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

Understanding interest groups' participation in global policy processes is critical not least because of an increasing shift in policy-making powers to global institutions. This paper contributes to existing research by examining advocacy efforts at the global level and proposing a novel argument linking the degree of policy complexity and the amount of groups' resources to lobbying strategies. Specifically, it argues that interest groups invest in both inside (“sitting in”) and outside (“speaking up”) lobbying strategies when the policy at stake is complex and they have more resources. This theory is tested using extensive and novel data spanning interest groups' lobbying efforts on global Internet privacy regulation.

We investigate government responsiveness in the notice and comment process, a prominent instrument of consultative authoritarianism through which policy is made in contemporary China. We conduct an extensive data collection effort, assembling draft policies, public comments, and government responses for more than one thousand instances of notice and comment policymaking over a 17-year period. Our statistical analysis demonstrates both the promise and limitations of consultative authoritarianism in the context of the notice and comment process. Government responsiveness in salient policy areas and to lengthy and critical comments demonstrates that public scrutiny matters to policymakers. These patterns are consistent with the notion that autocrats seek to remain in power not only through repression but also by bolstering exchanges of information between state and society. Central government ministries, however, are relatively unresponsive, indicating that significant aspects of policymaking are not characterized by robust attention to public sentiment and information.

Numerous studies assess how politicians control and shape bureaucracy. Yet, how politicians' behavior affects the norms and behaviors of bureaucrats through role modeling has not been studied. This is a curious omission, in light of evidence that social norms shape bureaucratic behavior. Through a lab experiment with over 900 bureaucrats in Bangladesh, we explore whether political corruption affects bureaucrats' pro-social behavior and whether this effect is particularly pronounced for corruption of the current government, as a particularly relevant social norm referent. Using a political corruption prime, we present evidence that those bureaucrats who recall episodes of the current government's political corruption when prompted to think about political corruption donate significantly lower real monetary amounts to charity. By contrast, we do not find clear effects of political corruption by other actors. Our findings underscore the importance of political leaders as role models for bureaucrats and the damage that political corruption may inflict on pro-social behavior in bureaucracies.

Gender quota policies have the ability to alleviate the scarcity of women in politics. However, opponents of quotas argue that such policies may constitute, in the long term, a “glass ceiling.” In Portugal, although there is still a long way to go in terms of gender equality, some municipalities have been successful in electing many women. Therefore, the aim of this article is to investigate, through the lenses of historical institutionalism and contagion theory, the factors that help women break out of the glass ceiling trap at local level. The study is based on a dataset from the last local elections and uses a panel data regression to calculate the probabilities of electing more women to municipal councils. The results underline that left-wing parties that have adopted voluntary quotas, municipal experience with women mayors, and competitive environments increase the likelihood of electing more women. Gender equality.

Public administrations must change toward sustainability to play a meaningful role in sustainable policy-making. However, little is known about how and why sustainability-oriented change unfolds in public administrations. This article aims to advance conceptual and empirical knowledge by examining sustainability mainstreaming through sustainability offices (SO) as a specific type of sustainability-oriented administrative change. Based on a framework that distinguishes modes and mechanisms of mainstreaming, the article provides qualitative insights into how SO in five Swiss cantons shape the work of their respective administrations toward sustainability. The case comparison suggests that sustainability mainstreaming is most transformative when committed SO address a combination of institutional, ideational, and agency-related factors through their activities. These findings highlight the critical role of SO in sustainability-oriented administrative change and lay the groundwork for developing targeted strategies to enhance their effectiveness in mainstreaming sustainability.

Transparency reforms make government contracting more open and amenable to public scrutiny, helping to improve public spending efficiency. But they are also politically sensitive, complex and highly technical, which makes them especially difficult to implement if state capacity is weak. Our research on nine low- and middle-income countries in Africa and Asia systematically assesses progress in improving the legal framework for procurement transparency and implementing systems that allow open access to data, between 2008 and 2019. Through interviews with key informants, we explore the reasons for progress or its absence, finding that success relies on strong leadership commitment, broad coalitions of state and non-state actors, and sufficient technical capacity. Leadership commitment ensures that implementing bodies have the appropriate mandate and resources, while broad coalitions sustain commitment and harness external technical assistance. Both factors are best achieved by framing the reforms as a way of improving efficiency rather than fighting corruption.

This article investigates the role of citizen political affinities in shaping attitudes towards judicial decisions in corruption cases involving politicians. Although emerging research suggests that decisions regarding a high-ranking politician can reduce general citizen trust in courts, there is no systematic evidence examining how political affinities differentially affect confidence in court decisions depending on the accused politician. We conducted a survey experiment during a 2022 presidential election rally in Brazil at a time of heightened affective polarization and corruption. We presented respondents with vignettes detailing a fictional corruption scheme and trial outcomes (acquittal or conviction) involving key political figures, including Presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro. The results indicate that when a court decision is consistent with citizens' electoral preferences, they are more inclined to trust the court decision and vice versa.

Governments increasingly restrict civil society organizations (CSOs). Different theories converge on the expectation that CSOs are important for public goods. A largely unexplored implication is that increased restrictions on CSOs will signal the under-delivery of public goods. Using data on government-imposed restrictions on CSOs for a global sample of countries, we test this implication. Controlling for unobserved cross-country heterogeneity, temporal shocks, and confounding variables, we find that the accumulation of restrictions on CSOs negatively correlate with public goods-oriented government spending and positively correlate with corruption and clientelism in the future. Our evidence also suggests that the mechanism underpinning these findings is that persistent restrictions on CSOs negatively correlate with engaged society and, to some extent, protest. While global governance actors warn of the negative consequences of restrictions on CSOs, our analyses provide evidence that restrictions are indeed a red flag for governments' failure to live up to their public goods commitment.