Why do policy actors create branded policy ideas like the big society and does launching them on Twitter extend or curtail their life? This book reveals how policy analysis can adapt in an increasingly mediatised world, offering interpretive insights into the life and death of policy ideas in an era of hashtag politics.

Whether post-modern or pre-industrial, the economic development of societies around the world is often influenced by the whims of a capricious international political environment. Globalization and Governance in the International Political Economy investigates the impact of diverse cultures on the development and actualization of global economic entities, exploring advanced methods and best practices for the effective utilization and management of financial organizations within a globalized political context. This essential reference provides readers in both political and economic fields with insights into the challenges and opportunities posed by the political economy.

The Internet and related technologies have dramatically changed the way we live, work, socialize, and even topple national governments. As the Internet becomes increasingly pervasive across societies, we find more often that governments adopt Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) as part of their toolbox for facilitating efficient and citizen-oriented service delivery at all levels of government. Local governments across the major industrialized democracies have not been an exception to this trend and have set sail into the age of digital government. Closest to their citizens, towns and cities have adopted ICTs to facilitate electronic government (e-government). While research on local e-government functionality in terms of information dissemination, service delivery, and citizen engagement continues at an impressive empirical and methodological pace, gaps in our knowledge remain. Cross-national comparative research on local e-government that covers a wide range of municipalities in combination with in-depth case study analyses is lacking. Informed by a comparative case study approach, this book seeks to narrow that gap and offer practical policy solutions to facilitate local e-government. We do so by pursuing both a macro and micro perspective of e-government functionality in the federal republics of Germany and the United States and unitary France and Japan. The macro perspective focuses on the state and scope of e-government functionality across a large number of randomly selected municipalities of all sizes in these advanced industrialized countries. Based on a small sample of case studies, the micro perspective analyzes the successful implementation of e-government in Seattle (United States), Nuremberg (Germany), Bordeaux (France), and Shizuoka City (Japan).

In this timely book about the current state of research and practice of emergency management in China, the authors take as their basic premises that we now live in a risk society and that our collective ability to deal with disasters and their aftermath is more important than ever. Set within a multi-disciplinary framework that places risk, disaster and crisis, the three phases of emergency management, on an analytical continuum, and drawing on empirical data obtained through surveys, observations, and interviews, the study not only provides a thorough overview of recent progress in our theoretical understanding of the subject but also offers insights on how scientifically informed policies can improve the way emergency management is done in China.

This book provides an extensive and comparative account of all welfare reforms that occurred during the last three decades in Continental European countries. It reveals unexpected important structural reforms, to be understood as the culmination of a long reform trajectory, analyzed in detail with the tools of comparative historical institutionalism. With these reforms, Bismarckian welfare systems have lost their encompassing capacities, have partially turned to employment-friendliness and weakened the strongest elements of their male breadwinner bias. "This volume is the definitive work on the politics of reform in Bismarckian welfare regimes. It is essential reading for any scholar interested in welfare reform - or indeed, in institutional and policy change more generally." (Kathleen Thelen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology ) "The contributors to the volume are all recognized experts on their field and provide strictly comparable analyses in their chapters, making this volume a gold mine for comparative welfare state scholars. Palier's volume is certain to be a benchmark study for the foreseeable future." (John D. Stephens, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) "This volume, representing the best available scholarship in comparative socio-economic research, provides important and highly policy-relevant insights. A must-read." (Fritz Scharpf, Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies)

This book is dedicated to a fundamental conflict in modern states: those persons holding public office are no more than ordinary citizens. Therefore, their activities must - as a matter of principle - be subject to full judicial control. But at the same time, democratically legitimated politicians need some discretion in their decision-making. Allegations of politicians committing criminal offences in office quickly attract a great deal of media attention. Even politicians themselves frequently use such allegations to discredit their political opponents. However, to date this topic has not been fully addressed on an academic level. This book is a first step in this direction. The individual contributions cover topics such as: "bad" political decisions that result in a waste of taxpayers' money corruption and conflicts of interest in political decision-making immunities and procedural obstacles to the effective prosecution of politicians abuse of criminal law and criminal proceedings in the political arena criminal liability for decisions taken in situations of state emergency the role of criminal law in public opinion. Leading experts examine these and other issues from a comparative perspective.

Although most advanced industrialized countries are facing population aging and other social changes, public long-term care programs for the aged are remarkably diverse across them. This book accounts for the variations in elderly care policy by combining statistical analysis with historical case studies of Sweden, Japan and the USA.

