Email hms2f@virginia.edu

Office Hours MW - 2:00-3:00 p.m., or by appointment

Session MW - 3:00 p.m. (75 mins.) - SS 010

COURSE DESCRIPTION & OBJECTIVES

This is not a traditional public administration, nuts and bolts, technocratically oriented course. Rather, it looks at the politics of administrative change in a variety of countries in order to understand how power is transformed into new institutions or used to transform old institutions. After a survey of literature on administration and the behaviour of actors inside administrative institutions we will turn to real life changes to budgeting, public sector labour relations and service provision in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Scandinavia.

Paper One Due In Class - Wednesday, October 6 = 30%

Paper Two Due in Class - Wednesday, November 17 = 30%

Paper Three (take home final) Due in to SS 744 - Tuesday, December 14 = 30%  (Bring Paper 3 to SS 744 Between (9:00 am and 1:00 pm)

Class Participation = 10%

Form: Three equally weighted 10 page papers are required, due 10/6, 11/17 and 12/14. Two of these papers may be cumulative - i.e. you can revise the 10 pages you have already written, integrate it with another, new 10 pages, hand in a 20 page paper and effect a revision of the grade for the earlier paper (NB! This revision can be downwards as well as upwards!) The last paper has the status of a take home final exam.

Papers must be typed, double spaced, spell checked. Please do not fiddle with margins and fonts to expand a short paper into a long paper; but please also hand in terse pointed papers rather than being redundantly pleonastic.

Function: The papers should investigate and compare the politics and substance of reorganization in a selected public sector functional area (i.e., health, education etc.) and/or publicly regulated service sector industry (i.e., telecoms, rail, etc.), comparing this process across at least two countries (or two Canadian provinces). One paper should address the politics of reorganization (why was reorganization a political issue? Who were the actors? What role did actors outside the party/parliament play? What were actors motives? etc.). One paper should address the substance of reorganization (what was changed over what time period? What was the relationship between declared objectives for change and the kinds of changes implemented? What happened to veto players? Who won and who lost? etc.). One paper should assess the relative success or failure of both the political venture (were reorganizers reelected, and was this because or despite reorganization? What happened to the sustainability of reorganization as a political issue? etc.) and the reorganization effort (did reorganization attain its declared objectives? Did it attain covert objectives (if any)? etc.). Ideally at the end of this process you will have 30 pages of integrated text dealing with the sectors/countries you have chosen.

Access: readings marked with an * are on reserve. Readings which are available and printable from the Web have a URL (i.e., http:// etc. provided), and are NOT on reserve. There are no required books for purchase. Students should buy what they are interested in keeping.

Requirements: readings are divided into mandatory and recommended readings. Recommended readings are for deeper or broader pursuit of particular topics but are not required. All other readings are required.

Sept 13-15: The Big Picture

*Christopher Hood, Explaining Economic Policy Reversals, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994, chs. 1, 2, 7.

*Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Response to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970. HM 131 H55 1970

Recommended: Roberto M. Unger, Knowledge and Politics, New York: Free Press, 1978.

Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 

The Sept. 20 class will have to be rescheduled as it is Yom Kippur.

*Claus Offe, "Divergent rationalities of administrative action," in John Keane, ed., Disorganized Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity, 1985. (This chapter is on reserve, not the whole book)

*Ken McKenzie, ch. 3 and Ron Kneebone, ch. 4 in Chris Bruce, et al., A Government Reinvented: Alberta, Toronto: Oxford, 1997. HJ 2056.5 A4 G68 1997

Recommended: Savas, E.S., 1987. Privatization: the Key to Better Government, New Jersey: Chatham House.
 

Paul Pierson, "The New Politics of the Welfare State," World Politics 48 (January 1996) pp. 143-179. AT: http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/world_politics/v048/48.2pierson.html

*Donald Savoie, Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney: In Search of a New Bureaucracy, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994, ch 2-4 JF 1411 S28 1994.

Recommended: Martha Derthick and Paul Quirk, Politics of Deregulation, Washington DC: Brookings.

Wilson's two matrices (Class Handout)

 

*John Williamson, ed., Politics of Economic Reform, Washington DC: Institute for international Economics, 1994, chs. 1, 2, 3, 12.

*Terry Moe, "The Politics of structural choice: Towards a theory of the public bureaucracy," In O. Williamson (ed.), Organization Theory, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 116-153. HD 31 O7385 1990.

Herman Schwartz, "Public Choice Theory and Public Choices: Bureaucrats and State Reorganization in Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, and Sweden," Administration & Society, 26:1, May 1994, pp. 48-77. AT: http://www.people.virginia.edu/~hms2f/pubchoic.html

Recommended: Fritz Scharpf, Games Real Actors Play, Boulder CO: Westview, 1997.

