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

This study examines how different types of regimes use performance-based legitimation after severe natural disasters. While prior research has evaluated emergency relief, broader fiscal responses remain understudied. Drawing on legitimation theory, we argue that all regimes seek to secure legitimacy, but hybrid regimes are more likely to expand public spending to ensure their political survival. Analyzing data from 166 countries from 1960 to 2018, we find significant post-disaster fiscal expansion in hybrid regimes (particularly those with weaker opposition and higher fiscal capacity), but not democracies or autocracies. We investigate three case studies that largely support these findings: the 1985 Algarrobo earthquake (Chile under autocracy), the 1974 Hurricane Fifi-Orlene (Honduras under a hybrid regime), and the 1999 İzmit earthquake (Turkey during democracy).

As European Union (EU) policymaking becomes increasingly politicized, national and local authorities face pressure to justify compliance with contested EU rules. This study examines how different explanations for compliance affect citizens' perceptions of legitimacy. We distinguish between blame-shifting and defending strategies communicated by national and municipal authorities. Our expectations and findings challenge the popular view that blaming the EU is the most credible approach. In policy implementation, national governments are often perceived as primarily responsible, making their blame-shifting attempts less persuasive. Instead, we expect and find that defending compliance by claiming responsibility increases perceived legitimacy. Municipal authorities, however, can more credibly deny responsibility for externally mandated policies because of their distance from the EU decision-making process. These results advance research on elite communication and the legitimacy of EU policies, offering new insights into how governments can reconcile public responsiveness with supranational obligations in an era of contested EU governance.

This article examines the political foundations of industrial policy amid the return of state economic interventionism. Comparing the United States' Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the European Union's Green Deal Industrial Plan (GDIP), it shows that contrasting industrial policy strategies were ultimately shaped by differences in the two polities' legislative rules. In both cases, geopolitical pressures sparked renewed interest in green industrial policymaking. However, procedural mechanisms for majoritarian decision-making in the U.S. Senate enabled the government to overcome partisan veto players and compelled the design of the IRA as a budgetary instrument centered on fiscal subsidies. By contrast, unanimity requirements in the EU's joint decision-making system prevented the Commission from overcoming Member State veto players in the Council, precluding supranational fiscal instruments and resulting in a regulation-based, decentralized approach via national state aid. The findings contribute to the burgeoning debates on the return of industrial policy and state activism by showing how political institutions contribute to shaping not only the scope but also the form of economic interventionism within different polities.

A public encounter is a direct, focused interaction between unelected public officials and private individuals with the goal of enacting a distribution of benefits or obligations. Administrative responsibility concerns an official's normative obligations for acting within a legally defined role. Does the public perceive notionally responsible action in a public encounter as actually responsible? Our mixed-method approach to this question begins by theoretically connecting two practical problems with specific principles of “good” public administration. We transform these problems into hypothetical scenarios supported by theory and local law, and then present them as vignettes in a randomized online survey experiment to 1100 respondents in the United Kingdom. We find that responsibility is clearly intuitive to participants, and that their arguments about the principles underlying responsibility seem to be clarified, rather than made more sophisticated or complex, by the public encounters they observe.

Addressing “wicked” problems like climate change requires collaborative efforts from public, private, and third-sector organizations (TSOs), making a co-productive approach especially promising. However, traditional co-production research often overlooks the contributions of TSOs and the voices of marginalized populations. This study addresses these gaps by exploring the role of TSOs as intermediaries in co-producing climate actions by empowering vulnerable communities. Through a case study of a project led by BRAC, a prominent hybrid TSO in Bangladesh, we find that creating a relational space for co-production—in this case, Climate Action Groups—is the key strategy used to foster active engagement and build long-term climate resilience. These spaces reach their full potential when intentionally supported by mechanisms such as awareness raising and shared goals, the incorporation of local knowledge, and inclusive engagement strategies. Our research contributes to the literature by demonstrating how TSOs facilitate meaningful co-production with vulnerable groups, thereby broadening our understanding of their role in climate governance and providing a comprehensive, practice-based model of sustainable, community-led adaptation. These findings offer valuable insights and emphasize the vital role of TSOs in developing practical and sustainable strategies for climate change adaptation.

In responding to crises, governments often need to enact restrictions on the freedoms of citizens that might be perceived as intrusive and unfair. Yet, government interventions need to retain legitimacy in the eyes of citizens. We study the perceived legitimacy of pandemic crisis interventions with a focus on the effects of multi-level governance and region-specific interventions. Such territorially-differentiated measures are often appropriate for effective crisis responses, but they raise concerns about equal treatment. Our pre-registered survey experiments run on quota-representative national samples in Germany and the Netherlands (N = 2252) find no evidence in support of the conjecture that citizens perceive nation-wide crisis interventions as more legitimate than region-specific measures. The level of government making the decision matters very little for the legitimacy of the interventions. Restrictions enacted by the national government are slightly more accepted than those decided regionally in the Netherlands, but there is no such difference in Germany.