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

Tax reduction is supposed to garner popular support, yet rural unrest sharply increased following the Chinese government's agricultural tax reform aiming to reduce peasants' tax burden. We argue that the tax reduction could undermine village elites' economic and political incentives to assist the state in implementing unpopular policies and achieving desirable outcomes. We exploit the exogeneous timing of the agricultural tax reform that abolished the agriculture tax and estimate its impact through a rare national representative village-level panel dataset. We demonstrate that the tax reform led to tax noncompliance and rising social unrest. We further show that local governance worsened because village elites were disincentivized from carrying out state-preferred yet unpopular policies.

Countries are facing the deterioration of democratic institutions under a process named democratic backsliding. In this context, political attacks on public organizations become more frequent and intense. While previous studies have examined how civil servants counteract and resist political attacks, their ultimate impact on civil servants' well-being remains underexplored. To shed light on this phenomenon, we conducted an exploratory sequential mixed methods design with civil servants from Brazil. The first phase of the study is qualitative and exploratory. The second is quantitative and we tested if perceived political attacks was associated with higher levels of emotional exhaustion, which, in turn, would lead to a greater incidence of physical health symptoms. Both studies provide compelling evidence of the negative impact of political attacks on civil servants' emotional and physical health, which may have significant consequences for the performance of public organizations and the effective functioning of the democracy.

The marketization of schools and of other public services is supposed to have changed the relationship of citizens to the state in many Western countries over the last 30 years. One explicit aim of marketization has been to increase citizen influence over public services. Yet, studies of its effects on citizens' willingness to address public decision-making remain scarce in general, and nonexistent as regards schools. In this study, a survey experiment taps the causal effects of both user choice and private provision. The results show that marketization significantly reduces respondents' intention to influence schools and related political and bureaucratic decision-making. The effects are robust and, in contrast to those of previous studies, driven by significant effects from the user choice introduced in connection with marketization. The pacifying effects recorded suggest that marketization potentially reduces public services' responsiveness to citizens' interests, thereby aggravating the problems it was meant to address.

Western democracies are experiencing a widespread shift towards greater recognition of transgender rights in public policy, yet the timing of change differs across states. To explain this variation, I present a novel theoretical framework called “policy momentum.” Unlike existing work on policy diffusion, which typically emphasizes domestic or international processes, I theorize how the combined pressure from each level creates the conditions for policy change to occur. Empirically, I contrast the creation of national human rights policies to protect transgender individuals in Canada (2017) and Australia (2013). Using process-tracing and within-case analyses, and drawing on elite interviews, primary documents, and Hansard records, I demonstrate the decisive interaction of subnational legislative changes with an emerging global norm to produce transgender policy change. This paper thus contributes to our understanding of LGBTQ+ public policy while also providing a framework for explaining the conditions for cross-national policy change more broadly.

As non-majoritarian institutions are deliberately insulated from electoral pressure and ministerial hierarchy, they face an accountability deficit. This deficit can be reduced by embedding the organizations in a wider accountability landscape with multiple forums. Of particular relevance in this landscape are the news media, who may not only serve as account-holders, but can also reinforce other forms of accountability. Yet, we know little about the conditions under which the media cover non-majoritarian governance, and the existence of “reinforced accountability”. Focusing empirically on news articles about the Bank of England (1997–2020), we trace coverage levels back to the announcement of key policy decisions and, to some extent, policy outcomes. We also find evidence of reinforced accountability, both in relation to parliamentary oversight and the Bank's own, voluntary account-giving. These results provide reason for cautious optimism about non-majoritarian accountability, at least in the case of a salient organization.