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This 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.

This 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. Adapted from the source document.

This article examines delegation in the environment of quasi-governmental, special purpose bodies. Better known as "quangos," these agencies present a challenge for the theory of delegation, because their tasks are often comprised of routine administration, such as the distribution of benefits & the collection of user fees, rather than more politically salient policymaking. Do (spatial) policy conflict & legislative capacity affect the conditions under which authority is delegated to quangos? What effect do "good government" ideology & legislative capacity have on the presence of ex ante & ex post control over quangos? Theoretical predictions are examined with data from a study of Dutch public bodies as well as issue scales from the Manifesto Research Group. Multinomial logit statistical models produce evidence that although policy conflict & legislative capacity measures affect the probabilities of enacting both ex ante & ex post controls, their contributions to ex post measures, as expected in the presence of important hidden action incentives, are much stronger.

The New Public Management has a paramount implication for the delegation of authority to implement public policy, namely, that efficient delegations are designed according to the substance of the task to be performed. In other words, the government must be able to choose the best agent to carry out a particular task, which implies that the set of agents must not be confined to actors & departments within the bureaucracy. This flexibility of form creates the incentives behind the quango, & increases the importance of ex ante design for the legislature to avoid misuse of public funds. It also has the potential to increase ex post enforcement activity by the government. This article examines ex ante design from the perspective of auditing, presenting a formal model of the construction of auditing procedures as a response to expectations of the misuse of funds. By creating requirements such as the requisite submission of annual plans, reports, & accounts, governments attempt to create a compliance-inducing scheme much like that present in tax enforcement. The theoretical model generates empirical predictions that are statistically examined using data on public bodies in the Netherlands created between 1946 & 1993. Empirical results demonstrate strong support for the theory. Tables, Figures, Appendixes, References. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractWe explore the democratic implications of a reputational account of bureaucratic authority. While an influential literature has examined the relevance of reputation—and mutual exchange between principals and agents in public organizations generally—the normative implications of these insights have largely escaped scrutiny. We discuss how reputation‐building impacts both the ability and the motivation of principals to oversee administrative policymaking. We argue that reputation‐sourced authority eschews ex ante incentives through the claims‐making and maneuvering of bureaucrats as they develop reputations with audiences. At the same time, it de‐legitimizes ex post oversight because monitoring and compliance must compete both with reputational authority and with resistance from the audiences that are the very sources of such authority.

We explore the democratic implications of a reputational account of bureaucratic authority. While an influential literature has examined the relevance of reputation—and mutual exchange between principals and agents in public organizations generally—the normative implications of these insights have largely escaped scrutiny. We discuss how reputation‐building impacts both the ability and the motivation of principals to oversee administrative policymaking. We argue that reputation‐sourced authority eschews ex ante incentives through the claims‐making and maneuvering of bureaucrats as they develop reputations with audiences. At the same time, it de‐legitimizes ex post oversight because monitoring and compliance must compete both with reputational authority and with resistance from the audiences that are the very sources of such authority.