Abstract
(a) Central institutions /Institutions centrales
74.3310 ALEXANDER, Lukas K. ; JACOBS, Nicholas F. —
We detail how the rise of executive-centered partisanship has transformed president-Senate relations since 1993. We argue that the growing centrality of the president as a figurehead for their party has produced incentives for both co-partisans and out-partisans. We use a measure of presidential “success” to model variation over time and between individual senators. We show that rising presidential partisanship has increased the likelihood for out-partisans to oppose the president’s legislative position, even after controlling for other markers of partisan polarization. This relationship is strongest among electorally vulnerable out-partisans. In addition, our data suggest that Republican out-partisans asymmetrically oppose Democratic presidents. We conclude that the growing centrality of the presidency in party affairs has increasingly set a hard limit on bi-partisan cooperation on legislation and nominee confirmations in the Senate. [R, abr.]
74.3311 BALLES, Patrick ; MATTER, Ulrich ; STUTZER, Alois —
This paper examines the role of local TV market structure in US congressional politics, exploiting variation in the overlaps of political markets and TV markets. Local TV stations are hypothesized to report relatively more per U.S. House representative in less populous markets (where the number of House districts covered is smaller), leading to better-informed voters and more accountable representatives. We find that smaller markets are indeed associated with (1) higher coverage of representatives and (2) a higher level of voters’ knowledge about their representatives. However, (3) representatives of smaller and more congruent markets are only more likely to decide aligned with their constituents’ policy preferences in highly competitive districts. This evidence suggests that local political news coverage on TV serves as a complement rather than a substitute in holding members of the US Congress accountable. [R]
74.3312 BATSANI-NCUBE, Innocent —
Largely inspired by western donor good governance agenda, the current African parliaments literature has overlooked the significance of new parliament buildings that have been constructed by China and tends to place a premium on appraising the performance of parliaments and parliamentarians in executing their legislative, representation, oversight and constituency support. While understanding how parliaments perform is important and necessary, it does not sufficiently address all the ways in which these parliaments are establishing themselves as sustainable political institutions. By disregarding the new parliament buildings, the literature potentially undermines prospects of a wider understanding of the development of African parliamentary institutions. This article leverages the Chinese government-donated parliament buildings in Lesotho and Malawi to make a theoretical and comparative case for the utility of discussing the concept of African legislative institutionalisation through and in juxtaposition to, the parliamentary built environment. [R, abr.]
74.3313 BELARDINELLI, Paolo, et al. —
This randomized study explores the causal mechanisms linking contingent pay to individual performance on a series of tasks mimicking real public management activities. Employing a parallel encouragement design in a laboratory setting, we disentangle the overall, direct, and indirect performance effects of perceived fairness as well as a pay scheme that reproduces the merit system provisions adopted by the Italian government. The overall performance effect of that contingent pay scheme turned out to be insignificant when averaged across the four experimental tasks. However, a significant pay-for-performance effect was detected for the most routine task. Moreover, we observed heterogeneity in the treatment effect depending on the participants’ relative positioning in the performance ranking. Overall, the data do not provide support for a mediation model linking contingent pay-for-performance through perceived fairness. [R]
74.3314 BISOGNO, Marco, et al. —
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a challenge that many public administrations face in promoting sustainable growth. Local governments, as the governmental tier closest to citizens, should deliberate upon strategies and actions attuned to achieving SDGs for the benefit of their communities. Through a comparative analysis of Italian and Spanish local governments, this research investigates the conditions that can support the achievement of SDGs. The results depict the political and financial levers that can stimulate politicians and policymakers in designing appropriate strategies and action plans towards the achievement of SDGs, while opening the path for further research that can support public administrations in their efforts at achieving sustainable growth. [R]
74.3315 BLOCHER, Joseph ; CHARLES, Jacob D. ; MILLER, Darrell A. H. —
Academic work is increasingly important to court rulings on the Second Amendment and firearms law more generally. This article highlights two recent trends in social science research that supplement the traditional focus on guns and physical harm. The first strand of research focuses on the changing ways that gun owners connect with firearms, with personal security, status, identity, and cultural markers being key reasons people offer for possessing firearms. The second strand focuses on broadening our understanding of the impact of guns on the public sphere beyond just physical safety. This research surfaces the ways that guns can create fear, intimidation, and social trauma; deter civic participation and the exercise of constitutional rights; and further entrench racial inequality. [R]
74.3316 BOCHEL, Hugh M. —
The introduction of evidence sessions for House of Commons public bill committees in 2007, including oral evidence from witnesses, was widely seen as a potentially significant improvement in informing scrutiny of legislation. Drawing on interviews with officials and witnesses, and on data gathered from Hansard for the 2017-2019 session, this article examines the selection and some of the characteristics of witnesses, witnesses’ views of the process and how oral evidence is used in subsequent scrutiny of the legislation. While recognising that oral evidence does make an important contribution to scrutiny, the article notes that both the process as it currently exists, and the inevitable influence of political factors, mean that the impact of oral evidence on legislation remains very limited. [R]
74.3317 BONIFATI, Lidia —
Constitutional design – Constitutional degradation – Power sharing – The rule of law – Constitutionalism – Constitution making – Constitutional transition – Divided societies – Role of internal diversity – Bosnia-Herzegovina – Inherent degradation – Dynamic degradation – European Court of Human Rights — Sejdić and Finci — Constitutional Court of Bosnia-Herzegovina – Compliance issues with court judgments – Repression of the public sphere – Electoral discrimination of national minorities – High Representative – Lack of local ownership. [R]
74.3318 BOYD, Christina L., et al. —
Within the politically charged immigration system in the United States, Congress mandates the entry of in absentia removal orders against immigrants who fail to appear for immigration court hearings. Statutory guidance similarly constrains the ability of appellate courts to overturn those in absentia orders. In this article, we examine how federal circuit court judges make decisions in the review of in absentia orders when faced with discretion-revoking congressional statutory language pitted against a highly politicized area of law where policy preferences sit at the forefront of judges’ minds. Using an original dataset of US Courts of Appeals cases decided from 2001 to 2020, we find that pro-immigrant decisions are rare, as intended by the governing statute. We also find, however, that judicial policy preferences predict the degree to which federal judges support the petitioning immigrant through statutory factors related to the adequacy of government notice and the presence of exceptional circumstances to justify nonappearance. [R]
74.3319 BROMLEY-TRUJILLO, Rebecca ; NOLETTE, Paul —
American federalism in 2022-2023 saw a continued escalation of the culture wars, with persistent battles fought between the heavily polarized political parties, different levels of government (including federal versus state governments and state versus local governments), and between states and private business. Policy conflicts have centered on a variety of issues related to reproductive rights, K-12 education, and gun policy, among others. A central theme has been the intensification of cultural disputes as a policymaking focus, particularly at the state level. [R, abr.]
74.3320 CHIOU Fang-Yi ; KLINGLER, Jonathan —
As one of the most powerful executive actions, rulemaking by US federal agencies involves all three branches and governs many issue areas, but some rules are routine and others are highly consequential. We build a new rule universe composed of nearly forty-thousand considered rules listed in the Unified Agenda since Spring 1995 and employ an item response model with 15 raters to generate integrated estimates of rule significance for each of the rules. To showcase the usefulness of this new measure, we propose and test competing models on agency productivity, finding that the president and Congress influence rule promulgation in a nuanced way. The president is dominant when agencies consider moderately noteworthy rules, and Congress has more influence over the most significant regulations, suggesting that the branches’ influences vary with the consequential nature of the issues considered. [R]
74.3321 DAVIS, Brandon R. —
Although scholarship analyzing US incarceration policy generally focuses on the federal government and federal criminal justice laws, state and local governments are principally responsible for the criminal justice strategy and tactics utilized within their jurisdictions, and that determines the size of state correctional populations. The overwhelming majority of the total U.S. prison population is under the jurisdiction of state correctional authorities. Since 2010, forty-six states have reduced their prison populations, but the efficacy of these reforms and interventions has varied considerably. Utilizing a series of case studies, I analyze a range of state approaches to reducing the prison population and consider the effectiveness of these policies. The most effective approaches have focused on reducing prison admissions, creating or expanding early release opportunities, and decreasing readmission of conditional release violators. [R]
74.3322 DEFACQZ, Samuel ; DUPUY, Claire —
Recent scholarship has focused on how coordination mechanisms are implemented by public sector organizations, thereby paying attention to coordination as a process. This article studies the coordination process that resulted in the implementation of the interministerial financial information system of the French central state—named Chorus. Chorus is a case of an unlikely coordination process rolled out in the non-conducive context of the French Napoleonic Administration. Chorus aimed at connecting all ministries’ administrative services to a shared information system, while ministries were previously using their own systems and applications. Based on the literature on mechanisms of coordination, and focusing on the role of existing institutions and the actors involved in the coordination process, the analysis has two main results. First, AIFE — “Agence pour l’informatique financière de l’État”, the agency in charge of the implementation of Chorus — steered the process by developing a stepwise networkbased interministerial strategy. Second, the coordination steered by AIFE resulted in a transformative change of the French state’s financial and accounting structures through a layering process of change. Thereby, the article contributes to the empirical analysis of public administrations’ recent changes toward increased coordination at the central level by studying recent reforms in France and their outcomes. [R]
74.3323 DEMAREST, Leila ; LANGER, Arnim —
Since independence, Nigeria has adopted federalism to manage the country’s deep ethno-regional divisions, but federalism has not averted instability and return to military rule in the past. This highlights the need for additional factors and mechanisms to secure and stabilize civilian rule in Nigeria. The country’s ethnic party ban ensures that parties in power have a broad basis across the territory. Theoretically, these “integrated” parties are often argued to foster intergroup compromise and political stability. Yet in our case study of intergroup relations in Nigeria’s National Assembly, we demonstrate that the country’s broad-based parties do not play a strong role in organizing intergroup cooperation. Despite this, the Assembly has not experienced substantial policy gridlock. [R, abr.]
74.3324 DESALEGN, Ambaw ; SOLOMON, Negussie —
Equity concerns the distribution of resources and is inevitably linked with concepts of fairness and social justice. What are the decision-making processes for fair allocation of infrastructure resources and its effect on social justice in Ethiopia? The article uses structural equation modeling-partial least square software for analysis. Therefore, the article finds that there is infrastructure inequity and social injustice owing to a lack of democratic decision-making and accountability in Ethiopia. Moreover, the Ethiopian government lacks the tools and institutions that provide the foundation for good decision-making processes and democratic accountability. There also exists a low level of social cohesion in Ethiopia today. Hence, the government needs a democratic decision-making process that would bring diverse interests together and solve the lack of intergovernmental relations (IGRs) as well as the lack of democratic accountability to improve citizens’ justice in the infrastructure sector in Ethiopia. As a result, it requires a focus on regional governments’ needs, reacting to their concerns, and keeping them justified on the equitable distribution of infrastructure across regional states in the country. This will also help to save Ethiopia from bloody conflicts. [R]
74.3325 DICHIO, Michael A. ; SINGER, Phillip —
This article explains a rising trend in American politics: the increasingly prominent role the state attorneys general (AGs) play in challenging federal policies. It focuses on one particularly important case — Republican efforts to overturn the Affordable Care Act in Texas v. California. We consider how state AGs and solicitors general (SGs) drive policy efforts through litigation and the factors that contribute to their participation. We find, first, that although members of the out-of-power party in Washington are the ones who typically bring state lawsuits, the Texas litigation demonstrates that these lawsuits are also a vehicle by which members of the party in power try to achieve goals that are otherwise unattainable through the legislative process. Second, Republican AGs submerge partisan arguments in “constitution-talk” with the aim of achieving a policy goal that was defeated democratically. [R, abr.]
74.3326 DISHMAN, Elysa M. —
State attorney general (AG) lawsuits have led to judicial limitations on federal agencies’ powers, including the Supreme Court’s formal adoption of the major questions doctrine in the West Virginia v. EPA case in 2022. These limitations empower states to further challenge federal agencies and shape national policy while correspondingly weakening agencies’ ability to defend such lawsuits and aggressively regulate important issues of the day. AG lawsuits against the Biden administration regularly asserted the major questions doctrine leading up to the West Virginia decision, setting the stage for the Court’s adoption of the doctrine, and states continue to rely on the doctrine in the aftermath of the opinion. The major questions doctrine has important implications for relationships between the federal government and the states and among the states, exposing patterns of cooperation and conflict. [R, abr.]
