Abstract
(a) Central institutions /Institutions centrales
73.3165 ADEGBITE, Kehinde John, et al. —
The study investigated the roles of bureaucracy in Nigeria and its inadequacies in adhering to the Weberian model of policy implementation in the Nigeria democratic governance. The study adopted a survey research design and utilized primary data obtained through the administration of questionnaires to a purposively selected 220 respondents comprising senior bureaucrats and CSOs, and conduct of the in-depth interview. The data were analyzed using descriptive analysis with the aid of SPSS. The study revealed that even though, bureaucrats are not necessarily the primary makers of the policy. They play an active role in policy implementation in Nigeria. However, factors such as political pressure, inadequate budgetary allocation, over politicization of the appointment into governmental offices leading to inadequate professionalism, and environmental variables hinder the effective implementation of policy in Nigeria. It was equally established that as ideal as the Weberian model of bureaucracy is, there are inevitable lacuna and inadequacies in its application to Nigeria, due to factors such as socio-cultural forces, collectivism as against individualism, and absolute formalism. [R, abr.]
73.3166 ALLEN, Nicholas —
Recent ‘takeover’ Prime Ministers have tended to conduct relatively brutal Cabinet reshuffles immediately after taking office. Liz Truss dismissed and moved large numbers of ministers after becoming Prime Minister in September 2022, and Rishi Sunak did the same after succeeding Truss in October 2022. This article locates the tendency towards brutalism in the broader context of British Cabinet reshuffles. It compares the scale of takeover reshuffles with other types of reshuffles and demonstrates how incoming takeover Prime Ministers in the twenty-first century have reconstructed their Cabinets more extensively than their predecessors. The article argues that the use of all-member ballots in party leadership elections has been a key driver of brutalism, and it further identifies several reasons why future Prime Ministers might want to resist the tendency. [R]
73.3167 ANDERSON, Sarah E., et al. —
Understanding differential policy costs across constituencies, and how they link to legislators’ policy preferences, can facilitate policy changes that solve pressing problems. We examine the role of policy costs on constituents by studying legislator support for taxing gasoline. Analysis of survey responses from US state legislators, as well as of their voting records, shows that legislators whose constituents would be most affected by an increased gas tax — those whose constituents have longer commutes — are more likely to oppose higher gas taxes. Separately estimating the impact of time spent driving to work versus using public transit shows that the effect of commute times comes from those who have long drives, not from those who ride public transit, highlighting how the policy costs to constituents is a major driver in legislators’ considerations. [R, abr.]
73.3168 ASENCIO, Hugo D. —
This study investigates the relationship between ethical leadership and commitment to behave ethically, a dimension of ethical culture largely understudied in government settings. It uses survey data collected from public servants in a US state. The results from OLS regression analysis indicate that ethical leadership is positively and statistically related to commitment to behave ethically. The findings underscore the importance of ethical leadership and call for a number of actions to enhance public leaders’ competencies to foster the ethical environment of public sector organizations. [R]
73.3169 BALLARD, Andrew O., et al. —
Affective polarization is pervasive in modern US politics, and can be intensified by strategic messaging from members of Congress. But there are gaps in our knowledge of the dynamics of polarizing appeals from elected representatives on social media. We explore the usage of polarizing rhetoric by members of Congress on Twitter using the 4.9 million tweets sent by members of Congress from 2009 to 2020, coded for the presence of polarizing rhetoric via a novel and highly accurate application of supervised machine learning methods. Fitting with our expectations, we find that more ideologically extreme members, those from safer districts, and those who are not in the president’s party are more likely to send polarizing tweets, and that polarizing tweets garner more engagement, increasing campaign funding for more polarizing members. [R]
73.3170 BEHRENS, Lion ; NYHUIS, Dominic ; GSCHWEND, Thomas —
There is growing interest in the policy impact of legislatures in parliamentary systems. While scholars have shown that coalition parties rely on legislative amendments to police deviations from the coalition compromise, there are notable gaps in our understanding of legislative review, most importantly, regarding the substance of amendments. Introducing the concepts constructive and destructive legislative review, we identify distinct patterns of legislative review by government and opposition parties. Using the notion of collective cabinet responsibility, we argue that coalition parties are bound by informal rules that limit them to the labor-intensive redrafting of bills (constructive review). Conversely, opposition parties take a low-cost approach by proposing to strike out bill sections (destructive review). We provide empirical support for our hypotheses by analyzing an original data-set of counterfactual bills from a German state legislature. [R, abr.]
73.3171 BELLI, Sharon S. ; BURSENS, Peter —
The staff flow between the public sector and organised interests is metaphorically defined as ‘revolving door’. This paper seeks to explain variation in hiring behaviour across interest organisations (IOs). Using data from the Comparative Interest Group-survey project, we show that revolving door practices do not occur systematically across IOs but that, under specific conditions, IOs are more likely to attract employees from the public sector than others. Our main findings demonstrate that citizen organisations are more likely to hire employees with public sector background, compared with professional and business organisations. We also show that the effect of group type is resource-sensitive, as wealthy citizen groups are more likely to hire from the public sector than wealthy business organisations. Additionally, we demonstrate that contextual factors such as the degree of political involvement and the perceived complexity of the policy environment predict hiring from the public sector. [R]
73.3172 BEST, Jacqueline —
How do central bankers cope with the uncomfortable fact that there are significant limits to their expertise without losing authority? Drawing on Steve Rayner’s concept of ‘uncomfortable knowledge’, this paper undertakes a historical examination of the early years of Paul Volcker’s role at the head of the Federal Reserve, and then traces the ways in which the uncomfortable fact of ignorance has been dealt with in the years since then: from the reflexive and experimental approach of the 1980s, through the dismissal and displacement of the Great Moderation, to the exceptionalism and new experimentalism of the post-2008 era. In each of these eras, I argue that central banks face a visibility dilemma: their expertise must be visible enough to demonstrate their mastery but not so conspicuous that the often ad hoc and uncertain nature of their craft generates political push-back about their role and authority. [R] [See Abstr. 73.3177, 3196, 3211, 3225, 3854]
73.3173 BLAND, Gary, et al. —
One of the linchpins of democratic accountability runs through service quality. Because citizens are sensitive to the quality of basic services, they can translate (dis)satisfaction into assessments of incumbent politicians. Yet, although previous research has shown that both access to, and the quality of, basic services decline in rural settings, this seems not to translate into increased dissatisfaction with incumbents. In this paper we seek to understand why. We theorize four potential mechanisms that might underpin the weaker accountability for poor service outcomes in more remote settings. To test these mechanisms, we use data from 34,514 geocoded survey respondents across 19 countries in Latin America. We show that the likelihood of translating dissatisfaction with services into discontent with elected officials decreases as distance to urban centers increases. [R, abr.]
73.3174 BODEA, Cristina ; GARRIGA, Ana Carolina —
In the last three decades, legal delegation of monetary policy to independent central banks (CBI) has achieved the status of a global norm of good governance. The recent backlash against this independence is an important but understudied trend. Our article analyzes the potential for delegation reversals with a focus on Latin America where CBI was effective in maintaining price stability, but placed important policy constraints on governments. We theorize that, in the shadow of the global norm for CBI, the increasing distance in preferences between the government and the central bank, and the procedural hurdles to change the status quo, explain the intensity of challenges to the delegation contract or the delegated agent. An analysis of the frequency of irregular central bank leadership replacements, and instances of politicization and de-delegation show the plausibility of our argument. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 73.3224]
73.3175 BOSTON, Joshua, et al. —
Legitimacy is a bulwark for courts; even when judges engage in controversial or disagreeable behavior, the public tends to acquiesce. Recent studies identify several threats to the legitimacy of courts, including polarization and attacks by political elites. This article contributes to the scholarly discourse by exploring a previously unconsidered threat: scandal, or allegations of personal misbehavior. We argue that scandals can undermine confidence in judges as virtuous arbiters and erode broad public support for the courts. Using survey experiments, we draw on real-world judicial controversies to evaluate the impact of scandal on specific support for judicial actors and their rulings and diffuse support for the judiciary. We demonstrate that scandals erode individual support but find no evidence that institutional support is diminished. [R, abr.]
73.3176 BRAMAN, Eileen —
This study investigates support for changes to the US Supreme Court using prospect theory. Risk domain is alternatively conceptualized as the perception of retrospective benefits and future risks posed by Supreme Court decision-making. Two experiments explore how citizens think about gains and losses from Court outputs. Findings indicate that retrospective benefits are influenced by the relevant time-frame respondents are asked to consider, political partisanship, and the interaction between them; prospective risks are affected by question wording, partisanship, and an interaction between respondents’ partisanship and the relevant time-frame. Conceptualizing risk domain in terms of the expectation of future gains and losses yields significant effects consistent with prospect theory. [R, abr.]
73.3177 COOMBS, Nathan —
While a rich literature has examined how central banks mobilize narratives to enrol publics in monetary policymaking, the effects of the narratives deployed in banking supervision remain neglected. Drawing on 21 expert interviews, this paper fills that lacuna through a study of stress testing, a technique that became a fixture of international banking supervision after the 2008 crisis and which the Bank of England is using to align the risk management of the United Kingdom’s banks with its sense-making about emerging financial stability risks. I theorize the entanglements of the Bank’s financial stability narratives with binding supervisory requirements as giving rise to a new form of ‘infrastructural power’. This perspective explains why some financial sector actors see their decision-making autonomy being sapped away by the Bank’s stress tests even though they work through banks’ own risk sensitive calculative infrastructures. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 73.3172]
73.3178 COOMBS, Nathan ; THIEMANN, Matthias —
This special issue argues that to make sense of the increased prominence of central banks after the 2008 financial crisis and COVID-19 pandemic requires interrogating the sources of and limits to their governmental power. In a time in which the ‘big state’ has returned alongside new forms of financial speculation, the theoretical claim advanced by this introductory paper is that the state ‘effect’ is in crucial respects conditioned by the economic governance arrangements set in place by central banks. We show that at the same time as promoting entanglements between states and markets, central banks attempt to draw new boundaries between state and economy, lending an unstable and sometimes contradictory character to their interventions. [R, abr.] [First article of a thematic issue. See also Abstr. 73.]
