Browsing by Subject "Public administration"

Over the past decade, international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have become increasingly active in authoritarian regimes as they respond to emergencies, assist with development, or advocate for human rights. Though these services and advocacy can challenge the legitimacy and power of the regime, many autocratic states permit INGO activities, and INGOs continue to work in these countries despite heavy restrictions on their activities. In this dissertation, I theorize that the relationship between INGOs and autocrats creates a state of amicable contempt, where each party is aware that the other both threatens and supports their existence. After outlining the theory, I explore the factors that determine when autocracies will constrict the legal environment for INGOs through de jure anti-NGO laws and the discretionary implementation of those laws. I combine a set of statistical models run on a cross-sectional dataset of 100 autocracies between 1991–2014 with case studies of Egypt, Russia, and China to test the effect of internal risk, external threats, and reputational concerns on the de facto civil society regulatory environment. I find that autocracies constrict civil society regulations in response to domestic instability and as regimes become more stable and cohesive. I also find that autocracies constrict civil society regulations in response to external threats to the regime, including the pressures of globalization. I find no evidence of an effect from reputational concerns. I then use results from a global survey of 641 INGOs to test the determinants of international NGO behavior. I find that the conflict between principles and instrumental concerns shapes INGO behavior and influences its relationship to its host government. Finally, I combine the survey results with case studies of four INGOs—Article 19, AMERA International, Index on Censorship, and the International Republican Institute—to analyze how INGOs respond to two forms of government regulation. When facing gatekeeping restrictions designed limit access to the country, I find that INGOs rely on their programmatic flexibility to creatively work around those restrictions. When facing restrictions aimed at capturing INGO programs, organizations rely on their programmatic flexibility to protect against changes to their core principles and mission.

The goal of this study is to understand how residents may benefit from living in a mixed income, HOPE VI development in the South. This analysis focuses on a former housing project and its immediate neighborhood in the aftermath of HOPE VI revitalization. I conducted a case study by utilizing original data collected from in-depth, semi-structured interviews and unstructured interviews, along with administrative records, evaluation data, media accounts, observation, and casual encounters. A unique contribution of this study of a HOPE VI development is that it also addresses the surrounding neighborhood. Furthermore, this case study offers a unique lens for examining contemporary black gentrification in a publicly constructed space.

A major finding of this study is that complex intra-racial social dynamics among African American community members may stem from HOPE VI intervention. Specifically, there may be limited positive interaction among residents in the development, and between them and residents of the proximate exterior neighborhood. Further, the nature of constrained interaction manufactures divisive processes for claiming space and community identity that may potentially have negative consequences for renters.

These consequences stem from a reproduction of space and community, which shapes social control, policing, and exclusion contests, among other tensions. Overall, this study brings to bear some unimagined consequences of HOPE VI that potentially neutralize anticipated benefits of mixed income living for the poor, based on real and perceived alterations of class, mobility, and shared identity in and around the development site.

How can we explain the significant variation in the organization and performance of public bureaucracies across countries, across regions, and between the levels of the administrative hierarchy? Considering the high level of path dependence in bureaucratic organization, this dissertation explains divergence in the institutions of public administrations through a set of historical analyses focused on the 19th and early 20th centuries–a time period crucial for the establishment of modern bureaucracies. The second chapter deals with the influence of socio-economic groups in countries that enjoyed domestic political autonomy. Three social classes had fundamentally different interests in the organization of the state apparatus, and their relative political influence was a key factor determining its organizational characteristics. The third and fourth chapters deal with the impact of foreign rule on the bureaucratic organization of countries that did not enjoy domestic political autonomy. Specifically, the third chapter focuses on within-country regional variation in bureaucratic organization and provides an in-depth study of Poland, which was historically ruled by three empires with vastly different bureaucracies. I develop an account of path dependence and suggest that persisting differences in culture and perceptions of public administration are key drivers of regional divergence. Finally, the fourth chapter focuses on variation in bureaucratic organization between levels of the administrative hierarchy and provides an in-depth study of Romania, which was historically partially ruled by the Habsburg Empire and partially autonomous. I develop a theoretical framework of imperial pervasiveness that explains differential effectiveness of external rule along the administrative hierarchy.

Local governments in the United States spend more than $1.6 trillion annually on public service provision. Access to reliable public services is essential for health and wellbeing. But there are large disparities in access to services across the country. This dissertation asks why. Specifically, I examine the incentives and constraints that influence investment in services. Local governments fund service provision with revenue from local taxes, fees, and intergovernmental aid. The amount of revenue that local governments collect depends on the demographics of their jurisdiction. Demographics undergird the size of the revenue base, voter preferences over tax rates and fees, and the need and capacity to seek intergovernmental aid. Each standalone chapter of this dissertation examines one of these components. In the first chapter, I use data from the U.S. Census and Census of Governments to examine how income segregation between municipalities shapes local service expenditures in metropolitan areas. In the second chapter, my coauthors and I use data on water rates and local elections to test whether voters hold local elected officials responsible for increasing service fees. In the third chapter, I use data from service area shapefiles, the U.S. Census, and state agencies to assess whether resource-based differences in need and capacity correlate with the allocation of federal aid for water services. Understanding the politics of local service provision has important implications for equitable access to services.