74.3327 ELLIAS, Jared A. —
In 1978, Congress created a new federal bankruptcy law that has since become a key part of the American capital markets. I examine how large companies and their investors contract to make bankruptcy more or less likely, how distressed firms negotiate with creditors outside of bankruptcy, and how companies plan for a Chapter 11 filing and navigate the bankruptcy system. I also survey the strategic moves, ranging from litigation to financing, that activist investors deploy to improve their bargaining power and earn higher returns. The American bankruptcy system is evolving constantly, and prevailing accounts of bankruptcy law quickly become stale, creating a constant need for new empirical research to establish a foundation for policy making. [R]
74.3328 FARRINGTON, Conor —
By long-standing convention, the prime minister sits in the House of Commons. This article adopts the perspective of a thought experiment in which the premier moves to the House of Lords instead, exploring the potential advantages and drawbacks of this scenario from multiple perspectives. This move would entail shifts in the prime minister’s roles and responsibilities, with knock-on implications for the day-to-day functioning of the upper house. While a red-bench premier would be less connected with the quotidian dynamics of electoral politics, they could also take a more strategic, long-term view of politics and engage more actively in deliberative debate in a revitalised second chamber. The shift would also prompt significant debates surrounding non-elective aspects of the constitution, including the House of Lords, raising important questions about legitimacy and representation. While acknowledging the unlikelihood of such a change, the article argues nonetheless that — as with all thought experiments — taking the possibility seriously can stimulate deeper thinking and challenge conventional assumptions about constitutional arrangements. [R]
74.3329 FEULNER, Frank —
This paper analyses the legislative activity conducted by the Parliament of the Republic of Fiji during the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2021. Exemplified by the characteristics of Pacific Island Countries, like small populations, remoteness, infrastructure challenges, cultural norms, and a susceptibility to natural disasters, the Parliament of Fiji has faced specific challenges to its administration and legislative activities. The paper describes the impact of the crisis on parliamentary operations like parliamentary sessions and committee meetings, resulting in an expedited rollout and usage of digital tools for online participation and communication. Moreover, it highlights the decreased influence of parliament on policymaking throughout the crisis, diminished executive oversight, and reduced public engagement. Although no state of emergency was declared in Fiji to deal with the crisis, the declaration of a natural disaster during the early stage of the pandemic allowed the government to impose several restrictive measures with little parliament debate and scrutiny. Subsequent lawmaking in non-pandemic- related policy areas occurred in an expedited fashion, resulting in a reduced consultation and deliberation. Similarly, the frequency and intensity of oversight instruments by parliament declined. With debate of pandemic measures and assistance mainly relegated to the annual budget discussion, no specific parliamentary investigating committee was set up to scrutinize the national response to COVID-19. [R, abr.]
74.3330 FLEMING, Thomas G. ; JAMES, Lisa —
The UK parliament’s role in the Brexit process has been closely scrutinised and fiercely contested. This article analyses the extent and nature of parliamentary influence on Brexit-related legislation between 2017 and 2019. Using new data on the legislative passage of 13 different bills, including over 3000 proposed amendments, we measure the prominence of three different kinds of parliamentary influence, and compare this to findings from earlier periods. We show that some Brexit bills had a fairly typical parliamentary experience, with very few successful non-government amendments but numerous government concessions. However, a dramatic change from earlier periods was the large number of Brexit-related bills that were simply paused once the government encountered parliamentary difficulties. Parliament’s influence over Brexit legislation in this period therefore showed elements of both continuity and change. [R, abr.]
74.3331 FRATEUR, Jakob, et al. —
Federal systems tend to have two venues of representation to ensure that both the people as a whole and the constituent units are represented at the federal level. While this double representation is put forward as a basic (normative) feature of federal systems, little to no empirical research has been conducted on this issue. This contribution therefore studies the representation of the people as a whole and of the constituent units in the Belgian House of Representatives by means of a representative claims analysis of 4,757 oral parliamentary questions. As federal systems tend to be dynamic, the analysis is based on six periods of federal reform through which Belgium decentralized. We argue that processes of federalization should address the adequate representation of both the constituent units and the people. [R, abr.]
74.3332 GARDNER, Tanya ; RUSSELL, Annelise —
Senators spent the Spring of 2020 responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the tone and framing used to engage a digital constituency was largely dependent on partisan alignment with President Trump. We use Senators’ Twitter activity during the outbreak to offer new insight into the mechanisms of lawmakers’ party polarizing trends in congressional communication. We show that divisions stemmed from senators’ sentiment and framing — with Republicans more likely to incorporate positivity into forwardlooking steps for economic recovery and Democrats preferring a negative tone to address government failings and inadequate response by President Trump. This article extends the literature on polarizing rhetoric in the Senate by using the pandemic response to illustrate how the dynamics of senators’ digital rhetoric, even during a moment of shared crisis, continue to fuel partisanship and polarizing narratives. [R, abr.]
74.3333 GEDDES, Marc —
This article contributes to debates about how Covid-19 became a dilemma of procedure inside the UK Parliament. Specifically, the article attempts to give an answer to the puzzle of why in-person proceedings and traditional approaches to representation were more important than adopting new and different ways to support representatives through, digital forms of participation. In order to answer this question, the article outlines and develops a theoretical argument, namely an interpretive approach to political science, and identifies a conceptual framework of beliefs, traditions and dilemmas. The article’s main focus is to develop this theory and apply it, in particular the concept of dilemma, in order to understand Covid-19 in Parliament. The article argues that the clash of beliefs that resulted from Covid-19 was ultimately won over through conservative webs of belief that relied on embedded and historical parliamentary practices and the power relations of MPs. This article therefore offers a conceptual contribution, specifically the importance of ideas and dilemmas to understanding politics, and an empirical contribution, by examining the case study of Covid-19 in the UK. [R]
74.3334 GOODMAN, Christopher B. ; HATCH, Megan E. —
Despite being popular with the public and preventing racial and economic inequality, states often preempt their local governments’ ability to adopt workers’ rights laws. We test several competing theories of preemption (ideology, political institutions, interest group involvement, demographics, and policy diffusion) using a time-series, cross-sectional approach. Using data on state legislative activity from 1993 to 2018, we find that increasing legislative conservatism, and more unified political control of the state government, regardless of party, are associated with a higher risk of preempting local workers’ rights laws, all else equal. Our focus on legislative ideology, a more precise measure than party control at the subnational level, as the nexus of preemption activity helps clarify prior contradictory results in the literature. [R, abr.]
74.3335 GRAHAM, Hannah —
This article provides a content analysis of Nicola Sturgeon’s first ministerial diaries in the final two years of her leadership (April 2021-March 2023). As first minister, to whom and what did she give her time — which issues and interest groups had access? Which didn’t? Or, who and what may be missing? An audience with a national leader can be indicative of priorities and potential for influence — as can its absence. The lens of chronopolitics — the politics of time — is used here to consider twenty-four months of diaries, with 681 entries. Some key social and political issues in Scotland were kept away from the FM’s meetings and delegated to other ministers to oversee, whereas other issues appear to be signature priorities, including climate and the environment, economy and finance, culture, and health and Covid-19. [R] [See Abstr. 74.3754]
74.3336 HAJJAR, Lisa —
The military detention facility at the Guantánamo Bay naval base is the most enduring manifestation of the US “war on terror.” It is also materially and symbolically central to US torture, war crimes, and other egregious violations of law in the post-9/11 era. Since the first detainees arrived in 2002, Guantánamo has been the subject of controversy and debate, as well as a key setting for legal challenges to government policies. This article traces the legacy of the prison and the military commissions across four administrations. It demonstrates that the lack of a common understanding or shared narrative about what Guantánamo means or has meant is a product of entrenched partisanship that characterizes contemporary US politics more broadly. Guantánamo’s confounding legacy reflects the lack of a national consensus about the role of laws and courts as guarantors of even the most basic rights. [R]
74.3337 HASSAN, Gerry —
The establishment of the Scottish Parliament created new institutions and a political environment which has had lasting implications for Scottish and UK politics, including furthering the rise of the Scottish National Party and the independence question. One central element of this new terrain has been the emergence of the Scottish government and the post of First Minister of Scotland. The latter, the most prominent devolved political position in Scotland, has so far been subjected to little detailed analysis. Drawing on a wide array of material, research and interviews with key individuals, this article explores four aspects: first, the nature of the office of first minister; second, how it has evolved over the past quarter century; third, what various post-holders have brought to the role; and finally, how they have been influenced by wider contextual factors such as the changing dynamics of party support, electoral competition and intra-party considerations. The article offers some provisional conclusions about the changing nature of political leadership and the interplay between institutional factors, public opinion and the role of the individual political actors in the twenty-first century, which has relevance not just for Scotland but further afield. [R] [See Abstr. 74.3754]
74.3338 HEYMANN, Orlaith, et al. —
Previous research has assessed the impact of state regulations on abortion clinics and patients, but how bureaucrats implement them is less understood and is increasingly important as states arbitrate abortion regulation. The authors conducted a case study of how bureaucrats use discretion to implement state regulations on abortion, focusing on two abortion facilities in southwest Ohio from 2010 to 2022. Ohio abortion facilities are required to obtain a written transfer agreement, despite it offering no demonstrable health or safety benefits. The authors find that state requirements for obtaining variances — a process that allows abortion facilities to operate without a written transfer agreement — have become exceedingly difficult to comply with. The authors show how state statutes and administrative law have enabled bureaucrats to wield unlimited discretion and enforce arbitrary requirements. This unlimited bureaucratic discretion and accompanying administrative burden exacerbated clinic instability and threatened abortion availability in southwest Ohio for almost a decade. As implementation and interpretation of abortion policy is increasingly left to state bureaucrats and civil servants following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, how bureaucrats use discretion will influence clinic stability and abortion availability. The authors posit that unlimited bureaucratic discretion may exert greater influence on abortion availability across the nation as states scramble to clarify and implement policies after Dobbs. [R] [See Abstr. 74.4118]
74.3339 IE, Kenny William —
Prime ministers in parliamentary systems confront a challenging agency problem in leading cabinets toward cross-government priorities: ministers tend to prioritize departmental interests and may lack incentives and/or information enabling co-ordinated effort. In Canada, a novel mechanism for both increasing incentives and information provision has been developed in recent decades: the mandate letter. These letters are issued by Canadian prime ministers to their ministers, reinforcing government priorities, each minister’s responsibilities, and specific policy expectations. This article examines mandate letters as mechanisms inducing interministerial policy co-ordination, focusing on the 2015-2021 period, under Justin Trudeau, as the first Canadian prime minister to release these letters publicly. Using topic modelling and social network analysis, I find that Trudeau has increasingly sought to strengthen ministerial co-ordination and ministers’ focus on crosscutting policy priorities. This case study contributes to our understanding of intraexecutive co-ordination and the agency problem in cabinet government. [R]
74.3340 JENKINS, Jeffery A. ; MONROE, Nathan W. ; PROVINS, Tessa —
The literature on congressional decision-making has largely ignored the influence of the minority party in the legislative process. This follows from the widely held belief that the majority party dominates the agenda-setting process. Though the minority party rarely achieves major policy success in Congress, we argue that the minority has significantly more influence over the legislative agenda than is commonly believed. We posit that, under some conditions, the minority has enough bargaining leverage to get floor votes on their proposals, in the form of both amendments and bills. We test our theoretical expectations with a novel design utilizing whip count data from the House and show that when a whip count on a bill occurs, the likelihood of a minority amendment disappointment and a majority amendment roll increases, respectively. This suggests that the more leverage the minority party has, the more we see their legislative proposals on the floor. [R]
74.3341 KARLSSON, Christer, et al. —
This study attempts to break new ground by systematically comparing oppositional behaviour of Members of Parliament (MPs) in the two key arenas found in parliament: the plenary and the committee. Do MPs express more opposition frontstage in the plenary than backstage in the committee when discussing European affairs? The article sheds new light on political opposition in parliament by using a dataset of hand-coded statements made by MPs during plenary debates and European Affairs committee deliberations in five national parliaments. The results lend strong support to the main hypothesis that MPs express more opposition during plenary debates than committee deliberations. [R]
74.3342 KEEGAN, Katrina —
Why do some autocratic countries embrace digital authoritarianism and others do not? The literature describes the political benefits of e-government for autocrats, but not the political costs. This study theorizes that egovernment helps autocrats reduce the threat of revolution from the public, but its anti-corruption properties increase the threat of a coup from elites. Analysis of three Central Asian cases, based on original interviews and open-source research, and a global statistical analyses establish a causal link between politics and digitalization. When elites are powerful, they resist e-government reforms that threaten their corruption income, and autocrats overcome this resistance only if the public threat outweighs the elite threat. [R]
74.3343 KENNEDY, Joshua B. —
Oversight of the executive branch is meant to ensure accountability, consistency, and fairness in the implementation of programs by the federal bureaucracy. Much previous scholarship has argued that oversight is more common when Congress and the White House are controlled by different parties. However, much of this research has focused principally on committee hearings, and other tools of oversight have received less attention. One such tool is the Government Accountability Office (GAO). I test competing theories of GAO usage: one which argues that GAO reports are simply another tool of oversight, like hearings, and tend to follow similar patterns and thus are more common in conditions of divided government. The other theory argues that the GAO, because of its commitment to providing useful, nonpartisan information, is more likely to be used when legislative and presidential priorities are aligned. [R, abr.]