73.3179 CURTIN, Jennifer ; KERBY, Matthew ; DOWDING, Keith —
This article provides the first analysis of gendered promotion issues for cabinet ministers using most-similar systems design for three “Westminster-style” governments: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Using individual-level data and controlling for biographical, institutional, and country effects we find, in common with earlier literature, that women are more likely to be given less prestigious cabinet posts and be assigned to “feminine” portfolio. Using both sequence and event history analysis, we see the careers of men and women starkly diverge. We find that women are less likely to be promoted than men but find no relationship between prestigious portfolio and promotion. However, feminine portfolio assignments decrease the promotion prospects for women yet increase them for men. [R]
73.3180 ELKINS, Zachary S. —
The 200-year gestation and birth of the 27th Amendment to the US Constitution is nothing short of miraculous in its duration and improbable finish. The 27th Amendment represents a story of tenacity and personal vindication in the face of steep odds. This article recounts the event and its meaning through interviews with the protagonists. [R]
73.3181 ESTERLING, Kevin M. ; MINOZZI, William ; NEBLO, Michael A. —
Canonical theories of democratic representation envision legislators cultivating familiarity to enhance esteem among their constituents. Some scholars, however, argue that familiarity breeds contempt, which if true would undermine incentives for effective representation. Survey respondents who are unfamiliar with their legislator tend not to provide substantive answers to attitude questions, and so we are missing key evidence necessary to adjudicate this important debate. We solve this problem with a randomized field experiment that gave some constituents an opportunity to gain familiarity with their Member of Congress through an online Deliberative Town Hall. Relative to controls, respondents who interacted with their member reported higher esteem as a result of enhanced familiarity, a mediation effect supporting canonical theories of representation. [R, abr.]
73.3182 FIGUEROA HUENCHO, Verónica ; ARAYA ORELLANA, Juan Pablo —
Today is important that public bureaucracies represent the needs of those citizens considered diverse, being relevant the contribution of the Theory of Representative Bureaucracy. To ensure pluralism and legitimacy in public policies is necessary that public managers activate their sense of representation, making decisions on behalf of those citizens diverse. This article identifies and analyses the main factors that inhibit the emergence of an active representation in indigenous public managers from a Latin American case, considering three levels of analysis: individual, organizational and socio-political context. The main information arises from in-depth interviews applied to 25 key actors who have played a role at different stages in the indigenous policy process, along with press analysis and official documents. [R, abr.]
73.3183 FLEISCHER, Julia, et al. —
The reorganization of governments is crucial for parties to express their policy preferences once they reach office. Yet these activities are not confined to the direct aftermath of general elections or to wide-ranging structural reforms. Instead, governments reorganize and adjust their machinery of government all the time. This paper aims to assess these structural choices with a particular focus at the core of the state, comparing four Western European democracies (Germany, France, the Netherlands, and UK) from 1980 to 2013. Our empirical analysis shows that stronger shifts in cabinets’ ideological profiles in the short- and long-term as well as the units’ proximity to political executives yield significant effects. In contrast, Conservative governments, commonly regarded as key promoters of reorganizing governments, are not significant for the likelihood of structural change. [R, abr.]
73.3184 FONG, Christian —
Congressional rules can be violated by majority vote, but the application of those rules often leads to different outcomes than would prevail under direct majority rule. Why does Congress enact rules in the first place, and why would not a majority violate those rules whenever it disliked the outcomes they produced? Drawing from work in psychology, I argue legislators become angry and engage in socially costly retaliation when unfavorable outcomes are produced by discretionary authority but not when they are produced by the application of fixed rules. Consequently, rules sometimes inefficiently allocate congressional resources, but they also reduce costly conflict within the institution. I present a model that provides conditions under which the legislature prefers to enact and defer to rules and derive its empirical implications. [R]
73.3185 FUCHONG Liao —
Under what configuration of factors does administrative reform improve a business environment? What role does administrative burden play in government-business interactions? This article approaches these questions by examining the configuration of administrative reforms in the Chinese context and exploring administrative burden reduction through a new analytic framework. By analyzing provincial empirical data with the fsQCA method, we found that administrative reform could help improve a business environment by way of three pathways: the balance-developed path, the reform-oriented path, and the resource-driven path. Promoting a business environment is plural rather than singular. And, administrative burden reduction is the mechanism underlying this process. [R, abr.]
73.3186 FURNAS, Alexander C., et al. —
Campaign donors and corporate interests have greater access to Congress, and the legislative agenda and policy outcomes reflect their preferences. How this privileged access converts into influence remains unclear because petitioner-legislator interactions are unobserved. We report the results of an original survey experiment of 436 congressional staffers. The vignette manipulates a petitioner’s identity, the substance of the request, and the supporting evidence being offered. We test how likely staff are to take a meeting, to use the information being offered, and to recommend taking a position consistent with the request, as well as whether they perceive the request to be congruent with constituent preferences. Staffers are more likely to use information and to make legislative action recommendations when the information source is an ideologically aligned think tank. [R, abr.]
73.3187 GARDNER, Paul J. ; THROWER, Sharece —
Separation-of-powers studies of judicial decision-making largely focus on congressional influences. Less attention is given to the role of presidents. Accordingly, we develop a new theory of how presidents influence the Supreme Court’s review of statutes through potential legislative and administrative action. Using a data set of all federal laws passed between 1948 and 2015, we find, like others, that judicial review is less likely to occur when the court faces an ideologically hostile Congress. Unlike previous work, we reveal that such constraint is only effective when Congress is aligned with the president, who is less inclined to veto court-curbing legislation. We also find that the court’s distance to the president is constraining given threats of nonenforcement, but only when the law is salient, the president and public align, and the president exerts more control over implementation. [R, abr.]
73.3188 GARLICK, Alex —
A persistent question in the study of American federalism is if the states actually serve as “laboratories of democracy” for the country as a whole. I argue that political attention to policy areas can diffuse upwards, from state legislatures to Congress. National and state legislators share a party brand and can learn from policy debates in other levels. We should expect to see the diffusion of messaging legislation — bills introduced without the intention of becoming law. Using an original dataset of introduced bills in all 50 state legislatures in 22 policy areas since 1991 drawn from LexisNexis, I show a positive association between changes in the number of state legislative bills introduced in 12 policy areas and the number of Congressional bills introduced in the next session, which is taken as evidence of “bottomup” diffusion. [R, abr.]
73.3189 GLEASON, Shane A. ; SMART, EmiLee —
Attorneys’ ability to secure justice-votes is shaped by gender schemas, subconscious expectations which hold women should use more emotion than men. This poses few problems for male attorneys since men and attorneys are both expected to avoid emotion. But, women are placed in a double-bind with competing professional and personal expectations. We argue gender schemas are not static rather they change with the context of the Court. Introducing a new dataset inclusive of all oral arguments from 1979 to 2016, we utilize quantitative textual analysis and find gender schemas predict securing justice-votes as the Bar becomes more diverse and justices become more conservative. Our results raise normative concerns about female attorneys’ ability to substantively contribute to the Court’s case law. [R]
73.3190 GRAY, Thomas R. ; JENKINS, Jeffery A. —
Many recorded roll calls in Congress each year are votes on bills that have no chance of becoming law, or are purely symbolic, or are procedural without policy content. Yet models of voting and measurement models of member preferences make assumptions that vote choices are largely about utility derived from policies. We consider the possibility that votes plausibly connected to policy and votes not plausibly connected to policy may have different data-generating processes and rely on different utility functions. Substantively, similarity across different contexts for policy change implies an importance of messaging over policy. Methodologically, similarity across these contexts is necessary to avoid biasing estimates of member preferences. We find that members’ voting patterns are highly stable across contexts in which policy change is credible and not credible. [R, abr.]
73.3191 GRIMALDI, Selena —
Presidents’ informal powers remain under-investigated especially in Western European democracies. This gap might hamper the full understanding of how presidents ultimately behave and act. This article first aims at adopting a definition of presidents’ informal powers by distinguishing them from formal ones and from informal institutions. Second, it distinguishes among different kind of informal powers by focusing on why presidents use them. To this end, a typology based on the following two criteria is proposed: (1) the existence of formal powers at disposal of the president in a specific sphere and (2) the evaluation of public support each individual president thinks to enjoy should they act or refrain. Four types of informal powers can be derived from these dimensions: substitutive informal powers, parallel informal powers, risk-taking informal powers and subverting informal powers. [R]
73.3192 GRUBE, Dennis C. ; KILLICK, Anna —
The Chilcot report set out in detail its finding that the Blair Government had been prone to groupthink in its decision-making processes when leading Britain into the Iraq War. Subsequent British prime ministers have been in no hurry to change their style of governing in ways that might broaden decision-making circles and introduce the ‘challenge’ that Chilcot said had been lacking. This article draws on the literature on the psychology of group decision-making to examine the extent to which groupthink remains embedded in the processes of cabinet government in the UK. The article argues that the strongest driver of groupthink is the psychological disposition towards conflict of individual prime ministers. Drawing on interviews with ministers, civil servants and special advisers we suggest that the political authority of the prime minister interacts with their psychological predisposition towards debate to encourage groupthink, polythink or a more positive style of ‘vigilant’ decision-making. [R]
73.3193 HARDING, Mark S. ; SNOW, Dave —
This article provides the first exhaustive quantitative account of the Supreme Court of Canada’s use of the term “cooperative federalism.” We find that cooperative federalism has appeared in twenty-four Supreme Court decisions from 1976 to 2019, and that these decisions have been more likely to favor the federal government than the provinces. Moreover, the Court’s use of the term can be divided between two distinct periods. During the formative period (1976-2009), the Court used the term fairly consistently. From 2010 to 2019, the Court has entered a contested period characterized by split decisions in which the Court is divided over differing conceptions of federalism. As cooperative federalism has transformed from a relatively vague concept into a more substantive constitutional principle, fissures over the term’s application have developed. [R, abr.]
73.3194 HASSAN, Muhamad Sayuti ; HED, Norhafiza Mohd ; KAMILAN, Idzuafi Hadi —
The 14th General Election in Malaysia was a pivotal turning point for the progressive parliamentary reform agenda. Recognising that parliamentary reform in Malaysia is highly complex, parliament plays a vital role in monitoring the SDG implementation. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to analyse the roles of parliament in advancing the SDGs through its reform agenda. It will be of great significance in elucidating parliamentary reform and embedding the 2030 Agenda to advance the functioning of parliament. The analysis was conducted using a qualitative approach through analysing parliamentary documents. The paper proposes an independent select committee, re-introduce the Parliamentary Service Act, empower the opposition, amend Standing Orders, and institutionalise a Parliamentary Research Services. [R, abr.]
