The article offers analytical tools for designing multi-actor implementation processes. It does so by proposing a design approach centred on causal mechanisms. Such design strategy requires designers to focus primarily on causal theories explaining why implementers commit overtime to implementing policies. The central proposal is that design procedures should be reversed, i.e. start by reasoning on the causal mechanisms explaining implementers’ behaviour and then go looking for design features. Several advantages of this approach related to designing, reforming, or transferring successful practices are discussed throughout the article. Finally, the article provides six extended examples of such mechanisms in different policy fields: actor’s certification, blame avoidance, earning brownie points, repeated interactions, focusing events and attribution of opportunity or threat.
When individual actors are involved in a policy process, do they assess and revise their policy preferences according to their interests or are they open to other forms of arguments over time? This study examines the effect of policy actors' interests on policy learning. It is based on a survey conducted in 2012 among 376 Belgian actors (from 38 organizations) involved in the European liberalization policy process of two network industries: the rail and electricity sectors. Borrowing from organizational research and behavioral economics, several hypotheses are drawn from a model of the individual shared by various policy approaches, such as the advocacy coalition framework. A "simple gain scores" approach to the measurement of policy learning is introduced. Regression analyses show that policy actors align their policy preferences with the impacts of policies on their own material well-being (personal interests) and the material prosperity of their organization (organizational interests). This tendency is independent of the importance that policy actors give to their interests in their everyday lives. This suggests that policy actors experience a sort of "interest shift" when they assess their policy preferences over time. This shift, however, exerts a limited influence on policy learning. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
This article focuses on the role of political parties for policy making, and it traces the development from party preferences over coalition positions to policy proposals. The main argument is that parties with more similar preferences agree on more encompassing sets of policies, and that if a coalition formulates a policy in its agreement the chances for a policy proposal are higher. However, the need to negotiate the coalition agreement with other parties mediates the influence of partisan preferences. The article is based on a qualitative content analysis of documents as well as expert interviews from three West European countries and focuses on higher education policy. The results show preferences of governing parties influence policy proposals also in situations of coalition government. Furthermore, coalition agreements are found to be central documents in policy making as they limit veto capacities and indicate where substantial policy change is likely.
The rapid change of local government operating environment shapes the interaction between political leaders and public administrators, who work in the constant riptide of service responsiveness and economic pressure. We investigate the relationship between political leaders and public administrators in the local administration of social and health services. The patterns and pictures are examined empirically, with data gathered from strategic-level political leaders and public administrators in six Finnish local government organisations. The analysis applies multivariate methods. The results suggest that there are different groups among the political leaders. The differences are not based on political opinions, but rather on the attitudes towards the decision-making process, also the views on local government decision-making processes differ between the groups. The rapid contextual change experienced in the public organisations requires a fast and well-informed response from political leaders and public administrators; even political differences can be pushed aside in this turbulent operating environment.
Stakeholders include scientists, interest groups, leaders, professionals, government and NGO employees, and activists; they are individuals or groups that play an increasingly important role in public policy. As such, stakeholders are frequently used as a source to better inform public decision making. Given the growing importance of stakeholders’ understanding and thus communication concerning the issues on which they inform the public, it is timely to ask: How do stakeholders comprehend, or mentally construct an understanding of the policy issues upon which they are asked to weigh in? In an attempt to address this issue, this paper uses a case study of a policy issue, river restoration. Results from a survey of 85 stakeholders and a follow up interview of 20 stakeholders shed light on whether stakeholders predominantly prefer to think of river restoration in terms of science or through policy narratives. The findings indicate that stakeholders prefer explanations that use science and the engaged citizen narrative when they think about the river’s restoration. Additionally, stakeholders who work for government particularly emphasize that the river should be described in scientific terms. We use this data to further analyze what elements of science and narratives are divisive to stakeholders and which are not and conclude with advice on how stakeholders can speak in a non-divisive way to the public and other stakeholders.