74.3344 KIM Jeong Hyun, et al. —
On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court decided in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (597 US (2022)) to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, a seismic shift in abortion policy that makes the states key battlegrounds in fights over abortion and broader reproductive rights. This article focuses on the role of state supreme courts in setting state abortion policies. Using an original data set of state court decisions surrounding abortion from the past 20 years, the authors investigate how two overarching factors affect state supreme court decision-making on abortion. First, they track how states’ political environments affect the decisions courts make about access to abortion. Second, the authors consider the scope of the abortion policy considered by the courts. The authors find that the partisan makeup of state legislatures does not influence the direction of state supreme courts’ rulings on abortion issues, but it does affect the scope of abortion regulation being considered by the courts. Additionally, they find that elected judges tend to be more responsive to constituent preferences when ruling on abortion policies. Overall, these findings illustrate the multifaceted dynamics involved in state supreme courts’ rulings on abortion. [R] [See Abstr. 74.4118]
74.3345 KLUNOVER, Doron —
The theory of bureaucracy describes the internal rent-seeking incentives in government agencies. A consequence is that a government agency competing with other agencies for budgetary funding will value rent-seeking ability rather than individual productiveness when choosing who to hire. With private-sector firms valuing personal productiveness, I look at labor-market incentives when job seekers facing employment options can choose effort at becoming productive and effort at becoming better rent seekers. A nested lottery contest with the two types of effort is used to show that, under reasonable conditions, prospective employees invest in the latter type of effort more than in the former. The productiveness of labor is therefore diminished in the private sector when a government agency is hiring in the same labor market. [R]
74.3346 KOTZÉ, Dirk —
This article seeks to provide a reliable indication of the contribution of the Electoral Commission of South Africa as an example of an election management body (EMB) in cultivating a mature democracy in South Africa. The measure of a maturing democracy is operationalised by applying the concept of the quality of democracy combined with the ideal role of elections in democracies. The discussion then focused on the EMB’s institutional framework (constitutional and legislative), as well as on perceptions of its performance and on its reputation as a democratic agent, approached from a social constructionist perspective. The main conclusion is that the commission has and continues to make a significant contribution to South Africa’s maturing democracy, but that its contribution is tempered by a decline in the public’s trust — possibly a reflection of the decline in South Africans’ trust in democracy in general. [R] [See Abstr. 74.3137]
74.3347 KRAUSE, George A. ; BYERS, Jason S. —
Administrative leader turnover adversely affects the organizational stability of US federal executive agencies, as well as undermines presidents’ policy goals. An incentive compatibility theory of administrative leader turnover is proposed that distinguishes between proponent (policy priority) versus caretaker (non-policy priority) loyalist executive appointees. This theory predicts that the proponents’ tenure will be comparatively more stable since it reflects incentive compatibility for both the president and executive appointee compared to caretakers where such a relationship is lacking. The evidence comports with this logic by demonstrating that appointee loyalty results in a longer tenure in office when their agency constitutes a stated policy priority for the president at the time of agreed upon service compared to when this happens not to be the case. Responsive competence in executive administration requires incentive compatibility that benefits both the president and executive appointees for ensuring stable leadership of US federal agencies. [R]
74.3348 KUROKI, Makoto ; SASAKI, Shusaku —
Existing research has focused on budget officers’ intertemporal decision-making but has not addressed the problem that budget officers tend to underestimate future outcomes in the budget process. This study experimentally investigates how messages containing behavioral economics “nudges,” addressing the underestimation, influence budget officers’ assessments. We conducted a survey experiment with responses from 484 budget officers in local governments throughout Japan. Respondents assessed a hypothetical environmental policy program budget, after having been randomly assigned to one of four groups, each given a different set of information and messaging: (1) baseline information (including future outcome information), (2) additional information with a loss-framing nudge, (3) additional information with a social comparison nudge, and (4) no baseline information. [R, abr.]
74.3349 KYEONG Kyuwoong, et al. —
Democratic governments, owing to limited resources, have no choice but to respond selectively to citizens’ preferences. This study focuses on the characteristic of selective government responsiveness and explores the influencing factors. We argue that institutional and political resources affect selective government responsiveness, and we try to prove this argument through Korea’s electronic governance system: the Korean National Petition. Specifically, this article collects and analyzes a unique data set of petitions and government responses in the system between September 2017 and December 2020. The results from multinomial logistic regression showed that government response to petitions differs depending on institutional resources. In addition, in the case of political resources, the influence of the resources on selective responsiveness is different according to incentives to be responsive. [R]
74.3350 LEVITA, Gabriel ; MÁRQUEZ ROMO, Cristian —
Legislative experience, one of the various indicators of both congressional institutionalization and political elites’ renewal, has been mostly measured by either turnover or reelection. However, in regions such as Latin America, with more volatile and less institutionalized party systems, where most careers are not stable and ambitions are not mostly static, turnover and reelection may not be accurate measures of legislative experience. This paper aims to fill this gap by assessing parliamentary experience in Latin America by means of a more accurate indicator: legislative amateurism. Using a novel dataset comprising eighteen national single or lower-chamber legislatures over almost three decades, we find that legislative amateurism is a consequence of party system institutionalization, electoral volatility, and newly implemented gender quotas. Overall, our findings suggest that weak political parties and certain electoral rules may become fertile ground for amateur legislatorś landing in Congress. [R]
74.3351 LI Tao ; WANG Zhenyu M. —
The prevalence of top-heavy bureaucracies in non-democracies cannot be explained by the theories of Parkinson, Tullock, Niskanen, or Simon or by classical managerial theories. When bureaucracy positions carry rents, the competition for promotion becomes a rent-seeking process. Borrowing the career-tournament theory framework from managerial scholarship, we argue that top-heavy bureaucracy resembles a tournament with too many finalists. When rent is centralized at the top (i.e. power centralization), as is the case in many non-democracies, the optimal bureaucracy should be top-heavy, accommodating and encouraging relatively more finalists at the top to compete for the final big prize. We provide suggestive evidence by analyzing ministry organizations in China (1993-2014) and Russia (2002-2015). After some fluctuations, the shape of Russian ministries eventually converged with that of China. In the steady state, their ministry shapes are far more top-heavy than what is prescribed by managerial theories. At the micro-level, ministry power centralization, measured by the perceived influence of the ministers, is correlated with ministry top-heaviness in Russia. [R]
74.3352 LOCKHART, Mackenzie ; HILL, Seth J. —
Previous research finds that nominating more centrist candidates increases vote share and win probability in congressional general elections. Yet party primary elections often nominate non-centrist candidates, increasing polarization between the American parties. We develop a model of choice in nomination politics that shows when and how actors respond to incentives of the general election. We then combine 200 million contribution records with data on 22,400 candidates in 7100 House primary elections from 1980 through 2016. We find that potential candidates and primary voters respond to general election incentives but do not find clear evidence for contributors or the winnowing process. Connecting these results back to our model, this implies that actors in the invisible primary either place higher value on in-party candidate ideology or have different beliefs about the general election than do primary voters. [R, abr.]
74.3353 LUYTEN, Janis ; MARNEFFE, Wim —
Public administration research is actively exploring alternatives for the General Red Tape (GRT) scale to measure red tape. Owing to increasing criticism on the GRT scale, scholars proposed the Three-Item Red Tape (TIRT) scale as an alternative. Using a repeated cross-sectional design, this article tests both scales in a before-after analysis of a major change in the organization of administration in a hospital. The results indicate that the GRT scale does not capture the resulting major change in red tape, which raises questions on the instrument’s validity in a bottom-up research design within one organization. The TIRT scale, however, which measures red tape at the work environment level, does reflect the change in red tape but shows empirical weaknesses in its design. Additionally, by randomly assigning respondents to substantially different red tape definitions, this article shows that the red tape definition does not significantly impact respondents’ GRT ratings. [R]
74.3354 MAI, Philipp —
In the literature on the determinants of party unity, one pathway has remained largely neglected: division of labour. Given their workload, members of parliament (MPs) are only thoroughly concerned with a subset of policies. We argue that this results in MPs casting fewer dissenting votes on matters within their area of specialization since they have had the opportunity to shape the party line there. Regression analyses using data for the German Bundestag support this hypothesis, including four important refinements: Not only the current but also past membership in the responsible committee reduces an MP’s defection probability. Additionally, this pattern is more pronounced for policy spokespersons and for less consequential, i.e., non-legislative votes as well as for issues less salient to the MP’s party. The results have implications for our understanding of MPs’ legislative behaviour, the functioning of parliaments as institutions and for the relationship between parties, MPs and voters. [R]
74.3355 MANSFELDOVA, Zdenka —
The COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on parliamentary activities have recently become a trending topic. The pandemic presented both challenges and opportunities for governments and parliaments. During times of crisis, government-parliament and government-opposition relations can result in contrasting expectations and outcomes with regard to democratic norms. While consensus on crisis measures between governments and opposition parties can increase public trust and legitimacy, criticism by the opposition is essential as a catalyst for fuelling public discourse. During a crisis, government-opposition relations can range from consensus-seeking to strictly adversarial. The paper1 aims to empirically analyse the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on relations between the government coalition of the Czech Republic and its polarised parliamentary opposition. Parliamentary elections coincided with the pandemic, and the minority government was replaced by a surplus majority coalition formed by the opposition parties from the previous legislature. The paper will examine whether the opposition adopted a differentiated strategy in its discussions regarding pandemic-related legislative proposals and to what extent it was able to act unanimously despite its polarization. [R]
74.3356 MARLAND, Alex ; SNAGOVSKY, Feodor —
What determines how Members of Parliament (MPs) and their staff frame their communications with all constituents in their electoral district? Prior research has suggested that constituency operations are one of the last bastions of freedom that MPs have from the full grasp of party discipline in Canada. If this remains true, MP communications with their constituents should reflect the MPs’ background or the constituency context and not their political partisanship. We collected a sample of published newsletters (“householders”) that Canadian MPs’ offices sent to all households in their electoral districts during the COVID-19 pandemic. We supplement our analysis with original insights about householders from a selection of MPs and their staff. Our results suggest that in a system of strict party discipline, the most important predictor of what MPs include in their constituent communications is indeed partisanship. The results inform our understanding of democratic representation, centralized co-ordination and political communication, and the pervasiveness of partisan messaging in Canada. [R]
74.3357 MARTÍNEZ-CANTÓ, Javier; BREUNIG, Christian ; CHAQUÉS-BONAFONT, Laura —
Which legislators become specialized in particular policy areas (hedgehogs), and which develop into policy generalists (foxes)? Instead of focusing on the individual characteristics of MPs, we build on institutionalist literature and argue that an MP’s specialization arises from an interaction between MP and parliamentary leadership. These interactions generate demand for policy generalists depending on a leadership position, committee membership, government status, and parliamentary group size. Policy specialization is measured by how many different topics a legislator addresses in Parliament. Using data from Germany from 1998 to 2013, topiccoded parliamentary questions are combined with MPs’ personal and partisan data. Descriptively, foxes are common in Germany and dominate in Parliament. The subsequent estimation indicates that policy specialists are related to government status and parliamentary group size. [R]
74.3358 MARTINS DA SILVA, Ludmilla, et al. —
Ten years of debates over democratic backsliding have failed to produce many examples of independent institutions thwarting authoritarian attempts on democracy. Yet Latin American courts seem to be countering this larger trend. The three largest countries in the region — Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia — have produced robust institutions able to check leaders with authoritarian tendencies, with high courts playing a fundamental role. In a dramatic succession of recent cases, courts in these three countries have been innovative, acted with a high degree of independence, and appear legitimately interested in defending democratic norms. All of this is profoundly surprising. There is little to no track record of independent Latin American judiciaries that stand in the way of authoritarian governments. Closer study of these three countries is therefore critical for scholars and practitioners, who are otherwise locked in debates over the importance of judicial review in preserving democracy. After dozens of judicial reform failures since the 1990s, we may be observing some overdue success. It appears that 1990s judicial reforms are making a comeback in Latin America. [R]
