governance. Benevolence is needed for that.
In this article, an investigation is made into the relationship between competitive tendering and contracting and satisfaction with health and care services in Norwegian municipalities. There is an ongoing public debate concerning privatization and contracting as a way of providing municipal services. Several studies suggest improved productivity, as well as service quality, as a result. Based on public choice and property rights theories, public organizations are argued to be inefficient. Thus far, we have little knowledge about the effects of competitive tendering and contracting on citizens’ evaluations of the services exposed to competitive tendering and contracting. To explore this, data from the Norwegian Citizen Study, covering over 35,000 individuals, are employed. The findings show that citizens and users are more satisfied with health and care services that are subject to competitive tendering and contracting compared to those provided solely by the public sector.
The findings of this article encourage the competitive tendering and contracting of health and care services. A positive relationship is found between competitive tendering and contracting and satisfaction with these services. Findings provide support for arguments made in Scandinavian evaluations; the introduction of competition and contracting is argued to increase municipal focus on service quality and increase service-oriented care, and is suggested as representing an improvement in attention to the ‘secondary needs’ of residents. This is especially important for public managers in social-democratic countries where the use of competitive tendering and contracting is still a controversial topic.
Big data have become a game-changer for modern public administration in those areas in which they are used. Although their application is still limited in the public sector, their use develops dynamically in areas where they bring tangible results in terms of efficiency and efficacy. This article presents the concept of big data, outlines the possibilities for using big data in the public sector and methods of their utilization, highlights cases where these have been implemented, along with the results. This article discusses applications of big data methods in public policy design and implementation and in public authority internal management. It includes a summary of the benefits, disadvantages and challenges related to utilization of big data. The article also briefly addresses historical, current and predictive approaches. Research was carried out using internet-based case analysis and is limited by the confidentiality of details relating to big data methods. Although the research has had to be limited to publicly available descriptions, the findings make it possible to understand the big data phenomenon in public administration and to draw general lessons from their use.
Big data is a contemporary phenomenon. Properly utilized it brings astonishingly positive outcomes for public administration in terms of its efficacy, efficiency, and overall client satisfaction. These benefits are a result of significant increase in the accuracy of decision-making, a significant acceleration of performance of internal the ‘information task’ and a significant reduction in operating costs related to the decision-making process. This is possible thanks to the digitization of human life and IT developments applied in a specific way for public administration – the way of big data methods where huge amounts of data are processed in a form of reasoning by powerful IT technology to present information that helps public administration to better perform its task.
For several years now, France has been witnessing the development of territorialised public innovation and economic development policies (cluster policies in particular), conducted by various actors, whether the state or the various local authorities. This has triggered the emergence of complex stakeholder systems in the territories, raising doubts about their coordination and performance. It also begs the question of the convergence of public strategies in these conditions. This conjecture, which ties in specifically with the issues of multi-level governance, is based on an empirical study conducted in three French regions, which set out to characterise the workings of these territorial innovation systems and to propose avenues of improvement. Based on this case, we characterise the sources of the apparent complexity of the system and show that, contrary to the voices that call for a reduction in the number of ‘structures’, over and above the harmonisation of operations, the establishment of new coordination mechanisms has the additional effect of creating spaces and procedures that allow the gradual formulation of a collective strategy for public actors in the territory.
This research provides a diagnosis of the difficulties of coordinating various cluster policies that coexist within a regional territory, which can help the practitioners involved with the design of public policies. However, above all, it offers regional government officials possible coordination mechanisms that should enable them to build economic development strategies that are more integrated and informed, without increasing the complexity perceived by the beneficiaries, that is, companies.
This article explores the usefulness of a recognition framework for the study of the relationship between municipal administrations and citizens. Within the organizational science literature, employee recognition has been shown to enhance their commitment to their organization. In a context where public authorities consistently seek to improve levels of civic engagement, could this conclusion be applied to the relationship between municipalities and their constituents? Following a review of the literature, we present the results of a content analysis of the websites of Quebec municipalities whose populations are greater than 20,000. Three modes of recognition are identified: personalized attention, value confirmation, and gratitude. Recognition practices are also found to vary between municipalities. Our study opens new pragmatic and theoretical horizons in the area of municipal management.
Managers know that showing recognition toward their employees is not only a sign of respect, but a means to mobilize employee commitment to their organization. This article explores the value of this finding for the field of municipal management and, specifically, to the study of the relationship between municipal managers and citizens. Should serving citizens not ultimately mean recognizing their individual identities, civic capacities, and contribution to their community’s vitality?
The article illuminates the dynamics of bilateral cross-border cooperation between two vastly different legal-administrative partners. The analysis utilizes empirical findings of a case study on bilateral Finnish–Russian crime prevention cooperation. Currently, both the differences in national legislations and the fast-changing administrative environment make this cooperation challenging. The case study showed that bilateral cooperation, which is the dominant form of cooperation between EU member states and Russia, is currently affected by disjointed and even competing multilateral and bilateral structures, differences in criminal law and procedure, gaps between international treaties and national legislation, local and regional variations of practices, weak institutional trust and abrupt policy changes. The results indicate that the effectiveness of cross-border networks cannot be assessed strictly in terms of quantitative outcomes. Further long-term development of the cooperation requires both realistic understanding of legal-administrative constraints and strong commitment at the national and supranational political levels.
Future long-term development of cross-border crime prevention cooperation between EU member countries and the Russian Federation requires more flexible crime prevention instruments and institutionalization of joint investigation teams. The optimal model in joint criminal investigations with Russian authorities could be one where the evidence of the protocol of the preliminary investigation could be acquired through direct regional connections between authorities. In practice, this requires a much stronger practical trust between different levels of authorities in the EU member countries and the Russian Federation, reconciliation of differences in national legislations and long-term political commitment at the highest level.
From three theoretical perspectives – instrumental, cultural and mythical – this article analyses the reasons for the worldwide emergence of post-New Public Management reforms and summarizes the typical features of those measures. In particular, it explores the link between post-New Public Management and public-sector reforms in China and argues that the ongoing reforms in China, including the super-ministry reform, the regulation of industry, the affordable housing policy, social and healthcare reforms, and the anti-corruption campaign, have shed light on various aspects of post-New Public Management measures. However, because China’s complex public administrative systems are more centralized than they are in many Western countries, it faces big challenges in deciding on and implementing reforms.
The examined administrative reforms demonstrate that China is imitating post-New Public Management reforms and adapting them to Chinese cultural traditions. China’s case reveals that the public sector is a complicated combination of elements from New Public Management and post-New Public Management reforms in a process where new reform elements are continuously added to old ones. China’s reforms are still ongoing; in the past years, China focused more on economic reform, decentralization and efficiency, but today its reforms are turning to social stability, political order and central control.
For more than three decades, European institutions have been committed to opening up the markets of public services, which were traditionally managed under monopolistic arrangements within each member state. The internationalization of firms previously operating in this sector is a phenomenon that will reshape the relationships between national governments and national industry. The creation of a comparative advantage in these markets is thus emerging as a crucial issue within each national political economy. While many scholars have emphasized the role of mercantilist strategies as the most prominent strategy for the creation of national champions, others have suggested that market-building and the pursuit of industrial goals may be self-reinforcing. Adopting a firm-level analysis of the EU market for public transport, this article adds empirical evidence to the debate on the relationship between regulation and industrial policy.
This article describes the evolution of 13 European firms operating in the fields of infrastructure management and public transport services. It tries to assess the linkage between national policy styles and concrete policy outcomes at the sectorial level. Three kinds of practitioners may benefit from the knowledge of these case studies. (1) Policy-makers might have a wider understanding of the impact of regulation on firms’ strategies and the potential trade-offs related to this connection. (2) Managers might benefit from a deeper knowledge of the different national approaches to regulatory issues. (3) Stakeholders might increase their awareness of the complex mechanisms operating behind privatization processes.
Public participation in administrative or political processes has been advocated as an important democratic reform by scholars and practitioners. Despite the importance of such public participation mechanisms, the relationship between participation in administration and political participation remains unexplored. This study aims to connect the missing link by empirically testing the mediating roles of political efficacy between two types of public participation. By connecting administrative and political participation through political efficacy, we intend to demonstrate that citizen participation in administration plays a pivotal role in remedying declining political participation. For the empirical tests, cross-sectional data from local jurisdictions in Korea were collected by survey questionnaires, and a series of Structural Equation Models are used to identify the causal relationships among these variables. The findings demonstrate that participation in administration influences political participation only through political efficacy, while the demand for participation in administration is connected to political participation either directly or through internal political efficacy. Conversely, political participation fosters participation in administration only through political efficacy. Given the empirical evidence, participation in administration and political participation reinforce each other, and political efficacy plays a critical role in mediating the two types of public participation.
Borrowing the concept of political efficacy, this study sheds theoretical light on a missing link between administrative and political participation. Practitioners need to realize that devising authentic administrative programs is a useful way to remedy waning democratic participation. Practitioners need to suggest many specific ideas on how to foster citizens’ political efficacy through public participation. By doing this, citizens could be politically awakened, which would lead to their increased participation. In this sense, this study is an initial step in exploring the possibility of democratic benefits produced by public participation mechanisms beyond the normative and instrumental benefits.
The Italian judiciary has been under the spotlight for more than two decades. The key criticism addressed to it has been the lack of organizational capacity, which is reflected in the trial time frame. After 2000, European institutions launched a new and comprehensive policy stream, targeting the administrative and organizational capacities of courts and public prosecutor offices. The pivotal policy instrument is represented by standards and soft law in general. By referring to four case studies, analysed in depth on the basis of a qualitative approach, this work engages in a critical appraisal of the New Public Management-inspired judicial policies and the way in which they have been implemented in the judicial sector in Italy.
This article makes a point about the structural and institutional conditions that turn out as pivotal factors to ensure an effective and efficient governance by standards. In other terms, the argument deployed herein concerns the function of a regulative agency, which might have the shape and the format of a ministerial unit, where the uniformity and the equality of the services delivered by a public institution or a network of public institutions are the outcome of the implementation of legally binding and non-legally binding norms. This is a key point, then, for public officers serving not only in the judicial sector.
In the transition and developing countries the use of surplus real property might be a good response to the acute need for local sources of revenues provided the requirements of the new public management regarding efficiency, effectiveness and quality of public services are carefully observed. The research has focused on the case of Romanian cities' real properties, aiming to reveal the problems of the existing municipal real property (MRP) management system in relation to both overall city conditions and the characteristics of the institutional and organizational framework. A questionnaire-based survey followed by nonparametric statistical tests have been employed in this respect, confirming the working hypothesis which points to the importance of the existence of an MRP plan, an MRP strategy and an MRP unit at municipality level for the effective use of these assets. A series of viable solutions to the problems identified have been also formulated.
The article emphasizes the decisive role of the strategic approach and corresponding instruments for effective MRP management, putting forward valuable recommendations for making MRP an important source of revenue for municipal governments. They are derived from the findings obtained within the EU-funded project entitled ‘Municipal Property Management in South-East European Cities’ (PROMISE) by the Bucharest University of Economic Studies team, one of the 13 partners involved. Its contribution has been nominated by the International Project Management Association among the five finalists of the Achievement Award global competition, category Community Service/Development Project 2013.
