新公共管理对官僚制是摒弃还是扬弃——基于制度层面的思考

新公共管理是20世纪70年代以后西方各国先后开展的以“企业家政府”为理论模型、以市场化运作模式和私营部门的管理为研究方法、以提高政府工作效率为目的的一项改革运动。新公共管理对政府流程再造的初期的确发挥了一定的作用,提高了行政效率,但是仍然无法改变官僚制的人事制度。新公共管理所提出的私营部门的管理方法,只是对官僚制的修正与补充,是对官僚制的扬弃,而不是摒弃。     

The creation of a Ministry of Culture: towards the definition and implementation of a comprehensive cultural policy in Peru

In June 2010, a Ministry of Culture was created in Peru, raising many questions regarding the ability of this new administrative structure to effectively implement a comprehensive cultural policy, which has been lacking so far, for the Peruvian State has based its previous policies almost exclusively on the preservation of cultural heritage. The Ministry inherits the flaws of the National Institute of Culture, and must address various challenges: the improvement of heritage management; the inclusion of indigenous populations in a never established national identity; a renewed scheme of promotion of the arts and incentives to cultural industries. The article discusses possible policy options for the new ministry, evidences the needs for a renovation of bureaucratic culture within the ministry, for clarification in the objectives set to the Ministry and for more comprehensive data about cultural practices in Peru.     

Paying Attention to Politics: Public Responsiveness and Welfare Policy Change

In order for the democratic process to work properly, it is vital that the public pays attention to politics and signals its opinions and preferences back to its representatives; if this is not the case, representatives have less incentive to represent. This article deals with the question of whether and how the public responds to welfare policy change. The thermostatic model departs from the assumption that the public responds to policy change with negative feedback, in relation to its preferred level of policy. The empirical analysis tests this model on public responses following the implementation of a consumer's choice model in Swedish primary health care. Did the reform trigger a thermostatic response from the public, and how should this be interpreted? A contribution in relation to previous research is the inclusion of ideological orientation and proximity, variables which, I argue, condition the nature and direction of public responsiveness. The study was designed as a natural experiment in which preferences of privatization of health care were measured before and after the health care reform of 2009/2010. The results provide partial support for the thermostatic model: preferences for further privatization decrease after the reform, but primarily within one subgroup. Additionally, public responses are demonstrated to vary according to ideological orientation, where the right‐oriented react thermostatically and the left‐oriented do not. The article contributes to a further understanding of the relation between policymaking and public opinion and to the expansion of thermostatic theory.     

The Determinants of Public Policy: What Matters and How Much

This article is a research synthesis addressing four questions critical to our understanding of the determinants of public policy. How often and how strongly do hypothetical determinants of policy—public opinion, interest groups, the party balance, and other factors—actually influence policy? Do some hypothetical determinants of policy have more influence than others? Does the way we measure policy affect our ability to explain it? And is there a connection between how strongly particular variables affect policy, and how much effort we devote to studying them? It turns out that variables hypothesized to influence policy more often than not have no effect. When variables do affect policy, researchers very seldom say anything about how much impact they have. Variables that convey the most information to policymakers about what the public wants have a greater impact than other variables, but it is less clear how the measurement of policy affects our findings. Researchers pay much attention to hypothetical determinants of policy unlikely to matter very much, and little attention to those likely to be the most important. Implications for future research are considered.     

Public Perceptions of Expert Credibility on Policy Issues: The Role of Expert Framing and Political Worldviews

How do individuals assess the credibility of experts in various policy domains? Under what conditions does the public interpret particular scientific knowledge claims as being trustworthy and credible? Using data collected from an online survey experiment, administered to 1,507 adult residents of Quebec, this paper seeks answers to these questions. Specifically, we examine variation in the way members of the public perceive the credibility of scientific experts in the areas of climate change, shale gas extraction, cell phones, and wind farms. Our results contribute to the existing literatures on public perceptions of policy experts, framing, and cultural theory. We find that individuals evaluate expert credibility based on the way in which experts frame issues, and on the congruity/dissonance between these expert communication frames and one's underlying worldview. However, we also identify limits to these framing effects. Our findings shed light on the interaction of framing and political worldviews in shaping public perceptions of expert credibility in various policymaking contexts.     

Policy Change: An Advocacy Coalition Framework Perspective

One purpose of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is to explain policy change. Previous holistic reviews of the ACF by Weible, Sabatier, and McQueen (2009) and Pierce, Peterson, Jones, Garrard, and Vu (2017) of the framework have not explicitly analyzed all the concepts and their interactions in a systematic manner. To address this gap and inform scholars and practitioners about past findings, strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for future research, this article analyzes how the ACF's theory of policy change is applied to 148 policy processes among 67 journal articles from 2007 to 2014. Similar to Weible et al. (2009), this research finds the frequent use of multiple primary pathways to policy change, infrequent use of many of the ACF's concepts, a plurality of applications in the environment and energy domain, comparison of subsystems, and a need for greater clarity and transparency among applications. Unlike Weible et al. (2009), this article explores associations between primary pathways and policy domains, the frequency of associations between primary pathways and secondary components, policy change and stasis, and identifies threats to internal validity of key ACF concepts.     