Combining practical experience with academic analysis this book explores the social and organizational dynamics of performance indicators. It moves beyond the technicalities of measurement and indicators and looks at how performance information is changing the public sector.

This book discusses parliamentary oversight and its role in curbing corruption in developing countries. Over the past decade, a growing body of research at the global and regional levels has demonstrated that parliamentary oversight is an important determinant of corruption and that effective oversight of public expenditure is an essential component of national anti-corruption strategies and programs. However, little research has been undertaken at the country level regarding how parliamentary oversight is undertaken, which oversight mechanisms are effective or on how national parliaments interact with other anti-corruption stakeholders. This book presents the results of a new large-scale, quantitative analysis which identifies the mechanisms through which institutional arrangements impact corruption, specifically through country case studies on the Caribbean region, Ghana, Myanmar, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda. Addressing a gap in scholarly knowledge while presenting practical policy advice for parliaments and for anti-corruption assistance agencies, this book will be of use to scholars interested in development, anti-corruption, public finance, as well as members of parliament, anti-corruption practitioners, and organizations working in parliamentary strengthening.

Successful delivery of public policy is increasingly dependent upon the effectiveness of information technology and systems. However, reformers must navigate the complex interactions between IT limitations, policy minefields, and complicated organizational networks which make change difficult. Public Sector Reform Using Information Technologies: Transforming Policy into Practice offers an analytical, interdisciplinary examination of electronic governance implementation from theoretical and practical perspectives. Researchers in fields like computer science, information systems, and sociology, and practitioners in policy formulation, implementation, and IT and systems deployment will find useful insights for improving the effectiveness of government services. Successfully transforming public policy using IT will help minimize the political and financial repercussions of failed implementations, meet the increasing expectations of citizens in modern democracies, and shape the public sector of the future.

Making illegal residence unattractive is a way for Western governments to limit migration from non-Western countries. Focusing on Dutch neighbourhoods with substantial levels of unauthorised migrants, Illegal Residence and Public Safety in the Netherlands examines how restrictive immigration policy influences immigrant crime and perceived neighborhood security. Salient questions arise. To what extent, and under which conditions, do illegal residence and illegal migration impact public safety? Does having illegal residence status influence how people observe or break the law and other social rules? Do their ties with established groups, such as legal migrants, employers and partners, have any sway? Answers to these issues begin surfacing in this rich combination of quantitative information, comprising police figures and surveys on victimisation, and qualitative sources, including interviews at the Dutch Aliens Custody and urban field research.

The inability of many democratic governments in Africa to govern effectively has been an important factor in the many problems that the continent and its constituent countries have faced over the past decades. The question for scholars has been in learning what has caused the endemic failure of public institutions throughout Africa and understanding how to create good government in the future of the continent. Strongly supported by empirical evidence, this book challenges the existing literature on the subject by breaking with the traditional notion among academics that the key to good government in Africa is through the creation of unique administrative structures, or at the very least developing significantly adapted foreign structures with an emphasis on the specific structure of African societies. Instead the author contrasts this notion with theories from other research fields suggesting that public officials are likely to be interested in following professional norms and that organizations generally strive to imitate each other, regardless of geographical location. This book presents rich original empirical research from the field of state audit in Sub-Saharan Africa where the above different theoretical approaches are empirically explored. The research results contradict many assumptions made in the literature on development and points to the importance of adding other dimensions, such as professional norms, to nuance the discussion of the future of the African continent.

This book explores the dimensions and characteristics of social vulnerability in Western Europe. It provides a broad empirical foundation for recent theories on the emergence of new social risks in post-industrial societies, revealing to what extent social risks are compromising the 'normal' functioning of the European population.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The Trojan Horse traces the growth of commercial sponsorship in the public sphere since the 1960s, its growing importance for the arts since 1980 and its spread into areas such as education and health. The authors' central argument is that the image of sponsorship as corporate benevolence has served to routinize and legitimate the presence of commerce within the public sector. The central metaphor is of such sponsorship as a Trojan Horse helping to facilitate the hollowing out of the public sector by private agencies and private finance. The authors place the study in the context of the more general colonization of the state by private capital and the challenge posed to the dominance of neo-liberal economics by the recent global financial crisis. After considering the passage from patronage to sponsorship and outlining the context of the post-war public sector since 1945, it analyses sponsorship in relation to Thatcherism, enterprise culture and the restructuring of public provision during the 1980s. It goes on to examine the New Labour years, and the ways in which sponsorship has paved the way for the increased use of private-public partnerships and private finance initiatives within the public sector in the UK.

