Suchergebnisse

In recent years, the accessibility and transparency of administrative procedures have attracted the attention of researchers and policymakers in the United States. This article investigates the accessibility and transparency of a particularly important administrative procedure, the notice and comment process. The article presents a theoretical account of the operation of political control and bureaucratic discretion in two aspects of the notice and comment process - the duration of comment periods and timeliness of the circulation of comments. The results of the analysis of original data demonstrate that both external constraints and agency need for policy information affect the duration of comment periods and circulation of comments. These results, which are unexpected from the perspective that the notice and comment process is procedurally neutral, imply that normative values such as accessibility and transparency cannot be meaningfully separated from the politics of political control and bureaucratic discretion. Adapted from the source document.

Although information technology is playing a fundamental role in China's political development, relatively little is known about the contours of online participation in government policymaking. This article presents the results of a survey of individuals who, in 2008, used the Internet to submit comments on the central government's plan to reform the nation's health system. The responses demonstrate that participants were, in the aggregate, well-educated professionals who live in urban areas and were especially likely to work in the medical and health industry. Substantial numbers of participants commented as a means of expressing concerns about the overall direction of reform, as well as on specific elements of the proposal itself. Participants generally anticipated no more than a modest degree of government responsiveness, although high expectations were held for comments from government officials and individuals who worked in the medical and health industry. Overall, these attributes and attitudes are illustrative of the evolution, as opposed to transformation, of the political system that is occurring in online contexts where neither democratization nor the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party is of immediate salience to government officials and societal stakeholders. (J Contemp China/GIGA)

Although scholars have found that policy innovations diffuse across states in a systematic manner, they generally have not examined the role that individuals and institutions play in promoting diffusion. I posit that interstate professional associations provide institutional foundations for the development and dissemination of innovations by state officials with jurisdiction over particular policy areas. I test this hypothesis by examining the determinants of state adoption of the Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) Model Act, a comprehensive set of regulations developed by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC). My central finding is that states whose insurance commissioner participated in the NAIC's Accident and Health Insurance Committee, which has jurisdiction over HMO regulation, were more likely than other states to adopt the Model Act. This result provides evidence that associations can affect policy diffusion. It also sharpens the conventional wisdom by highlighting a specific institutional arrangement—a committee system—through which participation in associations can facilitate the adoption of innovations.