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

Denigrating public servants has been a key feature of populists movements that seek to prioritize the individual and “common people” over “establishment elites”. In Canada, mainstream conservative party leaders claim “Canada is broken” and openly advocate for “getting rid of the gatekeepers,” for example, while right-wing populists often promote the dangers of the “deep state.” Despite these developments, we do not know whether and how populist attitudes relate to citizens' trust in the public service. We use public opinion data from a nationwide survey to determine that populism exerts an independent effect on public trust in the bureaucracy beyond democratic satisfaction and efficacy. Our findings suggest that, even when controlling for those other factors, populist attitudes remain the strongest determinants of public trust in public servants. This leads us to an important discussion of the impact of populism on the stability, legitimacy, and performance of the public service, particularly as populist leaders assume positions of power and control over the bureaucracy.

Gaining and maintaining access to government-run social welfare programs often requires significant and sustained effort by potential beneficiaries. Why do some eligible individuals persist in their pursuit of welfare benefits while others do not? In this paper, we provide a psychological theory of state-centric persistence. We argue that three attitudes—entitlement, indignation, and self-efficacy—decrease the psychological costs of interacting with the state and affect citizens' behavior vis-à-vis the state. In an original survey in Brazil, we ask respondents about the likelihood they would engage in state-centric persistence in the pursuit of social benefits and develop novel measures of entitlement, indignation, and self-efficacy in the domain of social policy. We provide evidence that these attitudes strongly correlate with state-centric persistence and that this relationship is stronger than their relationship with other actions. These findings show that government responsiveness can vary with the attitudes of the individuals seeking government services.

Governments worldwide have introduced transparency and accountability regulations so that citizens can hold officials accountable for their actions and fulfill their role as “watchdogs” of the state. In the long term, this should legitimize government by mitigating information asymmetries between citizens and the government. Therefore, if adequate mechanisms that empower citizens to increase government transparency and the accountability of public officials are properly stipulated in the law, do citizens also perceive it that way? Understanding public perceptions of decision-making processes and government activities is crucial for policymaking because citizens are the ultimate evaluators of policy outcomes. Thus, this study examines whether such institutionalized regulations reach citizens and (positively) affect citizens' perceptions of government transparency. Using individual-level data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and country-level data from the European Public Accountability Mechanisms Dataset (EuroPAM), we analyze the impact of five accountability indicators on citizens' perceptions of transparency in 28 European countries. Using the large-N sample data from the ESS, we control for socio-demographic variables and thus also shed light on covariates of citizens' perceptions of transparency. Contrary to our hypotheses, we find that the scope of accountability mechanisms is not indicative of perceived transparency. Rather, our findings point toward a more complex relationship between national policies and citizens' perception, and underline the importance of distinguishing between de jure, de facto, and perceived transparency.

Building on the policy feedback literature and the risk-based perspective of the welfare state, this study examines the causal link between policy and opinion in a non-democratic setting. I argue that the distinct distributional profiles of social insurance benefits and risks in the current system generate different feedback effects on public demands for social insurance reform. Drawing on original individual-level survey data collected in China between 2022 and 2023, I find that high financial risk in social insurance significantly increases individuals' support for cross-region integration of social insurance. In contrast, high inequality in the current social insurance has no such effects. The findings suggest that, given the looming financial pressure in China's fragmented and stratified social insurance system, citizens' support for cross-region integration of social insurance aligns with the government's strategy of prioritizing cross-region redistribution over cross-group redistribution. This policy feedback explains why the Chinese government can engage in “hard redistribution” without causing significant political and social instability driven by distributive conflicts.

States have invested heavily in controlling forced migration for decades, with mixed results. Research often focuses on deterrence, leading to a neglect of bureaucratic boundaries within borders. This article unpacks the unrecognized importance of people-processing capacity: a state's ability to render forced migrants legible by categorizing them as cases and selecting those perceived as desirable victims. Due to the heterogeneous nature of claims and the agency of migrants, rendering migrants as cases is a deeply complicated process. Using a historical-institutionalist framework, the article explores the role and historical development of people-processing capacity through a comparison of the evolution of modern migration control in Canada and Sweden, two states with similar trajectories of capacity-building but different guiding ideas for migration policy. The results trace the institutional roots of deservingness, reveal different ideals of vulnerable and adaptable refugees, and theorize how persistent governance problems emerge from classification systems intended to order migration.

While recent research has studied the coping behaviors of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs), less attention has been paid to the institutional antecedents of these coping behaviors. This paper examines how macro-level institutional factors—specifically, competing institutional logics—shape SLBs' meso-level organizational conflicts and micro-level coping behaviors. We use semi-structured interviews and archival data to investigate environmental policy implementation in China, where developmental state logic and regulatory state logic coexist and compete. We found that regulatory state logic increases SLBs' workloads and accountability, while developmental state logic limits their power and resources. These competing institutional logics result in unclear responsibilities, expanding the number of tasks but constraining resources, creating pressure for enforcement officials while providing few rewards. In response, SLBs engage in active and passive coping behaviors. Our study contributes to public administration and institutional theory research by introducing a multi-level framework that links competing logics to organizational conflicts and individual coping.