Many disasters are approached by researchers, managers and policymakers as if they have a clear beginning, middle and end. But often the experience of being in a disaster is not like this. This book offers non-linear, non-prescriptive ways of thinking about disasters and allows the people affected by disaster the chance to speak.

A major objective of this volume is to create and share knowledge about the socio-economic, political and cultural dimensions of climate change. The authors analyze the effects of climate change on the social and environmental determinants of the health and well-being of communities (i.e. poverty, clean air, safe drinking water, food supplies) and on extreme events such as floods and hurricanes. The book covers topics such as the social and political dimensions of the ebola response, inequalities in urban migrant communities, as well as water-related health effects of climate change. The contributors recommend political and social-cultural strategies for mitigate, adapt and prevent the impacts of climate change to human and environmental health. The book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners interested in new methods and tools to reduce risks and to increase health resilience to climate change.

This book provides rare insights into the nature of contemporary, technologically-facilitated government. Its multidisciplinary approach demonstrates that information technology is more than a tool for politicians and policy-makers. E-government has reconfigured public administration, policy, power and citizenship.

The Handbook of West European Pension Politics provides scholars, policy-makers and students with a complete overview of the political and policy issues involved in pension policy, and well as case studies of contemporary pension politics (1980 to present) in 16 countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. The book is suitable as a text for courses in comparative politics, European Studies, social policy, comparative public policy and public administration. Each chapter is written by an expert on pension politics and is presented in a standardized format with standardized tables and figures that describe: political institutions; government coalitions, parliamentary and electoral majorities; the party system; the pension system; proposed and enacted pension reforms.

The pursuit for better governance has assumed center stage in developmental discourse as well as reform initiatives of all organizations working for the public welfare, and includes such issues as service delivery and responding to citizens' needs and demands. In the era of globalization, multilevel and new modes of governance are changing the traditional governance models of nation states, accelerated by technological innovation, rising citizen expectation, policy intervention from international and multilateral donor communities, and the hegemony of western ideology imposed on many developing nations. However, a universally accepted and agreed upon definition of 'governance' still remains elusive. There is no consensus or agreement as to what would be the nature and form of governance and public administration. The question that is raised: Is there a universal governance mechanism that fits in all contexts or governance mechanisms should be based on home grown ideas?One can see various programs and policies of reforms and reorganizations in public administration in the developing countries, but these efforts have not been effective to address the challenging issues of economic development, employment generation, poverty reduction, ensuring equality of access to public services, maintaining fairness and equity, security and safety of citizens, social cohesion, democratic institution building, ensuring broader participation in the decision making process, and improving the quality of life. Therefore, there is a widespread concern for better governance or sound governance to bridge the gap between theory and practice, making this book of interest to academics as well as policy-makers in global public administration.

This study unravels the real dynamics at stake within the Lebanese Madame/Sri Lankan housemaid relationship. Unraveled in this book are the real dynamics at stake in the Madame/housemaid relationship. While cases of extreme physical abuse by the Lebanese women who hire housemaids - Madames - are an exception, what has become normalised are more insidious patterns of domination used to control each and every aspect of their employees' lives. For their part, Sri Lankan housemaids are not merely passive victims. Away from direct provocation and first-hand repercussions, they try to deflect what Pierre Bourdieu has called 'symbolic violence'. These attempts at 'everyday forms of resistance', as defined by James Scott, can help loosen their employers' grip. Yet, as this unprecedented study shows, the Madame/housemaid relationship and the rules that govern it remain under the managerial hold of the Madame.

A comparative study of how economic and political differences between Antwerp and Barcelona influence the life-course trajectories of Senegalese and Gambian migrants. This book examines two major social changes experienced by European cities in the last two decades: post-industrial economic restructuring and new immigration flows. The link between both has been extensively discussed throughout a variety of theoretical approaches and in numerous descriptive contributions. Adding to those studies, this research focuses on three elements of migratory experience that have been relatively neglected thus far: a dynamic view of changes over time, the influence of national welfare and legislation frameworks, and the importance of support mechanisms outside the labour market. The material underpinning the arguments is the qualitative life-course analysis of 81 in-depth interviews with Senegambian migrants living in Antwerp and Barcelona.

As countries around the world make continuous strides in developing their economies, it has become increasingly important to evaluate the different ways culture impacts the growth of a region. Global Perspectives on Development Administration and Cultural Change investigates the impact of economic growth on different demographics throughout the world. Identifying theoretical concepts and notable topics in the areas of economic development, organizational culture, and cultural shifts, this book is an essential reference source for policymakers, development planners, international institutions, public policy analysts, administrators, researchers, and NGOs.