Suchergebnisse

The Netherlands and Belgium exemplified the pathology of 'welfare without work' that characterized continental welfare states - until a political crisis in both countries produced a surprising divergence in scope and extent of policy change in the early 1990s. In Belgium, government announced major reforms but its social security arrangements proved remarkably resilient. In the Netherlands, policy makers announced and implemented unprecedented cutbacks and a major overhaul of the disability benefit administration and supervision. This book argues that reform is the product of the deliberate construction of a crisis as an imperative for change. It explains how crisis rhetoric resulted in drastic policy change in the Netherlands and in incremental change in Belgium.

Terrorism only poses a small risk to people but tends to be a major source of public fear. Through fear, terrorism has far-reaching implications for public governance. In this paper we look at trust in government as a potential mitigating factor of fear of terrorism. We discern between calculative trust, based on analytical assessment of previous and expected future actions, and relational trust, based on emotions and perceived value similarity with government. We find that relational trust decreases fear of terrorism. A similar but less robust negative relationship exists between calculative trust and fear. However, our regression analyses suggest that relational trust, in fact, may mediate the relationship between calculative trust and fear of terrorism. In other words, the more citizens think government is able to prevent terrorist attacks and feel that authorities are doing enough, the more they, in turn, feel that their government shares their values, and the less fearful they are of future terrorist attacks.

Terrorism only poses a small risk to people but tends to be a major source of public fear. Through fear, terrorism has far-reaching implications for public governance. In this paper we look at trust in government as a potential mitigating factor of fear of terrorism. We discern between calculative trust, based on analytical assessment of previous and expected future actions, and relational trust, based on emotions and perceived value similarity with government. We find that relational trust decreases fear of terrorism. A similar but less robust negative relationship exists between calculative trust and fear. However, our regression analyses suggest that relational trust, in fact, may mediate the relationship between calculative trust and fear of terrorism. In other words, the more citizens think government is able to prevent terrorist attacks and feel that authorities are doing enough, the more they, in turn, feel that their government shares their values, and the less fearful they are of future terrorist attacks.

Why do some public organizations survive for many decades, whereas others are terminated within a few years? This question of organizational survival has long intrigued public administration scholars. To explain longevity, public administration research has focused on organizational design features and adaptive capacities. The results have been inconclusive. This article explores an additional explanation for survival and demise: the density dependence theory as formulated in the field of organizational ecology. The underlying premise of this theory is that certain environments can only sustain a certain number of similar-type organizations. A rising number of organizations fuels competition for scarce resources, which inevitably leads to the demise of organizations. Density theory has often been tested in the business literature, but has been rarely applied to public sector organizations. In this article, we test whether this theory can help explain organizational survival in a population of US federal independent public agencies (n =142). Our results show that density matters. This is good news for public administration research: the inclusion of density boosts the explanatory power of traditional variables such as design and adaptation.