Trans-Subsystem Dynamics: Policy Topography, Mass Opinion, and Policy Change

We argue that the treatment of trans-subsystem change, and particularly the role of public opinion in fostering such change, within the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) has been underspecified. We propose a model of "policy topography" that combines the concepts of public opinion, clusters of linked subsystems, and policy issue venues. While the ACF has characterized subsystems as relatively self-contained, we argue that they are more usefully understood as operating in a relatively permeable fashion among evolving clusters of subsystems linked together by networked relations, strategically overlapping policy considerations, and public opinion disruptions. The "policy topography" model offers opportunities to assess the relationships across policy subsystems, and to better specify the critical relationship between public policy and mass opinions. We offer examples, and suggest hypotheses along with avenues for appropriate empirical analysis.     

The Role of Pilot Projects in Urban Climate Change Policy Innovation

Cities are taking a leadership role in addressing global climate change and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but policy innovations are needed to help cities move from goals to outcomes. Pilot projects are one means by which cities are experimenting with new ways of governing and financing climate change mitigation. In this paper, we develop a framework for understanding the role of pilot projects in urban policy innovation: their emergence and rationale, and the means by which they ultimately scale up and out to reduce GHG emissions. We use this framework to evaluate a pilot project for retrofitting social housing buildings in Toronto. We find the initial pilot project helped address the challenges of pursuing deep retrofits of social housing. Scaling these lessons up to the city level required overcoming challenges to financing and coordinating a larger project; scaling out to the provincial level revealed institutional and political obstacles to pursuing the co-benefits of deep building retrofits in social housing. Bridging agents play an important role in both scaling processes. The analysis reveals the additive nature of urban policy innovation and the dynamic interplay of change agents and institutional and political context in innovation processes.     

Public and Private Policy Change: Pension Reform in Four Countries

This article offers a comparative, qualitative analysis of the changing nature of—and relationship between—public and private old age pensions in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Japan. Stressing the impact of institutional legacies on policy change, the article explains why these countries have taken contrasting paths toward the restructuring of public and private pension policies. The study finds that the four countries fall into two distinct clusters. On the one hand are Canada and the United States, which have essentially witnessed policy drift toward a greater reliance on private savings. On the other hand are Britain and Japan, which have reshaped their pension systems largely through legislative revision. The last section explains the differences between and within these two country clusters. The article concludes that institutional forces explain the distinctive policy patterns between the two country clusters but that it is necessary to bring in other factors (i.e., demographic aging, union density, and the role of ideas) to account for differences within each of these clusters.     

The Influence of Organizations and Institutions on Wetland Policy Stability: The Rapanos Case

This paper uses a case study of wetland regulation in the United States to develop elements of a theory about institutional stability and change in policy processes involving large public organizations. This theoretical approach draws on the Institutional Analysis and Development framework to understand events that are not well explained by other policy theories. Our approach accounts for the theoretically unexpected outcomes of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Rapanos v. United States, which stood to change the way the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulate the filling of wetlands. We propose a typology of institutional types that operate inside public organizations, and use process tracing to show how tacit institutions, those created informally within public organizations, can play key roles in determining the outcomes of policy processes. In the Rapanos case, informal coordination mechanisms enabled regulators and members of the regulated community to preserve substantially the pre‐ruling status quo. The key role of these microlevel interactions in shaping the macrolevel behaviors of public organizations underscores the importance of further research investigating how, in similar cases, different behavioral mechanisms interact in often complex and unexpected ways to determine the outcomes of policy processes.     

Making Cultural Heritage Significant for the Public. The Role of Researchers in Encouraging Public Awareness and Local Pride

The municipality of Olavarría, Buenos Aires province, Argentina, has a rich, diverse, and ancient natural and cultural heritage, although this is not well known by the local community. For this reason, an itinerant exhibition was developed to promote public access to scientific information and community awareness concerning the importance of local heritage. This project was the starting point of an integral programme of public outreach and science education, whose main goal is to facilitate intellectual and physical access to academic knowledge by local communities. After seven years of development, several lessons have been learned, including the need to increase stakeholders’ participation and the exploration of new strategies of communication in order to engage different segments of the public.     

Tracking the Coverage of Public Policy in Mass Media

The average citizen often does not experience government policy directly, but learns about it from the mass media. The nature of media coverage of public policy is thus of real importance, for both public opinion and policy itself. It nevertheless is the case that scholars of public policy and political communication have invested rather little time in developing methods to track public policy coverage in media content. The lack of attention is all the more striking in an era in which media coverage is readily available in digital form. This paper offers a proposal for tracking coverage of the actual direction of policy change in mass media. It begins with some methodological considerations, and then draws on an expository case—defense spending in the United States—to assess the effectiveness of our automated content‐analytic methods. Results speak to the quantity and quality in media coverage of policy issues, and the potential role of mass media—to both inform and mislead—in modern representative democracy.     

