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Policy Cycle (policy + cycle)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	80%

Selected Abstracts

The Comparative Historical Analysis of Public Management Policy Cycles in France, Italy, and Spain: Symposium Introduction

GOVERNANCE, Issue 2 2010
MICHAEL BARZELAY
In recent studies of public management reform in France, Italy, and Spain inspired by historical institutionalism, the Napoleonic tradition is cast as a causal factor whose overwhelming strength explains how these countries' reforms proceed and finish. This symposium pursues the same research interest in the politics of public management reform and goal of understanding how reforms begin, proceed, and finish in these countries. However, the features of this research project include (1) a focus on instances of public management policymaking, (2) original research on public management reform episodes in each country, and (3) explanatory research arguments that place causation within events. Based on a comparison of explanatory research arguments developed in each case study, the symposium's conclusion extends earlier institutional processualist accounts of causal tendencies of public management policymaking and offers a critique of the historical institutionalist studies mentioned earlier. [source]

The political participation of social workers: a comparative study

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE, Issue 2 2002
Mel Gray
This article reports on a comparative study that examined the political participation of social workers in KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa, the state of New South Wales (excluding the Hunter region) in Australia, and New Zealand. Each of these contexts had roughly the same number of social workers, that is, approximately 1,200. It was found that social workers in New Zealand tended to be more politically active than their counterparts in New South Wales and KwaZulu-Natal, and the reasons for this are examined. In the process, New Zealand is presented as a case study of the way in which social work has responded to its political context. Finally, conclusions are drawn as to the engagement of social workers in the policy cycle and of the need for them to become more active politically. [source]

Punctuated Equilibrium in Comparative Perspective

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 3 2009
Frank R. Baumgartner
We explore the impact of institutional design on the distribution of changes in outputs of governmental processes in the United States, Belgium, and Denmark. Using comprehensive indicators of governmental actions over several decades, we show that in each country the level of institutional friction increases as we look at processes further along the policy cycle. Assessing multiple policymaking institutions in each country allows us to control for the nature of the policy inputs, as all the institutions we consider cover the full range of social and political issues in the country. We find that all distributions exhibit high kurtosis values, significantly higher than the Normal distribution which would be expected if changes in government attention and activities were proportionate to changes in social inputs. Further, in each country, those institutions that impose higher decision-making costs show progressively higher kurtosis values. The results suggest general patterns that we hypothesize to be related to boundedly rational behavior in a complex social environment. [source]

POLITICAL MONETARY CYCLES UNDER ALTERNATIVE INSTITUTIONS: THE INDEPENDENT TREASURY AND THE FEDERAL RESERVE

ECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 3 2005
Jac C. Heckelman
The theory of opportunistic political business cycles predicts incumbent politicians will alter their economic policies to spur short-run growth to attract additional votes for the upcoming election. There has not been much emphasis on the possibility of historical political business cycles prior to the Keynesian Revolution. No study has yet undertaken a systematic approach to testing for policy cycles during this period. Our study will bridge this gap by considering cycles in monetary policy for the periods of 1879,1914 until the start of Fed operations, and 1914,1932 until abandonment of the gold standard. To properly test for political cycles, it is necessary to develop reaction functions for the Treasury and compare against the reaction function later held by the Fed. This also reveals that creation of an independent monetary authority to be insulated from political pressures changed the manner in which policy was directed, aside from political issues. The evidence is not consistent, however, with monetary cycles closely tied to electoral concerns. [source]

The Political Consequences of the Crash

POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 1 2010
Andrew Gamble
The financial crash of 2008 precipitated a major recession. It shattered the financial growth model that had dominated the previous twenty years and plunged the international economy into a period of economic and political restructuring of uncertain duration. The immediate origins of the crash lay in the lending practices associated with the sub-prime mortgages in the United States which produced the credit crunch in 2007, but the wider causes were the unbalanced character of growth in the international economy and the particular role played by finance. The crisis has been explained in a number of different ways, focusing on the behaviour of the financial markets, the institutional and policy conditions that made the boom possible and then undermined it, longer-term economic and policy cycles and the nature of uncertainty and risk in complex social systems. The political impact of the crash and the recession has not been uniform; it has been highly uneven, depending on the position of particular states in the international economy. The rapid interventions by governments to stave off financial collapse at the end of 2008 were successful, but at the cost of creating serious problems of adjustment for the future. The political debate around what were the causes, who should be blamed and what should be done is only just beginning, and the way this crisis comes to be understood will play a major part in determining how it is eventually resolved and how far-reaching will be the changes to the international economy and to domestic politics. [source]