74.3359 MASOOD, Ali S. ; BOWIE, Jennifer —
Given their place within the judicial hierarchy, judges on lower courts face a complex array of challenges including heavy caseloads, mandatory dockets, and the threat of Supreme Court reversal. Despite the extensive scholarship on the American courts, little is known about judicial interactions in comparative contexts. We articulate and evaluate a framework for lower court adherence to Supreme Court precedents by leveraging a cross-national design in three countries — Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States — with similar systems but meaningful institutional variability. We find that the mechanisms promulgating adherence to Supreme Court precedents do not substantially vary across design or institutional context. Instead, our results demonstrate that legal factors exert a consistent, homogeneous effect on lower court compliance across judicial systems. Our work offers new and important implications for studies on law and courts and comparative institutions, more broadly. [R]
74.3360 MATOY CARLSON, Kirsten —
The US Supreme Court’s decision in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta has the potential to rework the long-standing division of authority among federal, state, and tribal governments. In issuing its decision in this June 2022 case, the majority departed from its previous decisions and congressional policy by enabling state governments to exercise criminal authority over non-Indians in Indian Country. This article examines the implications of Castro-Huerta for federal, tribal, and state governments on the ground in Indian Country as well as for scholarship and teaching on federal-tribalstate relations. [R]
74.3361 MAUERBERG, Arnaldo, Jr. ; LIMA DE OLIVEIRA, Renato ; GUERREIRO, Julia —
In multiparty presidential regimes, the head of the Executive manages a heterogeneous political base through a series of instruments. Among these tools, the use of patronage in appointments for governmental positions and the deployment of pork barrel to please congressional representatives have been highlighted by the literature as the glue that holds together multiparty coalitions. However, current studies neglect the role of politicians as active actors in multiparty presidential regimes in channeling resources to their constituencies and parties when holding a cabinet position. This paper contributes to the literature by merging these two tools of coalition maintenance. We analyze a complimentary strategy that benefits party leaders in the coalition by studying the relation of top-level cabinet appointments and grant transfers to subnational governments. Using data from Brazil, a paradigmatic case of multiparty presidential regime, we intend to answer the following question: Are ministries in Brazil being used to please ministers’ constituency and party allies? Using social networking analysis and econometrics for the period between 2011 and 2014, we provide evidence that ministers use their position to transfer funding to districts governed by fellow party members and not to their own political strongholds following a partisan pattern instead of a personal one. [R]
74.3362 MAYER, Martin K., et al. —
The US Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade shifted abortion-policy decision-making from the national level to the state level and opened the door for states to individually determine the level of protection for reproductive rights. We examine state actions following Dobbs and discuss the near-term implications of the decision for federalism and state governments. One effect of the Dobbs decision, evident in actions taken by some state legislatures, has been to open a window for states to enact laws imposing greater limits on reproductive options for women. However, another effect of Dobbs has been to create a greater demand for confirming and in some cases expanding reproductive rights, as seen by state constitutional amendments, supreme court decisions, and statutes protecting reproductive rights and safeguarding access to abortion services. [R]
74.3363 McKAY, Amy Melissa ; LAZARUS, Jeffrey —
This article presents the first direct analysis of the influence of revolvingdoor lobbyists over the content of adopted public laws. We use earmarks to evaluate both the effects of lobbying and the possible additional effects of lobbying by individuals who formerly worked as congressional members and staff. Employing a fixed-effects panel approach, we evaluate original data describing the lobbying efforts of the more than 5000 accredited US colleges and universities over a 12-year timeframe. Our analysis indicates that schools that lobby in a given year can expect to receive 54% more earmarks and 24% more earmarked funds relative to other schools and other years. Further, there is an additional significant effect of revolvingdoor lobbying that is greatest at lower levels of lobbying expenditures. Our results contribute to the emerging literature on comparative lobbying and speak to concerns about the possible corrupting influence of revolvingdoor lobbying over public policy. [R]
74.3364 McLAUGHLIN, Simon ; WEDER, Franzisca —
In this conceptual paper, we differentiate between political decisions and the conversations where these decisions are discussed and facilitated. We complement existing work on argumentation in political communication by applying Aristotle’s Rhetoric to the study of climate change debate. We show how Aristotle’s principles for ethical and rational political speech work toward audience trust and encourage deliberative debate and decision-making. Our deliberative perspective is supported by a case study analysis of Australia’s parliamentary climate change debate. We resurrect Aristotle’s Rhetoric both as an analytical tool for critical analysis and a potential framework for constructive climate change debate. Following the conceptualisation of parliamentary debate as a conversational space where decision-making processes are facilitated, we introduce Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the concept of ‘rhetorical responsibility’, which is further explored and exemplified in the case study. We conclude with future research questions for discourse and political communication studies. [R]
74.3365 MOFFITT, Susan L., et al. —
Vast disparities between and within American states’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have evoked renewed attention to whether greater centralization might enhance investments in subnational capacity and remedy subnational inequalities or instead erode subnational organizational capacity. Developments in American public education (1997-2015) offer perspective on this puzzle, which we examine by applying interrupted timeseries analysis to a novel dataset to assess the implications of centralization on subnational investments in administrative and technical capacity, two dimensions of organizational capacity. We find simultaneous subnational erosion in administrative capacity and growth in technical capacity following centralization, both of which appear concentrated in low-poverty areas despite centralization’s explicit antipoverty purposes. Public education reforms highlight both the challenge of dismantling subnational inequality through centralization and the need for future research on policy designs that enable centralization to yield subnational capacity that is able to remedy inequality. [R]
74.3366 MORAN, Rachel —
Police officers regularly serve as government witnesses in criminal cases. In recent years, they have also increasingly found themselves as defendants facing criminal charges, civil lawsuits, or both. This article surveys scholarly literature on police officers as both witnesses and defendants, with a focus on sociological and legal barriers to understanding officer deception, assessing officer testimony, and holding officers accountable for misconduct. With respect to officers as witnesses, these barriers include the prevalence of police officer perjury, judicial deference to officers’ testimony, and laws and policies that prevent defendants from learning about or exposing officer misconduct and unreliability. Charging and suing officers present additional logistical and substantive questions. These questions include who should be responsible for investigating and deciding whether to prosecute police, what protocols should guide those investigations, whether police prosecutions meaningfully improve policing or ensure accountability, and what role the civil legal system should play in addressing police misconduct. [R]
74.3367 MOSKOWITZ, Daniel J. ; ROGOWSKI, Jon C. —
Theories of electoral accountability emphasize voters’ ability to evaluate individual officeholders, which incentivises officials to demonstrate their quality. Before the Australian ballot was introduced in the US at the turn of the twentieth century, however, most ballot designs constrained voters’ ability to distinguish individual candidates. Previous scholarship argues that ballot reform led to the rise of candidate-centred politics and the decline in party influence in the twentieth century. We reassess the evidence for this claim and implement the most comprehensive analysis to date on the secret ballot’s effects on outcomes related to distributive politics, legislator effort, and party influence. Using an improved research design, we find scant evidence that ballot reform directly affected legislator behaviour, much less that it transformed political representation. While the Australian ballot may have been a necessary condition for the eventual rise of candidate-centred politics, ballot reform did not by itself reshape American politics. [R]
74.3368 O’CONNOR, Karl, et al. —
Government agencies are embracing the rhetoric of public value, but what does the empirical evidence tell us about drivers of its creation? One critical source of insight are the practitioners who turn public investment into public value through complex forms of labour. This article identifies how public value is interpreted and created by forensics scientists in the Criminal Justice System using Q Methodological interviews. The results indicate that two very similar types of forensic scientist exist The study finds that while the decisions of scientists are grounded in their expertise, their public value motivations are to ‘add value’ to the public through their science. They serve the citizen through their science. They do not serve the consumer, client or victim directly. The findings also indicate that there is a need to recognise hidden forms of value-added activity that take place upstream in public-value chains, ensuring that there are systems in place to maximise their impact downstream. [R]
74.3369 OLLERENSHAW, Kate —
This article analyses Statutory Instruments passed between 2010 and 2019 to evaluate the embeddedness of the UK Government’s regulatory off-setting and business impact target initiatives. It begins by outlining the origins of those initiatives and their scope, technical details and compliance mechanisms. After describing the methodology for the analysis, it reports results, showing that a range of exclusions and exemptions limit the number of Statutory Instruments covered by the initiatives, that the intensity with which burden reduction is pursued declines over time and that the largest savings are incidental rather than being motivated by a desire to reduce burden. [R]
74.3370 PAULIAT, Hélène ; EXPERT-FOULQUIER, Caroline —
In France, as elsewhere, Judicial Funding is at the heart of the reform proposals for a Judicial Governance that better protects Judicial Independence. Comparative analysis shows that many countries have conducted reflections leading them to introduce new governance models, within which the financing systems have also been adapted. Seeking a better balance between political and judicial actors, they are developing greater autonomy in the management of the judiciary, while maintaining political control over its budget. The reforms may have been disappointing in their ability to influence the decisions determining their funding. France should nevertheless draw inspiration from these models, particularly to improve its funding of ordinary courts, and to conduct a more global reflection on the governance of its judiciary. [R]
74.3371 PEETERS, Rik ; CAMPOS, Sergio A. —
The study of street-level bureaucracy has been dominated by research from the Global North. Mainstream conceptualizations are, therefore, based on observations from institutional contexts that may vary significantly from the working conditions of frontline workers elsewhere. This article takes stock of the growing body of literature on street-level bureaucracy in weak institutional contexts and brings together relevant insights from comparative political science and public administration into a coherent analytical framework. We identify four institutional factors that shape frontline working conditions and three behavioral patterns in frontline worker agency. These patterns in frontline agency — ranging from policy improvisation to informal privatization — can be understood as an institutional waterbed effect caused by institutional deficiencies, such as resource scarcity and accountability gaps: if the complexity of public service provision is not tackled at the institutional level, it is pushed towards the street-level where frontline workers cope with it in highly diverse ways. [R]
74.3372 PHAM Long, et al. —
This study examines the relationships between e-government service quality, perceived value, satisfaction, and loyalty toward e-government services. Survey data were collected from 340 randomly selected e-government service users in Vietnam. The results reveal that (1) e-government service quality consists of five dimensions: ease of interaction, fulfillment, citizen care, security and privacy, and trustworthiness; (2) among the five dimensions of e-government service quality, only trustworthiness and fulfillment are significantly related to perceived value; however, trustworthiness has a stronger association with perceived value than does fulfillment; and (3) both perceived value and satisfaction are positively associated with loyalty. The results indicate that the e-government can create value for the citizens by improving service quality, which may help satisfy citizens’ needs and build their loyalty. [R]
74.3373 PONCE, Aldo F. —
This article explains why there is important variation in the degree of concentration of legislative specialization across legislative parties. Greater concentration of legislative specialization leads parties to concentrate their legislative efforts on a smaller set of policy jurisdictions. Through enhancing their concentration of legislative specialization in certain policy areas, parties might more clearly signal their policy concerns and interests to voters. This study argues and shows that party size alters the concentration of legislative specialization. In particular, I find that a U-shaped curve defines the relationship between party size and the degree of concentration of legislative specialization: niche parties and the largest parties choose higher levels of concentration of legislative specialization. [R]
74.3374 PRIHATINI, Ella ; HALIMATUSA’DIYAH, Iim —
The persistence of political dynasties in developed and developing countries has been an interesting puzzle as democracy does not automatically obliterate the domination of familial ties in politics. Prior studies suggest that women are more likely to be dynastic than men. However, it remains unclear on how parties are allocating dynasts into committees and whether it is gendered or not. This paper introduces new observational data on female parliamentary representation, dynastic background and committee membership of 575 sitting parliamentarians in Indonesia. The findings suggest that one in every four members of parliament are dynasts and the proportion among female lawmakers has increased from 42% in 2009 to 44% in 2019. However, the experience of dynastic women in relation to committee assignment is not uniform. T [R, abr.]