Civic festivals offer an exceptional laboratory for the study of collaborative governance because these events are ubiquitous and are characterized by public and private partners engaged in joint activity. Using the Carnival festival of Salvador, Brazil, as an example, we analyze the current models of collaborative governance to determine whether they apply to the context of large civic festivals. Drawing primarily on Ansell and Gash’s (2008) model, our qualitative analysis shows that some constructs of collaborative governance models are present. However, our results uncover other factors affecting the collaboration process such as informal relationships and the basis of decision-making. Our results also suggest that trust, a factor commonly argued as necessary to collaborative action, may be less critical than received theories suggest.
Large civic festivals are a unique laboratory for studying inter-organizational collaboration because these events normally involve a myriad of public and private actors working in an interdependent fashion. Our study reveals some factors not covered by previous research that influence the dynamics of collaboration. We observe that repeated interactions between technical experts can foster informal (and effective) networks of collaboration and circumvent the problems generated by political disputes. The bases on which decisions are taken are also important factors to enhance collaboration. We found that trust, a factor commonly argued as necessary to collaborative action, may be less critical than received theories suggest.
Working in the public sector implies the need to make decisions in the face of dilemmas. As consistent decision-making is highly desirable for organizational performance, the question arises: what do public service professionals base their decisions on? This study aims to increase our understanding of whether public service motivation and professional role identity are useful concepts by which to predict what decisions public service professionals will make in complex situations. Using survey data, this research investigates the impact of these two concepts on the decision-making of veterinary inspectors working at the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority. The results support the hypothesis that decision-making is influenced by the way in which veterinary inspectors interpret their professional role. Public service motivation, in contrast, seems to have neither a direct nor a moderating effect on decision-making in the context of dilemma situations.
Two important conclusions of this study are of interest for managers working with professionals. Our findings should urge them to consider the different views that employees have about their job when teams are formed or when specific combinations of tasks are assigned. For example, attention should be paid to the question of which mixture of professional role identities is most suitable to accomplish organizational objectives. Second, the construct of public service motivation can be used by human resource managers to assess whether public professionals are motivated to provide public services. However, the results also indicate that the operationalization of public service motivation needs to be adapted to the professional context of public service providers.
Organizational justice is a topic popularized for Western bureaucracies but there is less known about its influence in Eastern cultures. This research tests how organizational justice moderates the relationship between political skill and career success in the Chinese public sector. Analysis reveals that four dimensions of political skill (networking ability, apparent sincerity, social astuteness, and interpersonal influence) correlate positively with career success (measured as perceived internal marketability and perceived career success). Although hypothesized that organizational justice would lessen the influence of political skill on career success as a result of the implementation of formal merit-based pay rules, findings show that political skill is only partially moderated. While lessening the value of social astuteness, a positive relationship between interpersonal influence and internal marketability remains.
Profound changes in China’s salary system challenge traditional workplace customs. The implementation of merit-based pay requires a fair procedure for determining salary raises. In China, personalism remains a driving force because of the importance of guanxi. This affects how formal merit-based pay systems function in the East. Chinese culture tempers Western notions of organizational justice with its persistent reliance on political skill. This blend of worker behavior and career success, moderated by a conceptualization of organizational justice that embraces political skill, complicates the application of Western management systems in the East.
This article examines the efficacy of central attempts to influence the use of specific types of contracts, namely, cost-reimbursement versus fixed-price contracts, by individual departments within a decentralized procurement system. We draw five years of data (Fiscal Years 2004–2008) from the Federal Procurement Data System to examine the contract type decisions of three US federal agencies: the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security. The results of our analysis suggest that while departments have discretion to purchase products that meet their mission requirements, there is relative uniformity in the reliance on cost-reimbursement versus fixed-price contracts.
The driving factor in the use of one contract type over the other is not the department in question, but rather what the department buys. Following central regulatory guidance, the three departments in our sample tend to use cost-reimbursement contracts for complex products and fixed-price contracts for simple products. The practical implications for central policymakers is that focusing guidance on what departments buy may be more effective in maintaining overall budget control rather than focusing on how the department buys products.
The euro crisis marked the start of the so-called ‘new European Union economic governance’. This new economic governance brings along different kinds of changes in the status of decision-making actors. Some of these changes involve power shifts, which can be categorised as either vertical or horizontal. Vertical power shifts transfer powers between different levels of government, usually from the national level to the European Union level. Horizontal power shifts transfer powers away from discretionary decision-making by governments to independent institutions. The new economic governance also implies a restriction in the discretionary decision-making power of governments by the imposition of policy rules. In this article, the accountability problems involved with these power shifts are analysed. It finds that, overall, the implementation process of the new economic governance has harmed accountability.
The key implication of this article is that the new governance arrangements made by the European Union to tackle the euro crisis are lacking in accountability and legitimacy. The moves towards more rules replacing policy discretion and towards entrusting policies to independent agencies rather than politically accountable governments are to the detriment of political accountability. Policy efficiency comes at a high price in terms of political acceptance as trust in the European Union is negatively influenced by the new governance system. Practitioners should keep this in mind when designing governance systems.
Surveys are a commonly used means of measuring transparency levels, but they are potentially vulnerable to perceptual biases. This study sought to examine perceptual differences by the respondents’ identities as general citizens or public employees, and the possible negative perceptions that one group may have of the other concerning responses to a survey-based measure of transparency. The survey was designed on the basis of existing literature, suggesting that transparency has up to six facets. Two samples were taken: from citizens who visited district offices to file civil applications during the survey period; and from public employees involved in processing these applications. A total of 472 surveys were used for analysis: 233 citizens and 239 public employees. The results indicated that the two groups had different understandings of transparency. Data from public employees produced a three-factor solution, which was labeled as Efficiency, Reliability, and Access. For citizens, a two-factor solution was a better fit, with the factors being described as Accessibility (a wider notion than Access) and Utility. The findings suggest that public employees adopt a somewhat technical view of transparency, whereas citizens have more practical concerns about it. Only citizens’ unfavorable perception of public employees had a negative influence on the level of transparency. This study contributes to the understanding of how public employees and citizens have qualitatively different perceptions of transparency.
To assess progress in governmental transparency, we must measure it, and surveys offer an accessible and potentially cost-effective approach. However, the survey responses of citizens and public employees show that they understand transparency in qualitatively different ways, with citizens’ perceptions of transparency also influenced by their perceptions of public employees. If governments are to increase public trust in policymaking and administration, they must focus on improving transparency as it is understood by the public rather than how it is understood by public servants.
Representative bureaucracy theory postulates that passive representation leads to active representation of minority groups. This article investigates the passive representation of female police officers at leadership levels and the active representation of women vis-a-vis gender-based violence arrest rates in the UK. Much of the extant research on representative bureaucracy is located at street level, with evidence showing that discretionary power of minority bureaucrats can lead to active representation. This article is focused on leadership levels of a public bureaucracy. The empirical research is based upon a panel dataset of female police officers as an independent variable and gender-based violence arrest rates as a dependent variable. The analysis reveals that there is little evidence of active representation of women by female police leadership.
The research offers policy and public service practitioners with empirical evidence to suggest that representation of minorities is mediated by organizational effects in public bureaucracies.
This article aims to explore the story of the front-line implementation of US welfare reform through analyzing the experiences of front-line workers with a grounded theory approach. There were deep concerns about the working poor and unelaborated programs for economic independence, which were attributable to the legislation’s thrust to work-first and a skill mismatch, without taking the quality of jobs into account. Welfare roll reduction resulted in taking a generous approach to welfare clients on the front lines. Although discretion resulted in the operation of more local initiatives on the front lines, it was not a substantial response to the demands of the real lives of clients. This article argues that the quality and sustainability of work is critical, prior to an emphasis on work-first. Front-line implementation must shift to increasing employers’ willingness to create incentives for skill-building and to giving clients some motivation to work.
A gap between policymaking and nonlinear policy implementation on the front lines is inevitable as local demands vary. Particularly, perspectives of front-line implementers are useful in reflecting various local demands and adjusting the different interests of clients in the process of refining welfare reform in lieu of federal policymakers. Although the discretion of front-line implementers is critical, less attention has been paid to how they put welfare reform into practice and what they learned. Qualitative exploration of such issues thus provides field-based evidence to improve its implementation to help the clients, which has rarely been examined in the literature.
The article addresses the difficult conditions of interorganisational collaboration for the implementation of integrated electronic service delivery from three theoretical perspectives: institutional, political and managerial. These perspectives are used to conceptually define the main obstacles to interorganisational collaboration and the leverage available to public managers to facilitate the integration of electronic services. Based on a multiple case study in Quebec, the authors examine, more specifically, the institutional, political and managerial conditions that have delayed the integration of electronic services in this Canadian province. They show how the persistency of administrative practices, the desire for autonomy of public organisations and cumbersome governance structures have contributed to the diversification of the supply of online services in Quebec at the expense of an integrated service. Drawing on theoretical considerations and the study results, the authors propose that public managers do not stick only to horizontal governance mechanisms, but also make use of vertical governance mechanisms, to mitigate the effects of certain constraints on interorganisational collaboration and to accelerate the implementation of integrated electronic service delivery.
Several countries have made integrated public service delivery a priority of e-government. To effectively coordinate these projects with their multiple partners, public managers need to apply a hybrid governance to benefit from the stability of the hierarchy and the flexibility of the network. More specifically, the study shows vertical governance to be an effective tool to coordinate the activities of a network of organisations involved in the implementation of integrated service delivery.
This article contributes to the debate on the ‘local governance turn’ by considering a recent immigration context: the Italian case. We analyse integration policies and governance processes in three regions: Lombardy, Piedmont and Emilia-Romagna. The aim is to shed new light on the multi-level governance relations that shape immigrant integration policies, taking into account the interdependencies of the vertical and horizontal dimensions of multi-level governance. The analysis points out the emergence of different multi-level governance arrangements and highlights the relevance of institutional and organisational factors in accounting for local differentiation. General traditions and established public–non-governmental organisation relations in the social policy field, the internal organisation of the regional administration (specialised staff versus general bureaucratic apparatus), and the role of ideology appear to make a difference. The implications of this analysis for multi-level governance scholarship are discussed, emphasising the need for a middle-range theory approach.
Multi-level governance is considered by policy scholars as a promising approach to make sense of increasingly complex policymaking processes, implying the interaction between different levels of government and between public and non-public actors. By considering the politically sensitive immigrant integration issue, this article attempts to point out how multi-level governance relations concretely take shape at the regional level in Italy, and which factors account for regional differentiation. Our study suggests that contextual and organisational factors are particularly relevant, that is, social policy traditions, the regions’ internal organisation and the individual civil servants’ attitudes. Nevertheless, politics should also be carefully taken into account.
Strengthening citizen participation in West Africa is an increasingly important aspect of democratic development – especially in mitigating setbacks arising from poor governance. This article uses Round 4 Afrobarometer data to explore what stimulates local-level participation by examining determinants against the backdrop of eight West African nations: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, and Senegal. Using a negative binomial regression model, our results are evaluated within the framework of good governance, and show that local context, specifically relative to citizens’ perceptions of and attitudes about the performance of local government, matters when it comes to local political participation.
This study provides public administrators with a framework for understanding what drives local-level, non-electoral citizen participation in West Africa, and helps them understand how to increase local citizen engagement and build a more democratic society through the pursuit of good governance principles. In addition, this study highlights the critical importance of local government performance, and the role of citizens’ attitudes and evaluations, in local civic engagement.
