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

Most explanations of the territorial unevenness of state capacity in the contemporary non-Western world focus on domestic factors. While international causes may have been crucial in shaping state capacity in Europe in earlier centuries, the logic goes, they are of less relevance for developing countries in the postwar era. This article nuances this picture, by arguing that international factors continue to matter for state-building. Using the geographic location of state institutions as a measure of state capacity, it finds that the spatial distribution of coercive institutions follows a U-shaped pattern: High capacity in the capital, lower in the middle, and then increasing again as one approach a state border. The results thus suggest a need to reconsider accounts that downplay the role of international pressures in shaping state-building after 1945, as well as highlighting the importance of distinguishing between different types of state power.

In contemporary democracies, independent technocratic bodies take many key policy decisions. The organizations are meant to avoid traditional policy responsiveness, but still have processes in place to take into account societal views. Our study analyzes how pressure on technocratic bodies affects the audience orientation of their policy explanations. Taking a reputational perspective, we argue that the policy explanations provided by technocrats whose legitimacy depends on their outcomes will be influenced by performance-based reputational threats. We hypothesize that such threats—whether based on perceptions or performance indicators—lead technocrats to orient themselves more toward the wider public, which we operationalize as accessibility and people centeredness of the language. We test our hypotheses on a new dataset of speeches of members of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (1997–2024). Though accessibility cannot be traced back to performance-based threats, people centeredness is affected. Yet, while negative performance-based perceptions are associated with more people-centered policy explanation, negative measured performance leads technocrats to center less on people. Our findings contribute to the literature on reputation, audience orientation, and communicative responsiveness, and suggest differential effects based on whether performance is perceived or measured.

Since Earth has entered the Anthropocene era, municipalities face growing challenges in managing interactions between humans and nature. Yet, limited research addresses the actual practices of coping with such situations, particularly within public administration, policy, and politics. To date, no systematic theory or methodology adequately captures the dynamics of animals as political agents, local governance, and policy support. Recent studies have begun to close this gap by examining governance and political participation in response to wild boars, support for local environmental morality policies, and the governance challenges posed by perceived harm. Building on these contributions, the present study introduces willingness to pay additional local taxes as a novel indicator of policy support, linking human–wildlife interactions to public finance, distributive fairness, and citizen compliance. Drawing on a quantitative, large-scale survey experiment (2020) and a choice-based conjoint analysis, supplemented by longitudinal trend indicators (2019–2024) for contextualization, we examine the individual, environmental, and political factors shaping residents' support for a local policy aimed at addressing urban environmental challenges. We use respondents' willingness to pay more taxes as a proxy for their support of the policy. Our findings show that individual and environmental factors negatively influence this willingness, whereas political incentives exert a positive effect. Unexpectedly, greater access to policy information generated information overload, which reduced public support. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for urban politics, approaches to managing wild animals in cities, and support for local environmental policies.

This paper examines how institutional mechanisms shape gender disparities in judicial promotion within a career-based civil-law system, where judges advance through merit-based hierarchies punctuated by discretionary appointments to higher courts. By design, civil-law judiciaries are typically governed by bureaucratic, merit-based promotion procedures. Yet even in such systems, women remain underrepresented in senior judicial positions. We develop a model to distinguish between two mechanisms— promotion aversion and sex discrimination—and derive empirically testable implications. Drawing on a unique longitudinal dataset covering the full careers of nearly 7000 Spanish judges from 2005 to 2023, we combine survival models, matched mixed-effects regressions, and data on voluntary specialization exams to analyze career advancement. Our results show that promotion aversion and sex discrimination operate at different stages of judicial careers: women who apply for promotion are highly qualified and successful in early-career moves, but face structural barriers in later discretionary appointments. These findings challenge assumptions about the neutrality of bureaucratic promotion systems and underscore the role of institutional discretion in reproducing inequality. The paper contributes to comparative studies of career public servants and the governance of judicial hierarchies.

This study investigates the extent to which collaborative platforms contribute to strengthening the collaborative governance capacity of municipal governments, focusing on smart city development as an empirical context. Drawing on survey data from 289 municipal government officials and using a multinomial logit model, we test eight hypotheses linking collaborative platforms to key dimensions of collaborative governance: knowledge sharing, innovation culture, competences, strategic orientation, monitoring, vertical and internal coordination, and decision-making power. Our findings challenge the prevailing assumption that such platforms are uniformly beneficial. While their presence might support some collaborative governance dimensions, their contribution is less certain in others. Moreover, in some cases, our data shows that municipalities managing collaborative governance initiatives by means of a collaborative platform might perform just as well or even worse than those without one. These results suggest that expectations about collaborative platforms should be more carefully calibrated. By critically examining the contribution of collaborative platforms across key dimensions of collaborative governance, this study advances theoretical understanding and offers actionable insights for municipal platform managers and policymakers.