Between 2010 and 2015, the UK’s Coalition Government introduced directly-elected Police and Crime Commissioners to oversee English and Welsh police forces, and also required every force to publish a range of performance and financial information online. Together with the fact that front-line policing services have not been outsourced or privatised, this suggests that strong ‘downwards’ mechanisms exist through which residents can hold their local force to account. However, the new arrangements are significantly more complex than their predecessors, because many more actors are involved – several of which assume the role of both ‘principal’ and ‘agent’ in different accountability relationships. As a result, there is a substantial risk that the public do not have a clear understanding of roles and responsibilities, which makes it more difficult to hold officials to account for their actions. Such findings highlight how direct elections do not necessarily make public officials more accountable, and therefore have implications for other jurisdictions and sectors.
The implementation of the devolution process that started in 1999 was frequently assumed by contemporary commentators and scholars to lead to a fractured relationship with the national centre and a fragmented state as a consequence. However, discourse analysis and policy reviews in relation to spatial planning policies demonstrates that agendas and legislation implemented by central and devolved governments since devolution are characterised by marked similarities in intention and type (albeit with some differences in name and delivery route). In investigating the potential sites and sources of these policy similarities and possible mobilities, and drawing on research data, we suggest that the British Irish Council’s spatial planning task group as one of the potential candidates to be considered as a national policy community or network. Alongside a range of other factors following devolution, this has contributed to development and delivery in one specific policy area that has taken a convergent rather than divergent character.
To help policy makers manage expenditures during periods of economic downturns, most states have formal budget stabilization funds and unreserved fund balances. Using indices of tax and expenditure limitations laws restrictiveness, we examine the relationship between tax and expenditure limitations and state reserves for years 1992–2010 to help determine the extent to which tax and expenditure limitations constrain or in other ways affect how states manage fiscal reserves. This time period is particularly relevant because it includes two recessions and most states had budget stabilization funds and tax and expenditure limitations. Findings suggest that state-constructed tax and expenditure limitations have little effect on state capacity to react to fiscal shocks.
At least part of the academic literature on public administration asserts that the mass media is responsible for the somewhat negative popular image of administrative agencies. Through negative reporting about the (mis-)behaviour of civil servants or about public administration as a whole, the media shape stereotypes in the collective mind of the citizens. However, while the ascribed role of mass media reporting is plausible, these effects have not yet been empirically verified. This article summarises the scientific discussion about the relationship between public administration and the mass media. Furthermore, it adds to this discussion by simultaneously examining both media usage and attitudes towards administrative agencies in Germany through a secondary analysis of data spanning nearly 30 years.
A perceived need for a wider resource base for territorial governance has initiated a new trend for regionalisation throughout the developed world. Local governments are frequently opposed to such a development. This article presents an institutional analysis of how Finland’s tradition of strong localism has affected the forms, processes, and results of regionalisation. We argue that path dependence in the form of localist influence from the mid-1990s until the mid-2010s led to an incremental development of regional structures. However, circumstances changed in 2015 due to a historical decision by the centre-right government to establish a new tier of elected regional government. This was due to the diminished credibility of localism given the realities of contextual pressures and the government’s attempts to improve efficiency and competitiveness. Eventually, this turn will radically undermine the role of local government as a stronghold of representative localism.
The shift from political leadership to new forms of governance has led to the establishment of locally appointed bodies in many public organizations including schools. From a dramaturgical perspective, this article focuses on the accountability of these new bodies, in particular on the codes of accountability. Using school governing bodies to illustrate, the article evaluates whether accountability in practice might be likened to a theatrical performance. The findings presented are relevant to school governing bodies and there may be wider application in public sector boards more generally.
Accountability and transparency are of growing importance in contemporary governance. The academic literature has broadly studied the two concepts separately, defining and redefining them, putting them into various frameworks, and sometimes mistakenly using them as synonyms. Curiously, the relationship between the two concepts has been studied only by a few scholars with preliminary approaches. This theoretical article focuses on both concepts, attempting first to describe them, taking into account the various evolutions in the literature and recent developments, and also the first attempts to link the two concepts. In order to show a new approach linking the concepts, theoretical situations in which the concepts are linked are portrayed, demonstrating the need to reconsider the relationship between transparency and accountability. Consequently, a new framework amending the most recent approaches is presented, theoretically delimited and exemplified through practical cases.