In the academic literature, mainstreaming is conceptualized as a shift in policy focus (from specific to generic), as well as in governance (from state-centric to poly-centric). Whereas mainstreaming has been applied in various areas, such as gender, disability and environment, a more recent application concerns migrant integration, which has so far been under-studied in academic circles. This article provides a critical analysis of mainstreaming as a supposed ‘trend’ in migrant integration policies. It provides a conceptual discussion of what mainstreaming might mean in the field of migrant integration in an effort to connect the concept of mainstreaming as used in other fields to the literature on migrant integration, and notably the emerging concept of interculturalism. Following this, it provides an empirical analysis of shifts in integration governance and policy in Denmark, France, Germany and the UK in an effort to explain whether mainstreaming, as conceptualized, is taking place. The article concludes that mainstreaming as a concept in the field of migrant integration can only partially explain policy developments. There is, indeed, a clear trend towards more poly-centric governance and towards generic policies. However, such policies rarely involve efforts to create a generic awareness of migration-related diversity, and are often overshadowed by broader national narratives on migrant integration, and pre-existing governance structures. However, the existence of an explicit pursuit of replacement strategies at the local level suggests that mainstreaming approaches may be a way of circumventing these national narratives and governance structures.
Potential degenerative effects of target group constructions can be averted by proxy strategies that are defined area- or needs-based rather than group-based. Mainstreaming also demands poly-centric governance structures that allow for horizontal (interdepartmental, multi-actor) and vertical (multi-level) coordination mechanisms to avert policy decoupling. Mainstreaming does not mean total group-blindness; mainstreaming works best when combined with knowledge of and sensitivity to these groups, while preventing formalizing target group constructions. Mainstreaming is not just an option, but also a necessity, for policies in super-diverse cities, where group distinctions can no longer be made.
Departing from the post-war Weberian-oriented bureaucratic model, the Greek administrative system has been subjected to several reform programmes with a view to its modernization. This article aims to explore the main shifts in the course of administrative change and relate this process with the broader theoretical developments in the field of public administration. It is argued that the Greek administration has been unable to follow and take advantage of a vigorously expanded constellation of ideal-types and hybrid models of state (re)organization. Transformations have diachronically produced weak results and failed to build a consistent conceptual and operational administrative paradigm. Even under the current economic contraction and the external conditionality pressure, there is no strong evidence of a paradigm shift in the administrative pattern but rather fragmented changes of limited ambit.
Despite the fact that the Greek public administration has undergone a series of transformations, interestingly almost none of these reform efforts seem to have incorporated a particular administrative pattern. This article summarizes old and more recent theoretical developments on models of administrative reorganization, with a view to broadening practitioners’ choices in the process of state reform.
Originally the exclusive preserve of the private sector, the mystery shopper technique is increasingly being used in the public sector. In the wake of the reforms to modernise the state, accountability and performance-monitoring exercises are on the rise. They focus, in particular, on service quality and user-customer satisfaction. The article makes a twofold contribution to this topic: methodological and substantive. First of all, the article undertakes a scoping review of the literature on the mystery shopper. This review makes it possible to present the mystery shopper technique and its use in the public sector. For this bibliometric study, a sample of 34 papers was analysed. Second, the article offers a summary of the research into the mystery shopper technique, its potential and its limitations.
This article describes the use of the mystery shopper technique in the public sector. The areas for which mystery shopper surveys are commissioned are relatively limited, most being undertaken in the health sector. However, the scoping review emphasises the potential importance of mystery shopping for the purposes of the evaluation. As such, investigating other areas can be very interesting and promising for the public authorities. We also observe from this literature review that the challenges identified during mystery shopper studies can be overcome.
The delivery of public services in collaborative agency networks has given rise to an increasing use of projects in administering policy and service delivery. Projects are assumed to provide mechanisms by which flexibility can be achieved and innovative solutions produced. The aim of the article is to advance the understanding of collaboration between stakeholders and its effect on innovation. It analyses stakeholders’ influence on the creation of project innovations in 275 European Union-funded projects by using content analyses and logistic regression analyses. The results show that projects can act as hubs where valuable information is produced but that few projects produce innovations. Project stakeholder network, knowledge dissemination and project influence, as well as sources of advice, play a role in predicting project innovations. The article concludes that the overly optimistic view of collaboration as a remedy for a lack of innovation in the public sector can be questioned.
The results of the article help practitioners to compose public sector development projects that foster innovation. The results suggest that it pays to include representatives of research and education facilities among project staff as their inclusion predicts the possibilities of achieving innovations. The empirical findings provide insight into project innovation and indicate which practices to avoid. It is suggested that when managed correctly, stakeholder inclusion has an effect on public sector project innovation.
The notion of opportunism is too often used loosely in policy and administrative research on executive decision-making: its various meanings are too rarely clearly distinguished. To make it useful for explanation, this article presents fresh concept formation work, clarifying the concept to recognize different kinds and degrees of opportunism. To illustrate the use of the refined concept, the article examines key decisions by British cabinets and core executives between 1945 and 1990. It proposes that neo-Durkheimian institutional theory can help to explain why different kinds of opportunism are cultivated in differently ordered administrations, so providing new insight into decision-making.
The article provides a framework through which public managers can identify degrees and types of opportunism among the elected politicians they serve. It will help public managers to identify risks associated with such decisions, when they are asked to execute them.
The desired e-government potentials and its shortcomings in reality are key reasons why e-government has become a major topic of interest to academics and practitioners, leading to an extensive body of knowledge. However, the literature still demands further quantitative empirical research to substantiate theory development. This situation calls for a specific review of the literature that arranges relevant knowledge and provides a solid foundation for future research. However, available meta-analyses do not deliver the particular insights to appropriately address the shortage of quantitative empirical e-government research. Therefore, this study explicitly focuses on this specific field to systematically uncover areas requiring further exploration, and defines promising research directions for a solid foundation for future investigations. Key findings of the meta-analysis are: the existence of a systematic divide of existing quantitative empirical e-government studies into 12 research subtopics, which are assessed according to different classification criteria for scientific research gap-spotting; the identification of emerging subtopics that carry innovative research potential; and that e-government is expected to be an ongoing, open-ended research environment that still provides manifold investigative opportunities. Based on these findings, straightforward suggestions for future research are provided.
Beyond providing insights into the current state of quantitative empirical research for scientific researchers, this article also delivers value for professionals working in public management and administration. First, the study provides a comprehensive overview of e-government-related meta-analyses, which allows us to quickly identify the literature in order to tackle particular e-government management issues. Second, the article classifies existing quantitative empirical studies, defines specific subject areas and arranges relevant knowledge, which eases the processes of confining and labelling e-government activities. Last, since these deliverables are based on empirical studies that draw their conclusions from perceptions of reality, the summaries and classifications are thus regarded to be of special importance for public managers.
One of the few robust findings in the public policy literature is that policy dynamics are both a function of stability and volatility. And although most theories of public policy making posit the occurrence of policy junctures as necessary conditions for significant change, studies that set out to unravel the underlying mechanisms of such policy junctures remain relatively rare. This article further develops the idea of policy junctures, commonly hypothesized to initiate significant change, as essentially entailing joint causation. We illustrate the joint and reinforcing nature of forces of change with a case study of bonus regulation. Based on document analysis and a political claim analysis, this article shows that most changes in bonus regulation were of a marginal nature. We argue that the intrinsically attractive nature of performance rewards that a bonus practice entails combined with a sheer lack of alternatives supported by a strong coalition on how to curb risk appetite in financial markets seem to count for the resilience of bonus practices. Theoretically, the case study contributes to theory development on joint causation that causes major policy change. Empirically, it unravels a key mechanism employed by the financial sector to resist reforms: offering an alternative no one can refuse.
There is a broad consensus in the policy literature that policy change usually results from multiple forces. We identify this crucial jointly causal nature of policy change and suggest that among the forces of change a strong policy alternative capable of uniting a broad coalition of stakeholders is a necessary condition for policy change. Financial reforms, in particular the practice of bonus payment, are thus not likely to result from tight regulation, but rather from real alternatives on how to reward professional excellence and curb risk appetite.
This article investigates the Confucian and Western traditions specifically with regard to the relation between morality, law and good administration. It is argued that the common opposition between the rule of man and the rule of law as reflecting the basic difference between the two traditions is inadequate. Confucianism can be better characterized positively as the rule of morality. It should also be noticed that ‘the rule of law’ is increasingly being introduced into the Chinese administration. Similarly, even though the Western tradition can be summarized in terms of the rule of law, it is acknowledged that ‘the rule of man’ cannot be avoided, and that morality is important. Both traditions oppose the rule of man, in as far as it refers to someone acting out his selfish preferences. It is concluded that good administration requires officials with both good morality and respect for the law; whether this is a kind of convergence is a matter of debate.
This article studies Confucian and Western administrative traditions in relation to the notion of good administration. It is argued that the common characterization and understanding of the Confucian tradition in terms of the Western reviled ‘rule of man’ is misguided. Rather than understanding the positive moral connotations of the Confucian good administrator it associates them with a specific negative notion; at the same time, overstressing the Western ‘rule of law’ may obscure the need for moral persons for good administration.
The performance-based reform programme launched by Fujian province in 2000 has been adopted by many other Chinese provinces, including Zhejiang, Hebei, Anhui and Sichuan, over the past 12 years. This article aims to explore the antecedents of the adoption of this programme, in particular, the effects of senior figures' political promotion incentives and diffusion mechanisms. Specifically, event history analysis based on probit regression is used to examine data from 31 Chinese provinces for the 2000–2012 period. The results show that leaders' relative age and chances of being appointed to the Politburo, and distance to the general election, are significantly negatively correlated with the reform programme's adoption, but top-down diffusion is significantly positively correlated with it.
This study confirms that the nomenklatura system in China shapes the diffusion of innovations through the mechanisms of political promotion incentives and intergovernmental interactions. Thus, the dynamics of innovation diffusion are, to some extent, rooted in particular political institutions and shaped by political contexts. Furthermore, the desire for political promotions may figure as a general deep reason for decisions about whether to adopt innovations; therefore, strengthening these incentives for adopting reforms becomes a key strategy.
Our study focuses on the relationship between elected officials and managers in the context of local services management. We analyse the political–administrative interface using Weick’s theory of sensemaking. Our research, based on the case of water services management in Montreal, shows that the loss of expertise in the public sector, coupled with a lack of political vision, leads to a mismatch between the actions envisaged by the managers and the resources available. The organizational purpose needs to be politically defined in order to achieve a reciprocal influence in policy making. This collaboration, or complementarity of politics and administration, allows shared sensemaking that is essential both to a management diagnosis in line with the organizational mission and to strategic decision-making which takes into account the civil servants’ recommendations.
Some urban infrastructures, such as water infrastructure, are neither easily visible nor accessible. Thus, there is sometimes a wide gap between managers’ interpretation of the situation and that of the citizens and elected officials. This is a challenge for the development of common sensemaking. Elected officials must be able to count on a competent civil service that provides them with reliable information, enabling them to make trade-offs with all the relevant facts at hand. It is also in the public interest that elected officials maintain strategic control of the water activity in order for public action to efficiently contribute to the political vision.
Evaluations may perform a key role in political systems as they provide a basis for parliaments to hold their executives accountable. This is equally the case in the European Union. Yet, several factors may work against the usage of European Union evaluations for accountability purposes. Members of the European Parliament work under great time pressure and executives may have little incentives to produce high-quality evaluations. This article therefore addresses the question of to what extent and when Members of the European Parliament use ex post legislative evaluations. We present an analysis of 220 evaluations, studying how many were referred to in parliamentary questions. Our main finding is that 16% of the evaluations are followed up through questions. However, the parliamentary questions hardly serve accountability aims. Members of the European Parliament mostly use evaluations for agenda-setting purposes. The main variable explaining differences in the usage of evaluations is the level of conflict between the European Parliament and Commission during the legislative process.
