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

Studies in medicine, bioscience, psychology, sociology, and public health have provided various contextual, individual, and vaccine-specific explanations for vaccine uptake. However, one significant yet often ignored fact is that vaccination could be viewed as a site of citizen-state interaction in implementing public vaccination policy. This begs the questions: What barriers create administrative burdens in vaccination? How do the experiences of administrative burdens (i.e., the learning, psychological, and compliance costs in citizen-state interactions) shape the public's willingness to vaccinate? According to theoretical insights drawn from the extant literature on administrative burden and vaccine uptake, this study uses a conjoint experiment design based on a representative sample of China to reveal the role of administrative burdens in shaping the public's willingness to vaccinate against the monkeypox outbreak, a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’ from July 2022 to May 2023. The experimental results suggest that multiple salient barriers have distinct effects on the respondents' learning, psychological, and compliance costs, thus significantly influencing their vaccine uptake. These findings have important implications for both future research and efforts to promote mass immunization programs.

This study focuses on the honor of Model County Party Secretary, a prestigious award bestowed by the Communist Party of China to recognize exceptional county party secretaries. Specifically, we investigate how county party secretaries' patronage networks with senior politicians and their relative economic performance compared to other political contestants can impact their likelihood of winning this honor. We collect demographic and biographic data on a sample of over 2000 county party secretaries from various official documents and online sources. Instrumental variable estimations show that, in line with tournament theory, an increase in county party secretaries' relative economic performance enhances their likelihood of receiving the honor. However, county leaders' patronage networks with senior politicians negatively moderate the estimated impact of economic performance. This finding contradicts the inference drawn from patronage theory but supports the conjecture that senior politicians may exploit patronage networks to politically suppress subordinate leaders and prevent political uncertainty.

Democratic governments have constantly added new policies to existing policy stocks to confront societal, economic, and environmental challenges. This development has the potential to overburden public administrations in charge of policy implementation. To address this issue, we theorize and analyze how the relationship between the size of sectoral policy portfolios and implementation capacities affects sectoral policy performance. Our Bayesian analysis of the environmental policies of 21 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries from 1976 to 2020 reveals a widening “gap” between the policies up for implementation and the implementation capacities available and shows that this gap negatively affects environmental policy performance. Qualitative insights from 47 in-depth interviews with implementers validate these findings and shed light on the underlying causal processes. Our findings suggest that in advanced democracies transforming additional policies into effective problem-solving crucially hinges on the deliberate expansion of implementation capacities.

The literature has usually regarded street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) as relatively privileged bureaucrats, neglecting an important sub-group of these civil servants: low-status SLBs. Even though they may be members of a team with other SLBs who have more status, they may suffer from intraorganizational inequality, meaning unequal access to resources and the requirement that they perform informal tasks associated with their unequal position in the organization. We examine the unique challenges low-status SLBs are often confronted with, and how they cope with them. Based on 94 interviews with community health workers in Brazil, we identify several types of burdens associated with their ambiguous tasks, as well as the strategies they use to cope with these burdens. The analyses suggest that the burdens and coping strategies are an important source of the inequality on the team. The paper discusses the importance of considering the diversity of roles occupied by SLBs and the inequalities within teams.

Organized business interests often seek to block public interest regulations. But whether firms oppose regulation depends on institutional context. We argue that, in federal systems, sub-national policies and politics can have a home state effect on firms' national policy preferences and the lobbying coalitions they join. State policies that force firms to absorb regulatory cost can reduce the marginal cost of national policies, leading to preference shifts. In addition, firms regulated at the state level have incentives to strategically align with their state governments to avoid future regulatory cost. We test our argument in the context of U.S. climate politics, matching original data on the positions of electric utilities toward the Clean Power Plan and data on ad hoc coalition membership with data measuring state policy stringency and state government positions. Quantitative evidence is consistent with hypotheses: both state policies and state politics influence utilities' positions on national climate policy. Qualitative evidence from elite interviews helps clarify the roles of different mechanisms. Our findings underscore the importance of sub-national governments in shaping national lobbying coalitions.