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

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.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, people have witnessed a deluge of conspiracy theories and disinformation. As the coronavirus poses a significant threat to individuals' lives, these conspiracy theories are dangerous, as they erode public trust and undermine government efforts to fight the virus. This paper examines the political determinants of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs. Particularly, we analyze how government policy responses to the pandemic and individuals' ideological predispositions interact to shape people's tendencies to believe conspiracy theories. Using survey data from 22 advanced industrial countries, we show that political conservatives are more prone to conspiracy beliefs than liberals. More importantly, this tendency is reinforced when the government adopts stringent containment policies. Our results suggest that governments' policy efforts to contain the coronavirus can trigger an unintended backlash from political conservatives. This study has important implications for the behavioral and attitudinal effects of government containment policies that are often overlooked.

This article investigates how organizational structure, collaboration, and professional standards influence the resilience of public agencies facing adversity. It links organizational reputation and blame avoidance literature with resilience and collaboration literature. We use the case of the Swiss Child and Adult Protection Agencies (CAPA), which faced massive media attacks. We apply a qualitative research design analyzing data from interviews and participatory observations. Our findings show that professional organizational structure, collaboration and standards are three interrelated factors that increase resilience against adversity. In particular, these factors reduce “blame-avoiding policy implementation” (BAPI), which is a coping strategy where street-level bureaucrats (SLB) exploit their discretion to make policy implementation less blameworthy. In their interplay, professional organizational structure, collaboration and standards increase the knowledge of a public agency about a particular situation because they enable better-informed decisions through collective deliberation practices, and strengthens the collective ownership as well as the individual SLB's confidence that the right decision is being made.