This article studies the usage of ex post evaluations of European Union legislation by Members of the European Parliament for accountability purposes by analysing European Parliament questions. It shows that MEPs ask different types of questions, referring to ex post evaluations. Most of the questions reveal forward-looking rather than backward-looking motives, aimed at agenda-setting and policy change instead of accountability. It concludes that variance in parliamentary questions about the follow-up of evaluation outcomes can be explained by the level of conflict between the European Parliament and Commission during the legislative stage.
This article is a contribution to the debate raised in the special issue of the International Review of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS) (Volume 79(3)) devoted to the World Bank’s approach to public sector management for 2011–2020. We offer a methodological framework for action that builds on the definitions we have chosen of three key concepts used by several authors: ‘administrative reform’, the ‘real world’ and the ‘performance’ of administrations. The proposed model suggests an inductive-style methodological approach, taking into account the challenges that the World Bank has set itself to secure the successful implementation of its strategy.
The success of administrative reforms very much depends on the consideration given to the different mechanisms that regulate the actual workflow in public services. The article shows how this flow is characterised by multiple methods of regulation whose nature and configuration vary from one administration to another, and offers a way of managing reforms that duly takes this into account. The focus is on the professionalism of the practitioners in this field.
This article presents and discusses empirical research into citizen satisfaction, conducted to measure the performance and management of local public policies. The object of the research is to evaluate the public safety policy of a Spanish city through a survey measuring citizen satisfaction with the local public services. Regression and ‘importance-performance analysis’ (IPA) were applied to the views expressed by a sample of citizens. One objective of the study reported is to use different derived importance values, from correlation and regression analysis, to compare the results of two ‘importance-performance analyses’. The concept of variant and invariant weights and the three-factor theory of customer satisfaction were also considered for the research. Results confirm that the ‘fire service’ is seen as a ‘dissatisfier’, a basic or flat attribute; they suggest that negative coefficient values could be associated with ‘dissatisfiers’ and that inherent discontinuity is only partly resolved in the partition importance-performance grid. The findings show that the results of the two IPAs differ using the traditional IPA grid but are similar with diagonal models of the partition IPA grid.
One of the main problems for political decision-makers in recent years has been the reconfiguration of the budget for the entity managed, such as a municipality, in the current situation of economic crisis. This article contributes to improving decision-making on the reallocation of money and resources in the face of restrictions and financial cuts.
Concern has been expressed by international organisations and in previous studies about the financial situation of local governments, and the question of debt has been identified as a crucial element in efforts to overcome the current financial crisis. However, the variables that can affect the financial soundness of these governments have not been sufficiently studied, despite their direct relation to the credit risk premium. In this article, we aim to identify risk factors for default by local governments, and provide useful information to municipal financial managers. We conducted an empirical study of 148 Spanish municipalities and analysed data from four years, applying a random effects logistic regression model. Our findings reveal that a lower population density, less dependent population, falling levels of per capita income and the presence of progressive local government are all risk factors for default by local governments. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the general financing structure variable and debt composition and maturity variable do influence the risk of default by local governments.
The findings of this article can provide useful information for managers and politicians responsible for the financial management of local governments, in particular, by enabling them to better understand the risk premiums assigned by banks. Specifically, by identifying the risk factors for default, this article highlights the warning signs of this risk, so that suitable arguments may be expressed in negotiating loan repayment schedules and interest rates, and in designing financial viability and restructuring plans.
This article aims to examine the potential transformation of practices triggered by the introduction of performance indicators in the water utilities in France in the late 2000s. We show that the transformative dynamic that, on the face of it, is brought about by this new governance tool is put into question by the multitude of brakes (political, economic, social and environmental) impeding its deployment. The article analyses the limits of the system by applying Foucault’s governmentality approach, defined by the analytical framework of the management tools as reformulated by Lascoumes and Le Galès.
In particular, following the adoption of the Water Framework Directive in 2000, European states have had to streamline their drinking water and sanitation utilities. New methods of regulation, borrowing more markedly than in the past from market logics, have thus gradually taken hold. In this article, we examine the controversial performance indicators of the water and sanitation utilities, whose effectiveness and legitimacy are regularly questioned. We seek to clarify the structuring of the current debate and identify possible ways to improve their functioning on the basis of the French case.
This article addresses the ‘local turn’ of migration and integration policies in historical perspective in Newcastle upon Tyne and Bremen. It draws upon a wide range of government documentation and offers a comparative assessment of both cities’ policies from the 1960s onwards. It discusses the vertical dimension of policymaking though an exploration of the local governance of migrant integration in relation to the national level. Although Britain and Germany's post-war immigration histories and political structures have often been perceived as contrasting, this article reveals a convergence in these cities’ governments’ approaches to their own local diverse societies. These case studies question the long-term impact of overarching national constitutional structures on city-level migration policies. Findings are framed within the local governance and multi-level governance MLG debates.
European cities are increasingly being recognized for the role they play in devising and implementing their own migration and integration policies. Yet very little is known about the relationship between this ‘local turn’ and multi-level governance (MLG). Practitioners can learn more about cities’ policymaking processes and the extent to which these have been influenced by national agendas, as well as about how research of a historical and cross-country and cross-city nature can inform the on-going policy debate.
The main purpose of this article is to analyse Barcelona’s mainstreaming approach to intercultural policy from the beginning of its immigration process. My key questions are threefold: (a) why was Barcelona attracted by the intercultural approach so early in 1997? (b) how can we understand the consolidation of interculturalism? and (c) how can its successful permanent endurance (16 years) be explained, given different migratory contexts/political governments? I will argue that Barcelona’s status as a key player within the multi-level system of Catalan and Spanish governance has been a favourable key factor.
I will first feature the mainstreaming approach, and then defend the argument that the vertical dimension has helped to strengthen the legitimacy of the horizontal dimension, as it has provided a favourable environment in which interculturalism can flourish. I conclude by highlighting the fact that the analysis of Barcelona helps to provide new meanings for the multi-level governance debate in diverse European cities.
Multi-level governance and cities networks influence the policy design and the consolidation of cities’ diversity policies. There is an assumed link for cities between intercultural policies and the mainstreaming approach in diversity policies. The relationship between the vertical and horizontal dimensions of multi-level governance plays a key role in promoting a favourable environment for these policies to thrive.
Much research has focused on finding and explaining the antecedents, correlates, and outcomes of public service motivation (PSM), but little is known about the influence of national context on individuals’ PSM. Previous research suggests that national culture may exert an independent influence on individuals’ PSM. This article examines PSM as an individual-level variable that is related to national culture, which is represented by Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. Using data from the International Social Survey Programme (2005), I investigate the relationship between cultural dimensions and individuals’ PSM. This article demonstrates that masculinity and indulgence are positively related to individuals’ PSM, whereas individualism is negatively associated with individuals’ PSM. However, power distance and uncertainty avoidance have a non-significant relationship with PSM. This article provides partial support for the thesis that national culture is associated with individuals’ PSM, but future research is required to explicate the relationship of cultural characteristics to individuals’ PSM.
Culture influences certain types of behavior both directly and indirectly. The article suggests that cultural tendencies such as masculinity, indulgence, and collectivism have a significant positive influence on individuals’ PSM. Organizational education and socialization enhancing these cultural values are likely to foster employees’ PSM.
Given the increasing emphasis on delivery and output as a source of legitimacy for local government, how do politicians and civil servants perceive conventional, input-based channels for citizens’ influence on government in relationship to performance and output-oriented opportunities to influence public service? This article compares the attitudes of senior local politicians and civil servants in Norwegian and Swedish local authorities on these issues. The analysis draws on a data set collected among political and administrative leaders in Norwegian and Swedish local authorities. We also compare a service sector where public management reform has been extensive (care of the elderly) with a service sector where regulation and law enforcement dominates (planning and construction). The analysis suggests that there is a significant similarity between politicians’ and bureaucrats’ attitudes, although politicians accord greater importance to input-based channels of influence and to throughput than do bureaucrats.
Public management reform provides a new channel for clients to influence public service directly through the providers of those services and not through conventional political channels. This article studies how politicians and public servants in Norwegian and Swedish municipalities evaluate conventional and new channels for clients to influence service delivery. We also compare service sectors where such choice is extensive with areas where choice is much more constrained. Overall, we find that politicians tend to favor conventional political channels for clients’ influence whereas public servants take a more positive view of clients approaching the executive side of the local authority.
This article investigates how Danish and Swedish national policies vis-à-vis refugees and asylum seekers are perceived, and responded to, at the municipal level in the cities of Aarhus and Malmö. As will be spelled out in the article, municipal representatives raised their voices in both Denmark and Sweden during the middle of the 1990s, arguing that their municipalities had to carry a larger ‘burden of reception’ than they could manage, and they thus urged for changes in the national dispersal and migration policies. The response at the national level was dramatically different in Denmark than in Sweden, however. This is today apparent not only in the sheer numbers of newcomers but also in municipal introduction practices as well as in the institutional memories of municipal officials.
The findings presented in this study point both to the possibility for municipalities to have a direct impact on national policies, in this case mainly on refugee settlement policies, but also to how policy decisions at one point in time shapes the political opportunity structures at national as well as local levels at later points in time.
In response to recent calls in the literature to decompose both the human resources system and performance, this study has examined the effects of ability-, motivation- and opportunity-enhancing human resources practices on the effectiveness, efficiency and fairness of public organizations, with job satisfaction considered as a mediating variable.
Insights from Human Resource Management and performance research, mostly conducted in the private sector, have been combined with public management literature in order to gain insight into the Human Resource Management–performance relationship in the public sector.
Regression analysis with a bootstrapping method was used to test the mediating effects.
The analysis showed that the three human resources components heterogeneously impact upon the three performance outcomes. Further, the results showed that ability-enhancing and opportunity-enhancing human resources practices are more strongly related to performance outcomes than motivation-enhancing human resources practices.
Decomposing Human Resource Management and performance provides greater insight into the Human Resource Management–performance relationship.
The results show that investing in Human Resource Management positively influences performance outcomes. Moreover, our results show that various aspects of public performance require different human resources approaches. Investing in ability-enhancing human resources practices seems to be particularly relevant if one wants to enhance effectiveness. All the human resources practices, but especially ability-enhancing ones, are relevant to enhancing efficiency. However, investing in motivation-enhancing human resources practices seems to make little sense if one is seeking to enhance fairness.
While there is universal recognition of their important role in the functioning of administrations and for the motivation of public officials, the values that serve as a reference for the public service are witnessing a change in the way they are understood and implemented in practice, particularly with regard to the new requirements of public management. The analysis developed in this article centres on the interplay between various dimensions relating to the perception and use of the key values of the French civil service and highlights the tensions that prevail despite the apparent preservation of the axiological reference universe of those concerned. It raises the question of the role of schools in the training of values management. It draws on the results of a survey conducted in France by the network of civil service schools (Réseau des écoles de service public; RESP) among managers undergoing training and their teachers and supervisory staff.
The study shows that organizations that are responsible for the initial or continuing training of civil servants offer a breeding ground for the (re)production of public service values. However, for civil service managers to be able to deal with the potential tensions between values (no clear hierarchy, apparent contradictions) it is necessary to develop their capacities for reflective analysis and practical application that will allow a critical distance and promote a contextualized ethical approach.