73.3195 HOUSTON, David ; FREEMAN, Patricia —
Public servants in the United States are more religious than their non-public service counterparts. The objective of this article is to determine whether this distinction holds cross-nationally. Using ISSP data from 37 nations, this research shows that the United States is not unique; government workers in most countries examined more frequently attended religious services than workers in the other sectors. The implications of this finding are examined. Religion is associated with several work-related attitudes and behaviors. Including public service motivation. Potential adverse effects include discrimination and increased conflict. [R]
73.3196 IBROCEVIC, Edin —
It is commonly assumed that state agencies legitimize themselves via outputs. This paper shows that in situations of organizational crisis, state agencies may adopt new policy areas symbolically to compensate for lost legitimacy. Drawing on an ethnography within the Bundesbank, internal documents, and insider interviews, I trace how the German Bundesbank adopted financial stability as a policy area to compensate for the loss of monetary policy and banking supervision in the early 2000s. By focusing on the relationship between internal organizational struggles over the Bundesbank’s identity and the boundary work it has to conduct to establish its new role, I show that the Bundesbank failed to shift the state-economy boundary post-crisis in its effort to regain its position as autonomous purveyor of macroeconomic governance. [R] [See Abstr. 73.3172]
73.3197 IHRIG, Jane ; WEINBACH, Gretchen ; WOLLA, Scott —
This article walks through the roles of banks and the Federal Reserve (the Fed) in the financial system and describes the key linkages between the two, using current concepts. Because many introductory economics textbooks are not up-to-date on key concepts, we highlight two crucial mistakes often taught in the classroom: (1) using an outdated description of Fed operations that rely on open market operations instead of focusing on the Fed’s administered interest rates, and (2) relying on the money multiplier equation, which broke down over time and is now no longer definable. We provide recommendations for the key themes that should be part of a current introductory economics curriculum and note many resources that are available for instructors seeking to update their materials. [R]
73.3198 JAIME-GODOY, Jhon ; NAVIA, Patricio —
The legislative success of a president is normally measured with respect to president-initiated bills. However, when they control the legislative agenda, presidents can also prioritize legislator-initiated bills and take credit for their passage. We contend that presidential legislative success should be measured with respect to both types of bills. With data on the 10301 bills introduced in Chile (1990-2018), we analyze the determinants of success of the 2640 presidential priority bills (PPB) — president-initiated bills and legislator-initiated bills that received a presidential priority motion to speed up debate. Reforms that strengthened the legislature have induced the executive to prioritize more legislator-initiated bills. PPB introduced in the first year of the term are more likely to pass while those introduced after the 2005 reforms and in the last year of the term are less likely to pass. [R, abr.]
73.3199 JOHNSON, Richard —
The US Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ended the federal right to an abortion, first pronounced in the 1973 case Roe v. Wade. Dobbs has immediate implications for American women, but it also exposes a growing hostility by the court to the doctrine of ‘substantive due process’ on which many other federal rights rely. This article argues that the court’s weakening of substantive due process is a direct challenge to the constitutional transformation wrought by the Fourteenth Amendment following the Civil War. The amendment asserted a national standard of fundamental rights, profoundly rebalancing power away from the states. Should the Supreme Court extend the logic of Dobbs, the national basis for many substantive due process rights will be removed. [R, abr.]
73.3200 JOHNSON, Richard ; MILLER, Lisa L. —
The US Senate is unique in the US and rare internationally for its total disregard of population differences among its representational units. To analyze malapportionment’s policy impact, we devised a hypothetical reapportionment scheme that more closely approximates state population but remains favorable to small states. We developed a formula to reweight senators’ roll-call votes to reflect better state population differences. We recalculated 804 key US Senate votes between 1961 and 2019 and found that state equality in the Senate systematically biases policy outcomes toward Republican preferences. [R]
73.3201 KREHBIEL, Jay —
Prominent among explanations for the creation and maintenance of effective judiciaries is the political insurance theory, which predicts higher levels of judicial independence where there is robust political competition. I consider the implications of political insurance theory for one of the most consequential organizational decisions for courts, the provision of panels or subsets of judges for rendering decisions. Identifying the ability of panels to provide political insurance, I contend that higher levels of political competition motivate the creation of panel systems in national high courts. An empirical analysis using an original dataset on the organic statutes of 106 high courts reveals a positive relationship between political competition and the use of panel systems, while further analysis shows that this relationship is limited to democracies. [R, abr.]
73.3202 KREWSON, Christopher N. —
Does the political nature of modern judicial confirmation hearings lead the public to think of the Supreme Court as a political body? Some political actors inevitably attack the institution during a confirmation hearing — which should lead to a decrease in support for it — but they attack the Court for acting extra-judicially. More generally, confirmation hearings send the American public an important and universal message: that the Supreme Court at least ought to be a legal institution. Based on original panel data closely surrounding the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, I find that confirmation hearings lead the public to place greater value on the non-political characteristics of a judge. [R, abr.]
73.3203 LIDINGTON, David —
The UK faces twin constitutional crises. The existence of the Union itself is now under stronger challenge than ever before, and many of the conventions and understandings which have underpinned the constitutional stability of the United Kingdom and the relationships between executive, Parliament and judiciary have been eroded or overthrown. There is no single, easy way to put things right. What is needed are reforms to the working of Parliament, the Civil Service and devolution, to restore greater balance and stability to our constitution. These should include measures to strengthen the ability of Parliament to hold the executive to account and a new Civil Service Act to provide for the independence, governance and accountability of the Civil Service. [R, abr.]
73.3204 LUCARDI, Adrián ; MICOZZI, Juan Pablo ; SKIGIN, Natán —
When (and why) do legislators quit their jobs? Previous answers to this question have focused on retirements. Looking at voluntary resignations instead, in this article we argue that leaving Congress to assume an elected (executive) office or a position in the (sub)national bureaucracy may be a career-advancing move motivated by progressive ambition. We document this claim with data from Argentina, where roughly 12% of elected deputies leave voluntarily before their term ends, but rarely become unemployed. Consistent with expectations, we show that resignations tend to follow instances of executive alternation at the (sub)national level, and are driven by legislators placed at the top of party lists as well as those elected in midterm years. [R]
73.3205 MACDONALD, Maggie ; RUSSELL, Annelise ; HUA, Whitney —
Congressional candidates regularly turn their frustration into posts on Facebook, fueling extreme partisanship and “echo-chamber” dialogue with their negative sentiment. In this research, we provide new evidence demonstrating the power of that negative sentiment to elicit more user engagement on Facebook across various metrics, illustrating how congressional candidates’ use of negativity corresponds with greater negativity in public responses. To fully comprehend the impact of these online political messages, we use a dictionary-based computational approach to catalog the tone of US House of Representatives candidates’ messages on Facebook and the user responses they elicit during the 2020 election. This research speaks to the power of elite rhetoric to shape political climates and pairs candidate strategies with user responses — contributing new insights into the mechanisms for voter engagement. [R]
73.3206 MADONNA, Anthony J. ; WILLIAMSON, Ryan D. —
While the US House and Senate differ in many significant ways, perhaps the most important is the ability of House leaders to control the legislative process through the usage of special rules, which establish the terms of debate on a bill and can limit the number and content of amendments allowed. House members of both the majority and minority party have complained about their recent increased usage. In contrast, the Senate lacks a comparable tool and scholars have reported sharp increases in the number of floor amendments being proposed. In this paper, we examine the increase in proposed floor amendments in the Senate; arguing that, in addition to an increased value from electoral position-taking, the procedures employed in the House influence the floor behavior of senators. [R, abr.]
73.3207 MARAS, Darija ; DANGUBIC, Miloš —
Formerly a solely government sphere, space is now an attractive frontier for private companies. As research and production costs were unreachable for private actors in the past, only government agencies such as NASA, could afford the development of their space program, with participation from private companies through contracting for design and manufacturing. Today, companies, such as Blue Origin and SpaceX, are privately developing different aspects of the space industry and making the topic of cooperation between government agencies and private companies for commercial services relevant. The article reviews the types of space companies, followed by a history of private space companies and the economic aspect of public-private cooperation, and finally the military-diplomatic effects of this cooperation. [R, abr.]
73.3208 MAUK, John A. —
Failure to recognize and adjust NSC analytical procedures is particularly problematic given growing security challenges, disturbing trends in America, and the fragile state of our Republic. President Joe Biden’s longawaited national security strategy fails to correct this and is predictably flawed in the same fundamental ways as past NSC efforts. The document voices broad, aspirational goals describing what the administration wants to achieve, but is very ambiguous on the fundamental purpose of a strategy, describing how their goals will be achieved. Specifically, the document’s lofty yet ambiguous language articulates more policy than strategy, reemphasizing a fundamental NSC misunderstanding of strategy. This disconnect has direct implications to successful implementation. Ambiguous goals mean defining intent and formulation of supporting objectives are left to departmental and interagency interpretation. [R, abr.]
73.3209 McTAGUE, John ; PEARSON-MERKOWITZ, Shanna —
This article examines the relationship between senators’ personal religious affiliations and their roll-call voting record on organized labor’s policy agenda. While an impressive body of literature now demonstrates clear connections between religion and representation in the U.S. Congress, fewer studies have linked religion to issues outside of the realm of cultural and moral policy. Based on a data set spanning 1980 through 2020, our findings show that evangelical Protestants are significantly the most opposed to organized labor’s legislative agenda, while Jewish senators are the most supportive. Other religions fall in between, depending on the decade. The findings imply that the reach of religion in Congress may run even deeper than is commonly understood. It extends beyond the culture wars to one of the most salient issue cleavages in the modern history of the American politics. [R]
73.3210 MILLER, Michael G. —
Growing evidence suggests that extreme candidates perform worse, in part because their party’s share of turnout declines. But does candidate ideology affect the decision of whether to abstain in a House race among voters who already turned out in the presidential election? I examine the relationship between candidates’ ideology and voter abstention in the House contest, reporting two main results. First, fewer voters abstain in elections featuring more ideologically polarized House candidates. A consideration of party effects reveals more nuance, however: In most cases, roll-off is lower when extreme candidates run, but the effect of an extreme Republican is substantially larger than that of an extreme Democrat. Further analysis suggests that decreased roll-off is probably due to extreme candidates mobilizing out-partisans. [R, abr.]