74.3375 PUT, Gert-Jan, et al. —
This article examines whether political parties reward the parliamentary activity of members of parliament (MPs) through candidate selection processes. Previous research on this question provides mixed evidence. Moreover, studies often disregard potentially unequal effects among different kinds of MPs. Using new data on all members of the Belgian Chamber of Representatives between 1995 and 2019 (N = 1108), this contribution shows that several types of parliamentary activity indeed matter both for MPs’ general renomination as well as for their claim to realistic list positions. Furthermore, our study provides evidence that parliamentary activity matters more for the reselection of newcomers than for experienced MPs. [R]
74.3376 PYSCHNY, Anastasia —
After the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the functioning of parliamentary control of the German Bundestag and the French Assembleìe nationale was criticised. While the criticism in France focused mainly on legal obstacles; in Germany it was especially the work of the opposition parliamentary groups that was judged to be inadequate. However, the criticism left open why certain criteria were applied and to what extent they are recommendable or sufficient for an assessment of parliamentary control activities. This paper addresses this research gap by asking which criteria could be used for a more systematic evaluation of parliamentary control in times of crisis. This paper offers an evaluation along two criteria: the level of communication between the government, the parliamentary majority and the opposition parliamentary groups at the beginning of the crisis, and the differentiation of control instruments according to the frequency of their use in non-crisis periods. Following this approach, the control performance of the German Bundestag can be evaluated as somewhat better than that of the French National Assembly. [R]
74.3377 RAGAIGNE, Aurélien —
Our paper analyses the role of dialogue in managing the autonomy and compliance paradox within a public authority. The literature on paradoxes presents management as being characterised by the coexistence of contradictory elements. We propose to build on this work by drawing on the literature on the concept of ‘dialogue’. By focusing on the case of a French Departmental Council that set up a procedure to manage travel authorisations for its staff, we study the way in which the dialogue between stakeholders ensured both the application of the framework prescribed by the procedure and the autonomy of the management teams when it came to managing these rules on the ground. Using a longitudinal analysis methodology combining semi-directive interviews and observations of working group meetings, we show that this space for dialogue provides an important opportunity for a face-off between the demands for compliance and autonomy and their further evolution. [R]
74.3378 ROCCA, Michael S. ; KREBS, Timothy B. ; McARTHUR, Dylan —
As polarization and gridlock continues to grip national politics, Americans are increasingly looking to states to remedy the nation’s most significant challenges. But this was not always the case. In the 1960s, state governments — particularly their legislatures — were in crisis. Few legislatures had the capacity to address the daunting issues that were creating massive political, social, and economic unrest in American states and cities. After decades of reforms to address these issues, and the studies of legislative reform that followed, we can make some conclusions about the consequences of legislative professionalization. The purpose of this paper is to present the key findings from work dedicated to the study of these consequences. [R]
74.3379 RUVALCABA-GOMEZ, Edgar A. ; CIFUENTES-FAURA, Javier —
The advancement and continuous development of information and communication technologies highlights the importance of analysing and monitoring the development and capabilities of governments to use and exploit the potential of new technologies. Digital government and artificial intelligence in the public sector are two trends associated with technological development. This research conducts an analysis of these elements from the perspective of public officials by conducting a factor analysis. The study is based on a survey administered to civil servants in the state of Jalisco in Mexico. An analysis was made of their training and knowledge of these aspects and whether there are significant differences according to gender, age, level of studies, area of knowledge and place of work. The results obtained show divergences and coincidences between variables and factors. The findings are useful as a reference for the government of Jalisco to promote measures aimed at improving the situation of digital government and artificial intelligence in the short to medium term, in order to optimize administrative management. [R]
74.3380 SCHENKER, Laura, et al. —
Differential police conduct may be attributed both to residential racial segregation and more general discriminatory attitudes and policies. We draw upon ethnographic and other studies of everyday policing to propose that police, in the context of racially segregated neighborhoods, intensively surveil individuals who are “out of place” in terms of their race and the local geographical context in which they are found. We then use statistical evidence from the New York City Police Department to compare stops in different neighborhoods. We find that the NYPD indeed carries out “stops” that differentially target African Americans and Hispanics present in predominantly white precincts, with the degree of surveillance increasing as precincts become more white, and as stops become more generic and less about specific, identifiable crimes. [R]
74.3381 SCOTT, Rodney J. ; DONADELLI, Flavia ; MERTON, Eleanor RK —
New Zealand is frequently cited as the archetypical example of New Public Management (NPM), having gone ‘further and faster’ than other jurisdictions in radically reforming their public service in the late 1980s. These reforms have been credited with significant gains in efficiency and responsiveness, while introducing new challenges. Successive reforms over the past 30 years tinkered with the model without fundamentally altering the underlying paradigm, such that authors refer to the ‘myth of post-NPM in New Zealand’. In 2020, New Zealand repealed and replaced its main public service legislation. By textually analysing government documents, this article explores the different theoretical roots of New Zealand’s ongoing administrative reforms and debates the extent of their theoretical coherence. The Act directly dialogues with and draws inspiration from recent academic debates, drawing from a range of sources (such as New Public Governance, Digital Era Governance, and the New Public Service). [R]
74.3382 SIEFKEN, Sven T. —
Parliaments and legislatures are central institutions in political systems to provide legitimacy. In crisis situations, that currently seem to abound, parliaments have been diagnosed as side-stepped, fitting into a broader trend of legislative decline. Based on a fundamental discussion about what parliaments and crises are and how best to study them, it becomes clear that three relationships must be considered: First, what role parliaments in crisis situations play, second, how crises are dealt with in parliaments and third, whether this can lead to a crisis of parliaments. The article lays the conceptual groundwork for future academic study of these issues and highlights the need to identify the determinants of variety. This can help for a better understanding of parliaments in the political system and help to make institutions resilient for future crises. [R]
74.3383 SIEJA, James A. —
Recent work on the federal judicial nominations process finds relationships between nominees’ characteristics, such as partisanship and gender, and American Bar Association (ABA) ratings. While the findings inform public debate about ABA involvement in the nomination, the studies do not take into account the characteristics of the individuals who investigate the nominees. This study adds investigator partisanship to understand more completely the relationship between nominees and their ABA ratings. The results indicate that the Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary (SCFJ) investigators’ partisanship contribute systematically to a nominee’s likelihood of receiving a higher or lower ABA rating. The probability that a Republican nominee receives the highest rating does not vary with the investigator’s partisanship. Democratic nominees, however, have the highest chance of the top rating after an SCFJ investigation led by a co-partisan. An analysis of matched data from the whole dataset reproduces the basic pattern of results, while the implementation of matching to partisan subgroups of nominees uncovers that both parties may benefit roughly equally from investigations led by co-partisans. [R]
74.3384 SORENSON, Maron W. —
Supreme Court oral arguments are often characterized as the Court rapidly firing questions at attorneys who struggle to keep up; however, nearly half of the Court’s utterances come not as questions but as statements. I ask whether patterns of questioning and commenting behavior during oral arguments can predict case outcomes and justice votes. To answer this question, I develop a theory of strategic communication that accounts for the differential ways justices — and other strategic actors — use queries and comments during arguments. Using transcripts from 1981 to 2019, I code for use of questions and statements, finding the two theoretically and empirically distinct: where questions increase a party’s chances of winning, statements increase their chance of losing. [R]
74.3385 SQUEVIN, Pierre ; AUBIN, David —
Ministerial cabinets hold a central place in the Belgian politico-administrative system, carrying out the bulk of policy formulation. However, they do not operate in isolation and rely on other actors of the policy advisory system for information supply and advice. They request, receive and use various advisory inputs. This article investigates how ministerial advisers utilize policy advice when they formulate policies. Based on a unique survey targeting ministerial cabinet members, it shows that policy advice utilization varies according to the source and its location in the policy advisory system. The sample consists of ministerial advisers from 11 ministerial cabinets in the two Belgian federated entities’ governments of Wallonia and the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. Ministerial advisers still predominantly use advice from the civil service, which points to the continued importance of advice provision from internal, in-house sources. However, advice from external actors — such as trade unions, civil society or consulting firms — have been observed to have rather high repercussions on policy formulation activities too. [R, abr.]
74.3386 STEIMAN, Daniel ; SUHAY, Elizabeth —
The field of political science is seeing renewed interest in studying the US Congress via one-on-one interviews. Yet, the qualitative research methods literature on this topic has lagged behind, with few recent treatments available. The result is uncertainty regarding how best to access and interview Congress. In this study, we implement a novel study design, interviewing over 20 authors — who collectively represent nearly all Congressional qualitative interview studies from the past several decades — about their research practices. Whereas the existing literature focuses on lessons learned from one or two authors’ research experiences, this approach allows us to synthesize a wide range of researchers’ practices and perspectives, identifying areas of consensus and dispute and ultimately providing comprehensive advice to qualitative researchers. [R, abr.]
74.3387 TADIDA, Eriole Zita Nonki —
Supreme audit institutions (SAIs) are a component of a nation’s institutional system. This article defines the concept of an institutional anti-corruption system centered on the SAI through four main characteristics: independence, accountability, mandate and collaboration. The article aims to assess the impact that the quality of the anti-corruption system has on perceived levels of corruption. Data from the 2019 International Budget Partnership Open Budget Survey covering 117 countries are used for this purpose. The regression results show that the quality of the institutional anti-corruption system centered on the SAI is associated with a low level of perceived corruption. However, other elements must be implemented to create an anti-corruption environment, such as citizens’ involvement as controlling actors. [R]
74.3388 TSELIOS, Vassilis —
All countries implemented policies to mitigate the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and control fatalities from COVID-19. Although early actions were pivotal in reducing confirmed cases and deaths, the timing of the introduction of these policies differed from country to country. This article assesses and compares the behavior of various decentralized countries in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the timing of implementation of containment measures and viewing timeliness of adoption as denoting a country’s level of responsiveness to a health crisis. Using international databases, this article finds that more decentralized countries delayed the start of containment measures. This article also finds that larger and more densely populated countries were more likely to delay implementation of these policies. [R]
74.3389 TULLIA GALANTI, Maria ; LIPPI, Andrea —
In a Napoleonic country such as Italy, ministerial cabinets have traditionally served as central advisors in the politicised policy advisory system (PAS), while evidence-based policy-making has usually been marginal. Nevertheless, recent developments in political systems have pushed for the pluralisation of the Napoleonic PAS toward a stronger demand for scientific and expert advice. Against this backdrop, the role of government research institutes (GRIs) as advisors represents an interesting change that could potentially fuel the development of an evidence-based approach in a period of changing advisory practices. We investigate these developments through a case study concerning 20 Italian GRIs that are engaged as influential advisors or recruited to support implementation through policy work. We obtained evidence through document analysis, in-depth interviews, and a questionnaire administered to the 20 GRIs. The overall picture displays a shift in conceiving policy advice in the political system and opens the door to innovation. [R]
74.3390 ULRICH, Michael R. —
Congress passed the first federal legislation on firearms safety in decades at nearly the same moment that the Supreme Court issued its first major Second Amendment decision since 2008. It will take time to assess the effects of these actions on both gun safety and Second Amendment rights, but, with gun violence skyrocketing across the country, it is clear that finding a balance between rights and safety is desperately needed. The public is ill-equipped to protect itself against the broad harms of gun violence, so the government has a central role to play in addressing those harms and the racial disparities that come with them. Gun owners, too, must recognize their obligations to fellow citizens, not only to act responsibly with firearms, but to accept the limitations of their constitutional protections. An evidence-based path forward can be forged that mitigates the harm of gun violence while minimally burdening the rights and interests of those who own firearms. [R] [See Abstr. 74.4230]
74.3391 VAN DIJCK, Charlotte ; STEEN, Trui —
Collaborative innovation is increasingly put forward as a way of addressing the many wicked problems our society faces today. This article focuses on how politicians indirectly affect projects of collaborative innovation and whether stakeholders experience them as helpful or hindering to the project. The impact of politicians on projects of collaborative innovation are compared across four cases and throughout three project phases (set-up, implementation and sustainment). The results show six ways in which politicians can help projects of collaborative innovation: by providing funding, by making a project a political priority, by connecting stakeholders, by resolving stakeholder conflicts, by unblocking red tape barriers and by extending a collaborative network legitimacy. Furthermore, stakeholders perceived politicians as potentially hindering collaborative innovation projects in three ways: through the adjustment of the project goals, through the loss of a project’s ‘neutral’ status and through blocking or obstructing a project. [R]
74.3392 VÁZQUEZ-FERREL, Carlos —
This article studies the determinants that influence the efforts of legislators through non-legislative actions in the Mexican Congress. Most studies are confined to analyse the effects of electoral systems and focused on bill initiatives. However, in contexts like in Mexico, where consecutive re-election is prohibited, the performance of legislators needs to be understood beyond purely institutional factors. This article uses a unique database of 8834 non-binding resolutions (points of agreement), an instrument that does not carry the force of law but is widely initiated in Mexico and the prior careers of 1511 members of Congress to test a general model. The results highlight the relevance of the government-opposition relationship, prior posts of legislators, gender and, to a lesser degree, a negative association with those electorally vulnerable parliamentarians, in explaining the use of this instrument, which is controlled by the party leadership. [R]
74.3393 WAISMEL-MANOR, Israel, et al. —
Covid-19 has shocked governance systems worldwide. Legislatures, in particular, have been shut down or limited due to the pandemic, yet with divergence from one country to another. In this article, we report results from a cross-sectional quantitative analysis of legislative activity during the initial reaction to this shock and identify the factors accounting for such variation. Exploring legislatures across 159 countries, we find no relation between the severity of Covid-19 and limitations on legislatures’ operation, thus suggesting that legislatures are at risk of being shut down or limited due to policy “overreaction” and that a health risk may serve as an excuse for silencing them. However, we find that legislatures in democratic countries are relatively immune to this risk, while those in frail democracies are more exposed. In partially free countries, the use of technology can mitigate this risk. We also find that the coalitional features of the government may lead to legislatures’ closing. [R]
74.3394 WANG Huanming ; SUN Xiaoyun ; SHI Yu —