The Role of Public Opinion in US and Canadian Immigration Policies

Considering that the United States and Canada are neighboring North American countries with fairly similar liberal democratic political cultures, their immigration policies are noticeably different. While US policies prioritize family reunification, Canadian policies favor labor demands and employability. This difference reflects the varying degrees to which the public influences their respective immigration policies. Examining contemporary immigration policies of the United States and Canada, this paper compares the role of public opinion in each, and argues that public opinion plays a more prominent role in immigration policies in the United States than it does in Canada. This observation is due in part to the partisan nature of the US political structure and to the cohesiveness among immigrants, particularly Latinos. Canada, in contrast, favors a policy of multiculturalism that empowers immigrant groups and limits individual groups’ capacity and inclination to dominate policy decisions.     

Global Public Policy,Transnational Policy Communities,and Their Networks

Public policy has been a prisoner of the word “state.” Yet, the state is reconfigured by globalization. Through “global public–private partnerships” and “transnational executive networks,” new forms of authority are emerging through global and regional policy processes that coexist alongside nation‐state policy processes. Accordingly, this article asks what is “global public policy”? The first part of the article identifies new public spaces where global policies occur. These spaces are multiple in character and variety and will be collectively referred to as the “global agora.” The second section adapts the conventional policy cycle heuristic by conceptually stretching it to the global and regional levels to reveal the higher degree of pluralization of actors and multiple‐authority structures than is the case at national levels. The third section asks: who is involved in the delivery of global public policy? The focus is on transnational policy communities. The global agora is a public space of policymaking and administration, although it is one where authority is more diffuse, decision making is dispersed and sovereignty muddled. Trapped by methodological nationalism and an intellectual agoraphobia of globalization, public policy scholars have yet to examine fully global policy processes and new managerial modes of transnational public administration.     

Facts and Myths about Research on Public Policy Implementation: Out-of-Fashion, Allegedly Dead, But Still Very Much Alive and Relevant

Despite several decades of research on public policy implementation we know surprisingly little, not only about cumulative research results, but also about several other key aspects of this research field. This article tries to amend these deficiencies by presenting the results of a comprehensive literature survey. Its main purpose is to challenge, revise, and supplement some conventional wisdom about implementation research. A second motivation is to lay the foundation for and initiate a much needed synthesis of empirical research results. The main results are: The overall volume of publications on policy implementation has not stagnated or declined dramatically since the mid 1980s as is commonly asserted. On the contrary, it has continued to grow exponentially through the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. Even more surprising is that a large number of publications are located outside the core fields. Hence, the literature is substantially larger and more multidisciplinary than most commentators realize. Doctoral dissertations are the most ignored, but probably the richest, largest, and best source of empirical research results. Tracing the origin as well as the location of the disciplinary and geographical cradle of implementation studies must also be readjusted significantly. The ethnocentric bias of this research field toward the Western hemisphere has been, and still is, strong and some policy sectors are given much more attention than others. Although positive in many ways, the predominant multidisciplinary character of implementation research still poses some serious problems with respect to theory development. Thus, I discuss whether a resurgence of interest in policy implementation among policy scholars may already be occurring. Finally, I suggest that the time is long overdue for efforts to synthesize research results in a more rigorous scientific manner than has hitherto been done.     

Strengthening the Role of Public Health in Environmental Policy

Over the past 25 years there has been a steady decline in the role of public health agencies in environmental protection. This paper examines the major factors that have contributed to that decline, including the impact of federal environmental laws, the disparity in funding between regulatory and public health activities in environmental protection, and the emergence of risk assessment as a basis for environmental decisions. The methods of risk assessment and traditional public health approaches are contrasted, and the advantages of the involvement of public health agencies are discussed. Recommendations are presented for strengthening the role of public health in environmental decisionmaking to address more effectively public concerns about environmental risks.     

Truncated Decision Making and Deliberative Implementation: A Time-Based Policy Process Model for Transitional China

The time dimension has not attracted enough attention in policy process research in China, yet speed is the most distinctive feature of China’s recent development. This article, based on observations of China’s policy practices, proposes a new research perspective for understanding how the Chinese government has been able to address policy challenges in an era of rapid transition. The approach adopted by the government allows decision makers to respond quickly to serious problems with a truncated decision-making process, and then implement the decisions through a more gradual deliberative process. The article examines China’s coal-mining industry reform as an empirical case to illustrate how this governance approach has been used to achieve major policy reform, namely property rights reform for coal mines, while simultaneously maintaining stability, regulating production safety, and stimulating industrial development. The article concludes with a discussion of the broad implications of this pattern for improving the effectiveness of public policy both in and outside China.