Since 2005, the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability tool has been widely used in developing countries and emerging economies to evaluate the performance of public financial management systems. In this article, we assess the strengths and weaknesses of the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability instrument tool for evaluating public financial accountability. We examine the theoretical literature on public accountability in order to derive a suitable normative framework to assess the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability tool. However, given that this literature is based on experiences in developed countries, we must extend it to also take into account the political cultures and practices in developing countries. Using this extended framework, we assess the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability indicators related to, in particular, parliamentary committees for financial oversight and Supreme Audit Institutions. We conclude that the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability tool could devote more attention to the independence of Supreme Audit Institutions, the nature of accountability debates, democratic inclusion and horizontal accountability mechanisms
The Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability tool has been applied in more than 116 countries and its reports offer valuable information for practitioners and researchers around the world. It is the only publicly available data set that measures the performance of financial committees of parliament and Supreme Audit Institutions. The strengths and weaknesses revealed in this article should be taken into account when using the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability tool for research or for evaluating the quality of financial accountability systems in particular countries. The international financial institutions and donor agencies governing the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability Secretariat can use the recommendations of this article to further improve the framework.
The International Public Sector Accounting Standards have been seen as a path towards the modernization of governmental accounting, and many countries have made efforts to adopt them. The purpose of this article is to analyse the stimuli and barriers to the adoption of International Public Sector Accounting Standards, as well as their main benefits, using a structural equation model. The research methodology is based on a questionnaire sent to American and European Union countries that has been used to construct a structural model, and our results show that comparability and modernization are direct benefits of International Public Sector Accounting Standards implementation, and that both adopter and non-adopter countries value these positive impacts. This justifies the process of harmonization that the European Commission recently started.
The analysis of the impact of International Public Sector Accounting Standards in the international context shows to what extent the adoption of International Public Sector Accounting Standards are useful for modernizing governmental accounting and achieving accounting comparability. Describing the experience of countries that have adopted International Public Sector Accounting Standards can help practitioners and professionals who participate in modernizing accounting systems, such as the European Union. Many countries are now moving towards International Public Sector Accounting Standards and the experiences of pioneer countries can serve as a learning process. This article shows that introducing International Public Sector Accounting Standards can have many advantages in practice and that countries that have implemented these standards consider that they allow an increase in transparency and accountability.
This article examines the Strategic and Operating Review (SOR) process used by the Government of Canada through a strategic management perspective. Initiated by the Harper government in the 2011 Budget as a one-year process, SOR is expected to secure savings of CDN$4 billion by 2014–15 from the CDN$80 billion operating budget of departments. Our article assesses to what degree the strategic operational cuts support the public policy priorities of the Harper government.
Using Canada as a case study to understand how budgetary cuts are handled, this article provides an opportunity to consider how policy makers align operational cuts with public policy priorities. While the budget cuts in this case study are operational in nature, they require direction from central government to support – not undermine – public policy priorities.
The current relationship between the state and civil society in Europe is a curious and historically unique one. This is no longer a situation in which participation and association prepare citizens for the offices of the state; rather, it is the state urging a sometimes-reluctant citizenry to engage actively in civil society. This phenomenon stems from a combination of changes in prevailing governance paradigms and of the more general process of social liquefaction. In the article, we analyse these two intertwining trends and discuss the new type of relationship between the state and civil society that may be emerging.
The article puts the current vogue for renewed state–civil society relationships in a larger context. It shows that, however commendable many initiatives may be, there is the risk that the desire on the part of governments for their citizens to participate and self-organize may lead the state to take over such initiatives, leading to a manufactured civil society that has little to do with spontaneous citizen initiatives. Another possible consequence is that truly spontaneous citizen initiatives will shun collaboration with the state and focus only inwards, to the detriment of broader public values. Therefore, in this area, the state must strike a delicate balance between encouragement and restraint.
There is widespread agreement that the local level has become more self-confident and self-reliant in formulating its own immigrant policies and sometimes developing distinct philosophies of immigrant incorporation. However, to date we know little about the actual capacities of cities to implement these philosophies consistently. This article offers a level-specific study of the governance of immigrant incorporation by European municipalities. It focuses on cities with diversity policies and it compares the meaning of diversity in formulated policies with policy implementation. Identifying an implementation gap of diversity policies in Antwerp, Amsterdam and Leeds, it argues that cities may have become more self-reliant and self-confident in coming up with their own ideas and concepts for governing immigration, but this may not mean that they also consistently implement these ideas. This article identifies two explanations for an implementation gap and different capacities across cities to consistently implement such policies.
The article establishes two explanations for the inconsistent implementation of policies, focusing on the case of local diversity policies, and delineates how this plays out across different cities. These findings are relevant as they allow us to define the conditions for consistent policy implementation.
Intersectoral policy networks may be effective in dealing with complex public health problems. Their performance is assumed to depend on network management and trust, as well as on integrated public health policy (i.e. policy coordination and integration). We studied the role of network management and trust in the realization of integrated public health policy and network performance, as well as the relation between integrated public health policy and network performance. In 34 Dutch local policy networks, we measured the perceptions of 278 actors through a Web-based survey and used regression analyses to assess the relations between policy variables. Management and trust were positively related to perceived integrated public health policy and network performance, while integrated public health policy was also positively related to perceived network performance. In public health, the performance of intersectoral policy networks may be improved by adequate network management, the creation of trust and policy coordination and integration. Future research could further explore the role of specific characteristics of the network manager, like the manager’s background, relation to the other actors and leadership style.
Regarding inter-sectoral policy networks in public health: first, when aiming for the realization of policy coordination and integration, the employment of network management strategies and the creation of trust are of importance for the network manager; and, second, when also aiming for the realization of network performance, the creation of policy coordination and integration is of additional importance for the network manager.
Countries in transition face numerous political and economic challenges often exacerbated by persistent corruption and internecine religious conflict. In Lebanon, existing local governments have proven ineffective at providing many public services, especially those with spillover effects and externalities. This article proposes a structural change: the introduction of special-purpose local authorities to provide a single service transcending the boundaries of individual local governments. This proposal promises an innovative and practical solution to some existing problems; moreover, it will disentangle some of the complexities in the social and political milieus of a country typified by intense conflict.
This article proposes a policy recommendation to address one of the many challenges facing decentralization in Lebanon. Existing local governments have proven ineffective at providing many public services, especially those with spillover effects and externalities. Special-purpose local authorities are introduced as an innovative and practical solution to some existing problems; an approach that will disentangle some of the complexities in the social and political milieus of a country typified by intense conflict. The article provides certain decision points that are useful for policy makers and practitioners as they consider possible resolutions to existing challenges, potential implementation obstacles, and mitigating factors.
In this multiple-case study, which involved seven municipalities in Brazil, we argue that good education is a by-product from educators’ commitment, which in turn is explained through self-determination theory. The research findings suggest that the support provided by local officials to teachers, their social status in small municipalities, and the lack of externally imposed educational targets all contributed to the fulfilment of educators’ needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness, thereby enabling the emergence of self-motivation, and, as a consequence, of commitment. It is also argued that these practices enhanced educators’ engagement in prosocial behaviour, which explains why they went a step further to help their poorest students. The authors suggest that the insights provided by self-determination theory can offer an alternative view to the carrot-and-stick approach in educational policies. The article closes with suggestions for further research on the role of motivation and prosocial behaviour on public service effectiveness.
Administrative practices associated with social policies have often avoided clarifying their theoretical assumptions, failing to state the implications that these may have on human motivation. By examining the case of education in poor municipalities, the study shows not only that commitment is a key factor for achieving policy goals but also that self-determination theory provides the theoretical explanations for this commitment. The knowledge of theoretical principles related to self-motivation can assist practitioners in social policy design, where the long-term goals are more relevant than short-term targets. Policy-makers can find creative alternatives to deal with specific contexts when instructed by overarching theories on motivation such as self-determination theory.
Organisational changes of the public sector have led to increased decentralisation of public services. Only fully fledged financial accounting and reporting systems guarantee the consolidated information needed by executive and legislative bodies to fulfil their duties in financial management and the supervision of network entities. Consolidated financial statements may serve to increase accountability and transparency towards internal and external stakeholders. The article aims at giving an overview of consolidation approaches in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. It will focus on the methods applied and the guiding principles followed to define the perimeter of consolidation. The analysis is carried out through a comparison of legal requirements and standards for consolidation, and the published consolidated financial statements, taking the International Public Sector Accounting Standards as a benchmark.
The analysis of consolidation practice in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries reveals that while the use of consolidated financial statements is increasing, there are still significant deviations from the perspective of international accounting standards. The results show that the equity method plays a crucial role as it is used in a transition period to full consolidation and/or for organisations having major influence on the statements of financial position. These findings are of interest in the ongoing debate of international standard-setting in the field of consolidation, as well as for the discussion of European Public Sector Accounting Standards.
Using stakeholder theory and a historical case study, I examine how key stakeholders failed to challenge the Alberta provincial government’s fiscal reforms, leading to the emergence of an unlikely champion in the Calgary hospital laundry workers. Notwithstanding that several prominent and powerful professional groups had the opportunity to oppose the government’s reforms, these groups either acquiesced or sought compromise individually with the government. This case calls into question the professions’ ability to protect public institutions under their domain.
In terms of potential implications for public administrators, this case provides an example of professional failure to intercede in the public interest, despite having the power and legitimacy to act according to stakeholder theory. This raises questions as to the circumstances under which professional groups will exercise their advocacy role. Unaddressed are the conditions under which relatively powerless demanding stakeholders can acquire power and legitimacy. Accordingly, administrators ‘relying’ upon established stakeholders as barometers of public opinion may misread public sentiment.
This article comparatively examines the higher education reform pathways of France and Italy. Using a scheme of empirical indicators, I focus on the divergent and convergent developments in these two countries, which played a pioneering role in the Europeanization of higher education. While France has consistently moved closer to a market-oriented model, legacies of academic self-rule were initially strengthened in Italy, before recent reforms aimed to crack down on academic power abuses. To explain these policy pathways, I pursue a dual theoretical argument by linking institutional isomorphism with historical institutionalism.
The article examines the changing structures of higher education management and administration in France and Italy. It focuses on the new roles attributed to the state, university leaders and external stakeholders, and addresses whether both systems have converged on a market-oriented paradigm. I explain how and why various new competitive steering instruments were introduced. The analysis should be of interest to both scholars and practitioners due to its focus on new power arrangements in quality assurance, university administration and research governance.
This study examines the joint influences of work exhaustion, job demands (red tape, role conflict, work overload), and public service motivation on street-level bureaucrats’ turnover intention. Based on a survey of 4974 Korean street-level bureaucrats, the study examines the potential mediating role of work exhaustion and complex moderating role of public service motivation in determining street-level bureaucrats’ turnover intention. In line with previous research, we find that job demands have both direct and indirect associations with street-level bureaucrats’ turnover intention through work exhaustion. However, public service motivation was found to reduce the employees’ turnover intention in two different ways. First, public service motivation was found to have a direct negative association with turnover intention. In addition, it was also found to mitigate the positive associations between job demands and work exhaustion, and between job demands and turnover intention.
The findings of the current study provide several practical implications for public managers. First of all, it suggests that imbuing public sector values through formal and informal training is important. Second, it provides some clues for local government managers to reduce street-level bureaucrats’ work exhaustion and turnover intention. For example, the problem of work overload for street-level bureaucrats could be reduced by reassigning work responsibilities according to workload analyses for given jobs.