73.3211 MIYAZAKI, Hirokazu ; RILES, Annelise —
Social scientists have recently shown how markets are discursively constructed and have documented the role of central banks in these constructions. Although framed as a critique of the neoclassical economic view, this approach still operates within a narrow vision of the world as divided into distinct political, social and economic spheres. Our goal in this paper is to replace this view with an exchange-based understanding of agency and relationality. The puzzle of our paper is one that has captivated academics and practitioners alike: Why did the market respond so powerfully to the Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda’s quantitative easing in 2013? Our focus is on the proliferation within the market and wider society of ‘expectations’. A multiplicity of expectations, of different orders, different kinds, different scales, and different targets folded together to generate the efficacy of this event in central bank politics. [R] [See Abstr. 73.3172]
73.3212 NAPOLIO, Nicholas G. —
Do agencies implement the president’s particularistic goals uniformly? This paper clarifies the presidential particularism literature by explicitly considering the mechanism through which the president pursues their policy goals: executive agencies. The constellation of bureaucratic agencies responsible for allocating grants plays a key role in facilitating or frustrating presidential policy priorities. Using a dataset of 21 agencies over 14 years, I find that only agencies ideologically proximate to the president engage in particularism benefiting the president. I find no evidence that politicization influences agency implementation of particularism. Critically, the moderating effect of the bureaucracy on particularism only occurs for distributive programs over which agencies have discretion. When disbursing formula grants written by Congress but administered by the bureaucracy with little or no discretion, ideological distance between agencies and presidents has no effect on particularism. [R]
73.3213 NELSON, Matthew —
Competitive elections are essential for democratic accountability, yet most US House of Representatives elections are uncompetitive. Using districtlevel data from 1982 to 2018, I examine the relationship between redistricting institutions and election competition. I extend the work of Carson, Crespin, and Williamson (2014) by separating independent and political commissions and find that, relative to legislative redistricting, independent commissions are 2.25 times more likely to have competitive elections, and they decrease incumbent party wins by 52%. [R]
73.3214 OCHIENG’ OPALO, Ken —
How do legislative Committees in emerging democracies spend their time? Committees are organisational devices for expanding valuable legislative time. Existing works posit that Committee work reflects legislatures’ need to rationalise their processes and outputs, acquire specialised expertise and information, and improve members’ electoral prospects by maximising policy impact. However, not all legislatures have the capacity to significantly shape policy design, influence executive agency behaviour during implementation, or advance their members’ political careers. This paper argues that in legislatures that fall in the latter category, Committee work focuses on maximising the personal benefit of individual legislators, as opposed to being geared towards policy impact or electoral goals. [R, abr.]
73.3215 PINA E CUNHA, Miguel, et al. —
Bureaucracies, especially state bureaucracies, are typified as rational-legal organizations. We study how one such bureaucracy acted as neither rational nor legal but proved to be a space of exclusion. Ihor Homenuyk, a Ukrainian citizen, was ‘retained’ and then killed by the Portuguese foreigners and borders service. Police abuse has been much in the news in recent times, as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement. The issues are wider than those of racial injustice, however; they go to the nub of what it means to protect both the citizen and the honour of these organizations that engage with them in a way that is required to be legally rational. We use the case to open the black box of abuse and advance an explanation of how vicious dynamics happen. [R]
73.3216 SAGUIN, Kidjie ; MOURA PALOTTI, Pedro Lucas de —
The role of public managers in public administration is well established but what they do in relation to policymaking is largely unexamined. This paper examines the interactions with various policy actors and the activities performed by public managers in relation to their ability to influence policymaking. It uses data from a large-N survey of public managers in the federal government of Brazil. It finds four clusters of public managers’ policy work: external coordination, stakeholder management, internal administration, and accountability management. Further analysis shows that external policy work or the work that involves engaging with external stakeholders increases managerial influence. Internal administrative work is negatively associated with managerial influence while accountability management does not have any effect. [R]
73.3217 SAMOKHVALOV, Vsevolod ; STRELKOV, Alexander —
The article seeks to explain why the restructuring of the Ukrainian public administration — a key element in democracy promotion — has been patchy, in spite of EU’s substantial investment in the reform process. On the basis of analyzing EU and Ukrainian documents as well as processtracing and interviews with stakeholders, the paper highlights limitations of explaining the outcome of Ukrainian civil service reform exclusively through functional cooperation, structural factors or civil society mobilization. Drafting and passing new public administration legislation was impossible without civil society mobilization; high-level intergovernmental pressure or functional cooperation would not have been able to achieve this on their own. [R, abr.]
73.3218 SANINA, Anna ; BALASHOV, Aleksey ; RUBTCOVA, Mariia —
The article is devoted to the understanding of digital government transformation (DGT) as key to improving public administration and governance. The paper complements the debate regarding DGT rationale in public administration, providing theoretical and empirical analysis of its socio-economic impact and performance in governance. The empirical part is based on two regression analyses exploring indicators of DGT and public administration performance. The article concludes that (1) DGT is understood as innovation, but innovation in the public sector is also commonly associated with DGT, (2) this innovation helps to reshape the governance to match the society’s needs, (3) the policy-based approach to DGT is not enough explanation of its rationale and efficiency, and (4) there are certain improvements in the socio-economic sphere that are related to DGT and thus help one understand its meaning for the contemporary world. [R]
73.3219 SCHÜRMANN, Lennart ; STIER, Sebastian —
MPs are elected via two different tiers in mixed-member electoral systems — as winners of a seat in a constituency or as party candidates under proportional rules. While previous research has identified important consequences of this “mandate divide” in parliaments, questions remain how this institutional setup affects MPs’ political behavior in other arenas. Analyzing more than one million social media posts, this article investigates regional representation in the online communication of German MPs. The results show that MPs elected under a direct mandate refer approximately twice as often to their constituencies by using regionalized wording and geographic references than MPs elected under the proportional tier. The substantive findings provide new evidence for the benefits of mixed-member electoral systems for political representation while the methodological approach demonstrates the added value of social media data for analyzing the political behavior of elites. [R]
73.3220 SEBŐK, Miklós, et al. —
While the stability of legislation is one of the fundamental issues in political theory, comparative and quantitative analyses on the subject are in short supply in the political science literature. We propose a novel measurement scheme for legislative stability, and we also introduce a Legislative Stability Index (LSI) developed to this end. In terms of empirical evidence, our index relies on the number of legislative amendments adopted within the span of an electoral cycle, as well as the breadth of issues the amendments touch on. It is based on the frequency with which laws are amended after their adoption. Our approach uses a new law-amendment edge-type network for a new Hungarian legislative database. Amendment-type connections are discovered by an automated dictionary-based text mining method. We tested the applicability of our index in various regression models. [R, abr.]
73.3221 SERRA-SILVA, Sofia —
This article explores how parliaments in Europe are adopting digital media to promote public engagement with citizens. Drawing on a meta-analysis of previous similar studies and a content analysis of parliamentary websites, the article concludes that parliaments are selective in their public engagement activities, are still mainly using ICT to report parliamentary business, and are timidly embracing the opportunities brought on by ICT to actively engage citizens. [R, abr.]
73.3222 SHIRIKOV, Anton —
Scholarly attention to authoritarian legislatures is steadily growing, and recent research suggests that there is substantial lawmaking activity and deliberation within these bodies. Does such activity matter for legislators themselves? Can it improve their career prospects? I examine the career paths of Russian national legislators, using a newly collected data set on biographies and parliamentary performance of politicians who served in the Russian State Duma in 2004–2016. I find that members who apply more effort in legislative work are more likely to keep their parliamentary seats, but legislative effort does not increase the probability of executive appointment. Rather, legislators appear to be recruited into executive offices on the basis of previous work experience or personal ties. Parliamentary service, however, may still help legislators get ahead by making them more visible to government leadership. My research highlights that legislatures may be used by authoritarian governments to improve the management of political careers. [R]
73.3223 STEPHENS, Jennie C., et al. —
The US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) 2021 report on solar geoengineering research is a political intervention in global climate politics. Although the NASEM report explicitly acknowledges the risks of unilateral research without broad-based public participation and global governance, the report minimizes these concerns by recommending that the US act swiftly to establish a publicly funded national research program. By providing details for how the research program should be designed, the report contradicts its own recommendations for an inclusive and international process. By mainstreaming solar geoengineering, the report risks increasing the likelihood of international conflict and unilateral deployment, and further exacerbates delays in prioritizing other climate actions. Instead of expanding research on global manipulation of the earth’s climate, the United States, like other countries around the world, should commit to multilateral, coordinated efforts to phase out fossil fuels, advance global climate action, and invest in climate justice. [R]
73.3224 THATCHER, Mark ; STONE SWEET, Alec ; RANGONI, Bernardo —
Elected governments and states have delegated extensive powers to nonmajoritarian institutions (NMIs) such as independent central banks and regulatory agencies, courts, and international trade and investment organizations, which have become central actors in governance. But, far from having resolved the balance between political control and governing competence or removed certain issues from political debate, NMIs have faced challenges to their legitimacy by elected officials and sometimes attempts to reverse delegation through “de-delegation”. Our special issue studies the politicization of NMIs, and then whether, why and how it leads to dedelegation through reducing the formal powers of NMIs or increasing controls over them. In this article, we examine how to analyze de-delegation, how politicization of NMIs has developed, and how it has affected de-delegation. [R, abr.] [First of a series of articles on "Reversing delegation? The politicization of non-majoritarian institutions". See also Abstr. 73.3174, 3869, 3871, 3872, 3890, 3893]
73.3225 THIEMANN, Matthias —
Post-crisis, central banks were encouraged to intervene against the cyclical build up of systemic risks in the financial system, a mandate which contravened previous conceptions of the state-economy boundary. This paper traces how central bank economists forged an analytical apparatus that could guide and legitimize such central bank interventions, detailing how their work involved forging new connections between actors within the boundary zone between the academic and the bureaucratic fields. Acting as ‘economists in the wild’, I show how these actors were able to establish ‘stylized facts’ about the boom-and-bust cycles of financial markets. Holding a foot both within the academic and the bureaucratic fields, such boundary walkers skilfully leveraged central bank resources to enrol allies in the field of academic economics to decisively shift the discursive representation of finance as cyclical, in turn legitimating ambitious central bank interventions into the functioning of the economy. [R] [See Abstr. 73.3172]
73.3226 THROWER, Sharece —
Though the US presidency literature widely examines how Congress limits executive power, recent discourse argues the public is the more effective restraint. This paper develops a theory explaining when inter-institutional relations and public constraints influence the alteration of unilateral directives. Both are important for curbing substantial policy changes that likely provoke congressional and public response. Using data on when executive orders are amended and revoked between 1955 and 2013 to measure policy shifts, I find orders are less likely to be altered under presidents facing oppositional or cohesive congresses and high public disapproval. Both types of constraints are strongest for large policy changes, that is, revocations or targeting ideologically distant orders. [R, abr.]
