Governance-An International Journal of Policy Administration and Institutions最新文献

Different disciplines ask why public sector corruption occurs, addressing diverse phenomena. However, how different approaches and factors at micro, meso, or macro levels relate to each other in causally complex, context-dependent ways is seldom theorized. This article develops an integrated “Corruption Hexagon” model with six dimensions. The analytically relevant context provides a not directly causal background that influences the interplay of the pressure to act corruptly, the opportunity to benefit from corruption, the capability to exploit the opportunity, the supply of corruption, and the rationalization of one's corrupt behavior. Using secondary data from 23 European countries, we operationalize the Hexagon to explain differences in procurement-related corruption risks. Results corroborate the Hexagon's expectations: whereas the circumstances enable corruption, their interplay with personal characteristics or rationalization triggers corruption. The Hexagon offers a flexible, context-dependent, complexity-informed model for cumulative research integrating different methods and theoretical assumptions about the agency underlying corruption.

In what ways, if at all, does transparency influence how politicians cooperate with interest organizations? While there are convincing normative arguments stressing the importance of transparency in politics, empirical evidence for how transparency in practice affects how politicians reason regarding cooperating with interest organizations is scarce. In this article, I address this gap by conducting a mixed method survey experiment with 1659 Swedish politicians. The findings indicate that a lack of transparency, as explored in this study, diminishes politicians' willingness to closely cooperate with interest organizations by submitting policy proposals drafted by these organizations. However, the central concern for most politicians, in both the transparent and untransparent conditions, was whether they had exercised independent political judgment rather than blindly accepted the interest organization's suggestion. These results contribute to the literature by showing how a specific form of transparency influences cooperation between politicians and interest groups, while also offering theoretical insights into the critical role of political judgment in this cooperation.

Liberal democracies increasingly restrict civil society organizations (CSOs), a trend frequently linked to illiberal governments. But when do ideologically liberal governments resort to such restrictions? Linking research on state traditions, party ideology and crisis governance, we theorize factors enhancing liberal governments' propensity to adopt normatively contentious CSO restrictions. Distinguishing formal-legal restrictions on CSO voice from those on CSO existence, we show that nearly 90 such restrictions were adopted by 17 cabinets in France and the United Kingdom over the last 2 decades. In line with theoretical expectations, restrictions on CSO existence are more prominent in statist France, while governments in the United Kingdom tend to restrict CSO voice. More right-wing governments adopt more CSO restrictions, while restrictions go up with government crisis pressure. Overall, understanding how liberal governments use CSO restrictions requires considering contextual opportunity structures and ideological dispositions in conjunction.

In the mid-2000s, the Single Market Program and European Monetary Union lost momentum, as public services advocates increasingly succeeded in tempering attempts to liberalize public utilities through legislative amendments and Court of Justice rulings. After the 2008 crisis, however, the EU's shift to a new economic governance (NEG) regime provided EU executives with a new tool to advance their objectives. Unlike EU directives, country-specific NEG prescriptions require neither the approval of the European Parliament nor their transposition into law, making it more difficult for social forces to contest them. Our analysis of NEG prescriptions for public utilities in two sectors (rail and water) and four countries (Germany, Ireland, Italy, Romania) across 10 years (2009–2019) shows that the shift to NEG provided EU executives with new extra-parliamentarian and extra-juridical tools that allowed them to revive their stalled commodification agenda; at the price of accentuating the EU's democratic and justice deficits.

Street-level organizations (SLOs) play a key, but understudied, political role in democratic governance as they are responsible for the direct-delivery of public services that are vital to the functioning of the state. To discuss the political role of SLOs in general, this study begins by identifying four SLO roles, which are conceptualized here by distinguishing policy-sphere versus politics-sphere and “SLOs-as-takers” versus “SLOs-as-makers.” SLOs' political role in a democratic backsliding and populism context is specified by distinguishing whether SLOs converge to, or diverge from, illiberal policies, and distinguishing reactive and proactive responses. Each of the four responses is elaborated by referring to how SLOs both influence, and are influenced by, populism and democratic backsliding. Shifting attention to the specific context of democratic erosion allows a more nuanced distinction between policy sectors and countries, as well as identifying the ways through which public service provision facilitates or inhibits democratic backsliding.

Regulating organizations to align their private interests with public interests is important, especially for collective action problems in climate and sustainability governance. Whereas these issues are not satisfactorily addressed by conventional regulations, norms are envisioned as a promising alternative. But norm-based policy instruments are not well understood regarding their scalable effects on substantive organizational actions, given the presence of other regulations. We advance a conceptual framework, accounting for norm-based interventions' potential effects on organizational actions and their differences from conventional regulations in institutionalized governance. Based on the setting of cleaner production (CP) in China and an event study strategy, we provide empirical evidence consistent with the framework: non-regulatory, norm-based interventions led to nation-wide, significant improvement in plant-level CP; the effects were stronger via network-based diffusion and local internalization, weakened by extrinsic motivation from regulations, and associated with managerial conformity, not innovation. We estimate substantive benefits of norms in public goods provision, with the amount of water saved equivalent to the consumption of a water-scarce province in China. Our findings provide consistent explanations for norm-based instruments in real governance settings, showing them as a complement to other policies in shaping organizations and guiding proactive transitions to address global challenges.