This article focuses on a new type of rules that the European Union may adopt: delegated legislation. Although this instrument may be new, it follows from a long-standing controversy over the means by which the European Parliament can hold the European Commission to account when it adopts executive rules. On the basis of interviews and documentary evidence, this article aims to test to what degree the new system delivers on its promise of stronger accountability. Although the new system is still in its infancy, the article concludes that formal rules, internal norms and practices are already indicative of stronger legislative control. However, capacity issues within the European Parliament, as well as a lack of public transparency, may well prove to be detrimental when the number of delegated acts increases.
This article assesses the degree to which the European Parliament is equipped to hold the European Commission to account when it adopts delegated legislation. Current accountability systems and practices are still in their infancy, but there are already clear signs of stronger legislative control over the European Commission. However, capacity issues within the European Parliament and a lack of transparency of delegated legislation will jeopardize accountability as the number of delegated acts increases.
Using a cross-sectional survey of 254 Turkish district governors, this study assesses the impact of personality on decision-making among public managers. The research evaluates self-reported results from the Five-Factor Model of personality and the Decision-Making Questionnaire of the psychology literature. The findings suggest that Openness, Conscientiousness, and Extraversion are important in the analysis of decision-making subjects, tasks, and contexts, respectively. Departing from previous research, the analysis here suggests that culture and structure are important factors in explaining personality and decision-making in public administration.
This study offers policy implications for the recruitment, performance appraisal, training, and assignment of practitioners in the public service. Personality assessments can be used as a valuable tool during the evaluation of public officials under consideration for recruitment, appointment, and promotion. Matching the personalities of potential candidates to positions requiring comparable qualifications has important organizational, personnel, and financial implications. Our research also suggests that decision-making and personality should also account for social, cultural, and organizational differences in their applications.
Experts suggest that when faced with fiscal stress public managers can engage in three coping practices: an actual cutback in services, expansion of existing financial resources, or reduction in work force. During the Great Recession (2007–2012), US subnational governments utilized all three of these practices. The purpose of this article is to identify coping mechanisms used by state and local governments to respond to the Great Recession, and identify approaches to minimize the negative and disproportionate impact of these actions on women, minorities, and the economically disadvantaged. The authors provide specific examples of tactics employed by US subnational governments in response to fiscal stress and evaluate the equity of their consequences on the distribution of goods and services. A review of the concept of social equity, its related literature, and an analysis of the disparate impact of coping practices on underrepresented groups is provided. Finally, the article presents mitigating strategies in order to reduce the regressive impact of these coping practices on the vulnerable populations.
This article identifies ‘coping’ strategies used by US Subnational Governments in response to the Global Recession. It presents the inequities caused by these responses and suggests some ‘mitigating’ strategies to reduce the regressive impact on the disadvantaged.
Citizen trust in government at the macro level has been studied by public administration scholars for many years. To further our understanding, assessing trust at the meso level of government organizations is important to more precisely determine effects and antecedents of trust at the organizational level. The organizational trust literature has shown that organizational trustworthiness is multidimensional, but the extant literature has not validated such measures in a public administration context. The proposed scale builds on and adapts an existing organizational trust scale to a public administration context. The ‘Citizen Trust in Government Organizations’ scale is validated using data from two different samples (total n = 991), resulting in a scale of nine items measuring three dimensions: perceived competence, benevolence, and integrity. This scale can be used by other researchers and is valuable to gain a more specific and multi-dimensional understanding of trust in government organizations.
A major problem for government organizations worldwide is the lack of perceived trustworthiness by the public. To tackle this problem, a way to measure it is needed, but at the moment there are only generic measures to assert perceived trustworthiness in a government organization. This article presents a first validation and incorporates three dimensions: perceived competence, benevolence, and honesty. Practitioners can use this scale and adapt to their relevant local context to identify specific trustworthiness problems.
This article reports on research aimed at assessing why Public Administration research is eligible for research ethics review or not through a quantitative content analysis of two international peer-reviewed journals. Through a comprehensive literature review on research integrity, research ethics and human subject protection regulations, the reasons, convictions and conditions for ethics review were identified and combined into a conceptual framework for the purpose of the content analysis. The study revealed that 60% of the articles reported on research involving human participants directly or indirectly. An interesting observation was the lack of reporting on ethical considerations in general and specifically in the research design of those articles with the potential to harm human subjects. It is recommended that higher education institutions hosting researchers in Public Administration, as well as peer-reviewed journals, should instil the awareness and sensitivity for research ethics among researchers.
The study on which this article is based reports on the qualifying reasons, convictions and conditions for ethics review in Public Administration research. Consequently, the article proposes a conceptual framework that could be used by Public Administration researchers and ethics review committees to assess whether research is eligible for ethics review or not.
Although scholars and practitioners in the field of public administration have investigated the nature of social enterprises emerging from the nonprofit sector, little research has been undertaken on the role of governments in facilitating prospective social enterprises to transform nonprofits into social enterprises. This research explores the global phenomenon of social entrepreneurship by analysing the government-driven social enterprise programs in South Korea. What is the government-driven social enterprise policy in South Korea? What is the role of the government in driving the success of the social enterprises in South Korea? What are the factors that affect the success of government-driven social enterprises? The results of this study highlight how government support helps nonprofit organizations cope effectively with diverse constraints that may cause nonprofit failure in societies like South Korea. The study findings confirm that Salamon's third-party government perspective and nonprofit failure theory justify government intervention, suggesting that governments may drive nonprofit organizations efficiently to overcome a propensity to failure by providing them with resources.
This study found that government support to the small nonprofit organizations may facilitate civil society growth in Eastern Asia countries. Our research of government-driven social enterprise policy in Seoul Korea will provide a policy model for policy decision-makers for program design that would expand social services provided by non-state actors, and government-driven nonprofit policies will allow public agencies to direct and expand the social services without creating new agencies. However, we also found that the mandatory administrative approach may not address nonprofits’ daily challenges in an effective manner.
A large number of empirical studies have shown a wide range of positive effects of transformational leadership, which is arguably the dominating leadership paradigm in the last two decades. In this study, we ask whether this type of leadership is as common in public as in private organizations. Through a survey, the leadership style of 2488 leaders in Norwegian organizations with more than ten employees was mapped out. Focus is set on whether the occurrence of transformational leadership varies according to an organization’s publicness. It is hypothesized that the effect of publicness on transformational leadership will be mediated through bureaucratization, centralization, professionalization, pro-social motivation and gender composition. The study controls for organization size and task, variables often missing in comparisons of public and private organizations. The main finding is that publicness has no direct effect on transformational leadership when controlling for main task, organizational size and the leader’s gender. However, it does affect transformational leadership indirectly through bureaucratization, professionalization and gender composition. Based on the findings, more general implications for comparing public and private organizations are discussed.
It is often claimed that leadership in the public sector is different from leadership in the private sector. This study shows that such a claim is an oversimplification. First, there should be an awareness that leadership does not take place only in the private or public sector, but also in a myriad of hybrids between the public and the private sectors. Second, various challenges for leaders may be more strongly linked to basic features such as task and organizational size, rather than to whether an organization is public or private.
Although experimented within public organisations for over 30 years, strategic planning and management still raise a number of questions and doubts as to their ability to improve public performance. The purpose of this article is to look into the strategy formulation processes in the public sector and the type of strategic approach that best matches the characteristics of this sector. It sets out to do so by first drawing up a theoretical analysis grid, based on the three main approaches to strategy in the public sector. This is followed by an exploratory case study that brings to light a complex strategic process that combines and alternates rational, collaborative and political decision-making logics, and a planned and incremental development.
This research highlights the need to combine different logics and approaches in the strategic control of public organisations: a rational logic, a political logic and a collaborative logic. It underlines, in particular, the importance for public managers to build skills in the development and management of inter-organisational networks and interpersonal relationships. The ability to create interactions between a variety of stakeholders, both internal and external, to mobilise and channel collective intelligence towards the definition and implementation of public projects and policies is a key component of the strategic management of public organisations.
Several studies suggest that public trust in government in China remains high and without any trend of decline despite the fact that public trust in government has declined dramatically in developed countries. This article analyses public trust in government in contemporary urban China with a comprehensive representative survey and tests the factors associated with public trust in government. Trust in government in China is found to be much lower than previous studies have indicated. Furthermore, the variables of citizen satisfaction with the quality of public services, general democracy, participation in government and the transparency of government are positively associated with public trust in government in China at both the city and central level. In addition, this research also finds that citizens who are younger, more highly educated and well-paid have a lower probability of trust in government in China. These findings suggest that maintaining political trust will be a challenge for the Chinese government.
The findings in this study suggest that public managers and policymakers in China should pay full attention to the challenge posed by maintaining public trust in government, and need to consider formulating specific and feasible measures to enhance public trust based on the determinants of public trust in government. Moreover, in terms of the fact that the determinants that make public trust in government decline in developed countries also affect public trust in government in China, such public managers and policymakers need to strengthen communication with developed countries to improve the handling of the common challenge of maintaining public trust in government.
Evaluating the performance of local environment activation strategies, set forth in many central policies, is an exercise fraught with challenges. Based on an analysis of 10 Integrated Territorial Approach initiatives, which were rolled out in Quebec’s fight against poverty, this article proposes a framework to better assess their various effects. These strategies are characterised by a partnership process and a collective focus. Performance occurs at micro-, meso- and macro-levels and is observable not only in the production of deliverables, but also on three other process dimensions, which are characteristic of such strategies: fostering the maintenance of local mobilisation drivers; improving the quality of locally productive elements; and learning strategic coherence. This understanding of collective performance takes public managers out of their comfort zone. Beyond having to develop collaborative skills, as is now well-documented in the literature, it leads them to develop an investor mindset and to become logisticians of the collective, not just efficient service providers.
Public managers sometimes feel disadvantaged in local collective action strategies because their performance depends on the contribution of a number of partners whose actions are driven by logics that differ from theirs. By outlining the many possible facets of performance in local collaborative strategies, the statements made in this article could give them greater peace of mind, as well as point out the systemic stumbling blocks that they may face.
Intellectual capital approaches become critical at universities mainly due to the fact that knowledge is the main output as well as input in these institutions. Although some attempts to measure intellectual capital have been made so far, there is still a long way to go. The purpose of the present article is to provide a model for the measurement of intellectual capital in higher education institutions. The results of a study done at Spanish public universities are used to indicate which intangible elements need to be measured, and a new framework for the measurement and management of intellectual capital is presented.
The main contribution of this article is the validation of the consensus on the key intangible elements and indicators that should comprise a university intellectual capital model. Our proposed intellectual capital model helps universities on the path to presenting information that is useful to their stakeholders, contributing to greater transparency, accountability and comparability in the higher education sector. This article offers useful and specific guidelines for intellectual capital reporting practice in universities. The creation of a framework of intellectual capital reporting facilitates benchmarking analysis and comparative studies in order to help decision-making processes, improve the articulation of public policies and increase transparency in the whole system.
This research reviews key issues in the privatization of local police services by discussing economic and political pressures for police privatization and concerns regarding the quality and accountability of privatized police. In particular, the authors explore whether the cost-efficiency sought from police privatization outweighs a critical side effect of a growing confusion regarding police oversight and significant uncertainties in accountability. They analyze court decisions in the US dealing with the question of whether constitutional protections extend to private police conduct. Relevant court decisions suggest that the confusion may grow even worse and local policy makers may need to pay more attention if they decide to privatize police services.