73.3227 TRACHTMAN, Samuel —
Members of Congress represent geographically demarcated districts embedded in subnational policy environments. Drawing on policy feedback literature and literature on congressional representation, I argue that, because of this institutional configuration, subnational policy adoption can affect national representation. More specifically, policy reforms in the states they represent can increase pressures members face from organized groups and individuals in their constituencies to promote aligned federal policies. Empirically, I examine the effects of state marijuana legalization. The inferential design leverages differences across the states in statewide citizen initiative institutions, which provides exogenous variation in legalization. Instrumental variables analysis indicates legalization influenced pro-marijuana bill sponsorship and roll calls in the 116th Congress. The evidence points to growing influence of industry in legalizing states. [R, abr.]
73.3228 URLACHER, Brian R. —
In October 2021, the US Census Bureau piloted a new set of questions to operationalize sex and gender identity. This move follows a larger trend across the social sciences to rethink how surveys ask about sex and gender. Although this step is normatively positive, it complicates well-established protocols for weighting survey data. This article explores the likely pitfalls for survey researchers that accompany a shift in how the US Census Bureau measures gender. A preliminary empirical investigation of survey weighting indicates that using more inclusive gender categories will not negatively affect weighting metrics. Whereas the creation of a new set of US or even global best practices in measuring gender may be helpful to survey researchers, at this stage, there remain important empirical and ethical questions that are not well understood. [R]
73.3229 VAN OSCH, Daniëlle ; DE RUITER, Rik ; YESILKAGIT, Kutsal —
International cooperation in networks between national civil servants is often judged necessary to address global policy challenges. The civil servants cooperating with each other in these transgovernmental networks (TGNs), are often employed by national agencies that are not part of a ministry. It is therefore assumed in the literature that participating in a TGN renders account giving to a political forum difficult. We offer in this paper a state-centered perspective on the functioning of TGNs to assess whether a trade-off exists between accountability and the creation of technocratic driven networks. We develop a typology of TGNs and accountability, based on the function and the governance style of networks. In three out of four cases studied, variation in the institutional set-up influences which type of accountability is dominant. In one case we expected to find political accountability but observed that elected politicians did not hold civil servants in TGNs to account. [R]
73.3230 WANG Huanming ; CHEN Bin ; KOPPENJAN, Joop —
How public policies change incrementally over time remains understudied. This paper contributes to the studies of incremental policy change by integrating the theories of policy layering and learning into a theoretical framework of experimental governance (EG). Using a mixed research method, we apply this framework to process-tracing the changing trajectory of China’s central government infrastructure public-private partnership (PPP) policies from 1988 to 2017 by looking at evolving policy goals, policy measures, and policy co-issuing networks. Results suggest that China’s central government infrastructure PPP policy change follows a refined EG approach in which policies change incrementally in a layering pattern, primarily driven by learning. Findings provide a new account of incremental policy change. [R]
73.3231 WEINMANN, Philipp ; GROTZ, Florian —
In the 2017 Bundestag election, the recently reformed mixed-member proportional system (MMP) produced an enlarged parliament with 111 additional seats. As could happen in the future, the Bundestag may even increase in size, so the parliamentary parties committed themselves to a renewed reform in order to curb seat enlargements. This was nonetheless to be done without major changes of the existing MMP. The article analyzes the frontiers of such “minimally invasive” reform. Each modification of “personalized PR” that reliably maintains the Bundestag size would compromise one or other of its fundamental features: personalization or proportionality. We illustrate this by exploring the effects of various singlemember district (SMD) reforms that are widely considered the “least harmful” minimally invasive approach. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 73.3643]
73.3232 WOCHNER, Timo —
I examine how outside earnings relate to absence rates and parliamentary activities using new data for members of seven German state parliaments. The setting is compelling because reforms of disclosure requirements for outside earnings provide finer-grained data, tackling challenges of previous studies. The full sample results do not suggest that outside earnings were overall correlated with absence rates, speeches, interpellations, or group initiatives. I also examine heterogeneity across age cohorts, government and opposition parties, and modes of entry into parliament. MPs who entered parliament via party lists reduce their parliamentary activities the most when they receive higher outside earnings, suggesting that electoral accountability matters for the relationship between outside earnings and MPs’ efforts in parliament. [R, abr.]
73.3233 ZBIRAL, Robert ; PRINCEN, Sebastiaan ; SMEKAL, Hubert —
This article analyzes the extent to which EU directives allow for variation in domestic implementation. Such flexibility in implementation may be used to deal with heterogeneity among member states. Based on an original dataset of 164 directives adopted between 2006 and 2015, we find that the use of flexibility is associated more with efforts to accommodate differences between national policies (substantive use of discretion) than with attempts to facilitate the decision-making process in and between EU legislative institutions (strategic use of discretion). Although flexibility may be used to address some of the same concerns that drive differentiated integration (DI), the situations in which each is most likely to be used are distinct because they approach the divergences between member states differently. [R] [See Abstr. 73.3654]
73.3234 ZEITLIN, Jonathan ; RANGONI, Bernardo —
How far and under what conditions may experimentalist governance be an efficient and legitimate means of responding to diversity among EU member states, in comparison to both conventional uniform regulation and differentiated integration? By comparing two major domains where the challenge of integrating national diversity has arisen prominently, electricity and banking, we find that under conditions of high interdependence and high uncertainty, diachronic experimentalism may be a necessary condition for synchronic uniformity. Uniform rules can be accepted as efficient and legitimate by member states, provided that they are regularly revised based on implementation experience through deliberative review processes in which national officials themselves participate. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 73.3654]
(b) State, regional and local institutions/Institutions locales et régionales
73.3235 BARNETT, Neil, et al. —
This article explores the contested politics and interpretations of the new practices of municipal entrepreneurship across local government in the UK. Drawing on empirical evidence from six case studies of entrepreneurship in local councils, descriptions of income-generating projects by officers in thirty authorities, and a series of semi-structured interviews, we identify, name and characterise an emergent discourse of municipal entrepreneurship for the public purpose. We argue that this novel strand of discourse within the wider field of urban entrepreneurialism confers a degree of political agency to local authorities under austerity, while redescribing and attaching commercialism and entrepreneurship to the public good. In so doing, we challenge overly reductionist accounts of local state agency under austerity, and articulate and evaluate the potentials and obstacles for a progressive interventionism in this discursive space. [R]
73.3236 BELLO-GOMEZ, Ricardo A. ; AVELLANEDA, Claudia N. —
When considering taking over public projects, executives assess their perceived credit-claiming opportunities against potential blame attribution. The balance of these perceptions may shift under crisis. Meanwhile, the literature has mostly explored project uptake in delegation contexts when decisionmakers hold certain control powers over delegees, but not when such controls are absent. Amid one of the largest migrant crises worldwide, we conducted a survey experiment with 238 sitting Colombian mayors. We explore issue visibility, salience of project beneficiaries, and policy stage (formulation versus implementation) as drivers of mayors’ preferences for project uptake or cession to upper-level governments. Results reveal mayors are less likely to cede implementation to the national government when presented with a more visible project. Neither visibility nor beneficiaries’ salience affects mayoral preferences for project formulation on its own. However, mayors are less likely to delegate both formulation and implementation when beneficiaries are more salient to their constituents. [R]
73.3237 BLIDOOK, Kelly ; KOOP, Royce ; LUCAS, Jack —
The comparably small scope of municipal politics creates a unique setting within which elected officials act as representatives. Here, we explore how mayors and councillors in Canadian cities do so by addressing and explaining variation in their representational style and focus. Across three studies, we explore how these elected officials allocate their time and aspire to allocate their time between different representational activities and who they attempt to represent. We do so using data from a new survey of Canadian mayors and councillors. Canadian mayors and councillors tend to prioritise policy representation over other types of representation and aspire to spend further time on policy-related matters. Further, mayors and councillors, despite some variation, tend to prioritise representation of their cities as wholes. A number of institutional and individual-level factors help to explain variation in these responses. [R]
73.3238 BRUNNER, Eric J. ; SCHWEGMAN, David J. —
We examine how county governments respond to plausibly random increases in the local tax base generated by wind energy installations using data on the universe of US installations from 1995 through 2017. Wind energy installation led to large increases in county revenue and expenditures, with county governments using this revenue to prioritize spending on highways and hospitals. We also find that wind energy installation led to increases in county property values, suggesting that residents value the enhancements to local public services, property tax reductions, or other changes to local amenities that accompany wind energy installation. [R]
73.3239 BUTLER, Daniel M. ; SUTHERLAND, Joseph L. —
Previous work has shown that US voters are focused on national news and national issues and that US elections have become more nationalized. We explore whether state policy agendas have become more nationalized over time. We measure the state agenda by analyzing governors’ State of the State addresses from 1960 to 2016. Our analysis shows that state agendas have become more similar to each other over time and that state agendas are more similar to the national agenda (as laid out in the State of the Union address). The nationalization of US politics is not only affecting voters and elections; it is also seen in the nationalization of the policy agenda. [R]
73.3240 CAMPOMORI, Francesca ; CASULA, Mattia —
Innovative practices based on the involvement of citizens as co-producers of welfare local services have been increasingly adopted by the public sector to effectively tackle emerging social problems. Despite the development in the literature on this subject, recent studies still do not clearly indicate which are the challenges for the institutionalization of such practices. By applying a governance lens to the analysis of co-production of local public services, this article aims to contribute to bridging this gap through the empirical analysis of the childcare experience in four European cities. More in detail, it debates the concepts of co-production and innovation in public service delivery within the context of the different waves of public administration reforms; and it investigates how three different sets of conditions — namely, state support and capacity; organizational cultures which support innovation; and integration with facilitative technologies — integrate to facilitate or hinder the institutionalization of coproduction initiatives. The findings show that the enabling role of the state actor is a sine qua non to guarantee an institutionalization of these practices, particularly concerning the promotion of trust-building processes. [R, abr.]
