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

Resilience of local communities (territorial hromadas) is an increasingly salient matter in the academic and policy debate on the factors which have determined Ukraine's resilience to Russia's 2022 invasion. Building on existing literature on institutional resilience and its predictors, this article explains the ability of Ukrainian self-governed municipalities to withstand the threats to institutional stability stemming from the invasion. First, it uses an exploratory qualitative design to operationalize the concept of resilience and its predictors with an account of varying experiences of Ukrainian hromadas during the full-scale invasion (e.g., hromadas near the frontline and in the rear). Next, it presents data from open sources and the results of a regression analysis to test the impact of various groups of predictors on hromadas' resilience to the full-scale invasion. Our models show a significant relationship between hromadas' resilience and geographical, politico-administrative and economic predictors influenced by the outcomes of the decentralization reform conducted in Ukraine since 2014.

Privatization reform originated in Western countries and was translated across political regimes. While extensive literature discusses the practices of privatization in liberal democracies, little has been written on its implementation in authoritarian contexts, where the logic of privatization is incompatible with the logic of authoritarianism. This study explores the adoption of a specific administrative model promoted by the privatization reform: nonprofit board governance in Shenzhen, China. We find that, although the nonprofit board is the formal governing structure, regulatory agencies constrain the autonomy of boards, decoupling governance practices from board governance. Two organizational-level contingency factors—institutional origins and political risks—help explain the balance of the competing logics and the degree of decoupling from board governance. These findings suggest that, within the global privatization movement, the seemingly converging administrative structures embody divergent practices when adapting to local contexts.

This short paper summarizes the key findings of a collaborative project looking at civic actors' role in promoting more equitable taxation across seven countries. Their examples show that effective tax advocacy usually relies on multiple strategies that engage diverse actors—from public officials and legislators to the media and broader civic coalitions. Moreover, progress depends on building robust and convincing narratives around the need for tax reform and deploying different kinds of capacities—for technical analysis, political engagement and compelling communications. Ultimate success often builds on past failures. In this sense, civil society tax advocacy is a long-haul endeavor that requires organizations to have a long-term vision and learn and adapt.

Privately financed infrastructure agreements (PFIAs) are increasingly being used across the globe, bringing private money into the delivery of public goods. How does introducing private actors to such a process change how we think about distributive politics? I investigate this question using both quantitative and qualitative analyses, uncovering a relationship consistent with PFIAs being used as distributive goods and exploring how the credit-claim potential of PFIAs may affect their distributive use. My quantitative analyses (on 16 middle-income countries) present evidence suggestive of a relationship between electoral variables and the likelihood of a PFIA being present in a district. In districts aligned with the national ruling party, PFIAs are more likely to be concentrated in swing districts than core districts. I find that this relationship is more pronounced for PFIAs that are more directly attributable to the government. My qualitative press analysis provides insights into how politicians use various features of PFIAs to create credit-claiming opportunities.

We examine the implications of anti-statist populist leaders' inattention to competence and service delivery, and their embrace of a particular form of dysfunctional politics: government shutdowns. This paper explores the effects of US government shutdowns on agency policy implementation and personnel and using survey data from several hundred thousand federal employees. The first study gauges the effect of the 2018–2019 shutdown on specific elements of agency policy implementation. The results suggest that shutdowns, as a type of shock associated with anti-statist politics, undermine the quality of government in the eyes of those closest to the work. The second and third studies consider the effect of shutdowns on employee morale, using the 2013, and 2018–2019 shutdown. While our findings indicate that the 2013 shutdown wrought durable negative impacts on the morale of shutdown agency personnel, that event appears to have prepared agencies to absorb any negative morale impacts in the 2018–2019 shutdown. Our study shows both the immediate and long-term dynamics of government shutdowns on policy implementation and the administrative workforce.

Participatory governance arrangements are assumed to strengthen elected representatives' capacity for political leadership. This study argues that the relationship between participatory arrangements and perceived political leadership depends on the design of the participatory arrangements. Drawing on a survey to local councilors in Norway, we found that sharing power with citizens through interactive governance arrangements was associated with lower perceived capacity for political leadership than giving power away through distributive arrangements. Case studies exploring how politicians experienced interactive and distributive participatory arrangements showed that politicians were especially ambivalent about interactive arrangements that were perceived to disrupt their traditional ways of doing political leadership. Notably, interactive arrangements were believed to decrease leadership capacity because politicians remained responsible for matters over which they no longer had full control, challenging their ability to stay accountable to the voters.

In federal presidential democracies, discretionary transfers are often mentioned as a tool used by the national executive to build and strengthen subnational support, typically governors. Funds to local mayors, however, have been much less studied. With original data, in this study we analyze the distribution of a particular discretionary transfer (ATN) to the Argentine municipalities during two periods: 1997–2000 and 2016–2019. We show that the main driver for transfers is the mayor's political alignment. Indeed, the president is more likely to reward loyal mayors, but especially when both the latter and the President oppose the provincial governor. By this token, we highlight a nested political game, in which the President considers the loyalty of both mayors and governors combined to decide when to reward (or when not to reward) municipalities. Furthermore, we find that the Executive provides aid to smaller municipalities to circumvent the possibility of funding mayors from larger cities who may pose a threat as political rivals in the future. Since this pattern is more evident in localities with aligned mayors, we can infer that the President's strategy is aimed at preventing future challengers from within their own coalition.

Using data from the Afrobarometer surveys, this paper finds that people living in regions in which police corruption is more prevalent are more likely to report that they or someone in their family have been victims of physical assault. People living in more corrupted regions are also more likely to report that they or someone in their family has had something stolen from their home. We find no statistically significant gender differences in the average marginal effects. Controlling for the incidence of corruption in other domains reduces the size of the estimated association but does not render it insignificant in terms of statistical significance or magnitude. Non-police corruption is also strongly associated with an increased risk of crime. For both types of crime, the evidence points to “transactional” police corruption (having to pay bribes to get help) rather than “predatory” police corruption (having to pay bribes to avoid problems) as driving the relationship. Finally, we show that, controlling for whether the respondent reports being a victim of either type of crime, police corruption predicts an increase in the probability that the respondent reports feeling unsafe while walking in their own neighborhood thus imposing a cost even on those who have not been victims.

Previous studies have identified individual and organizational factors that influence the turnover intentions of bureaucrats. However, they have overlooked how the type of national bureaucracy influences turnover intention. Combining data sets on macro-level bureaucratic structures and individual civil servants, we examine how bureaucratic politicization and closedness are associated with the turnover intentions of bureaucrats in 36 countries. Our analysis indicates that there is large cross-national variation in turnover intention, and that bureaucratic structures matter as one of the predictors of turnover intention. Public servants working in more closed and regulated bureaucracies exhibit lower turnover intention. We also find that public servants working in more politicized bureaucracies (in which personnel decisions are made via political connections) have lower turnover intention than those working in more merit-based systems. Such low turnover intention in politicized bureaucracies may be explained by the characteristics of patronage appointments in which public jobs are distributed based on personal or political loyalty.