1,721,045 research outputs found
Congressional ideology and administrative oversight in the New Deal era
No full textHistorians of the U.S. Congress often draw claims from interpretations of legislators’ rhetoric and the outcomes of key votes. In this article, the author tells a cautionary tale: Such strategies ignore the correspondence between roll-call voting on select issues and broader coalitional structures in Congress. He does so by examining contrary positions about a key issue during the New Deal: On the one hand, some researchers claim that reasoned congressional deliberation on the issue of administrative oversight was separate from the prevailing legislative concerns of the day. Other scholars, on the other hand, assert that the prevailing issue dimensions in Congress included administrative oversight. Using a Bayesian measurement method, Ordinary Least Squares, and probit regression, and a novel selection of roll-call data, the author tested these claims, concluding that broader coalitional structures subsumed issues of administration
Impoverished Liberalism: Does the New York Workfare Program Violate Human Rights
Full text linkImpoverished Liberalism: Does the New York Workfare Program Violate Human Right
Marketing racism: the imperialism of rationality, critical race theory, and some interdisciplinary lessons for neoclassical economics and antidiscrimination law
No full textMarketing Racism: The Imperialism of Rationality, Critical Race Theory, and Some Interdisciplinary Lessons for Neoclassical Economic
The role of political ideology in the structural design of new governance agencies
No full textThis paper employs theories of structural politics and delegation to develop a set of propositions about the legislative delegation of authority to quasi-governmental entities, known as "quangos." Legislators have incentives to condition their choice of structure for an organization charged with implementing policy on their own political attitudes toward "good government." The quasi-independence of quangos provides credibility for legislators to commit to a process that takes policy making out of their hands while creating a structure that increases the likelihood of achieving their policy goals. Theoretical implications are empirically examined using data on the financial autonomy of Dutch public bodies. The results support the argument that it is important to consider politicians' ideologies directly in governance studies because they form the key component of structural politics
Credible Governance? Transparency, Political Control, the Personal Vote and British Quangos
No full textThis article claims that special-purpose independent agencies such as quangos provide an avenue for understanding the 'personal vote' and political control of administrative policy making in Britain. Quangos make policies that directly influence particularistic concerns in an MP's constituency, generating incentives for MPs to meddle with their independence in order to capture the personal vote. A division of labor within the governing party relies on back-bench MPs to sound 'fire alarms' when their constituents find fault with quango activities. Once the alarms are sounded, the government has the incentive to manipulate quangos' independence, for example, by making their decision making transparent to provide information for the fire alarm mechanism in the future. This manipulation draws from the government's stock of political capital gained from a supportive electorate. Statistical analysis of transparency in British executive non-departmental public bodies from 2002 to 2005 suggests that increases in back-bench salience (personal vote) and public satisfaction with government (government strength) increase the transparency by which quangos make decisions, thus decreasing their independence. Public satisfaction with the status quo of public service provision, by contrast, decreases transparency, increasing independence. These results suggest that far from being fully independent, quasi-governmental organizations are subject to political control. © 2008 The Author
Public goods, private partnerships, and political institutions
No full textPublic–private partnerships (PPPs) have become an essential vehicle for infrastructure devel- opment worldwide. Theoretical arguments primarily focus on build-operate-transfer (BOT) agreements as a canonical form of PPP, though they rarely discuss the political underpinnings of governments’ decisions to enter such agreements. How does a government’s longevity, stability, and its capacity to raise revenue make BOTs more attractive than other types of partnerships? Extending recent theoretical advances through concepts of control rights and veto players and statistically analyzing a database of more than 4,300 PPP agreements for new construction of infrastructure in 83 developing economies between 1990 and 2014, I provide the first large-scale quantitative evidence of the influence of political institutions on govern- ment choices to adopt BOTs. I find that BOTs are less attractive as the tenure of the longest- serving veto player increases, when veto players are more frequently replaced, and when governments can generate more tax revenue, but more likely when that revenue is above a country’s historic average. My findings contribute to literatures on distributive public policy, hybrid governance, complex project management, and to the policy debate about the role of PPPs in economic development
Determinants of bureaucratic turnover intention: Evidence from the department of the treasury
No full textThis study employs a novel statistical strategy to examine the determinants of turnover intention in government service. To appropriately measure a main determinant of turnover intention - functional preferences - I estimate an ordinal item response model using data from the Federal Human Capital Survey. The sample is selected to facilitate an important comparison: the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has undergone significant performance-based pay reforms for supervisors, but not for nonsupervisors, whereas the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), also a subunit of the U.S. Treasury, has not. Inferential models of turnover intention reveal among other things that functional and friendship solidary preferences are important determinants of turnover intention, but increased accountability is associated with greater turnover among subordinates. IRS supervisors, who face paybanding, are significantly less likely to consider leaving than their counterparts in the OCC, who do not face such incentives
Public policy investment : priority-setting and conditional representation in British statecraft
No full textNo abstract availabl
Democratic Accountability and the Politics of Mass Administrative Reorganization
No full textData and replication code (Stata) for Bertelli and Sinclair, "Democratic Accountability and the Politics of Mass Administrative Reorganization," British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
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