Institutional arrangements used to steer public policies have increasingly become layered. Inspired by the literature on institutional layering and institutional work, this paper aims to make a contribution to our understanding of institutional layering. We do so by studying an interesting case of layering: the Dutch hospital sector. We focus on the actors responsible for the internal governance (Board of Directors and Supervisory Boards) and the external regulation (the Healthcare Inspectorate) of hospitals. In the paper, we explore the institutional work of these actors, more specifically how institutional work results from and is influenced by institutional layering and how this in turn influences the institutional makeup of both healthcare organizations and their institutional context. Our approach allowed us to see that layering changes the activities of actors in the public sector, can be used to strengthen one’s position but also presents actors with new struggles, which they in turn can try to overcome by relating and using the institutionally layered context. Layering and institutional work are therefore in continuous interaction. Combining institutional layering with a focus on the lived experiences of actors and their institutional work makes it possible to move into the layered arrangement and better understand its consequences.
A number of studies have considered the evaluation of efficiency in higher education institutions. In this paper, we focus on the issue of revenue efficiency, in particular ascertaining the extent to which, given output prices, producers choose the revenue maximising vector of outputs. We then relax the price taking assumption to consider the case in which the market for some outputs is characterised by monopolistic competition. We evaluate efficiencies for English institutions of higher education for the academic year 2012–13 and find considerable variation across institutions in revenue efficiency. The relaxation of the price-taking assumption leads to relatively small changes, in either direction, to the estimated revenue efficiency scores. A number of issues surrounding the modelling process are raised and discussed, including the determination of the demand function for each type of output and the selection of inputs and outputs to be used in the model.
Regulatory governance scholars tend to focus on either the formal or de-facto independence of regulatory agencies. Very little attention has been given to linking these two sides together and even less has been said about the relationship between these two aspects. In this paper, the relationship between the formal and de-facto independence of the Egyptian telecoms regulator will be investigated. The aim is to contrast these two aspects of regulatory independence. In addition, the way in which the formal independence is translated by the sector regulator into practice. The paper argues that the formal independence of the Egyptian telecoms regulatory agency is an important but not a sufficient factor to guarantee the de-facto independence of the agency. Empirical data collected from 44 interviews with different stakeholders in the Egyptian telecommunications market is analyzed. Documentary analysis of the telecoms Law and other official policy documents and reports is also considered. The initial findings of the paper show that the telecoms law grants the regulator the ability to act independently from the Ministry and the regulated industry. Nonetheless, this strong legal mandate has not been fully translated into independent practices on the ground in regards to the way the regulatory agency connects with the Ministry of Telecoms and the previous sector incumbent. The paper suggests that the relationship between formal and de-facto independence of telecoms regulators should be carefully considered.
How can we explain cross-regional policy variation? That is, how can we understand different policy outcomes within similar institutional and organizational settings? Scholars have recently reflected on the new institutionalist explanatory pitfall involved in assuming a causality link between institutional factors and policy outcomes and argue that such link needs to rely on evidence from policy variables. On this line,
The issue of same-sex marriage and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender equality has received considerable attention from policy scholars. This is unsurprising given the issue is one of the defining social policy battles of the last decade. State governments at the forefront of this battle have responded by proposing a multitude of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender-related policies. In this study, we comparatively assess the diffusion of two of these policies across US states: the legal recognition of same-sex marriages and state constitutional amendments defining marriage as exclusively between one man and one woman. While previous studies have examined the diffusion of same-sex marriage bans across states, none have offered a comparative examination of how both sides of this contentious issue have advanced their policy preferences alongside each other. Using event history analysis, we analyze a unique set of covariates to test two diffusion hypotheses: learning and imitation. We find that for both policies, policy learning is the primary mechanism occurring, suggesting that policymakers learn from one another for the same policy area, even if the policies have different motives or objectives. However, the effect of learning is more prominent for anti-gay policies, suggesting there are differences between policies.
Community sports networks were established in 2007 to coordinate local sport and physical activity promotion. Partnerships continue to be used to deliver policy. It is important to understand the relationship between the internal structure of partnerships and their outcomes. This study assesses associations between predictor variables relating to partnership structure and process and four intermediary partnership outcomes: satisfaction, synergy, commitment and effectiveness. A retrospective analysis of data was conducted on 171 surveys administered between September 2008 and March 2009 from community sports network members in England. The predictor variables explained 67% of the variance in synergy, 75% of the variance in satisfaction, 63% of the variance in commitment and 46% of the variance in effectiveness. Sustaining a positive benefits-to-costs relationship, establishing effective communication and partnership strategy, and demonstrating impact were predictive of the four intermediary partnership outcomes. Further research is warranted to help establish a detailed understanding of partnership processes and outcomes.
