Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article empirically investigates the relative efficacy of different direct participation processes. Specifically, it compares the effects of three types of participatory processes (public meetings, focus groups, and citizen juries) on participants' issue awareness, competence, empowerment, and trust in service professionals. The authors hypothesize that all three participatory processes will positively affect these individual outcomes but that the magnitudes of effects will differ across the three processes. Using data from field experiments, the authors test and find general support for the hypotheses. This study contributes to understanding of public participation, particularly in terms of the relationship between participatory design and outcomes.

An increasing number of countries are adopting open government reforms, driven, in part, by the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a global effort dedicated to advancing such initiatives. Yet, there is still wide variation in openness across countries. We investigate the political, administrative, and civic factors that explain this variation, using countries' fulfillment of OGP eligibility criteria as a proxy for minimum standards of openness. We find that countries with strong constraints on the executive and high levels of citizen education have governments that are more open. A dense network of civil society organizations is associated with more budget transparency and higher civil liberties, but not with access to information or asset disclosure laws. The results suggest that if the value of openness is to be translated in practice, it is not enough to have capable bureaucracies—countries also need informed citizens and strong oversight of executive agencies.

This article investigates the impacts of partnerships on three aspects of nonprofits' human resources capacity—paid staff, volunteers, and the professional development of staff of nonprofit organizations. Analysis of the seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR) suggests that partnerships may yield some human capacity improvements, that is, increasing the number of staff and opportunities for their professional development. The number of volunteers is not affected by partnerships but rather by other financial resources. The main implication of this research is that partnerships should be formed on the basis of their comparative advantages and focused on identifying suitable partners and cultivating these relations rather than collaborating with more organizations.