Elaine K. Denny, Ngoc Phan, Diego Romero, Erik Wibbels
{"title":"Incentives, audits and procurement: Evidence from a district-level field experiment in Ghana","authors":"Elaine K. Denny, Ngoc Phan, Diego Romero, Erik Wibbels","doi":"10.1111/gove.12798","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gove.12798","url":null,"abstract":"<p>There is growing affinity for audits as a tool to promote political accountability and reduce corruption. Nevertheless, knowledge about the mechanisms through which audits work remains limited. While most work on audits shows that they can work via citizen sanctions of bad performers, we emphasize that audit effects can also run through prospective incentives, that is, the desire to avoid poor audit results in the first place. We distinguish audits' impact on prospective incentives and sanctions using a field experiment in Ghana; districts were randomized into audit treatment conditions targeting district procurement and oversight of development projects. We assess the effect of audits on political officials using survey experimental data and show that officials respond powerfully to prospective incentives. In districts treated with top-down audits, in-party favoritism falls from 60 percent at baseline to 20 percent at midline, and rates remain at 19 percent at endline. This suggests that the audit's main effect occurred before the audit results were made public, and that prospective mechanisms play an important role in audit efficacy.</p>","PeriodicalId":48056,"journal":{"name":"Governance-An International Journal of Policy Administration and Institutions","volume":"37 3","pages":"729-750"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87347709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Tessa Haesevoets, Arne Roets, Kristof Steyvers, Bram Verschuere, Bram Wauters
{"title":"Towards a multifaceted measure of perceived legitimacy of participatory governance","authors":"Tessa Haesevoets, Arne Roets, Kristof Steyvers, Bram Verschuere, Bram Wauters","doi":"10.1111/gove.12800","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gove.12800","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Policy decision-making modes in governance contexts have become increasingly participatory. This raises questions about legitimacy, and how to measure this concept. The current article advances a multifaceted measurement of perceived legitimacy of policy decision-making modes in participatory governance, capturing the three components of legitimacy (input, throughput, and output) with two items each. This six-item measure was tested in a vignette survey (total <i>N</i> = 4583), which was administered among four types of democratic stakeholders: politicians, civil servants, civil society, and citizens. Respondents completed the scale for four different policy decision-making modes (representative, consultative, co-decisive, and decisive). Our six-item scale shows excellent internal consistency as an encompassing measure, while at the same time also allowing for fine-grained analyses on difference patterns in the input, throughput, and output components of legitimacy. As such, it provides a relevant and parsimonious tool for future research that requires a multifaceted measurement of the perceived legitimacy of participatory governance.</p>","PeriodicalId":48056,"journal":{"name":"Governance-An International Journal of Policy Administration and Institutions","volume":"37 3","pages":"711-728"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91435505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Disgruntled cadres: How tax reduction undermines rural governance","authors":"Linke Hou, Mingxing Liu, Xiaobo Lü","doi":"10.1111/gove.12799","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gove.12799","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Tax reduction is supposed to garner popular support, yet rural unrest sharply increased following the Chinese government's agricultural tax reform aiming to reduce peasants' tax burden. We argue that the tax reduction could undermine village elites' economic and political incentives to assist the state in implementing unpopular policies and achieving desirable outcomes. We exploit the exogeneous timing of the agricultural tax reform that abolished the agriculture tax and estimate its impact through a rare national representative village-level panel dataset. We demonstrate that the tax reform led to tax noncompliance and rising social unrest. We further show that local governance worsened because village elites were disincentivized from carrying out state-preferred yet unpopular policies.</p>","PeriodicalId":48056,"journal":{"name":"Governance-An International Journal of Policy Administration and Institutions","volume":"37 3","pages":"751-769"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75534081","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Political attacks and the undermining of the bureaucracy: The impact on civil servants' well-being","authors":"Gabriela Lotta, Gustavo M. Tavares, Joana Story","doi":"10.1111/gove.12792","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gove.12792","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Countries are facing the deterioration of democratic institutions under a process named democratic backsliding. In this context, political attacks on public organizations become more frequent and intense. While previous studies have examined how civil servants counteract and resist political attacks, their ultimate impact on civil servants' well-being remains underexplored. To shed light on this phenomenon, we conducted an exploratory sequential mixed methods design with civil servants from Brazil. The first phase of the study is qualitative and exploratory. The second is quantitative and we tested if perceived political attacks was associated with higher levels of emotional exhaustion, which, in turn, would lead to a greater incidence of physical health symptoms. Both studies provide compelling evidence of the negative impact of political attacks on civil servants' emotional and physical health, which may have significant consequences for the performance of public organizations and the effective functioning of the democracy.