International Public Management Review
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Book Review: Nazli Choucri. 2012. Cyberpoltics in International Relations. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Get PDFIn the last half of the twentieth century, the world was transformed by the internet. Every facet of life has been affected by the revolution in telecommunications, from commerce to entertainment to academics. In the past few years social networking has been highlighted as a major factor in political revolutions and popular protest, and recent headlines warn of hackers from Russia to China to the United States who target governments and corporations to disrupt operations and steal secrets
New Public Management and the Politics of Government Budgeting
Get PDFThe ‘guardian-spender’ framework formulated by Aaron Wildavsky has defined the way in which most political scientists think about government budgeting since it first appeared in 1964 (Wildavsky 1975; Green and Thompson 1999). Wildavsky argued that budgetary outcomes could be explained (or at least analyzed) by focusing on the interplay of budget actors performing the highly stylized institutional roles of guardian (of the public purse) and spender. This behavioral framework proved sufficiently flexible to account for the differences in budgetary performance across different political systems (see studies by Savoie 1990; Heclo and Wildavsky 1974; Wildavsky 1986); as well as explaining the impact of budgetary reform and divergent economic environments on budget politics (Caiden and Wildavsky 1974; Wildavsky 1975). Reference to ‘guardians’ and ‘spenders’ still pervades discussions of government budgeting in the academic literature of political science and economics (Campos and Pradhan 1997), and has become accepted as conventional descriptions by practitioners in national governments and international bodies (such as the OECD, World Bank and the IMF)
A Critical Assessment of Central Agency Motives in Danish Public Management Reform
Get PDFThis article explores the question why a relatively „healthy“ governance system like Denmark embarks on and continually develops NPM inspired public sector reforms. Expanding Roberts' categorization of problems as „simple“, „complex“ and „wicked“, the article interprets Hood's paradox of the „malade imaginaire“ as „solution driven problems“ in strong economies
Assessing the Impact of Federal Funding to Swiss Universities: A New Performance Audit Concept
Get PDFOpportunities and risks must undergo careful assessments in order to survive in the world of globalization. This applies not only to the private but also to the public sector, including governmental, political and educational institutions. New control mechanisms must be developed and implemented to measure and monitor the performance of political programs. These tools primarily employ evaluation techniques and performance indicators. The need for such instruments is most acute in political programs and processes where large sums of money are involved, where little information is available about the recipients of monetary contributions and where significant public emotional involvement is apparent, such as in education, social security or public health issues
Experiments with New Teaching Models and Methods
Get PDFThe article describes and assesses forms, conditions and advantages of problem-oriented learning and presents several variants of active teaching methods: Panel Discussion, Role Playing, Case Studies, Simulation Games and Project Study. The strengths and weaknesses of these methods are assessed in the light of the objectives of public management teaching. Relations between problem-based learning and successful learning transfer are identified. The article relates experiences with some of these teaching methods in public management courses. Additionally, new experiences with summer schools, multinational lectureships and intercultural learning in the postgraduate Master’s in Public Management program at Potsdam University are reported
Mexico’s Professional Career Service Law: Governance, Political Culture and Public Administrative Reform
Get PDFLess than three years after the historic election of President Vicente Fox in July 2000, Mexico passed a professional career service reform law (Ley de Servicio Profesional de Carrera, 2003) for national government ministries. This law, and the linked transformations in governance and political and administrative culture that underlie it, have stimulated public administrative reform at all levels of Mexican government – national, state and local. This paper: (1) presents a conceptual frame for the evolution of public personnel systems in developing countries, (2) describes Mexico’s professional career service law (LSPC) and the historical conditions that led up to it, (3) places the LSPC in the context of underlying changes in Mexican governance, political culture and institutions, and (4) uses selected economic, social, political and administrative indicators to benchmark the impact of the LSPC and these related changes on public administrative reform in Mexico today
Improving Fiscal Governance and Curbing Corruption: How Relevant are Autonomous Audit Agencies?
Get PDFThis research therefore underscores the limits of institutional design and constitutional engineering for improving the performance of government auditing. External factors, such as the functioning of the national system of fiscal control, the cycle of legislative accountability and the balance of political powers, matter greatly. A critical and often dysfunctional link is that between the AAA and their main principal, the legislature, as mediated by the legislature’s public accounts committee. This functional relationship is particularly important in the monocratic and collegiate models of external auditing where the autonomous audit agency acts as an advisory body to the legislature, such as in Argentina. It is a crucial relationship to enforce ex post government accountability in financial matters through the annual certification of public accounts and the discharge of government
Total Quality Management and Paradigms of Public Administration
Get PDFThe implementation of total quality management (TQM) in public organizations is usually associated with the rise of New Public Management (NPM). Together with NPM, TQM has encountered a lot of criticism. The underlying argument has been that NPM and TQM undermine civil service ethos since they advocate entrepreneurial approaches in providing public services. Apart from the discussion of TQM’s suitability for public agencies, there is an ongoing discussion about the downsides of TQM as such. One of the most serious objections to TQM is that it creates mechanistic solutions (Godfroij 1995) and increases bureaucracy (Hill and Wilkinson 1995, 19)