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

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.

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.