</p>","PeriodicalId":48056,"journal":{"name":"Governance-An International Journal of Policy Administration and Institutions","volume":"37 2","pages":"619-641"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80807807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pacified citizens with a marketized school system: Causal evidence of boomeranging effects of user choice","authors":"Johan Wejryd","doi":"10.1111/gove.12793","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gove.12793","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The marketization of schools and of other public services is supposed to have changed the relationship of citizens to the state in many Western countries over the last 30 years. One explicit aim of marketization has been to increase citizen influence over public services. Yet, studies of its effects on citizens' willingness to address public decision-making remain scarce in general, and nonexistent as regards schools. In this study, a survey experiment taps the causal effects of both user choice and private provision. The results show that marketization significantly reduces respondents' intention to influence schools and related political and bureaucratic decision-making. The effects are robust and, in contrast to those of previous studies, driven by significant effects from the user choice introduced in connection with marketization. The pacifying effects recorded suggest that marketization potentially reduces public services' responsiveness to citizens' interests, thereby aggravating the problems it was meant to address.</p>","PeriodicalId":48056,"journal":{"name":"Governance-An International Journal of Policy Administration and Institutions","volume":"37 3","pages":"691-709"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gove.12793","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80919740","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Retooling development aid in the 21st century: The importance of budget support. By Shahrokh Fardoust, Stefan G. Koeberle, Moritz Piatti-Fünfkirchen, Mark Sundberg, and Lodewijk Smets, Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. 2023. pp. 240. $90.00","authors":"Richard Allen","doi":"10.1111/gove.12789","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12789","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48056,"journal":{"name":"Governance-An International Journal of Policy Administration and Institutions","volume":"36 3","pages":"999-1001"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50154479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Explaining transgender policy change: Policy momentum in Canada and Australia","authors":"Nicole McMahon","doi":"10.1111/gove.12781","DOIUrl":"10.1111/gove.12781","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Western democracies are experiencing a widespread shift towards greater recognition of transgender rights in public policy, yet the timing of change differs across states. To explain this variation, I present a novel theoretical framework called “policy momentum.” Unlike existing work on policy diffusion, which typically emphasizes domestic or international processes, I theorize how the combined pressure from each level creates the conditions for policy change to occur. Empirically, I contrast the creation of national human rights policies to protect transgender individuals in Canada (2017) and Australia (2013). Using process-tracing and within-case analyses, and drawing on elite interviews, primary documents, and Hansard records, I demonstrate the decisive interaction of subnational legislative changes with an emerging global norm to produce transgender policy change. This paper thus contributes to our understanding of LGBTQ+ public policy while also providing a framework for explaining the conditions for cross-national policy change more broadly.</p>","PeriodicalId":48056,"journal":{"name":"Governance-An International Journal of Policy Administration and Institutions","volume":"37 2","pages":"497-515"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gove.12781","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85985987","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pawned states: State building in the era of international finance. By Didac Queralt, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 2022. pp. 368. $35 (paper)","authors":"Agustín Goenaga","doi":"10.1111/gove.12790","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12790","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48056,"journal":{"name":"Governance-An International Journal of Policy Administration and Institutions","volume":"36 3","pages":"1002-1004"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50143449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Localized bargaining: The political economy of China's high-speed railway program. By Xiao Ma, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2022","authors":"Erik H. Wang","doi":"10.1111/gove.12787","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12787","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48056,"journal":{"name":"Governance-An International Journal of Policy Administration and Institutions","volume":"36 3","pages":"996-998"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50143448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Spin dictators: The changing face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. By Sergei Guriev, and Daniel Treisman, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 2022. pp. 360. $29.95 (cloth)","authors":"Áron Hajnal","doi":"10.1111/gove.12791","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12791","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48056,"journal":{"name":"Governance-An International Journal of Policy Administration and Institutions","volume":"36 3","pages":"1004-1005"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50118688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}