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

Frontline workers who are confronted with crises need enormous resilience and the ability to deal with stress from crisis-related increases in demands and risks. Simultaneously, populist governments with an illiberal agenda may undermine the work of street-level bureaucracies for political reasons. Little is known about how deconstruction of the administrative state by populist government—through lacking government support when it is needed the most—affects frontline work. Thus, this article asks: how does lacking support by a populist government affect frontline workers' self-efficacy when they face a crisis? Based on unique data from an online survey of 3229 Brazilian frontline workers during the early COVID-19 pandemic, when the Bolsonaro government denied the existence of the pandemic, we test the relationship between government support, demands, and resources on frontline workers' perceived self-efficacy. Results show that lacking government support from the federal and local government are negatively associated with frontline workers' self-efficacy. At the same time, resources and managerial support exhibit positive associations—but they cannot always compensate for a lack of government assistance.

The European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) and the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) have experienced increases in available resources and have conducted joint operations with European Union (EU) Member States in recent years. They may be regarded as examples of agencification in border protection and asylum policy, but this paper argues that agencification has proceeded without an expansion in agency mandates. Using Frontex and EASO operations in two Southern European border countries, Cyprus and Greece, as comparative case studies, I show that the two agencies have employed their growing technical, performative, legal and moral resources to legitimize efficient processing of asylum applications in reception centers, and coordinated border protection and more/swifter returns. At the same time, the absence of mandates on final decision-making has diluted policy accountability and weakened monitoring vis-à-vis Member States, with respect to fundamental rights violations and the implementation of EU law. This resource expansion without mandates has allowed EU agencies to resolve long-standing tensions among Member States and the European Commission in a contested policy area. The analysis has broader implications for the role of agencies in multilevel migration governance.

Following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine and the arrival of 170,000 refugees, the already fragile Italian refugee system was forced to undergo major re-structuring and expansion. Re-organisation included the adoption of partially new multi-level governance relationships, as well as political instruments. Despite the widespread positive attitude of public opinion toward the Ukrainian refugees and the bipartisan support for their reception, the outcome of the policy has been not in line with the goals the proponents set out to achieve. In fact, there have been delays, poor assistance to those who have offered to host, and, in the end, a partial waste of the economic and human resources which were devoted to the reception itself. The purpose of this article is to investigate the origin and development of the “vices” of this process, departing from the interpretive lens on policy and governance failure. Our findings consolidate the theoretical challenge to the reductive binary rhetoric on success and failure, and the classic view of failure confined to formulation and implementation. In addition, the article shows that multi-level governance dynamics are strongly relevant in explaining the “vices” of policies, particularly highlighting the role, until now largely disregarded, of the latent conflicts between the actors involved. The study has benefited from 38 semi-structured interviews with political actors, including third-party organisations and public actors, the analysis of political documents, and local and national media.

This paper examines how political alignment influences the job satisfaction and motivation of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs)—low-level frontline workers implementing policies while interacting directly with the public. I argue that political alignment affects SLBs' job satisfaction and motivation to work harder through three theoretical channels: (1) policy-driven effects, particularly demoralization from implementing disagreeable policies; (2) spill-over effects from other policy areas; and (3) political person-organization fit effects, which result in decreased pride in their employer. Using the International Social Survey Program data from 34 countries, and panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, tracking 880 respondents over 30 years, I find a robust link between political alignment and job satisfaction and motivation, and evidence for all three links. These findings underscore the importance of considering political alignment as a key factor in understanding and improving street-level bureaucrat performance beyond policy-specific and client-specific contexts.

This article dives into the complex web of actors and processes of migration policy implementation in Ghana, revealing political tensions as they play out in this field. The analysis is based on semi-structured interviews with bureaucrats and practitioners involved in migration governance initiatives in Ghana. The study reveals how institutional power hierarchies and funding structures affect execution processes on the ground. Mapping out observations concerning implementation as it is experienced across the vertical scale of involved actors, the study reveals that politics are engrained in Ghanaian migration policy implementation through experiences of (1) incoherent narratives on policy and migration; (2) local-level exclusion from policy design; and (3) mismatch between policy targets and local realities. The article concludes by contemplating theoretical needs and proposing avenues for future research.

Research on the dynamics of corruption has rarely considered sex as a currency in corrupt transactions. This article puts forward the argument that the abuse of entrusted power in exchange for personal gain is relevant also when sex, rather than money, is the currency. It then contributes with a careful conceptualization of such transactions as sexual corruption. Anchoring our conceptualization in the abuse of entrusted power, the article defines sexual corruption, its elements, categories and delimitations, and proposes a conceptual framework that can be used to develop research on sexual corruption. We also address the implications of recognizing sex as a currency in corrupt transactions, providing insights as to why abuse of power is often overlooked when sex is the currency of the transaction. Our approach offers analytic precision and contributes to setting an agenda for the study of sexual corruption as an obstacle to good governance, at a time when efforts to collect data on sexual corruption are increasing.

We study cartels in public infrastructure procurement and analyze the conditions under which they succeed in generating rents. We first conceptualize the interplay of the central actors of a procurement project, notably the contractor, the procurement agency, as well as the supervision and design consultants. By focusing on consultants, our framework includes important yet understudied actors in cartels that design tenders, evaluate bids, and supervise the implementation of projects. We go on to explore an original dataset of infrastructure procurement contracts in Lebanon and analyze the conditions under which powerful political elites can broker deals to overprice and/or overspend contracts. To examine how cartels operate, we identify the political connections of contractors and consultants and classify them according to their “quality” in terms of access to institutional functions of the implementing agency. We argue that design consultants serve as the lynchpin of the cartel by reducing transaction costs for searching, bargaining, and enforcing of corrupt deals.