73.3241 CAPONIO, Tiziana ; CLÉMENT, Anthony —
The article addresses the topic of cities’ trajectories of participation in Transnational City Networks on migration-related issues to identify factors and mechanisms of mobilisation. We present the results of a qualitative study on Turin (Italy) and Saint-Etienne (France). Both cities started to mobilise internationally in the 1990s on the initiative of entrepreneurial mayors, yet throughout the 2000s took opposite paths: in Turin, intense participation until 2014 was followed by partial dis-involvement and renewed activism since 2018; Saint-Etienne started to distance itself in 2008 and has not actively participated since then. We show how in the case of Turin, internationalisation has been driven by networks’ professionals engaging their personal relations in boundary-spanning work, establishing connections between public and non-public actors and between the local and international spheres. Such dynamics are absent in the case of Saint-Etienne, where mobilisation on migration has always been mayors-centred. [R] [See Abstr. 73.3262]
73.3242 CHUNG Ju Won ; CHOI Yujin —
This study investigates the factors that influence collaborative relationships between the central and local governments, drawing on the intergovernmental relations theory. Specifically, we examine the impacts of function allocation, personnel and financial relationships, administrative control, contact frequency, and collaborative attitude on intergovernmental collaboration using a comprehensive approach. To do so, this study utilizes a large volume of survey data on intergovernmental relationships collected by the Korean Institute of Public Administration. We found that collaborative attitude and level of satisfaction on fiscal relationships had positive impacts on intergovernmental collaboration across all levels of government, but the priority each level of government placed on other factors varied. Results and implications are discussed. [R]
73.3243 COLLINS, Brady ; KALEI DEL REY, Dana —
With the neighborhood seen as the ideal unit for participatory modes of governance, many cities in the US have established formal systems of neighborhood councils to increase civic participation, improve service delivery, and enhance democracy. Los Angeles boasts the most extensive neighborhood council system, which was founded in 1999, in the country. Through a qualitative study of two neighborhood councils in LA, this study investigates how neighborhood councils influence land use and policy decision-making. It finds that political capital, negotiation, and associational leverage are the most important tools for these councils in exerting influence. In doing so, the authors suggest that the oft-cited justifications for pursuing formalized modes of participatory urban governance do not take into consideration the sociopolitical dimensions of urban regimes, and suggest three propositions for future research on neighborhood governance systems. [R]
73.3244 DURMUS, Elif ; OOMEN, Barbara —
Local governments and transnational city networks (‘TCNs’) have been increasingly engaging with norm-generation in the traditionally state-centric international law and migration governance. We identified two modes of this engagement: participation in mainstream state-centric processes, and norm-generation within their own networks. Through four examples, his article identifies four functions of this jurisgenerative activity. Theexternal function is bringing local interests and expertise to influence international normative developments. The internal function is regulating local governments’ behaviour towards their own citizens, creating and upholding standards. Through a horizontal function, local governments recruit peers and rally around normative documents that offer a compact, crystallised expression of their interests. The integrating function enables local governments to combine fragmented issues of international law in unified, practical toolkits for their own use. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 73.3262]
73.3245 ESTRADA, Lorenzo ; BASTIDA, Francisco —
Using a sample composed of the 298 Honduran municipalities for the period 2006-2014, we evaluate the impact of budgetary, political and socioeconomic factors on the probability of mayors’ re-election. The findings show that mayors who have initiated greater municipal spending are more likely to be re-elected (a $100 increase in real per capita expenditure increases re-election chances by 19.01%). This finding partially supports both public choice theory and the theory of political budget cycles: voters prefer increased spending. Furthermore, mayors with greater transfers from higher levels of government have more chance of being re-elected. When it comes to political factors, progressive parties and mayors with a majority have more chance of being re-elected. [R]
73.3246 EVERS, David ; DIGNUM, Marloes ; HAMERS, David —
The Dutch national government likes to present itself as modern, open and having embraced the transition from government to governance (transformation thesis). In 2015, it launched its ‘Urban Agenda’ to harness the creative potential of cities to solve complex problems by means of city deals: voluntary agreements between municipalities, national ministries and private parties. City deals were supposed to operate according to the precepts of network governance and reap the benefits commonly associated with it. In 2017, research was carried out to investigate whether this was the case. Based on 44 in-depth structured interviews with a representative sample of participants, the city deals were found to exhibit network governance attributes to widely differing degrees. Moreover, little correlation was found between network governance attributes and positive outcomes. As such, this empirical investigation supports the recent critiques of the transformation thesis. [R]
73.3247 FELLOWS, Caillan ; DOLLERY, Brian ; MARQUES, Rui —
Size effects such as economies of scale and economies of scope can be utilised to achieve cost savings in local government systems. Numerous municipal reform policies in Australia and elsewhere have historically been premised on size effects. In this paper, we investigate whether an interaction effect exists between scale economies and scope economies in New South Wales local government using a 2011 sample of local councils. We estimate the effects of scale and specialisation on efficiency by way of a multiple regression, using a novel approach to measure specialisation. [R, abr.]
73.3248 FIELD, Luke —
In May 2019, three Irish local authorities ran plebiscites alongside their local elections: Cork City Council, Limerick City and County Council, and Waterford City and County Council. The plebiscites were run to judge support for Government proposals to introduce a reformed, directly-elected mayoral office. The results were, in some ways, the worst possible from a Government perspective: a mix. While voters in Limerick backed the plan by a slight majority, it was marginally rejected in both Cork and Waterford. Faced with disappointing a large group of voters no matter the course of action taken, the Government shelved the plans for Cork and Waterford indefinitely, though the plan for Limerick may proceed. Despite the 2019 rejections, the 2020 UCD Online Election Poll (INES 1) found indications of high levels of support for these reforms: four-in-five respondents agreed that mayors should be directly elected, which is a significantly higher proportion than the Yes vote in any of the three plebiscite areas. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 73.3430]
73.3249 FOUROT, Aude-Claire ; HEALY, Aisling ; FLAMANT, Anouk —
Transnational city networks (TCNs) bring together the characteristics of both supranationalisation and subnationalisation processes. In the context of an increased securitisation and criminalisation of borders, several networks have become more vocal — particularly with the advent of the socalled ‘refugee crisis’ — advocating for inclusive changes in terms of immigration, integration, human rights protection and refugee resettlement. How do French cities position themselves in this context of increased transnational activism? In comparing the cases of Lyon, Nantes and Strasbourg and their respective involvement in TCNs over the last fifteen years, our findings indicate that instead of becoming increasingly active, French cities within European networks have developed three distinct processes of disinvolvement, which we identify according to their ‘neglectful,’ ‘testing,’ and ‘competing’ characteristics. We highlight the fact that, in some cases, the activities undertaken by municipal or metropolitan governments in city networks do not automatically lead to transnational ‘activism.’ They may instead be understood as forms of ‘passivism.’ [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 73.3262]
73.3250 FOWLER, Luke ; FOX, Dalten —
The authors examine whether there are geographic biases in public administration research. They use a dataset of 557 research articles from top public administration journals in which specific state names appear in the title or abstract. Findings suggest that not only is a mass of public administration research concentrated in four states (Florida, California, New York, and Texas), but specific thematic topics and policy areas are associated with each of those states. In general, this suggests that authors need to consider if continuing these trends creates a blind spot for research bias in the field, where the collective understanding of a specific topic is disproportionately influenced by data from a single state. The broad implications are that how states serve as a research setting should be actively considered by authors. [R]
73.3251 GEBHARDT, Dirk ; GÜNTNER, Simon —
This article analyses how the transnational city network Eurocities engages in EU policies on migration and integration. Eurocities stands out from other cases through its autonomy and its clear objective to influence EU policies. To understand how the network operates as a policy entrepreneur, we analyse how cities and the Brussels-based secretariat collaborated in shaping the network’s positions on migration and asylum – from the launch of the work on this dossier in 2001 to the ‘Solidarity Cities’ campaign in 2016. During this period, Eurocities’ agenda developed, to some extent opportunistically, driven by institutional and thematic interests. We find that it had the highest impact during the refugee reception crisis, when the secretariat’s facilitation work, technical exchanges between city representatives and the activism of local politicians converged creating a common narrative on how to tackle the crisis from a city-centred angle. [R] [See Abstr. 73.3262]
73.3252 GRADUS, Raymond ; DIJKGRAAF, Elbert ; BUDDING, Tjerk —
Using data for Dutch municipal elections between 1998 and 2018, this paper finds two dominant trends: more political fragmentation and increasing electoral success of independent local parties. The relative size of local parties in the council rises from 25% in 1998 to 37% in 2018 and the relative share of their aldermen from 21% to 32%. When understanding the increasing share of local parties, the number of inhabitants, regional diversity, the share of elderly people and the election year dummies are important explanations. Looking at the changes after large decentralisations, also indications for a welfare hypothesis were found, if fixed effects are included. Following an empirical approach for AfD in local elections in German state of Lower Saxony, the impact of the anti-establishment Freedom Party on contesting local parties was analysed and this influence turned out to be small. This also gives an indication that Dutch local parties are becoming more established. [R]
73.3253 HASTINGS, Annette ; GANNON, Maria —
Whilst post-GFC austerity state retrenchment is widely studied, there is little research which focuses on the experiences of those who work at the front-line of austere public services. Drawing on qualitative evidence with front-line workers in four UK local authorities significantly impacted by austerity, this paper explores ‘coping mechanisms’ developed by workers to manage resource restriction. It argues that existing conceptualisations of coping mechanisms, such as either resistance or adaptation, are insufficient to understand how workers manage contemporary austerity. This paper proposes an additional mechanism — absorption — and explores analytically how workers cope with austerity in terms of resistance, adaptation and absorption. The paper concludes that front-line local government workers are coping with austerity cuts, in large part, by acting as ‘shock absorbers’ of state retrenchment. [R]
73.3254 HEIMANN, Christiane ; GLUNS, Danielle ; SCHAMMANN, Hannes —
Making use of qualitative data from case studies on two of the most important city networks in the field of migration and diversity in Germany, this contribution aims to deepen the understanding of city networks and their modes of operation. Based on a literature review covering the characteristics of city networks we propose an analytical framework that distinguishes between the dimensions of internal and external representation. This framework enables the analysis of the two cases: Deutscher Städtetag (Association of German Cities) and Kommunaler Qualitätszirkel zur Integrationspolitik (Municipal Quality Circle on Integration Policy). While the former is an umbrella organisation of larger cities, the latter can be described as an informal network of likeminded municipalities in the field of migration and diversity. In order to shed light on the interplay of structure, strategies and issues addressed by these networks (in the field of migration), we draw on the analysis of various documents as well as participant observation and face-to-face interviews. Concluding, we critically discuss the conventional characteristics of city networks and develop assumptions on how a network’s structure influences its outreach strategies. [R] [See Abstr. 73.3262]
73.3255 HIGUERA-MOLINA, Emilio J. de la, et al. —
This [examines] whether there is opportunistic behavior in local government decisions related to contracting out, public-private partnership (PPP) and/or public externalization. Analysis of the results obtained from applying a fixed effects panel data model to a sample of 2,274 Spanish municipalities supports the existence of asymmetric opportunistic behavior. Specifically, there is strong evidence that in pre-election years, there is less likelihood of contracting out and PPP decisions being approved, and a greater probability of public externalization taking place. In post-election years, an increase in capital spending is associated with a lower probability of contracting out and of PPP. An increase in current spending in pre-election years reduces the probability of decisions being taken on contracting out and PPP. These empirical results highlight the extent of opportunistic behavior in selecting management forms for the delivery of local government services. [R, abr.]