How to attract commercial investment to provide infrastructure and public service is an important issue for governments around the world. This paper investigated what government characteristics can attract commercial investment. Using China’s PPP cases, this study shows that local government’s fiscal stress, land resources, and wealth are important determinants in attracting commercial investment. The business environment of local government plays a moderating role between government characteristics (i.e., fiscal stress, land resources, and wealth) and commercial investment. By highlighting the determinants of commercial investment, this study offers important implications for the theory and practice of PPP management. [R]
74.3395 WEEKS, Liam, et al. —
While the public image of legislative debates is often less than favourable, parliamentary deliberations can be an important indicator of policy preferences, issue saliency and cohesion within political parties. We consider the case of a parliamentary debate that had a considerable long-term political legacy, forging a party system that endured for almost a century. The debates in the Irish parliament over the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty were a critical juncture that split a dominant party, resulting in, first, a civil war and, later, a new mode of party competition. We analyse the text of the debates from this period to see if they contribute to a greater understanding of the ensuing split. Few differences between the two sides in parliament are found, which might explain why few were the differences between the key actors in the party system that evolved. [R]
74.3396 WHITE, Allison C. ; KIM Youngsung —
This study examines fiscal federalism by interrogating the relationship between first- and second-nature geographic features — most notably distance as well as various economic/infrastructural indicators — and intergovernmental transfers and subnational fiscal dependence in Russia and the US from 2003 to 2015. Our findings reveal stark differences in the role that geographic factors play in these two federations. While first- and second-nature factors influenced both transfers and reliance in Russia, only second-nature indicators had an effect in the US case. Economic development and infrastructural improvements do not cause the influence of first-nature indicators to evaporate altogether, but they do attenuate the effects of those considerations. [R]
74.3397 WHITE, Bob W. —
Researchers in social sciences have become increasingly interested in how pluralism is used in the context of local government, especially with regards to municipal administrations’ efforts to make cities more inclusive. What can municipal action show us about the evolution of pluralist thinking? How do cities in pluralist societies mobilize the principles of pluralism in their attempts to ensure greater social cohesion as urban spaces become more and more diverse? This article proposes the use of a systemic framework to show how municipal governments in the predominantly French-speaking province of Québec have attempted to go beyond the paradoxes that structure pluralism in rapidly diversifying urban settings. [R] [See Abstr. 74.3875]
74.3398 WIRLS, Daniel —
The author traces the history of the terms “congressman” and “congresswoman” and notes that this convention for members of the House has gone unchallenged. He argues that the House, press, and public should replace the terms with the one specified in the Constitution: “Representative.” [R]
74.3399 WITZIG, Martina Flick ; VATTER, Adrian —
This study examines the personality traits of candidates for the Swiss government and how they are related to the candidates’ electoral chances. Switzerland as a paradigmatic consensual democracy is an ideal test case to examine the connection between the specific pattern of a democracy and the government personalities that fit it. We argue that the cultural and institutional setting of the Swiss Government increases the electoral chances of kinder and gentler personalities. To test this, we estimate regression models on a new data set of candidates covering all vacancies in the Swiss government between 1982 and 2020. Our results reveal that candidates with a higher level of agreeableness do enjoy an advantage in the electoral process for Swiss consensus government. [R]
74.3400 YORK, Erin —
How do technocrat ministers affect governance under autocracy? Autocrats frequently appoint non-partisan actors with technical competencies to bureaucratic leadership roles. Though their competencies might predict positive performance in office, these ministers are also dependent on the regime for their position and should thus demonstrate loyalty to its interests. I test this in the context of horizontal accountability to the legislature, using data on more than 27,000 legislative requests submitted to ministries in Morocco. I use both exact matching and difference-in-differences analyses to show that technocrat ministers are more than 25 percentage points less likely to respond to legislative queries than partisan cabinet members. The results imply that outside (partisan) participation in government strengthens weak institutions of executive oversight. They also cast doubt on the presumption that technocrat participation in government is universally beneficial to governance. [R]
(b) State, regional and local institutions/Institutions locales et régionales
74.3401 ALCAIDE MUÑOZ, Cristina ; ALCAIDE MUÑOZ, Laura ; RODRÍGUEZ BOLÍVAR, Manuel Pedro —
The emergence of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has put emphasis on the open government approach (OG), provoking a cultural change in both the citizenry (demanding new ways of collaborating with public administration and more openness in government), and in the public administrations (adapting their structures and processes to support civic participation). This article analyzes both the strategies followed by local governments in implementing OG initiatives and the level of alignment of the objectives included in the municipal OG strategies with those settled by the regional government to which they belong. Empirical research on the OG objectives included in the strategic planning of largesize Andalusian municipalities has been performed. Findings reveal that most local governments are implementing a push strategy based only on more openness in government (mainly owing to normative requirements). Additionally, the objectives included in both the economic and governance dimensions are those included in the OG initiatives in municipalities, although each one has a particular way of adopting digital and OG strategies consistent with their municipal priorities and circumstances. [R]
74.3402 BELMAR, Fabian, et al. —
Non-programmatic policies are usually analysed from the perspective of parties that rely on vote-buying, patronage, or pork-barrel, to distribute benefits and enhance their electoral performance. It is assumed that parties and politicians offer these particular distributions to citizens. This is not what happens at Chile’s sub-national level, however. There are no political machines in this country, so the citizens come to demand benefits from the mayor. Based on data from 50,099 formal meetings requested by citizens to mayors of the 345 Chilean municipalities, we show that when there is an absence of a party machine or patron that makes a top-down offer, it is the people who approach the authorities to demand resources. We conclude that, first, demands are primarily to claim for targeted distribution. Second, citizens who demand non-programmatic benefits are not part of organizations and do so particularly. Third, women are largely those who seek more targeted distribution. Fourth, the demands on mayors occur mostly in most rural comunas. Fifth, mayors who respond to these formal demands mainly do not mobilize intermediation networks. [R]
74.3403 BLAHODARNYI, Andrii M., et al. —
This article is written to provide a general overview of the concept and principles of local self-government, in particular its role in the context of interaction with the central government. In addition, the article analyzes the features of local self-government in three EU member states and Ukraine. The leading scientific method used in the study is the formal-legal method, which allows the author to trace the relationship between the internal content and external expression (form) of state-legal phenomena and institutions. The author also seeks to apply the best European practices of local self-government to Ukraine. [R]
74.3404 BORG, Mary O. ; BORG, John Rody —
Do assessment caps make the property tax more regressive? Are they fair to all taxpayers, or do some groups get more benefit than others. This paper examines these issues using a sample from the Jacksonville, FL Metropolitan Statistical Area. Regression models are run using housing values averaged at the census block level and matched to census block socioeconomic and demographic data obtained from the US Census. Results show that when permanent income is used as the measure of ability to pay, the SOH benefit makes the property tax fairer, but when current income is used as the income measure, it makes the tax less fair. In addition, the assessment caps cause some serious horizontal inequities. [R, abr.]
74.3405 CARRERI, Maria ; PAYSON, Julia —
Do the choices of city leaders matter for local economic conditions? While existing literature focuses on how the preferences of local officials influence city policy, we argue that the managerial skill of local leaders should condition their ability to achieve their goals. We conduct an original phone survey of over 300 mayors and city managers across the USA to learn about their management practices. Using a two-way fixed effects design that holds fixed a rich battery of individual and city-level characteristics, we examine how changes in leadership affect economic growth, a common goal for local officials. We find that when local leaders employ the “best practices” of organizational management, their cities grow across a range of indicators. These results are strongest for the subset of leaders who mention a growth-related goal for their time in office, suggesting that managerial skill allows local leaders to more effectively achieve their objectives. [R]
74.3406 CASADEMONT FALGUERA, Xavier ; BOLDÚ ALFONSO, Maite ; GINESTA REY, Mercè —
This paper studies, from the point of view of local politicians, the governance of social services in different municipalities and County Councils in Catalonia. The political dimension of local social services has rarely been studied and this article contributes to the understanding of which actors and what kind of relations are developed during the policy process. From a qualitative approach, the study is based on 17 in-depth interviews with local politicians, as well as two focus groups with managers and front-line social workers. The results reveal that local politicians do not have a longterm and strategic perspective, and that they feel more comfortable dealing with management rather than politics. At the local level, social services tend to be a depoliticized issue. Although local politicians have a positive attitude towards dialogue and working together with all actors, they lack regular coordination and strong commitment to facilitate a comprehensive approach to the challenges they face. [R]
74.3407 CONNOLLY KNOX, Claire ; RIVERA, Jason D. —
The need for effective inclusionary planning practices is paramount in the whole community approach within emergency management. However, accountability, legitimacy, bureaucratic discretion, and a planner’s perspective on public involvement can limit the ability to effectively include the public in emergency management planning processes. Through survey and focus group analysis of county-level emergency management planners in Florida, this preliminary study explores the implications of these factors for effectively engaging in democratic policy and planning development within the realm of emergency management. We provide recommendations for practitioners attempting to engage the public and suggestions for future research. [R]
74.3408 DAHIR, Abdinor ; ALI, Ali Yassin Sheikh —
Somalia adopted federalism in 2004 and embarked on its implementation in 2012. This paper provides critical insights on the reception and performance of Somalia’s federal project since 2012. The analysis has shown major practical challenges facing Somalia’s federal structure: constitutional ambiguity and lack of consensus on federalism, difficulties regarding the formation of the federal member states and their border demarcations, the status of Mogadishu and questions concerning fiscal federalism. The paper argues these challenges as well as the general public’s inadequate knowledge of federalism are pushing the nation towards decentralisation. It contends the regional politics and shifting alliances in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East are affecting Somalia’s federal future, thus enforcing the ‘federalism is a foreign initiative’ notion. The paper suggests that a close study of Somali perceptions reveals that federalism is an externally imposed idea, which renders the weakening of the Somali state a strategic state policy. [R]
74.3409 DALY, Siobhan ; CHAPMAN, Rachael ; PEGAN, Andreja —
In the UK, during austerity local governments face pressures to identify transformative financial solutions to parks provision and to protect parks as public spaces. Yet, how local government officers balance these demands is under-explored. This article discusses the transfer of Newcastle upon Tyne’s parks from local government to a new entity, Urban Green Newcastle. Working within a project framework, across the local authority, and in public consultation, we show how local government officers crafted narratives to legitimise their work and to provide an ex-post rationalisation for: creative working; the changes to democratic accountability in the new model; and the risks involved in creating UGN. The article deepens our understanding of local government officers’ agency during austerity via its attention to legitimisation narratives. We show how local government officers contribute to the (re)conception of parks as public spaces through the negotiation of alternative narratives of parks management, governance, and democratic accountability. [R]
74.3410 DASGUPTA, Debjani ; WILLIAMS, Glyn —
This article examines how more democratic forms of state-citizen engagement can be engineered under less than favorable political conditions, through the case of the Village Development Committees under the Left Front government in West Bengal, India. Our research shows that these Committees embodied empowered participatory governance ideals and made meaningful contributions to citizens’ participation within the local state, confirming the potential for well-designed institutions to deepen democratic engagement. However, this reform’s abrupt reversal indicates that leftist parties are not automatically wholehearted supporters of empowered participatory governance, and that this reform needed to be connected to a wider set of claims about the Left Front’s participatory successes, in order to build its legitimacy. Our wider argument is that research should examine not only the quality of participatory spaces themselves but also their political contexts. [R, abr.]
74.3411 DONATELLA, Pierre ; KARLSSON, David —
Throughout history, critics of democracy have doubted people’s ability to govern themselves. For example, are local politicians — who often lack any formal training in accounting or economics — really able to comprehend complex financial information? Previous studies addressing this issue are in short supply, and their results are generally pessimistic. The aim of this paper is to test which — if any — financial indicators are related to local politicians’ perceptions of financial conditions in the setting of Swedish municipalities, thus extending earlier studies to a European context. Our analysis shows strong and significant correlations between most of the financial indicators tested and politicians’ perception of their municipality’s financial condition, including financial indicators capturing the levels of net income, equity ratio and tax rates. These findings provide optimism and strengthen arguments for the defenders of democratic government. [R]
74.3412 ERMASOVA, Natalia ; GUZMAN, Tatyana —
This comparative case study explores the capital budgeting before, during, and after municipal bankruptcy in three US local governments: Jefferson County, AL; Central Falls, RI; and Vallejo, CA. This in-depth examination of capital budgeting challenges reveals a pattern across all cases — a significant decrease in capital spending on infrastructure and maintenance before and during municipal bankruptcy. In fact, the mismanagement and underinvestment in capital infrastructure were some of the causes of municipal bankruptcy in all three local governments. The comparison of the reforms adopted after the bankruptcy shows that all three local government went through a similar two-stage process of recovery and restructuring, employing the emergent strategy to exit the bankruptcy and the problemoriented innovative strategy to recover. [R, abr.]
74.3413 FERNANDEZ HOTT, Henrique Augusto Campos ; MENEZESFILHO, Naercio —
This paper examines how mayors’ political experience impacts fiscal outcomes. Using a regression discontinuity design in highly-contested elections in Brazilian municipalities, we estimate the differences in fiscal performance between newcomers and veteran politicians. We find that municipalities governed by mayors who never won an election before experience a worse budget balance and a substantial increase in public investments. This difference appears to be driven by differences in candidates’ experience rather than by factors such as re-election concern, ideology, vertical partisan alignment, gender and political party turnover. [R]
74.3414 FLAVIN, Patrick ; SHUFELDT, Gregory —
State preemption of local policymaking is an increasingly used political tool and source of intergovernmental conflict. While previous studies have examined the determinants and effects of preemption, to date no study has examined citizens’ attitudes and opinions about the practice. Using two original public opinion surveys, we find that support for preemption does not seem to be politically driven as there are no discernable partisan differences and citizens are no more likely to support preemption when their party controls state government. Instead, support for preemption appears to be tied to more general feelings about state government such as trust and perceived responsiveness to citizens. Moreover, when using a survey experiment that primes respondents with a concrete example of preemption — forbidding cities from raising their minimum wage — support for preemption falls. [R, abr.]
