The GOVERNANCE blog

In an open-access research note in the current issue of Governance (24.3, July 2011), Paolo de Renzio and Harika Masud of the International Budget Partnership describe a tool for documenting the state of budget transparency — the Open Budget Index.  Produced biennially, the Index is beginning to provide interesting comparative evidence on trends in the management of public finances and disclosure of budget information.  Although global levels of transparency are “worryingly low”, the Index does suggest that disclosure practices are slowly improving. Open access to this research note for the month of July. To learn more about the International Budget Partnership’s work, subscribe to its bi-monthly electronic newsletter.

In the current issue of Governance (24.3, July 2011), Paolo Graziano of Bocconi University examines how two countries — France and Italy — have adapted their welfare systems to European employment policies.  His study contributes to our understanding of the evolution of welfare states in the context of Europeanization.  Graziano finds that the preferences of key institutional and social actors play a critical role in determining the course of domestic adaptation.  He concludes that expectations of a “soft” path to convergence among national employment policies should be lowered.  “Europeanization induces policy change only when specific domestic conditions are in place . . . . If such conditions are not available, we should not expect EU pressures to trigger substantive policy change.”  Read the article.

In the current issue of Governance (24.3, July 2011), Adam Graycar and Diego Villa report on a study of one hundred successfully prosecuted corruption cases in New York City.  Although in some cases there was a significant monetary loss to the city because of corrupt activity, the larger difficulty, they find, is the loss of governance capacity — mainly through the undermining of regulatory processes designed to protect health and safety and promote sound planning.  Most of the corrupt conduct in these cases involved low risks, and also low rewards.  Graycar and Villa find that there are multiple interventions that could discourage corrupt activity by altering the risk-reward calculus.  Read the article .

Much has been written about the role of political parties in channelling citizen demands on government.  In the current issue of Governance (24.3, July 2011), Nicole Bolleyer of the University of Exeter takes a different perspective, examining the role of political parties in integrating complex governmental apparatuses.  Bolleyer’s three-country study finds that parties “facilitate communication and coordination between different decisionmaking arenas,” compensating for the fragmentary tendencies of “increasingly specialized” governmental processes.  But this does not necessarily imply improved coordination between policy arenas: under certain conditions, says Bolleyer, parties might use this “connectedness” to reinforce cross-jurisdictional conflict.  Read the article: The Influence of Political Parties on Policy Coordination.