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

The marketization of schools and of other public services is supposed to have changed the relationship of citizens to the state in many Western countries over the last 30 years. One explicit aim of marketization has been to increase citizen influence over public services. Yet, studies of its effects on citizens' willingness to address public decision-making remain scarce in general, and nonexistent as regards schools. In this study, a survey experiment taps the causal effects of both user choice and private provision. The results show that marketization significantly reduces respondents' intention to influence schools and related political and bureaucratic decision-making. The effects are robust and, in contrast to those of previous studies, driven by significant effects from the user choice introduced in connection with marketization. The pacifying effects recorded suggest that marketization potentially reduces public services' responsiveness to citizens' interests, thereby aggravating the problems it was meant to address.

Western democracies are experiencing a widespread shift towards greater recognition of transgender rights in public policy, yet the timing of change differs across states. To explain this variation, I present a novel theoretical framework called “policy momentum.” Unlike existing work on policy diffusion, which typically emphasizes domestic or international processes, I theorize how the combined pressure from each level creates the conditions for policy change to occur. Empirically, I contrast the creation of national human rights policies to protect transgender individuals in Canada (2017) and Australia (2013). Using process-tracing and within-case analyses, and drawing on elite interviews, primary documents, and Hansard records, I demonstrate the decisive interaction of subnational legislative changes with an emerging global norm to produce transgender policy change. This paper thus contributes to our understanding of LGBTQ+ public policy while also providing a framework for explaining the conditions for cross-national policy change more broadly.

As non-majoritarian institutions are deliberately insulated from electoral pressure and ministerial hierarchy, they face an accountability deficit. This deficit can be reduced by embedding the organizations in a wider accountability landscape with multiple forums. Of particular relevance in this landscape are the news media, who may not only serve as account-holders, but can also reinforce other forms of accountability. Yet, we know little about the conditions under which the media cover non-majoritarian governance, and the existence of “reinforced accountability”. Focusing empirically on news articles about the Bank of England (1997–2020), we trace coverage levels back to the announcement of key policy decisions and, to some extent, policy outcomes. We also find evidence of reinforced accountability, both in relation to parliamentary oversight and the Bank's own, voluntary account-giving. These results provide reason for cautious optimism about non-majoritarian accountability, at least in the case of a salient organization.

In this paper, we develop a framework for understanding the different spheres of authority of chiefs aiming to widen the perspectives on how government-chief interactions affect the governance process. The framework is applied in our analysis of interviews with government actors involved in area protection in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area (GLTFCA). Our results illustrate the variety of approaches and perceptions towards governance with chiefs that exist amongst government actors within the same governance system. Although government actors perceive chiefs in the GLTFCA as a parallel system, chiefs can act as a rival, mediator, adviser, or partner to the government; thus, both enable or hamper government governance.  The informal governance arrangements found in the data between government actors and chiefs moreover underscores the importance of qualitative case studies of hybrid governance systems

The study examines bureaucrats facing administrative architectures that are multiple, overlapping, ambiguous and sometimes incompatible. It makes two main contributions. Firstly, by an organizational approach it derives fine-grained predictions on how bureaucrats maneuver when taking part in integrated multilevel administrative orders. Secondly, benefitting from a large-N data-set (N = 4285) from 16 ministries and 47 government agencies in Norway, the study demonstrates how organizational factors systematically ‘moderate’ and bias behavioral perceptions among government officials. Moreover, to probe the robustness of explanatory models, the study specifies patterns of moderation by outlining multiple interaction models as well as illustrating how interaction effects unfold. The study finds that few moderators make dramatic effects by profoundly weakening relationships. Moderating variables either strengthen or attenuate already apparent effects, thus probing the empirical robustness of the models.