74.3415 GALIŃSKI, Paweł —
In the literature, the debt burden in local governments is considered as a main predictor of the fiscal distress. The growing indebtedness of the municipalities may also negatively affect the business sector. Therefore, this paper examines the significance of key financial and non-financial debt drivers of local governments based on the example of the municipalities functioning in Poland in 2010-2021. The article studies the whole population of the above public units and the influence of the financial, economic, demographic, institutional and spatial factors on their indebtedness. Due to the data, methodology and the robustness check, the fixed effects panel models, Arellano and Bond’s two-step generalized method of moments and the Moran I and LISA statistics were applied. Therefore, the final regressions include significant explanatory variables and might contribute to more efficient debt management and its control. The paper also reveals spatial associations in the field of the indebtedness of local governments. [R]
74.3416 GOLDFINCH, Shaun ; YAMAMOTO, Kiyoshi ; AOYAGI, Saizo —
Trust in government and its antecedents and development remain leading policy and research concerns. Drawing on a broadly representative online survey of 3100 respondents in Japan, we examine measures of trust in three local government actors. We find political participation is not associated with trust in local government, contrary to our expectations. Civic participation is associated with trust in the mayor, but not councillors or administrators. Satisfaction with services provided by local government, and positive perceptions of policy process, are associated with trust, with interactions suggesting process is the stronger antecedent. To develop greater trust in local government, it is important that public sector actors exhibit respect for rights and follow procedure, laws, and regulations, as well as deliver positive outcomes. [R]
74.3417 GRANDAGE, Andrew J. ; MITCHELL, David —
We provide a comparative analysis of capital project management for major transportation and information technology (IT) acquisitions in US state governments, focusing on the use of earned value management (EVM). Results indicate that most states have adopted basic reforms, such as establishing project management offices and developing guidelines based on industry standards. However, fewer have implemented reforms with more teeth to them, such as centralized oversight and EVM. We find that states with greater spending are more likely to use EVM but that it is more commonly prescribed for IT than transportation. [R]
74.3418 GRIGORYAN, Hasmik —
Scholarship has made significant advances in our understanding of the determinants of the survival of regional governors under authoritarianism. However, most studies focus on large nondemocratic regimes such as Russia or China. Drawing on data for 2007-2021, I test whether governors in Armenia were rewarded on the basis of their political or economic performance. I find strong support in favour of rewards based on regional election returns, a change in prime ministers, patronage and prior career in state office in the period up to the 2018 revolution. Afterwards, however, vote mobilisation no longer had the same effect on governors’ careers. [R]
74.3419 HAMZA, Lenhard —
Since democratisation, South Africa has struggled to create a stable system of local governance. There are constant municipal failures. Higher levels of government have to intervene in municipalities regularly. This study, therefore, set out to assess the effect of intervention mechanisms, including preventative measures, as part of the broader accountability and oversight setting. Based on a qualitative research approach, this paper argues that both prospective and retrospective accountability forms are weak. Post-factum interventions yield only limited results. Overall, these mechanisms are not able to form stable local governments and prevent municipal failures. Ultimately, this paper infers that strengthening prospective accountability and oversight mechanisms has the capacity to increase the stability of the local governance system. This finding has important implications for developing new accountability and oversight practices in South Africa and elsewhere. [R]
74.3420 HELPAP, David J. —
This research assesses the challenges facing rural local governments, impediments to addressing them, and the extent to which rural local governments would benefit from additional revenues, management capacity, or partnerships. Using survey data from rural local governments in Wisconsin, findings indicate longstanding problems related to revenue limitations, management capacity, and service delivery remain, but there are also significant concerns about high-speed internet access, affordable housing, and substance abuse. Impediments to addressing challenges include financial limitations, reduced state support, and declining community involvement. Obtaining additional revenues and partnerships with other, nearby local governments were viewed as the most helpful methods to address community challenges. Overall, the results update and expand on existing research on the challenges facing rural local communities, and further highlight the need for additional research on this specific subset of local governments. [R]
74.3421 KHALEH, Esmaeil Nasiri Hendeh ; SHAHBAKHSH, Omid Jamshidzehi ; MOHAGHEGHPOUR, Seyedeh Yasaman —
The growth of urbanization created new challenges for local governments to match UN sustainable goals such as being resilient and inclusive. These goals are most unlikely in informal settlements characterized by vulnerability and rejection. This study investigates the relationship between good urban governance and the resilience of informal settlements in Zanjan City, Iran, using criteria such as participation, equity, effectiveness, accountability and security as independent variables. The data were analyzed using SPSS statistical software. Pearson correlation test and multivariate regression analysis were used to analyze the effect of the independent variable on the resilience of informal settlements in Zanjan. The results showed that all variables have a significant relationship with the dependent variable. The results of multivariate regression analysis indicated that the three variables of participation, effectiveness and accountability had a significant effect. However, the other two variables, equity and security, had a less significant effect on resilience. Five indicators of the Urban Governance Index can be used as a guiding tool for managing informal settlements. [R]
74.3422 KIRLAPPOS, Andreas —
The Republic of Cyprus is a small EU member state, whose domestic structures replicate a durable tradition of centralisation, limiting the overall role of local government. This work employs the vertical research dimension of top-down Europeanisation to investigate the influence of European Integration vis-à-vis the promotion of gender equality at the municipal level. It adopts a local government comparative viewpoint to analyse the adoption of the European Charter for Equality of Women and Men in Local Life by the Cypriot Municipalities (2011–present). This work utilises specific analytical frameworks (Europeanisation and Historical Institutionalism) to provide a theoretically and empirically informed analysis based on empirical data resulting from three field studies (2013, 2019 and 2021) and respective electoral data. Our research results suggest that the effects of Europeanisation, in terms of promoting gender equality, have been limited due to long-lasting formal and informal institutional restrictions. [R]
74.3423 KÖLLING, Mario, et al. —
This article studies the determinants of tax innovation in Spain’s Common Regime Autonomous Communities (ACs) over the period 1986-2018, across the different types of taxes included in their “own taxes.” Our central finding is that the introduction of taxes is motivated by politics: ACs governments introduce taxes when governed by left-wing parties or by a coalition government that included a regionalist party. Second, we find that parties in government follow a strategic calculus when introducing new taxes: an approaching election and a previously introduced tax decrease the chances of tax innovation. Two important negative results to come out of this analysis are that taxation innovation is not sensitive to geographical diffusion or to the availability of alternative source of revenue in the system of territorial financing. [R, abr.]
74.3424 MA Ming ; KANG Yi —
By examining the case of rural Guangdong, this research elaborates on the practice of party-led social capital building (PSCB), which provides a Janus-faced mechanism for creating synergies between the local party, state and society: the Primary Party Organizations cultivate bonding, bridging, and linking social capital to enhance community engagement while deliberately limiting the democratizing potential of this process by selecting vetted nonstate actors, including social workers, private entrepreneurs, and official delegates from higher administrative levels, to serve as key nodes in the community networks. These delegates are tasked with gathering information, building trust and reciprocity, and influencing public opinion to ensure that mass participation in community affairs produces the results desired by the local party-state. [R, abr.]
74.3425 MIURA, Kacie —
During foreign policy disputes involving China and some of its most important economic partners, why do local leaders punish or protect foreign commercial actors? Understanding this variation is important because how local leaders treat foreign businesses can influence the overall effectiveness of the Chinese government’s use of economic coercion against foreign states. Two variables help determine whether local leaders participate in economic retaliation: (1) whether they regard commercial ties to the targeted state as essential to achieving the economic growth necessary for career advancement; and (2) whether they are politically vulnerable, either because they lack powerful patrons or because their locality recently experienced social unrest. Economic importance creates incentives to protect foreign commercial interests, and political vulnerability provides incentives for local leaders to demonstrate their patriotic credentials through economic retaliation. [R, abr.]
74.3426 MUGHAN, Siân ; OVERSTREET, Dallin —
Differences in managerial expertise and political incentives associated with local government form may affect local government spending levels as well as the allocation of resources. This paper explores the latter possibility by estimating how the distribution of resources in council-manager and mayor-council municipalities responds to a positive fiscal shock resulting from the abolition of a municipality’s court. We find that court abolition has a distinct effect on the allocation of resources in council-manager and mayor-council governments. As expected, mayor-council municipalities allocate the marginal dollar to policing. However, council-manager municipalities react to court closure by reducing police expenditures over the long-term. [R]
74.3427 NAKATANI, Ryota, et al. —
Does health expenditure decentralization improve a nation’s health? Should countries care about governance quality when they decentralize healthcare spending to local governments? We answer these questions using cross-country data comprising fifty countries from 1996 to 2018. We find that health spending decentralization worsens health outcomes, which are offset by better governance of government. We calibrate the maximum feasible degree of health expenditure decentralization to have positive effects on health outcomes for a given percentile distribution of governance quality. Countries should be mindful of this negative consequence of health spending decentralization and should ensure that the quality of their governance exceeds a certain threshold to offset this negative externality. [R, abr.]
74.3428 OLSZEWSKI, Johnny, Jr. ; ABUKHDIER, Momen —
Baltimore City’s CitiStat, a performance management program designed to increase productivity by requiring key indicators on a regular basis, quickly became a highly lauded model that was replicated by other governments around the world but that has had its own sustainability questioned. Based on lessons learned from the CitiStat experience, Baltimore County’s BCStat program has taken a “three pronged approach” to maximize program benefits and to address the sustainability challenges faced by CitiStat. Specificially, BCStat is focused on collaborative, cross-departmental priorities; the Stat team provides data and consulting support; and data literacy has become infused across all county departments, including programmatic assistance. [R]
74.3429 PARK Sungho ; MAHER, Craig S. ; LIAO Wei-Jie —
Recent fiscal condition literature has been attentive to the consistency between subjective measures of local fiscal condition based on public officials’ perceptions and their objective counterparts measured using financial data. Studies have found little evidence of a relationship between them, leading scholars to speculate flaws in measurement or intentional lack of association. This study reevaluates the issue by investigating intervening explanations for the absence of connection. Analyzing survey and audited financial data from 185 municipalities across 31 states, we identify various individual and organizational attributes that help clarify the association between the two types of fiscal condition measures. [R]
74.3430 PORTO, Alberto ; PUIG, Jorge —
We study the interaction between intergovernmental transfers on the level and the structure of local own revenues. Based on a sample for Argentina’s local governments, specifically the 135 municipalities of the province of Buenos Aires, we find that transfers facilitate local revenues collection. This effect is more pronounced in urban local governments, with higher population density, poverty levels, and demand for public services. In addition, transfers bias own revenues composition. That is, higher transfers lead to higher local tax collection, which is obtained through less distortionary taxation (i.e., property tax). Interestingly, this bias is stronger for local governments with a higher share of divisible public goods (that are likely to be financed according to the “benefit principle”). [R, abr.]