While police privatization occurs at all levels of government, this research focuses narrowly on the municipal level because there are significantly more local police agencies than at any other level of government. This study first clarifies the motives behind police privatization and then brings to light the side effects that may occur, especially accountability issues. This will act as a guide for local policy makers because accountability and cost-efficiency are major concerns when considering police privatization. Local officials can more comprehensively consider the demand for privatization of local police services and potential legal issues caused by the privatization effort.
The central Government of Malta has had an accrual accounting reform in process since 1999. Originally, the accrual accounting reform envisaged developing and implementing a tailor-made set of accounting standards. These were developed but not implemented. In 2011 the central Government of Malta decided instead to fully adopt IPSAS. By means of documentary research, supported by interviews, this study tries to identify the underlying factors that led to this decision. The institutional theoretical framework is used to analyse the findings. The findings show that, in Malta, credibility is regarded as the most important factor, which will be provided by the adoption of internationally recognised and accepted standards. It is claimed that EU pressure had nothing to do with the Maltese government’s decision on accounting policy, but an undercurrent of such potential pressure is experienced.
One advantage of an accrual accounting system is that accrual data is generated from the accounting system, but this accrual data would still need to be reviewed in order to make it ESA-compliant. The solution proposed by the EU Commission is to revise IPSAS and minimise the differences with ESA. The feasibility of this solution is questionable given that the objectives of IPSAS and ESA are different and relate to different types of reporting. They purport to measure the same thing, that is the deficits and debts of a government, but they do not. In order for such convergence to be considered, one financial measure would have to give way to the other.
This article reports research on bureaucrat behaviour. Where discretion exists, do primary associations such as religious, gender or racial identity guide behaviour or are these associations superseded by secondary learned professional or technocratic attachments? Using the theoretical lens of representative bureaucracy and Q methodology to investigate bureaucrat role perceptions, two distinct bureaucrat typologies are identified in Belfast. The evidence demonstrates that an elite-level bureaucrat may actively represent his or her own professional interests or, alternatively, may seek out and actively represent the interests of the political elite as a collective. The findings have implications for representative bureaucracy research as it is demonstrated that an elite-level bureaucrat may actively represent something other than a primary identity. This contribution also provides a useful insight into everyday life within a bureau of a successful power-sharing system of governance.
Politicians and bureaucrats from Northern Ireland are perpetually being invited to ‘teach the lessons’ of their power-sharing experience. This article highlights the importance of the elite-level bureaucrat in sustaining power-sharing regimes and provides an empirical basis for those seeking to draw on the Northern Ireland experience of conflict management and post-conflict governance.
The notion of a global public service has been put forth in the literature as a means of addressing a number of policy issues that can no longer be addressed by a nation-state in isolation. This article sets out to address whether it is possible to formulate and implement a leadership competency model that could be used to select, develop and reward these global public servants and, if so, what leadership competencies they would require. Evidence will be drawn from both the literature on the competencies required for global managers/leaders as well as various public sector leadership competency models. It is argued that more thought needs to be given to how a leadership competency framework might be fruitfully employed to buttress such a cadre of individuals.
Public services around the world have been embracing the use of leadership competency models as part of their human resources management frameworks for the past few decades. This research examines a number of the various models that have been employed with the intent of identifying key competencies that would be more universal in nature. Additional research needs to be conducted to ensure that such models reflect the distinctiveness of the public sector.
Smart specialisation is now a major idea behind the European Commission’s cohesion policy reforms in the field of innovation, and it must be applied by European Union member countries in order to secure funding under the 2014–2020 European Union budget, even though the concept itself has only recently emerged. The success of translating this policy into practice depends on a thorough analysis of regions’ and countries’ potential for innovation based on empirical evidence. Currently, countries use a wide array of methods to define priority areas, but these have, for the most part, failed to address the challenges of this process. This article explores the data that can be used in the prioritisation process of developing a smart specialisation strategy. The approach follows the main recommendations for profiling regions and countries, uses data already available at the national statistical offices, and is based on indicators that can be grasped intuitively by policymakers. It includes data on each relevant aspect of smart specialisation, that is, economic, scientific and technological specialisation, as well as the entrepreneurial discovery process. This article demonstrates the approach using a case with Slovenian data; the results suggest that it can be an effective tool for narrowing down a list of industries to be considered for a smart specialisation strategy.
A smart specialisation strategy will be a precondition for using European Union regional and investment funds during 2014–2020 in order to support research and innovation investments. The success of translating this policy into practice depends on a thorough analysis of regions’ and countries’ potential for innovation based on empirical evidence. A ready-to-use methodology for narrowing down a list of industries to be considered for a smart specialisation strategy is proposed, and is demonstrated using the example of Slovenia.
Since the initial ‘public service motivation’ concept and measures were developed, various studies have raised concerns with regard to cultural differences. According to previous research trying to supplement the four original dimensions of the original construct with a fifth dimension, this study follows this same strategy, taking into account three aspects of the Napoleonic administrative tradition. The analysis captures one new dimension with political loyalty values, which slightly improves the measurement of public service motivation in that specific context.
Previous research has showed that ‘public service motivation’ has consequences in terms of individual and collective behaviour and, thus, it may contribute to improve organizations. Public service motivation has been related to performance, organizational commitment and job satisfaction, among other attitudes and behaviours. It has also been used by public administrations in job selection processes.
This article explores the influence of two types of signalling on the career success of civil servants in the federal ministerial bureaucracy of Germany. Whereas ‘ability signalling’ displays bureaucratic expertise in the sense of both political craft and administrative management competencies, ‘intention signalling’ indicates party politicization. Data are drawn from the biographies of 341 civil servants within the two highest ranks in federal ministries and the chancellery who held office between 2002 and 2013. Taking gender, formal education and career patterns into consideration, we are able to find clear evidence for ‘intention signalling’, whereas ‘ability signalling’ plays only a minor role. Over time, the accelerating effect of ‘intention signalling’ on administrative careers is increasing.
How important is political loyalty for senior civil servants in merit bureaucracies? This article investigates the relationship between the merit principle and politicization in the German federal bureaucracy. By analysing the importance of certain career steps, we find clear evidence for party politicization. Employment in positions that signal party political loyalty accelerates the careers of ministerial officials, even if the data also prove that there is no distinct ‘fast track’ to leading administrative positions in Germany. Moreover, our analysis reveals an under-representation of women in administrative top positions, as well as the continuing dominance of lawyers. Regarding career patterns, considerable differences between state secretaries and directors-general are evident.
The delegation of public tasks to arm’s-length bodies remains a central feature of contemporary reform agendas within both developed and developing countries. The role and capacity of political and administrative principals (i.e. ministers and departments of state) to control the vast network of arm’s-length bodies for which they are formally responsible is therefore a critical issue within and beyond academe. In the run-up to the 2010 General Election in the United Kingdom, the ‘quango conundrum’ emerged as an important theme and all three major parties committed themselves to shift the balance of power back towards ministers and sponsor departments. This article presents the results of the first major research project to track and examine the subsequent reform process. It reveals a stark shift in internal control relationships from the pre-election ‘poor parenting’ model to a far tighter internal situation that is now the focus of complaints by arm’s-length bodies of micro-management. This shift in the balance of power and how it was achieved offers new insights into the interplay between different forms of governance and has significant theoretical and comparative relevance.
For professionals working in the field of arm’s-length governance, the article offers three key insights. First, that a well-resourced core executive is critical to directing reform given the challenges of implementing reform in a context of austerity. Second, that those implementing reform will also need to take into account the diverse consequences of centrally imposed reform likely to result in different departments with different approaches to arm’s-length governance. Third, that reforming arm’s-length governance can affect the quality of relationships, and those working in the field will need to mitigate these less tangible challenges to ensure success.
This article analyses the factors that seem to play an important role in determining the cost of sovereign debt. Specifically, we evaluate to what extent transparency, the level of corruption, citizens’ trust in politicians and credit ratings affect interest rates. For that purpose, we create a transparency index matching the 2007 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/World Bank Budgeting Database items with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Best Practices for Budget Transparency sections. We also check our assumptions with the International Budget Partnership’s Open Budget Index and with a non-linear transformation of our index. Furthermore, we use several control variables for a sample of 103 countries in the year 2008. Our results show that better fiscal transparency, political trust and credit ratings are connected with a lower cost of sovereign debt. Finally, as expected, higher corruption, budget deficits, current account deficits and unemployment make sovereign interest rates increase.
The key implications for professionals working in public management and administration are twofold. First, despite the criticism raised by credit ratings, it is clear that poorer ratings are connected with higher financing costs for governments. Therefore, governments should enhance those indicators that impact the credit rating of their sovereign debt. Second, governments should seek to be more transparent, since transparency reduces uncertainty about the degree of cheating, improves decision-making and therefore decreases the cost of debt. Transparency reduces information asymmetries between governments and financial markets, which, in turn, diminishes the spread requested by investors.
The aim of this study is to present a framework for analyzing and assessing accountability for public policies. First, I suggest two dimensions for analyzing accountability for policies (the informative/justifying dimension, and the evaluative/sanctioning dimension), applied to the implementation phase of the policy and, in particular, to three central elements that make up this phase (the actors responsible, the resources, and the policy results). Second, I suggest assessing accountability for a public policy starting from the degree of formalization and, specifically, from compliance with four characteristics of its regulatory framework: specific, binding, public and autonomous character. Third, I develop an empirical application of this proposal to the analysis of health policy in Spain, whose decentralized design, where regional governments are responsible for its implementation, allows us to analyze the differences in the levels of accountability for this policy across regions.
This study identifies and limits the components that can be incorporated into the analysis of accountability for public policies by providing an analytical framework that can be used to measure and compare levels of accountability for different kinds of policies (e.g. health, education, pensions) in different contexts (e.g. countries, regions, local governments). In order to test the validity of the proposal developed here, this article presents an empirical application to the analysis of health policy in Spain, whose decentralized design allows us to analyze the differences in accountability across regional governments.
Despite the growth of literature on country attractiveness covering a wide range of research areas, minimal effort has been expended on its conceptualization in public administration. This article seeks to add to previous scholarly works by clarifying the concept and operationalizing its multi-dimensions to explain the effects of the attractiveness of nations based on theoretical grounding. More specifically, by examining prior studies in international business, tourism and migration research, the article attempts to reorganize the constituent elements of the concept into a multi-dimensional framework from a sustainable development perspective. This can be broken down conceptually into three spheres: economic, social and environmental attractiveness. The theoretical background for each dimensional effect is taken from signaling and soft power theories. The article presents a synthesis of the concept intended to cover all aspects of the empirical findings.
As globalization results in more and more competition, it is imperative that every country employ marketing and promotion strategies/policies to raise global public awareness of its image to stakeholders including companies, customers, citizens, tourists and highly-skilled migrants. Therefore, public administration researchers and policy makers must take into account the concept of country attractiveness, the core element of a country’s soft power, as it can play a key role in enhancing the success of the strategies and policies of countries in the various fields of international competition.
This article explores the possibility that common standards for performance audit reports may result in increased objectivity and accountability, and that this could narrow the ‘audit expectations gap’ and contribute to good governance within local government. Inspired by the UK's external performance auditing model and considering the current scenario in Spain, a number of hypotheses are formulated whereby the audit of a set of aspects in the areas of managing finances, governing the business and managing resources leads to higher accountability as a result of the audit reports. These hypotheses are tested through a survey to internal and external auditors of the Spanish local government. The strong endorsement of these aspects in the survey responses leads to their inclusion in the content of the audit reports. In addition, this content is simplified through a factor analysis of the suitability of smaller municipalities, and a practical contribution is offered by providing a template for external audit reports.