73.3256 HOFFMAN, Istvaìn —
The Visegraìd countries have similar administrative systems, therefore the major characteristics of their development policies are similar, but several differences can be observed. These similarities and differences are analysed by this paper. Poland has a regionalized system and a partially merged 1st tier municipal model. Therefore, local development has a significant role. Hungarian, Czech and Slovakian local development policies are limited by the fragmented spatial and municipal systems, however the Slovakian regions have a strong development characteristic. Centralization tendencies can be observed but their intensities are different. The Hungarian model is significantly impacted by the strong centralization of the last ten years. Similar structures evolved among the local development policies of the 1st tier municipalities: the detailed development policies can be observed among the larger, mainly urban municipalities, the local development policies of the smaller, rural municipalities are based on the personal cooperation and neighbourhood activities. [R, abr.]
73.3257 HUE Trinh Hoang Hong ; SUN Milan Tung-wen —
During the 21st century, socially equitable economic growth and sustainable human development are also goals that most countries over the world are pursuing, which emphasized the notion of “good governance”, or “sound governance”, or “democratic governance”. For Vietnam, how to promote and strengthen democratic governance must be one of the most crucial issues to achieve Sustainable Development Goals. This study is innovative as applying democratic governance to examine the influence of citizen participation on the performance of local governments in Vietnam with four different aspects: economic, institutional, political, and administrative. We employ Random Effect Model (REM) to test six hypotheses developed from the literature review. The secondary data come from four sources, including The Public Administration Performance Index, the Provincial Competitiveness Index, the Public Administration Reform Index, and the General Statistics Office of 63 provinces of Vietnam from 2012 to 2017. Some major findings: (1) citizen participation at the local level has mixed effects on institutional, administrative, and political performances; and has no significant effect on economic performance. [R, abr.]
73.3258 KANG Hyewon ; CHEN Gang —
Fiscal transparency is widely promoted as an effective means to achieve government accountability. Although scholars have explored various drivers of fiscal transparency, the relationship between a government’s financial condition and fiscal transparency has received less attention. This study explores this relationship based on signalling, blame-avoidance, and resource hypotheses. Presuming that following the best practices in financial reporting leads to a higher degree of fiscal transparency, this study examines how a local government’s financial condition is associated with the probability of having a certification that represents the quality of financial reporting. Using a sample of municipalities in California from 2003 to 2015, we find that municipalities with a higher debt level and a lower fund balance ratio are more likely to pursue fiscal transparency in financial reporting. [R]
73.3259 KIM Taegyoon, et al. —
Subnational governments in the US have taken the lead on many aspects of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Variation in government activity across states offers the opportunity to analyze responses in comparable settings. We study a common and informative activity among state officials — state legislators’ attention to the pandemic on Twitter. We find that legislators’ attention to the pandemic strongly correlates with the number of cases in the legislator’s state, the national count of new deaths, and the number of pandemic-related public policies passed within the legislator’s state. Furthermore, we find that the degree of responsiveness to pandemic indicators differs significantly across political parties, with Republicans exhibiting weaker responses, on average. Lastly, we find significant differences in the content of tweets about the pandemic by Democratic and Republican legislators. [R, abr.]
73.3260 KOUBA, Karel ; DOSEK, Tomas —
Municipal size affects local democracy through two mechanisms — participation and contestation. By drawing on national-level theories of democracy, this article identifies a necessary tradeoff: decreasing municipal size maximises the participatory dimension of local democracy but reduces the level of contestation, which is similarly crucial for a healthy democracy. Employing multilevel models that simultaneously account for national-level and local-level influences, this proposition is tested using a large dataset of over 9,000 municipalities in 15 Latin American countries with competitive local elections. The evidence supports the operation of such a tradeoff in a regional comparison, and single-country analyses suggest that it is present with varying force in most countries of the region. [R]
73.3261 KRAUSE, Rachel M. ; HAWKINS, Christopher V. ; PARK, Angela Y. S. —
Although many US municipalities have adopted climate protection and sustainability as explicit objectives, they are not among their traditional responsibilities. As a result, compared to policies focused around core functions, those related to sustainability may be at greater risk of retrenchment or change in times of crisis. This research examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted local governments’ sustainability efforts. Using data from a nation-wide survey, we examine the degree to which the pandemic has affected programmatic priorities, resources, and operations related to sustainability. Findings indicate that the pandemic hurt the implementation of sustainability initiatives in almost half of US cities. At the same time, many cities increased the priority of economic and social sustainability initiatives in response to the pandemic. [R, abr.]
73.3262 LACROIX, Thomas —
In recent years, one observes a surge in the number of city networks formed to address the welcoming and integration of immigrant populations. Drawing on a database of over sixty networks, the paper provides a global overview of their different types, scales and activities. Exploring the underlying factors explaining this worldwide expansion, it highlights two sets of congruent dynamics. This phenomenon has been elicited by the longue durée devolution to local authorities of powers and responsibilities pertaining to the management of immigrant populations on the one hand and the recent events of the 2015-2016 ‘migration crisis’ on the other. [R, abr.] [First article of a thematic issue on "City networks activism in the governance of immigration", introduced, pp. 1017-1026, by Anouk FLAMANT, Aude-Claire FOUROT and Aisling HEALY. See also Abstr. 73.3241, 3244, 3249, 3251, 3254, 3282]
73.3263 LANNING, Tess ; LAURENCE, Rachel —
While national government approaches to economic policy have focused on economic output as measured through GDP, many local government approaches see it as their primary economic responsibility to make the local economy work well for their residents — both in terms of quantity and quality of jobs, and of the provision of adequate local services, amenities and culture. In recent years a growing interventionist inclination has emerged in local government, seeking to shape the local economy in response to many waves of national economic crises. This article explores a range of such approaches and models, with deep-dive analysis of Barking and Dagenham, where both authors have worked. It draws out the lessons for national economic policy and strategy in shaping a more resilient, functional and prosperous everyday economy for people. [R] [See Abstr. 73.2889]
73.3264 LEE Moonsoo ; BAE Hyunhoe —
Previous studies have discussed the effects of electoral competition on corruption, but only a few explored the effects of political power shifts — the results of electoral competition. To fill the gap, this study tests hypotheses that three types of political power shifts (the shifts of individual local government heads, local government ruling party, and local council majority) reduce the corruption (overall, external, and internal), with a panel data set of 226 Korean local governments. The empirical study shows that only shifts in the local government head reduce internal corruption. The other dependent and independent variables do not have any significant relationships. This can be because of structural matters of Korean local politics such as strong mayor-weak council and the closed local elite networks. [R]
73.3265 LIPPARD, Cliff —
The Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations serves as a model for bringing policymakers and stakeholders together, more clearly defining public policy problems, and reaching consensus on how to address those problems. [R]
73.3266 McGING, Claire —
This article examines the development of caucuses by women councillors in Irish local government in the wake of the 2017 launch of a caucus for women members of the Oireachtas. The multi-method research offers a rich, gendered assessment of the factors which enable and constrain the establishment and operations of caucuses for women councillors and it places a particular focus on the first local caucuses established in the country (Limerick City and County [2019] and Dublin City [2020]). Local government in Ireland provides a unique opportunity to support such an investigation as partisanship is less significant there than it is at the national level. The research illuminates the circumstances under which we can expect locally elected women of different parties and ideologies to come together in order to cooperate. Enabling circumstances include a high level of interest and gender consciousness among women councillors – with new women identified as key players – and the presence of a caucus entrepreneur and a dedicated secretariat. [R, abr.]