This study explores the process of endogenous institutional change. It utilizes the concepts policy layering and displacement to explain gradual but yet significant and cumulative institutional change that has taken place in civic national service policy in Israel. Layering was an expedient strategy of change given the highly charged politics surrounding national service and the opposition of ultra-orthodox and Israel’s Arab citizens to any form of service. While the government and administrative agencies were the primary agents of change, we will also take note of the important and contentious role of Israel’s High Court of Justice which served as a catalyst to policy change, compelling the government to end policy drift. However, it is important to note that judicial intervention may also derail gradual reform as will be shown in the Israeli case.
Research on the impact of European integration focuses on the external relations of national agencies. This has neglected the impact that Europeanization has on the internal operations of agencies and the way in which coordination is practiced. This article researches the impact of European integration on national agencies with regard to three dimensions: their recruitment schemes, their internal organization, and their external coordination arrangements. The paper presents a 20-year historical review of highly Europeanised agencies – the German pharmaceutical and chemical regulators. This allows us to explore whether different roles in the policy process mediate the effects of Europeanisation. As a result, the article shows that Europeanisation has impacted comprehensively on the recruitment schemes, organizational structure, and coordination arrangements of the two agencies. Both agencies have gained highly qualified personnel for their tasks related to European decision-making and have reorganized their structure to adapt to the requirements of this decision-making.
This article analyses the politics of performance management in the United Kingdom, focusing on the extent to which a highly centralised Westminster majoritarian polity has encouraged the top-down control of public services. It does so by comparing the approaches to performance management that prevailed under the Labour Governments (1997–2010) and the Coalition (2010–2015) to demonstrate the degree of continuity that exists between the ostensibly divergent approaches that each sought to develop. In particular, the article reveals that despite various promises to ‘let go’, successive governments have instead sought to ‘hold on’ to the detail of delivery, which has resulted in a burgeoning disconnect between ‘managers’ and ‘the managed’. Presenting the results of an extensive programme of original empirical research, this article is therefore of significance for theories of performance management, and illuminates the connection between macro-level ‘patterns of democracy’ and meso-level ‘patterns of public administration’.
The role of permanent secretary represents the apogee of a career in the Whitehall bureaucracy. Even so it is under-researched and, with exceptions, notably Dunleavy et al. on bureau shaping, under-theorised. Emanating from a longitudinal survey of eight successive permanent secretaries at the Ministry of Education from 1976 to 2011, this paper identifies them as members of a meta-political class who, whilst influencing the policy decisions of politicians, are nonetheless not members of the political class. A model locating them across a spectrum of six related yet distinct genres of ‘centrism’, and a continuum of five contingent descriptive styles is used to illustrate and interpret their praxis.
Discourses of public sector reform in the UK have been shaped in recent years by the participation of new kinds of hybrid cross-sector intermediaries such as think tanks, social enterprises and other third sector organisations. This article provides a documentary analysis of Demos, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts and the Innovation Unit as intermediary organisations in public sector reform, exploring their promotion of modes of digital governance and their mobilisation of new software technologies as models for new kinds of governing practices. These intermediary organisations are generating a model of knowing public services that operates through collecting and analysing big data, consisting of personal information and behavioural data on individual service users, in order to co-produce personalised services. Their objective is a new style of political governance based on human–computer interaction and machine learning techniques in which citizens are to be governed as co-producers of personalised services interacting with the algorithms of database software.
What factors explain the success of the UK Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insights Team? To answer this question, this article applies insights from organizational theory, particularly accounts of change agents. Change agents are able—with senior sponsorship—to foster innovation by determination and skill: they win allies and circumvent more traditional bureaucratic procedures. Although Behavioural Insights Team is a change agent—maybe even a skunkworks unit—not all the facilitating factors identified in the literature apply in this central government context. Key factors are its willingness to work in a non-hierarchical way, skills at forming alliances, and the ability to form good relationships with expert audiences. It has been able to promote a more entrepreneurial approach to government by using randomized controlled trials as a robust method of policy evaluation.
