Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Expanded Contents List -- Figures and Tables -- Abbreviations -- Preface and Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1. Thinking Politically: The Nature of Local Government in Scotland -- 2. Mapping the Networks and Relationships of Scottish Local Authorities -- 3. Scottish Local Authority Structures: From Feudal Burghs to Single Tier Authorities -- 4. Council Decision-Making Structures: From Traditional Administration to Post-Devolution Modernisation -- 5. Councillors, Elections and the Electoral System: A Healthy Democratic Foundation? -- 6. Beyond Elections: Non-Electoral Forms of Public Participation and Non-Elected Local Governance -- 7. Political Parties in Scottish Local Government -- 8. Reconstructing Accountability: Value for Money and the Rise of the Performance Culture in Scottish Councils -- 9. Financing Scottish Local Government -- 10. The Bigger Picture: Central-Local Relations, Multi- Level Governance and Globalisation -- Conclusion: Has Devolution Made a Difference to Local Government in Scotland? -- Bibliography -- Index

"Success and failure is key to any consideration of public policy but there have been remarkably few attempts systematically to assess the various dimensions and complex nature of policy success. This important new text fills the gap by developing a systematic framework and offering an entirely new way of introducing students to policy analysis"--

"The Politics of Crisis Terminology" published on by Oxford University Press.

"Policy Success and Failure" published on by Oxford University Press.

The discipline of public policy has struggled to come to terms with how we may conceive of 'policy failure'. It tends to assume either that failure is self-evident or that it can be assessed by means of examining the gap between government goals and outcomes. Often, there are multiple caveats that seem too difficult to address – particularly the role of perceptions, which in turn are often dependent on whether or not the policy is supported. This ground-breaking article builds on and refines existing literature. It turns on its head the multiple methodological challenges surrounding what constitutes policy failure (such as competing goals and variance over time) and suggests that such seemingly impenetrable challenges actually help illuminate our understanding. In doing so, it argues that once we conceive of studying policy failure as 'art and craft', we are better placed to navigate the messy realpolitik of types and degrees of failure, as well as ambiguities and tensions between them. The groundwork for doing so is based on a working definition of failure, namely that a policy fails, even if it is successful in some minimal respects, if it does not fundamentally achieve the goals that proponents set out to achieve, and opposition is great and/or support is virtually non-existent.