73.3267 MEDEIROS-COSTA, Caio Ceìsar de —
The article analyzes how local corruption affects health indicators. Using a random sample of audited Brazilian municipal governments, an objective indicator of corruption was constructed and utilized as an explanatory variable for health indicators involving different dimensions of performance. Using instrumental variables and a series of controls to assure robustness of the results, a causal relationship was found between corruption and the performance of public services, confirming a chain reaction. The study confirms that additional resources are necessary, but not sufficient, to guarantee improvements in the performance of local government services in Brazil. [R]
73.3268 MISHRA, Santap Sanhari —
Being broader in dimensions, sound governance like good governance also strives to achieve citizens’ satisfaction and wellbeing. The street-level bureaucrats play a big role in achieving this task, as they are in direct contact with people in delivering services. In this context, can the transformational leadership quality of these street-level bureaucrats ensure better sound governance and citizens’ satisfaction? To know this, this survey uses responses from 230 health service users of Delhi Mohalla clinic of India. The results show that all the four dimensions of transformational leadership namely idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration have positive and significant relationship with sound governance and citizens’ satisfaction. [R]
73.3269 MITCHELL, David, et al. —
Implemented in over 200 North American local governments, prioritybased budgeting (PBB) reflects a contemporary attempt to systematically determine and implement desired budgetary reallocation. The study utilizes a lagged dependent variable alternative to difference in difference analysis to examine reallocation patterns for 32 early-adopting US cities before and after PBB implementation. The findings suggest that PBB fulfills its promise, as low-priority departmental budgetary allocations shrink by 2%–3% following PBB implementation. These PBB early adopters offer evidence that PBB can effectively transcend the marginal, transactional nature of incremental budgeting practices; however, its effectiveness must be weighed against potentially substantial costs of implementation. [R]
73.3270 POSEY, John Randall —
Prior research on regional differences in income levels has focused almost exclusively on market mechanisms that affect wages. This article argues that federal policy has had significant effects on changes in regional income inequality, and that these effects have rarely been analyzed. Since 1969, an increase in transfer payments and financial deregulation have increased the share of national income going to transfers and financial income. To show how these changes played out spatially, this article offers a decomposition of the difference in income growth between ten of the fastest-growing metropolitan regions and the United States as a whole, for the period 1969-2019. In most of the regions with the fastest income growth, financial and transfer income account for most of the difference in income growth rates between region and nation. Literature on regional income inequality would benefit from paying more attention to unearned income, and from engaging more fully with literature on financialization. [R]
73.3271 POWELL, James E., et al. —
Juneau, Alaska, kept COVID-19 deaths lower than in other similar jurisdictions. We argue that adaptive leadership — the early decisions and actions of Juneau’s leaders, effective communications, and emergent new collaborative structures — in the context of municipal ownership of key assets enabled Juneau’s success. The result of 61 interviews and follow-up research, this case study contributes a better understanding of which institutional design, communication, and collaborative factors mattered in responding to the pandemic. Adaptive leadership provides a better explanation for Juneau’s success than alternatives that focus on its isolation, home-rule status, and socio-economic structure. [R]
73.3272 RAFIQUE, Zain ; HABIB, Shahid ; ROSILAWATI, Yeni —
This paper was designed to explore the Legal, Political, and Administrative barriers to Citizen Participation in Local governance. The paper explored both the subjective factors that include the role of stakeholders (local administrators, local political representatives, Civil Society Organizations and Citizens) and objective factors such as legal and administrative basis of Citizen Participation. The paper presented evidence from an inquiry of the local government institutions in Pakistan by employing qualitative research methods. The findings divulged manifold problems that contributed to the ineptitude of Citizen Participation in current development lexicon. First, mechanisms of direct Citizen Participation are faulty. The legal framework on Citizen Participation has a very high margin of manipulation. The main policy documents and laws can be easily interpreted and accommodated to different development discourses. In addition, local government administration, the provincial government, and political elites are not ready to disseminate their powers. [R, abr.]
73.3273 RIOS, Vicente ; HORTAS-RICO, Miriam ; PASCUAL, Pedro —
This study investigates the spatial heterogeneity of the flypaper effect in a sample of 2,451 Spanish municipalities over the period 2003-2015 by means of Bayesian spatial panel data econometric techniques including municipal and time-period fixed effects. In particular, we analyse how differences in the degree of political competition and the local governments’ monitoring and enforcement effort in tax collection affect the size of the flypaper effect. Our results suggest that municipalities with higher tax collection efficiency and where local governments have more political strength exhibit a lower flypaper effect. [R]
73.3274 RODRÍGUEZ R., Roberto —
Studies of multi-level blame avoidance strategies generally assume that (1) governments prefer to shift responsibility to other levels and (2) an unclear distribution of formal responsibilities complicates blame allocation to a single actor. Considering the temporal location of such strategies — in anticipation or as a reaction to adverse events — the article tests these assumptions. Drawing on the case of air quality policy in Mexico City, the article uses causal process tracing to develop the mechanism leading to an anticipatory strategy and its unfolding. If the distribution of responsibilities on connected policy instruments is clear and major political actors share power, then government levels from different parties engage in a joint anticipatory strategy to avoid crisis and keep stability. The mechanism breakdown leads to reactive behaviour and policy change. Contextual changes redistributing power can destabilise the arrangements, leading to reactive blame games, fostering policy change. [R]
73.3275 RUČINSKÁ, Silvia, et al. —
Coping with crisis scenarios, explicitly highlighted during the Covid-19 pandemic, has shown the necessity to adapt and to find feasible solutions for state governments and self-government’s execution of tasks and responsibilities. In Slovak Republic’s conditions, the central government transferred the execution of several response activities onto municipalities and cities. In addition, citizens naturally expected and demanded solutions from the local self- government representations, which are seemed more closely to them. The aim of the paper is to identify and analyse bottom-up response activities from the municipalities and cities, strongly supported by the interest groups and associations of the municipalities and cities in the Slovak Republic during crisis situations, including the Covid-19 pandemic. Innovative solutions, stressing out the use of ICT, proposition of state-of-the-art approaches in providing services for the citizens will be highlighted. [R]
73.3276 SOUSA, Luís de ; CRUZ, Nuno F. da ; FERNANDES, Daniel —
Much of the literature on quality of democracy is case study-oriented and focused on nation states. Theoretical work and, in particular, comparative empirical research on the quality of local democracy are less advanced. This paper contributes to our understanding of how democracy works from below. It develops a conceptual framing and employs a multidimensional index of the quality of democracy across all 278 municipalities in mainland Portugal by focusing on procedural dimensions of democratic performance at three levels of legitimacy: input, throughput, and output. Regression analysis is then used as a preliminary test of the usefulness of these measures of quality of local democracy and to uncover associations between them and a range of political and socioeconomic factors. The results suggest that municipalities led by independent mayors, with larger populations and higher levels of multiculturalism are likelier to be associated with ‘better’ local democracy. [R]
73.3277 SPICER, Zachary ; LYONS, Joseph —
On September 1, 2020, the Township of Zorra, Ontario, Canada began a compressed work week pilot project designed to add flexibility for its employees in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Office-based employees who opted into the pilot were given either Monday or Friday off from work and then worked longer shifts for the four remaining days. This field note provides information on the program’s design and implementation and reports on the findings of pre- and post-pilot surveys designed to gauge attitudes of workers toward the compressed work week. Results indicate that the pilot was received positively and managed to avoid concerns typically associated with compressed work weeks, namely increased fatigue and staffing challenges. We also provide insight into how organizational scale can aid in the development and design of public sector workplace innovations. [R, abr.]
73.3278 TAYLOR, Kristin ; JESCHKE, Nathan ; ZARB, Stephanie —
Policy learning is an important part of the policy process that crosscuts multiple frameworks. However, policy learning is difficult to model and predict, and even less is known about the extent to which community characteristics affect policy learning. This article examines the contextual factors that promote and constrain policy learning in local government by identifying factors that promote learning. The central theory is that community characteristics, experience with a policy problem, and the type of subnational government will be important factors. We examine this in the context of primary data collected after Hurricane Harvey from open-ended interviews with 22 local government officials across Southeast Texas. Using a mixed methodology, we leverage the results of content analysis and Poisson regression. We find that cities with higher median incomes and larger populations are more likely to experience policy learning. Experience is not an important predictor of policy learning, suggesting possible maturation effects in the learning process. [R, abr.]
73.3279 TAYLOR-COLLINS, Emma ; DOWNE, James —
The 2008 Global Financial Crisis and subsequent austerity drive across Europe and North America has been particularly felt at a local government level. Wales presents a valuable case study through which to explore the impact of austerity on local government: it is a small country with a devolved government that is philosophically opposed to austerity, yet where cuts to local government have been drastic. Drawing on interviews with Welsh councils and key stakeholders, this paper explores three approaches councils have taken to managing austerity — efficiency, investment, and retrenchment — and finds that councils were already at a financial ‘tipping point’ before the pandemic. This paper concludes by considering the lessons that could be applied to the new challenge of recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. [R]
73.3280 VALENTIM, Vicente ; WIDMANN, Tobias —
Political rhetoric has important effects on the quality of democracy, but we know very little about what causes variation in the tone of the political debate. We investigate how radical-right success affects the way the remaining politicians discuss political issues. Using an original dictionary, we measure different positive and negative emotions in a newly collected dataset of speeches in German state parliaments. Taking advantage of variation in the timing of elections when radical-right politicians enter these parliaments, we find that politicians of other parties respond to radical-right success by using more positive, instead of negative, emotions. The analyses suggest that this finding may be the result of a strategy by the remaining politicians to distance themselves from radical-right discourse. [R, abr.]
73.3281 VOORBERG, William ; VERMEEREN, Brenda ; VAN BUUREN, Arwin —
This paper tests to what extent the dimensionof the CLEAR model can be used as reliable predictors of an individual’s decision to pursue council membership. By using the CLEAR framework as an extension of known frameworks such as self-determination theory and public service motivation that only focus on motivation, we develop a more comprehensive view of an individual’s decision to run for candidacy. Our research shows that people do not distinguish between the ‘can do’ and ‘like to’ dimensions. Rather, these two dimensions must be considered as three sub-dimensions in our research coined as amotivation, intrinsic motivation, and extrinsic motivation. Furthermore, in explaining why people tend to decide to run for council membership, only amotivation, intrinsic motivation and social support (enabled dimension) appeared to be reliable predictors. To further our analysis, we have analysed how these different dimensions differ across different societal groups. [R]
73.3282 WHITE, Bob W. —
Cities are increasingly important actors in the field of migration and integration policy, both in terms of the design and implementation of policy and via cities participation in larger international networks. In this text I will explore how one such network, the Council of Europe’s Intercultural Cities programme(ICC), has evolved over its ten year history, not only in terms of membership and geographical coverage, but also in terms of its attempts to respond to changes in global political sensibilities. The analysis presented her attempts to understand how the participation of cities in international networks can have an impact on local dynamics of governance and on public policy. The analysis of city-based inclusion networks makes it possible to see not only the shifting dynamics of power between cities and states, but also the impact of international networks on cities’ abilities to mobilise locally or subnationally. [R] [See Abstr. 73.3262]
73.3283 ZABLER, Steffen —
Strategies for limiting public debt remain a constant issue in public policy and are set to become more salient considering the current high levels of public spending in response to the COVID-19 crisis. One noteworthy strategy has been the introduction of institutional debt brakes. Although public debt at the local level does not necessarily follow the same rules and trends as debt at the national level, debt brakes at the local level are not nearly as comprehensively covered by both public and scholarly debate. The adoption of voluntary debt brakes in several German municipalities in the last decade offers intra-state variance to assess their fiscal effectiveness. A generalised synthetic control analysis is applied to mitigate for the special challenges of causal attribution and rare treatment cases. This approach provides a clear result: on average debt brakes in their present form are unable to limit debt levels in the examined municipalities. [R]