74.3431 QUINCKHARDT, Matthias —
This paper investigates how party connections affect the ability of local politicians to obtain central government funds for their municipality. Using a novel data-set for mayoral elections in Germany spanning 2322 municipalities in eight states in the years 2000 to 2008 and regression discontinuity design, I find that party alignment between a local mayor and the state government increases transfers to a municipality by 20% per year. Such favoritism has been interpreted as a sign of partisanship and blamed on central governments which use public funds for partisan purposes. I show that local political conditions, such as reelection incentives and information transmission can partly account for the alignment effect. Taken together, the results provide alternative channels for the interpretation of alignment effects. [R]
74.3432 RAHMATUNNISA, Mudiyati, et al. —
One of the Indonesian government’s efforts to improve the economy of rural communities is the establishment of Village Owned Enterprises (BUMDes). BUMDes that are successful in their management cannot be separated from the role of local governments as those who have the authority to foster, supervise and develop BUMDes. Therefore, this study aims to determine the capability of the local government of Bintan Regency to the management of BUMDes. This study uses a qualitative method with a case study approach. Data were obtained through in-depth interviews using purposive sampling techniques to key people in the local government of Bintan district and managers of advanced and developing BUMDes in Bintan district. This study found that the government’s capabilities include entrepreneurial capabilities, motivational capabilities, investment capabilities, and adaptive capabilities. The researcher also found that the importance of legislative capability by the local government as a guarantor that all investments that have been given by the government are able to survive and develop. The challenge for the government in its implementation is that there are still BUMDes that have not been able to accept the policies made by local governments. This is due to the low resources of BUMDes managers, the lack of village community support for BUMDes and the disharmony of relations between the village government and BUMDes managers. [R]
74.3433 REPETTO, Luca ; SOSA ANDRÉS, Maximiliano —
In this paper we use data on US states and a regression-discontinuity design to study how divided government affects the polarization of the legislature, inter-branch conflict, and policy implementation. We document that Republican legislators serving under a divided government have more conservative ideologies than those serving under a fully unified government. Correspondingly, Democrats have more liberal ideologies. In terms of policy implementation, however, we find evidence of moderation: compared to unified Republican governments, divided ones with a democratic governorship or senate implement more liberal policies. When Democrats lose unified control, instead, policies become more conservative. [R]
74.3434 ROCCO, Philip, et al. —
United States territories — home to more than 3.5 million Americans — are excluded from the safeguards of American federalism. Unlike states, they are subject to the plenary power of the US Congress, lack core legal protections, and are denied meaningful political representation. As such, territories must find alternative approaches to exercising political voice in the American federal system. Yet territorial-federal relations have received virtually no empirical attention from federalism scholars. To address this gap, we examine territories’ efforts to advance their interests within both bottom-up and top-down intergovernmental councils, as well as through territory-specific advocacy. Our analysis of organizational participation, agendas, and policy outcomes suggests that territories — while denied access to traditional mechanisms of shared rule — do participate in intergovernmental relations, through a combination of bottom-up and top-down multilateral intergovernmental councils (IGCs), as well as bilateral intergovernmental lobbying. Challenges to exercising political voice vary across these institutions. [R]
74.3435 RUTHERFORD, Amanda ; MERRITT, Cullen C. —
Existing research provides evidence that the framing of information can substantively alter how citizens perceive institutions of government and a range of policy issues. While prior work acknowledges that there are limits to the effects of framing, less attention has been given to examining contexts in which framing fails to shape perceptions. Using an exploratory survey experiment, we compare the effects of political knowledge, perceived ideological distance, and more deliberative thinking to framing regarding councilor pay, an issue for which citizens consistently express negative sentiment. When provided real-world information showing local councilors are compensated less than their counterparts in comparable cities, citizens are somewhat more likely to rate their councilors as underpaid. However, framing effects are not observed when respondents use more deliberative thinking. Further, we find that explained variance in perceptions is more strongly associated with political knowledge, ideological distance, trust, and, in the case of deliberative thinking, gender. [R]
74.3436 RYSER, Laura ; HALSETH, Greg ; MARKEY, Sean —
Municipal reform has accelerated since the 1980s, with municipalities learning to adjust to changes in responsibilities downloaded by senior governments. However, small municipalities struggle with outdated financial and jurisdictional structures as senior governments ask them to become more ‘entrepreneurial’ for a broader range of responsibilities. To date, little research has explored the influence of statutory settings that shape municipal powers, and hence, an understanding of the concept and associated processes pertaining to municipal entrepreneurialism. Drawing upon key informant interviews in four regions across Canada, this paper explores how small municipalities are generating revenue and other resources needed to address community and economic development priorities. Findings indicate that small municipalities are engaging in a variety of entrepreneurial activities, including municipal enterprises, social enterprises, and service contracts, while pursuing pro-active approaches to leverage place-based assets. These endeavours, however, are shaped by many dimensions of risk that underline the conceptualisation of municipal entrepreneurialism. [R]
74.3437 SEN Somdeep —
This article studies the violent politics of stigmatisation and erasure of nationalist urban infrastructure. In general, urban infrastructure is a mechanism of state power. But, through the case of the imposing presence of Turkish nationalist infrastructure in the Kurdish city Diyarbakir, it demonstrates that when tied to an antagonistic nationalist political project, this infrastructure is often purposefully built to violently cleanse urban spaces of the national “other”. Be it a statue, a mural or a picture of a nationalist leader — this infrastructure is incapable of inflicting physical pain. Nonetheless, its violence is symbolic and meant to have a real effect on Diyarbakir’s Kurds’ ability and willingness to identify as Kurds. That said, violence does not entirely inform the spatial experience of those targeted by this nationalist infrastructure. The article demonstrates that Kurdish residents also found ways of remaining unaffected, even treating the infrastructure laden with Turkish nationalist iconography as a reminder of their own Kurdish identity. This article thus expands our understanding of what nationalist infrastructure does. It may be designed to be violent. However, it also reveals itself to be a site of contestation — equally inspiring the persistence of the counter-narrative of the national “other”. [R]
74.3438 SHINOHARA, Shugo —
The link between actual government performance and citizens’ performance perceptions has been controversial. Given the prevalence of negativity bias, however, the link between bad performance and citizens’ perceptions could appear to be strong. To explore this theoretically unconfirmed link, this study uses a quasi-experiment that contrasts a Japanese town in fiscal crisis, involving tax increases and service cuts, with a control village not in fiscal crisis. Using a difference-in-differences analysis with a careful retrospective pretest, it finds negative effects of the fiscal crisis on citizens’ process perception, while it shows no effects on citizens’ service satisfaction and trust in the mayor, council, and administrators. The study further finds positive associations between citizens’ performance perceptions and civic engagement. It discusses these findings to identify the boundary conditions in which a bad performance-negative perception link is likely to appear. [R]
74.3439 SPICER, Zachary ; KUSHNER, Joseph ; LAMARCHE, Jean-Francois —
In this paper, we examine whether a political budget cycle exists in municipal governments that fall under tight financial and institutional regulation by senior orders of government. For other levels of government, there is evidence that politicians initiate popular programs in election years and delay the unpopular tax increases after the election. Using a sample of 444 Ontario municipalities, with few exceptions, no such evidence was found. The results are the same regardless of the length of the term (three or four year), municipal size (small, medium, or large), and the governance system (one or two-tier). The paper concludes with possible explanations as to why there are no opportunistic manipulations of municipal budgets. [R]
74.3440 STAUFFER, Katelyn E. ; MILLER, Susan M. ; KEISER, Lael R. —
Governments rely on citizen compliance to implement policies. Yet, in the current climate where citizens express low levels of trust in government, gaining compliance can prove challenging. Scholarship suggests other factors that might promote compliance even in the absence of trust. We examine two: expertise and descriptive representation across race, gender, and partisanship. We experimentally activate general (dis)trust in government and use a conjoint experiment to examine multiple factors that might shape citizens’ willingness to comply with and trust government guidance related to COVID-19. We find that shared partisanship and consultation with experts have the largest effects. We also see an effect of shared racial identity on compliance for Black Americans, at least when trust is relatively low. As we consider the role of trust, expertise, and descriptive representation across race, gender, and partisanship simultaneously, the results offer important insights into factors that underpin citizens’ willingness to comply with government mandates. Our results have important real-world implications, highlighting the importance of bipartisan responses to crises as well as ensuring racial representation in government. They also demonstrate that explicitly involving experts in decision-making processes increases citizens’ willingness to comply with policy. [R]
74.3441 TORIKAI, Masatomo —
Authoritarian leaders incorporate key subnational posts into state bureaucratic structures to consolidate their regimes. Exploiting a comprehensive dataset of post-tenure careers of governors in Russia, this study demonstrates that under the centralisation reforms of the Putin presidency, governors have left their posts at the discretion of the federal government. In the 2010s, outgoing governors frequently faced criminal charges. At the same time, an increasing number of governors have been promoted to federal government posts, and regional posts have been incorporated into the federal administrative structure through a combination of tight control and promotions. [R]
74.3442 USTER, Anna ; COHEN, Nissim —
The literature on intergovernmental relationships discusses the tension between centralization and local autonomy. However, few studies question local authorities’ response when dissatisfied with central government policies. Using Hirschman’s model of exit, voice and loyalty, we explore local government’s response to such dissatisfaction. Specifically, we suggest that local authorities may adopt a “do-it-yourself” approach, unilaterally engaging in semi-legal strategies to improve outcomes. This solves immediate local organizational problems, without waiting for approval. Using the Israeli case, we show how a pervasive culture of “do-it-yourself” affects local governments’ responses. We also discuss implications for the relationship between the two bodies. [R]
74.3443 UTTERMARK, Matthew J. —
Contemporary research in American federalism has evaluated the centralizing characteristics of several institutions within state governments — including state statutes, executive orders, and judicial decisions — and has shown that these institutions are generally associated with shifting power away from local governments toward state governments. I expand this discussion by assessing the consequences of direct democracy for the balance of power between state and local governments. In particular, I investigate whether ballot measures are associated with decentralizing power away from state governments toward local governments or rather whether these measures are associated with centralizing power in state governments. Leveraging new data across the history of direct democracy in the US and coding 945 proposed ballot measures according to their de/centralizing impact on local governments, I find that citizen-initiated ballot measures are neither centralizing nor decentralizing, but legislature-referred ballot measures are decentralizing. [R, abr.]
74.3444 VARTAŠOVÁ, Anna ; ČERVENÁ, Karolína —
In the article, the authors focused on the application of the most recently introduced optional local fee in the Slovak Republic, namely the local development fee. Since 2017, the income from the fee has been a source of funding for the municipalities that have introduced it in their territory by a generally binding ordinance. The article aims to identify the position and budgetary significance of this fee and to evaluate its development in the period since its introduction, at the national level in Slovakia in comparison with the trend in the capital of Slovakia - Bratislava. The authors conclude that the fee is being imposed by a permanently rising number of municipalities and increasing incomes from the fee are observed. The importance of the fee as a source of funding was identified at a case-to-case level, even though its significance at the overall level of Slovakia is yet low. [R]
74.3445 VERHELST, Tom ; PETERS, Klaartje —
Despite their vast relevance to democracy, scholars have paid little systematic attention to the scrutiny function of local councils. To stimulate such research, this study theorises the concept of council scrutiny. First, we outline the rationale, wider policy context, and conceptualisations. Next, we present and discuss an actor-centred institutionalist approach to introduce an analytical framework that depicts council scrutiny as a loop comprising eight interrelated parts. These parts include the institutional context and policy environment, intrinsic motivations and actor properties, scrutiny objects, objectives, constellations, the scrutiny process as such, and its effects and personal rewards. Finally, we explain how this analytical framework may serve as a vehicle for a more comprehensive and detailed study of the various aspects of council scrutiny. [R]
74.3446 VITOMIR, Jelena ; TOMAS-MISKIN, Sonja ; POPOVIĆ, Slobodan —
The importance of the application of controlling in public enterprises is highlighted in the study. The aim of the research was aimed at establishing evidence that improvement of management can be achieved through the application of controlling 141 public companies were analyzed in terms of the use of controlling and internal control, that is, about 20% of the mentioned companies whose founders are local self-government units. We found that there are significant differences in terms of established control and it is increasingly in favor of the application of controlling in relation to internal control based on the analyzed five factors: planning, decision-making, business analysis, presentation and reporting. The main conclusion would be that the operations of public companies in the coming period will require an increasing application of controlling in the management system. This was determined by applying the so-called T-test, and the total score, and it refers to all analyzed factors (p=.000) in relation to established controlling and internal control in public companies. [R]
74.3447 WANG Xiao Lu —
This article explores the relationship between meta-governance, uncertainty and governance network responses. A social network analysis was conducted on the interlocking directorate network among nonprofits before and after a market-oriented collibration triggered by a new public management reform to the corporatist social service provision system in Hong Kong. By unpacking and showing the distinct processes of network formation in response to substantive and strategic uncertainty arising from the market-oriented collibration, the study shows that although more nonprofit actors were directly included in the formalized policy venues after the reform, the network density and clustering coefficient dropped after the reform, potentially reducing the self-coordinating capacity of the governance network. However, for some nonprofit actors, node betweenness centrality increased and node degree centrality decreased, creating an enabling condition for adaption. [R]
74.3448 WANG Xiaoheng ; CHENG Jen-Chi —
Local governments’ ability to sustain a healthy fiscal structure and meet service obligations is critical in avoiding financial hardship. This study empirically tests the effects of intrastate fiscal decentralization on municipal fiscal health that is measured by cash solvency, budget solvency, and long-run solvency. The two key variables, revenue decentralization and expenditure decentralization, are constructed to represent intrastate fiscal decentralization. The panel dataset includes 100 large US cities and covers fiscal years 2007 through 2016, which encompasses periods before, during, and after the Great Recession started in 2008. The model estimation is based on a two-way fixed-effect panel regression. The results show that an increased degree of state-local revenue decentralization is significantly associated with higher long-term solvency, while an increased degree of state-local expenditure decentralization leads to higher levels of cash solvency and lower levels of long-term solvency. [R]
74.3449 WILSON, Saul —
China’s rapid urbanization has generated a substantial population of “landless peasants,” villagers whose farmland has been fully expropriated. The fate of these “landless peasants” has varied greatly from locale to locale. In many cities, they have become wealthy urban landlords; in others, they have been pushed aside in the urbanization process. When they have become urban landlords, they have often done so through the formation of village collective shareholding corporations and villages-in-the-city (chengzhongcun, also known as “urban villages”), which have in turn provided housing for many migrant workers. Through a comparison of Guangzhou, with its many villages-in-the-city and powerful village collectives, and Shanghai, with far fewer villages-in-the-city or village collectives, this article argues that these starkly divergent physical, institutional, and distributive outcomes have been the result of divergent municipal policies that seek to urbanize peasants in very different ways. [R, abr.]
74.3450 YOHANITAS, Witra Apdhi, et al. —
The problem of regional innovation is the absence of data inventory, processes, lesson learning, well-integrated regional innovation management, and supporting infrastructure for activities, namely the Knowledge Management System container. Knowledge Management System is a tool, technique, and strategy used to maintain, analyze, organize, develop, and share business expertise. The purpose of this study is the availability of lesson learned knowledge management system governance in government agencies as a comparison, an integrated KMS model can support the sustainability of regional innovation in Tangerang Regency, and an integrated and sustainable KMS prototype of regional innovation. Research methods are carried out qualitatively with literature studies, comparative studies of research objects, and applied model tests in Tangerang Regency. Data collection techniques use literature review, observation, expert judgment, and in-depth interviews to test the KMS model for Regional Innovation. The expected result is the availability of an innovation knowledge management system model for local governments which can then be developed into a knowledge management system for regional innovation. [R]