Suchergebnisse

This book challenges the conventional wisdom that government bureaucrats inevitably seek secrecy and demonstrates how and when participatory bureaucracy manages the enduring tension between bureaucratic administration and democratic accountability. Looking closely at federal level public participation in pharmaceutical regulation and educational assessments within the context of the vast system of American federal advisory committees, this book demonstrates that participatory bureaucracy supports bureaucratic administration in ways consistent with democratic accountability when it focuses on complex tasks and engages diverse expertise. In these conditions, public participation can help produce better policy outcomes, such as safer prescription drugs. Instead of bureaucracy's opposite or alternative, public participation can work as its complement

What are key barriers that prevent complementary safety net services? How are states and localities navigating those barriers? For policymaker and practitioner perspectives on these questions, we turned to experts in the Colorado Department of Human Services: Dr. Ki'i Powell, former director of the Office of Economic Security; Ian McMahon, director of the Division of Economic and Workforce Support; Michael Martinez-Schiferl, former operations manager in the Division of Economic and Workforce Support; Rebecca Balu, employment and training manager; and Samantha O'Neill Dunbar, budget and legislative manager in the Office of Economic Security. Colorado has sought to overcome administrative burdens by developing shared-eligibility systems that allow individuals to apply for multiple services through a common application process. This approach has enhanced user experiences from the perspective of service recipients, but it shifts administrative burdens to the implementing agencies, who face complex data demands arising from federal and state-level policy design and strained workforce capacities. Colorado's experiences underscore how resolving administrative burdens depends on federal and state policy action above and beyond agency-level adjustments. The conversation, led by Susan Moffitt, occurred on November 29, 2022, and has been edited for length.

Implementation represents a key venue for the expression of political conflict. The challenge of illusory implementation, implementing the law's letter but not its spirit, has long vexed scholars and architects of public policy. We develop a political model of policy implementation to predict the kinds of politics—electoral, group, administrative—that different parts of complicated laws activate during implementation. Using original state‐level data on landmark education policy, we assess whether and how these politics render illusory implementation more or less likely for specific policy tasks embedded in complex laws. Consistent with our model, we find electoral politics render illusory implementation less likely for a narrow set of tasks. Group‐based politics and administrative politics bear on illusory implementation for a broader set of tasks in diverse ways. Overall, how policy activates politics during implementation depends on the features of the policy lever, where it is put into practice, and how traceable it is to the bureaucrats who do the implementing. Further, the results underscore how nuanced insights about implementation emerge when one considers individual components of complex laws, rather than treating the laws themselves whole cloth.

American public benefit provision bears little resemblance to a safety net capable of preventing people from experiencing economic devastation. It is not a carefully planned machinery of complementary programs but individual threads of support, some of which connect, many of which do not. The increased need for public benefit provision during the COVID-19 pandemic has renewed national and state policy debates on the importance of a comprehensive system of public investment in children. This volume draws on perspectives from various academic disciplines, both to identify the public supports that children need to thrive and to analyze existing models of complementary public support provision that do benefit children. The persistence of individual program-based support provisions and administrative burdens make it difficult for the current system to operate as a comprehensive safety net, but recent innovations offer hope: these include the expansion of the Child Tax Credit and collaborations between public agencies and organizations that help integrate aspects of service delivery. Missing, however, is the political will at all levels of government to invest in an infrastructure of support.

"School reforms are almost always born out of big dreams and a well-meaning desire to change the status quo-the American education system as we know it was the product of such a reform. But between the lawmakers who spearhead these changes and the students whose education is at stake, there are countless teachers, principals, administrators, and local politicians and, correspondingly, countless ways that things can go sideways. In Reforming the Reform, political scientist Susan Moffitt, education scholar Michaela O'Neill, and the late policy and education scholar David K. Cohen take on a wide-ranging examination of the nitty-gritty of school reform. They focus especially on mezzo-level actors: but the countless school superintendents, principals, and teachers figuring out how to apply a new policy in the unique context of their district or school. They conducted more than 250 interviews with mezzo-level administrators in Tennessee and California (chosen as contrasts for their different political makeup and centralization of the education system) between 2016 and 2020, ending their data collection as schools were going virtual at the beginning of the pandemic. They also collected survey data from across the US. Finally, they turned to archival data dating to the earliest American educational reform: the creation of a centralized national education policy. Taken together, this data demonstrates an impressive ambition: to identify common problems that arise when a general policy is implemented in a local context. The framework provides a general explanation for problems facing social policy reforms in federalist systems (including healthcare) and offers pathways forward for education policy in particular"--

Vast disparities between and within American states' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have evoked renewed attention to whether greater centralization might enhance investments in subnational capacity and remedy subnational inequalities or instead erode subnational organizational capacity. Developments in American public education (1997–2015) offer perspective on this puzzle, which we examine by applying interrupted time series analysis to a novel dataset to assess the implications of centralization on subnational investments in administrative and technical capacity, two dimensions of organizational capacity. We find simultaneous subnational erosion in administrative capacity and growth in technical capacity following centralization, both of which appear concentrated in low-poverty areas despite centralization's explicit antipoverty purposes. Public education reforms highlight both the challenge of dismantling subnational inequality through centralization and the need for future research on policy designs that enable centralization to yield subnational capacity that is able to remedy inequality.