Across a range of health care systems there is a responsibility placed on meso-level budget holders to set priorities and allocate resources within constrained budgets. The literature suggests that these organizations have typically defaulted to historical and/or political processes for decision making. Whilst the literature on resource allocation in health care attests to the political nature of decision making, this has remained largely under-theorized and therefore priority setters may be unfamiliar with the analytic benefits of applying insights from the broader political sciences. Conversely, policy scientists may know relatively little about existing research on how healthcare organizations make allocative and redistributive decisions. This paper aims to open a dialogue between these solitudes by exploring political effects on health care priority setting, using the interpretive concepts ideas, interests and institutions.
In Britain since the 1930s social assistance recipients have in certain circumstances been able to claim ‘exceptional expenses’ in addition to their weekly benefit income. From the 1940s these were administered by its central government. However, in April 2013 the then incarnation of such payments (the discretionary Social Fund) was partly replaced by locally administered Local Welfare Assistance. Drawing upon material held in files at Britain's National Archives and central government documents framing the development of Local Welfare Assistance, this paper examines how concerns raised in the 1980s meant it was not possible to then transfer responsibility for ‘exceptional expenses’ from central to local government. The paper explores those concerns and how in contemporary Britain they are no longer deemed to be problematic because of the Coalition government's emphasis upon localism and because of changing local government views on the possibility of delivering a mainstream social assistance function.
The literature on policy analysis and policy advice has not generally explored differences in the analytical tasks and techniques practiced within government or between government-based and non-government-based analysts. A more complete picture of the roles played by policy analysts in policy appraisal is needed if the nature of contemporary policy work and formulation activities is to be better understood. This article addresses both these gaps in the literature. Using data from a set of original surveys conducted in 2006–2013 into the provision of policy advice and policy work at the national and sub-national levels in Canada, it explores the use of analytical techniques across departments and functional units of government and compares and assesses these uses with the techniques practiced by analysts in the private sector as well as among professional policy analysts located in non-governmental organizations. The data show that the nature and frequency of use of the analytical techniques used in policy formulation differs between these different sets of actors and also varies within venues of government by department and agency type. Nevertheless, some general patterns in the use of policy appraisal tools can be discerned, with all groups employing process-related tools more frequently than "substantive" content-related technical tools, reinforcing the procedural orientation of much contemporary policy work identified in earlier studies.
This paper reviews the New Public Management literature on the effects of the creation and ongoing operations of agencies across European public sectors. It finds that the bulk of evidence concerns internal effects on processes/activities of agency creation and management and little evidence on outputs and outcomes. The article identifies a number of patterns across the sample and finds positive effects on improved processes and an orientation toward results and service users’ needs. Similarly, it finds improvements in transparency and accountability across various countries, but evidence in these areas is less clear. It finds that 46% of the studies included in the sample identified concerns about fragmentation, coordination or organizational stability and shows that unintended consequences are an important part of the evaluation of the effects of agencification. The paper argues that the picture of the effects of agencies is nuanced and discusses possible factors that can tip the balance for or against the success of the agency model.
The ancient Greek philosophers taught us many of the desirable features of government, but since 1979 we have lost sight of most of them. We now have a restricted view of citizenship, a defective view of the public interest, a diluted public service ethic, little public service education and training and above all we have lost sight of the Greeks’ demand to seek the good life and the good society. Instead we have the ‘Three Es’ and a business approach which is profit led. Leadership and action are needed to restore the former virtues of British government, many of which were learnt from Plato and Aristotle.
This article assesses the aftermath of the 2001 UK foot and mouth crisis in the context of Europeanisation. Informed by significant elite interviews with British politicians and senior officials in the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Cabinet Office, and the European Commission, the article shows that the 2001 foot and mouth crisis led to an enthused approach by UK policy-makers to reforming the EU legislative framework governing future outbreaks but that this was unmatched by a problematic policy implementation process – despite the impact of a crisis. The article concludes that the twin conceptual bases of Boin et al.’s categorisations of change and Europeanisation are important lenses for studying the aftermath of the foot and mouth crisis.