In this article we identify a minimal content for the external audit reports issued for Spanish local government, providing a possible template. This content gathers a set of aspects of public management that should be reviewed by external auditors. The proposal originates in international experience and is validated for the Spanish context by the results of the survey. We believe that this could increase the capacity of the reports to achieve accountability and help to narrow the ‘audit expectation gap’. The simplification of the content of the reports undertaken pursues a greater adaptation of the audit work to the conditions of small municipalities.
This study provides empirical evidence on how institutional differences influence school budget decisions by using panel data from 178 K-12 New Jersey school districts for the period 1996 to 2007. The findings obtained by the Newey-West model, correcting heteroskedasticity and serial correlation, support our hypothesis that school districts with elected school boards (Type II districts) are more likely to be effective at lowering school spending than ones with appointed school boards (Type I districts). Viewing school systems through the lens of new institutional economics, this study argues that institutional differences in governance are critical in leading to differences in budgetary decisions by affecting incentive structures faced by public officials, along with transaction costs and agency costs.
To date, the issue of the impact of institutional differences on local budgetary decisions has been an ongoing topic of debate among many scholars and practitioners in the public administration field. This implies that as an effective incentive structure as well as constraint mechanism, direct electoral institutions in school districts can be a valuable tool to control growing education spending by placing clear accountability on school boards in shaping school budget decisions. Policy makers should consider feasible strategies accompanied by institutional changes in a situation in which local governments are challenged to manage their budget effectively under fiscal stress.
This paper considers a range of time-related issues in the comparative empirical study of the American States and demonstrates how visualizations animated to show change over time can provide information that summary statistics do not. Issues discussed include proactive and reactive policies, proper measurement of money over time, and proper linking of variables over time. Relationships with nearly identical annual correlations can exhibit strikingly different scatterplot animations. Visualization tools can help us recognize and better understand temporal phenomena.
Just as visualizations are helpful in data analysis, visualizations animated to show change over time are helpful in analysis of cross-sectional time-series data Animated scatterplots show change over time for individual units of analysis and the sample or population as a whole Animated visualizations can add richness and texture to understanding of empirical phenomena; they can stimulate insights, develop hypotheses and test hypotheses Animated visualizations can highlight temporal components
This article first provides a selective overview of the literature on bureaucratic autonomy and identifies different approaches to this topic. The second section discusses three major sets of open questions, which will be tackled in the contributions to this special issue: the subjective, dynamic and relational nature of autonomy; the complex linkages between tasks, organizational forms, and national path dependencies on the one hand and autonomy and performance on the other hand; and the interplay between autonomy, accountability and democratic legitimacy.
This article examines institutional change in a case that was expected to be particularly resilient but showed considerable structural transformation: the institutionalization of the regulatory state in Switzerland. This process is illustrated through the establishment of independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) in four areas: banking and finance; telecommunications; electricity; and competition. The theoretical framework developed by Streeck, Thelen and Mahoney is used to explore hypotheses about the modes of institutional change, with the methodology of diachronic within-case study. Results confirm only partially the expectations, pointing to layering and displacement as the prevalent modes of change. The concluding part discusses the type and the direction of change as additional explanatory factors.
This article examines the institutional development of the regulatory state in Switzerland through the establishment of independent regulatory agencies (IRAs). Different modes of change are illustrated through the analysis of the processes leading to agencification in four areas: banking and finance; telecommunication; electricity; and competition. Results suggest that the dynamics of re-regulation follow a quite different logic compared to the general trend towards liberalization. What is more, the empirical analysis indicates that independent regulatory agencies are mostly created by importing exogenous models in the case of the ‘positive’ reform of previously self-regulated sectors, while they are established along existing institutional arrangements when reforming former state-owned enterprises or publicly regulated sectors.
Regulatory administrations are increasingly fragmented. Regulation is produced by multi-actor multi-level constellations. Researchers have described how actors in such constellations coordinate with each other. This article explores how coordination affects the decision-making autonomy of agencies, using a case study of energy regulation in Belgium. It describes the extent of autonomy from the parent minister and explores how the regulator coordinates with other actors at multiple levels of government. The findings indicate that de facto discretion of regulators can be increased or reduced by other governmental actors besides the parent minister. This calls for the development of a ‘relational perspective’ on (regulatory) agency autonomy, which looks at relations with multiple actors, even when these actors have no direct principal–agent relationship with the agency.
In recent decades, many Western governments have created independent regulatory agencies. The accumulation of these agencies across policy sectors and across levels of government has been associated with the creation of new coordination mechanisms. However, these trends may have certain unintended consequences. When authority is fragmented, the capacity for single actors to intervene may be reduced. Coordination may affect the de facto decision-making capacity of regulators. When agencies use inter-organizational relations to build up expertise, the autonomy vis-à-vis the parent minister may increase. However, when coordination mechanisms are based only on informal, voluntary agreements, these mechanisms may fail to compensate for all resource dependencies.
The task of agencies is often considered to be an important determinant of agency design, autonomy, governance and control. The evidence for these expectations has, however, been limited so far. Moreover, there are several problems with the ‘task-variable’. There is no clear definition, agencies often perform multiple tasks, and as task is a nominal variable there are restrictions on the use of statistical techniques. Two questions arise: does task matter and does it matter how task is measured? Using survey data on Dutch agencies (N = 206), several expectations are tested with different techniques. Overall, some tasks have some effect on agency autonomy and control, however, often only indirectly and not sustained in multivariate analyses. Formal autonomy and budget are more decisive than task in explaining agency autonomy and control. Analysis with dummy variables offers better opportunities to test task effects than non-parametrical tests. Researchers should use multiple task categories in future analyses instead of simple dichotomies, not only because agencies perform multiple tasks but also because specific tasks have specific effects.
Agencies have multiple tasks in different combinations. This should be taken into account when designing agencies' degrees of autonomy and control. There are no straightforward relations between task and autonomy or control. The type of agency and the size of its budget are most decisive to agency autonomy and control.
Time is often considered to be an inert background against which governance processes evolve. Instead, this article approaches time as a factor that influences the development of innovation processes in water governance. Drawing on two Dutch cases, we analyse perceptions of time and the management of time. Public managers manage time by trying to fix deadlines, by synchronizing different timelines or by imposing their time horizon on the process. Different actors' timeframes may interfere with one another, and this may hinder governance processes. The analysis of time helps to explain the dynamics of governance processes, and this article shows that the alignment of timeframes is a crucial activity in realizing innovations in governance.
Time is a crucial factor in innovation processes. Actors often have different perceptions of time, including different time horizons and deadlines. Classic time management mainly aims at budgeting time. This article argues for time sensitive governance. An elementary step is to explicate actors' various time-horizons, time cycles and time-budget. Managers need to align short-term time horizons needed in competitive markets, with medium-term views required to carefully develop innovations and embed them in the policy environment. Adaptivity in dealing with time is important to synchronize the development of innovations with developments in the market and governmental organizations.
The study examines the effect employee background (gender, education level and affiliation to the government) on organizational justice perceptions using the three-factor model (distributive, procedural and interactional justice). Selected demographic and attitudinal data were collected from a sample of 313 employees representing 10 public organizations. The findings of this study show that gender had a significant effect on distributive and interactional justice but not procedural justice; education level had a significant effect on distributive and procedural justice but not interactional justice; and affiliation to the government had a significant effect on all the three dimensions of justice. Managerial implications of these findings and future research directions are also discussed.
Gaining a better insight into the effects of demographic factors (gender, education level and affiliation to the government) on the three dimensions of organizational justice indicates to policymakers and public managers where improvements can be made, and helps them to develop strategies and policies that could improve the perceived justice. Another important implication of this study for countries emerging from a civil war, liberation struggle or other similar conflict (for example, South Sudan, Libya, Afghanistan) is regarding converting former fighters into civil servants and their management afterwards. It is crucial to provide them employment opportunities in a civil service provided that they are placed based on the principle of the right persons on the right positions and then treat them as equal as their counterparts: non-ex-fighter civil servants. They only need to be given some (special) kind of training (at the beginning) that expedites their socialization and integration into the main stream way of thinking and doing things.
This article reports the results of a comparative analysis of the human resources management (HRM) autonomy of government agencies in Germany and Norway. Whereas the academic literature largely focuses on ministry–agency relations in countries where agencies have been only recently established, these two countries have a long tradition of delegation to agencies outside ministerial departments. However, although sharing a broadly similar administrative tradition, each country differs with regard to the management reform trajectory. This allows an empirical test to be carried out of the effects of management reforms on HRM autonomy, drawing on survey data. The article also discusses the literature on how task characteristics and formal agency structure supposedly affect agency autonomy and puts these claims to an empirical test. The empirical analysis reveals cross-country differences, a somewhat limited effect of task characteristics, and a clear effect of formal structure on de facto HRM autonomy, especially in the German context.
The article shows that administrative traditions do not determine trajectories and effects of administrative reforms. Although both countries have a public sector dominated by public law and the principle of legality, the article shows that agency managers in Norway report more extensive autonomy for managing their staff. Thus extensive delegation of management autonomy to agencies is possible even in a ‘Rechtsstaat’ context. Moreover, the article shows that granting agencies extended formal autonomy and the possibility to generate additional income will also contribute to extended management autonomy. Thus, decision-makers may deliberately influence de facto agency autonomy by using different elements of institutional design.
The aim of this article is to analyse the level of public financial information disclosed by certain Arab countries in the Middle East, in view of calls for greater transparency and international trends in this respect. Accordingly, we examined the financial reports published online by the selected countries, contrasting them with the financial statements and contents proposed in the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) issued by the International Federation of Accountants. The results show that the Arab countries analysed present a low level of public financial information. They all present similar degrees of compliance with IPSAS 1 and 2. Nonetheless, we can observe that aid-receiving countries are implementing the policies stipulated in the international recommendations in response to the demands of donors and international agencies. Countries with oil revenues experience less pressure to implement the IPSAS.
The findings of this article may be of interest to public managers in all the selected Arab countries, especially those in the public administrations of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and to consulting companies in the Gulf region. The analysis made of financial legislation and of the IPSAS 1 and 2 indexes for the selected countries may encourage them to initiate a process of financial reforms.
Regulation has in many cases been delegated to independent agencies, which has led to the question of how democratic accountability of these agencies is ensured. There are few empirical approaches to agency accountability. We offer such an approach, resting upon three propositions. First, we scrutinize agency accountability both de jure (accountability is ensured by formal rights of accountability ‘fora’ to receive information and impose consequences) and de facto (the capability of fora to use these rights depends on resources and decision costs that affect the credibility of their sanctioning capacity). Second, accountability must be evaluated separately at political, operational and managerial levels. And third, at each level accountability is enacted by a system of several (partially) interdependent fora, forming together an accountability regime. The proposed framework is applied to the case of the German Bundesnetzagentur's accountability regime, which shows its suitability for empirical purposes.
Regulatory agencies are often considered as independent, yet accountable. This article provides a realistic framework for the study of accountability ‘regimes’ in which they are embedded. It emphasizes the need to identify the various actors (accountability fora) to which agencies are formally accountable (parliamentary committees, auditing bodies, courts, and so on) and to consider possible relationships between them. It argues that formal accountability ‘on paper’, as defined in official documents, does not fully account for de facto accountability, which depends on the resources possessed by the fora (mainly information-processing and decision-making capacities) and the credibility of their sanctioning capacities. The article applies this framework to the German Bundesnetzagentur.