This dissertation comprises three articles:

“Rethinking Stakeholder Participation in Regulatory Governance: A Historical-Institutional Analysis and Proposed Theoretical Model” (Chapter 2/Article 1): The regulatory policymaking process provides myriad opportunities for stakeholder participation. While policymakers have invested considerable resources in engaging stakeholders in regulatory policymaking, comparatively few resources have been invested in evaluating the effectiveness of participation processes. Similarly, although there is a burgeoning literature on stakeholder participation in regulatory policymaking, the topic of participatory effectiveness is under-explored. A more holistic understanding of the causal chain connecting participatory institutional design, stakeholder participation, and regulatory policy outcomes would contribute to the theory and practice of regulatory governance by illuminating the conditions under which interactions among regulators and external stakeholders promote or hinder effective regulatory policy. Based on a historical-institutional analysis of participatory institutional design in the United States over the last century and a review of the extant interdisciplinary theoretical and empirical literature, this article proposes a novel causal process model of participatory effectiveness. This model both formalizes a theoretical approach to defining participatory effectiveness and informs empirical approaches to measuring the effectiveness of participation in regulatory policymaking.

“Technocracy, Democracy, and Public Policy: An Evaluation of Public Participation in Retrospective Regulatory Review” (Chapter 3/Article 2): In 2011 and 2012, President Obama issued a series of Executive Orders (EOs) mandating that U.S. federal agencies engage in “retrospective review” of their existing regulations. While prospective assessment of regulations is a well-established feature of the U.S. regulatory policy cycle, EOs 13563, 13579, and 13610 recognize that retrospective assessment is not yet institutionalized. This article presents the first systematic assessment of participation in U.S. retrospective regulatory review. Drawing on content analysis of an original dataset of government documents and public input, this article analyzes participatory institutional design, the level and composition of resulting participation, and the effectiveness of participation processes. The results suggest that participation processes were effective with respect to the purposes of participation identified in the EOs and extant literature: policy learning and process legitimacy. These findings offer preliminary evidence that under certain circumstances regulatory agencies may use participation to enhance technocratic expertise and promote democratic accountability.

“Banking on Burden Reduction: How the Global Financial Crisis Shaped Stakeholder Participation in Banking Regulation” (Chapter 4/Article 3): The Economic Growth and Regulatory Paperwork Reduction Act (EGRPRA) of 1996 requires the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC)—an interagency council composed of U.S. banking regulators—to conduct decennial retrospective reviews of existing banking regulations, with an emphasis on reducing regulatory burden. EGRPRA reviews provide a lens to study government-market interactions before and after the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007-2009. Through comparative case studies of EGRPRA reviews in 2007 and 2017, this article documents how banking regulatory review processes and stakeholder participation in banking regulation have changed over the last ten years. Using within-case process tracing and content analysis of an original dataset of government documents and public input, this article analyzes the extent to which changes in review processes, participation, and outcomes can be attributed to the policy shock of the GFC and/or shifting political, regulatory, and/or market contexts. The results suggest government-market interactions have changed considerably since the GFC, and that regulatory politics explain many of these changes. While retrospective review and stakeholder participation therein may enable more effective and legitimate regulations and rulemaking processes, much work remains to realize these potential benefits in banking regulation.

Since the end of the Cold War, the US Government’s difficulties in implementing policies requiring integrated responses from multiple agencies have led to a number of calls to reform USG inter-agency policy-implementation; similar to how the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act improved the “jointness” of the various military services. All of these major studies and reports, most prominent being the 2008 “Project on National Security Reform”, similarly recommended adopting a Unity of Command approach that authorizes a single manager to synchronize the operations of all departments and agencies in time, space, and purpose. All of these studies directly or indirectly base their recommendations off a single case study from the Vietnam War that implemented the policy of pacification (counter-insurgency)- CORDS (Civil Operations Revolutionary Development Support). However, the causal relationship between single management and effective pacification has never been established as a fact; it is a rather a widely-held, but untested, assumption. This project will supplement archival research from the US and Communist perspectives with current qualitative and quantitative research on counter-insurgency (COIN) and CORDS in Vietnam to test the assumption that single management made CORDS effective. By generating a detailed list of alternative explanations for improved pacification in Vietnam in addition to CORDS, it will use three different political science methods (comparative, congruence, and process-tracing) to eliminate the infeasible hypotheses and rank order the remaining feasible hypotheses. The triangulation of this research question shows that, while the causal connection between single management and effective pacification in Vietnam is not an absolute fact, it is an extremely strong and likely assumption.