Arguments within political science, public administration and public policy about how to both conceptualise and operationalise structure and agency in analysis have tended to operate at the level of ontology – and occasionally at the level of epistemology. This paper argues that development at the methodological level is required to make sense of the complexities of this debate. An analysis of how structure and agency can be applied to the museums policy sector is utilised to demonstrate the importance of linking methodology to epistemology and ontology, and to show the analytical consequences that arise from this.
This article addresses committee scrutiny undertaken at the National Assembly for Wales during the third assembly (2007–2011). The analysis is addressed through a scrutiny framework that considers the substantive issues in terms of three overarching elements – selection, access to information and assistance, and evaluation. The framework is developed through scholarship about the UK House of Commons as well as a wide range of other parliaments and assemblies. This analysis is also used to identify features facilitating effectiveness and specify seven hypotheses concerning explanations for scrutiny characteristics. The analysis is then applied to the Welsh case study, which results from a substantive series of interviews with Assembly Members, witnesses and officials, as well as significant documentary analysis.
Drawing upon a range of policy documents, government papers and parliamentary reports, as well as published academic and think tank analyses, this article sets out the civil service inheritance bequeathed to the 2010 UK coalition government by its predecessors, examines the pre-election civil service policies of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, illustrates the policy challenges facing the civil service in serving two masters, and analyses the reasons for and early impact of organisational and leadership changes in Whitehall since 2010. The background to, and potential significance of, the 2012 Civil Service Reform Plan are set out. The article provides a succinct overview of the impact of the coalition government on Whitehall during the first two and a half years of its term.
The European Commission has undergone successive waves of public management reforms since the second half of the 1990s that have led to substantive administrative change. This contribution aims at explaining how the "unique" politico-administrative context of the European Union affected the trajectory of reform of the Commission, compared with trajectories of reform of the public sector at the national level. On the basis of such analysis, the Pollitt and Bouckaert model of contextual influences on the dynamics of public management reform is revisited, and considerations on the use of historical institutionalism in the study of administrative reforms proposed.
The local government of Stockholm in 2008 introduced a growth scheme including a financial incentive for the independent arts sector. As financial incentives are virtually non-existent in the cultural sphere, this must be seen as a rather extreme development in cultural policy. The article explores both the rationale behind the new growth scheme as policy tool as well as its reception by the sector through three complementary perspectives: historical institutionalism, ideology analysis and policy values analysis. Contributing to the empirically under-researched area of cultural policy, the combined approach offers a broader understanding of policy development and implementation than would a single perspective interpretation, and acknowledges the complexities of policy making and policy change. The institutional perspective shows that marketisation policy is layered on a previous Folkhem policy with an extended budget facilitating its introduction. An ideology perspective shows how the new growth scheme follows neoliberal ideas of the role of the state as facilitator of market growth in the arts. A values perspective, finally, shows that the economic values of the new cultural policy are not shared by the independent arts sector, but new policy instruments are accepted as they expand resources available for the sector.
This article explores local safety policy (LSP) developed to resolve urgent safety problems in two Swedish municipalities. It shows that local safety actors conceive and construct safety problems in ways that make them manageable, and that LSP evolves as a web of interactions between safety actors in the public and private sectors. The actors use established safety solutions and routines while exploring new ways of managing the problems. The municipalities’ problem-solving structures differ mainly in that different actors and institutions are involved. The policy process and features of LSP correspond well to how policy is portrayed in other cross-sectoral policy domains. Local safety policy development cannot easily be separated from policy implementation, nor can safety policy be separated from safety work, for they evolve together. The implication of this study for governance is that policy workers at different levels and from different organisations create LSP. Although LSP is partly initiated and legitimised at the political–administrative level, it is not from this level that it evolves.
For at least fifty years and from uncertain beginnings, management has steadily advanced to become a dominant feature across the public sector. Management is necessary and, when purposefully and judiciously applied, can be efficacious. But it lacks the constitutional bearings of the traditional public administration that it has in large measure displaced. And, in the absence of the "sudden death" market discipline of the private sector, from which many of its practices have been imported, management has often become the self-serving entity described in this article as managerialism. Specified here in "ideal type" terms, managerialism is not so much the product of a conspiracy, rather that of a conjunction of factors, often lending plausibility to the need for more management. This article identifies some of these factors and their ill effects on the public sector.