Different kinds of markets (Class Handout)
 

Oct 13: Actors, agents: Public sector bargaining

Torben Iversen, "Power, Flexibility and the Breakdown of Centralized Wage Bargaining," Comparative Politics 28:4, July 1996, pp. 399-436.

Peter Swenson, "Labor and the Limits of the Welfare State" Comparative Politics 24:4, 1991, pp. 379-399.

Recommended: Peter Warrian, Hard Bargain: Transforming Public Sector Labour Management Relations Toronto: McGilligan Books 1996.
 

Theo Toonen and Jos C.N. Raadschelders, "Public Sector Reform in Western Europe: an overview," in Civil Service Systems in Comparative Perspective, part 1-11. AT: http://www.indiana.edu/~csrc/csrc.html

getting to 4 policy syndromes (class handout)

Oct 25-27: Local colour: How did this work in Alberta?

*Ron Kneebone and Ken McKenzie, ch. 5, Paul Boothe, ch. 6, and Ron Kneebone ch. 7 in Chris Bruce, et al., A Government Reinvented: Alberta.

*Trevor Harrison and Gordon Laxer, eds., Trojan Horse: Alberta and the Future of Canada, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1995. HC 117 A6 T76 1995.

Herman Schwartz "Reinvention and Retrenchment: Lessons from the Application of the New Zealand Model to Alberta, Canada," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 16:3, Summer 1997. AT: http://www.people.virginia.edu/~hms2f/alberta.html

Recommended: Peter Aucoin, The New Public Management: Canada in Comparative Perspective.

Mark Lisac, The Klein Revolution, NeWest Books, 1994.

Alberta fiscal charts: expenditures by source, real percapita and revenues by source, real percapita

British Columbia fiscal charts: expenditures by source, real percapita and revenues by source, real percapita

Nov 1-3 What are the cousins up to? Australia
 

Graham Scott, & Peter Gorringe, "Reform of the core public sector: the New Zealand experience," Australian Journal of Public Administration 48:1, 1989, pp. 81-92.

*Francis Castles, Rolf Gerritsen, and Jack Vowles, eds., The Great Experiment: Labour Parties and Public Policy Reform in Australia and New Zealand, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996 ch. 3 (boston/uhr) and 5 (castles/shirley).

John Halligan, in Civil Service Systems in Comparative Perspective, AT: http://www.indiana.edu/~csrc/csrc.html

Recommended: Colin Campbell and John Halligan, Political Leadership in an Age of Restraint: the Australian Experience, Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.

Michael Pusey, Economic Rationalism in Canberra : a Nation-building State Changes its Mind, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Nov 8-10: New Zealand?s "Contracted State"
 

*Jonathan Boston, "Reorganizing the machinery of government," pp.233-267, in J. Boston, J. Martin, J. Pallot, & P. Walsh, eds., Reshaping the state, Auckland: Oxford University Press 1991. Also: Walsh, chs. 3, 5.

*Auditor General’s Office: Toward Better Governance: Public Service Reform in New Zealand (1984-94) and its Relevance to Canada, Ottawa, Ont.: Auditor General of Canada, 1995. JQ 5849 R4 T69 1995.

Recommended: Jonathan Boston, ed., The State under Contract (or) Boston, Public Management: The New Zealand Model.

Jane Kelsey: The New Zealand Experiment, Auckland: Auckland University Press 1995.
 

Christoffer Green-Pedersen, "Danish Welfare State under Bourgeois Rule"

Rune Premfors, "The 'Swedish Model' and public sector reform," West European Politics 14:3, 1991, pp. 83-95.

Bo Rothstein, "Crisis of Swedish Social Democrats and future of the universal welfare state," Governance 6:4, Oct 1993, pp. 492-517.

Recommended: Daniel Cohn, Reforming Health Care in Canada and Sweden.
 

I will be in New Zealand for several conferences arranged in advance of this teaching commitment.

Nov 29-Dec 1: NO CLASS

I will be in New Zealand for several conferences arranged in advance of this teaching commitment.

Dec 6-8: Conclusions

Evert Lindquist and Karen Murray, "Appendix: a Reconnaissance of Canadian Administrative Reform During the Early 1990s," Canadian Public Administration, 37:3, 1995, pp. 468-489.

Phillip Genschel, "Dynamics of Inertia: Institutional Persistence and Change in Health Care and Telecommunications," Governance 10:1, January 1997, pp. 43-66.

*Donald Savoie, "What is wrong with the New Public Management?" Canadian Public Administration 38:1, 1996, pp. 112-121.
 

Last modified: 8 September 1999

Ó Herman Schwartz