Paul 't Hart - Böcker

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.This book presents twenty-three in-depth case studies of successful public policies and programs in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Iceland. Each chapter tells the story of the policy's origins, aims, design, decision-making, and implementation processes, and assesses in which respects - programmatically, process-wise, politically, and over time - and to what extent it can be considered to have been successful. It also points towards the driving forces of success, and the challenges that have had to be overcome to achieve it. Combined, the chapters provide a resource for researchers, educators, and students of public policy both within and beyond the Nordic region.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.In Canada many public projects, programs, and services perform well, and many are very successful. However, these cases are consistently underexposed and understudied in the policy literature which, for various reasons, tends to focus on policy mistakes and learning from failures rather than successes. In fact, studies of public policy successes are rare not just in Canada, but the world over, although this has started to change (McConnell, 2010, 2017; Compton & 't Hart, 2019; Luetjens, Mintrom & 't Hart, 2019). Like those publications, the aims of Policy Success in Canada are to see, describe, acknowledge, and promote learning from past and present instances of highly effective and highly valued public policymaking. This exercise will be done through detailed examination of selected case studies of policy success in different eras, governments, and policy domains in Canada. This book project is embedded in a broader project led by 't Hart and OUP exploring policy successes globally and regionally. It is envisaged as a companion volume to OUP's 2019 offering Great Policy Successes (Compton and 't Hart, 2019) and to Successful Public Policy in the Nordic Countries (de La Porte et al, 2022). This present volume provides an opportunity to analyze what is similar and distinctive about introducing and implementing successful public policy in one of the world's most politically decentralized and regionally diverse federation and oldest democratic polities.

Political leadership has made a comeback. It was studied intensively not only by political scientists but also by political sociologists and psychologists, Sovietologists, political anthropologists, and by scholars in comparative and development studies from the 1940s to the 1970s. Thereafter, the field lost its way with the rise of structuralism, neo-institutionalism, and rational choice approaches to the study of politics, government, and governance. Recently, however, students of politics have returned to studying the role of individual leaders and the exercise of leadership to explain political outcomes. The list of topics is nigh endless: elections, conflict management, public policy, government popularity, development, governance networks, and regional integration. In the media age, leaders are presented and stage-managed--spun--DDLas the solution to almost every social problem. Through the mass media and the Internet, citizens and professional observers follow the rise, impact, and fall of senior political officeholders at closer quarters than ever before. This Handbook encapsulates the resurgence by asking, where are we today? It orders the multidisciplinary field by identifying the distinct and distinctive contributions of the disciplines. It meets the urgent need to take stock. It brings together scholars from around the world, encouraging a comparative perspective, to provide a comprehensive coverage of all the major disciplines, methods, and regions. It showcases both the normative and empirical traditions in political leadership studies, and juxtaposes behavioural, institutional, and interpretive approaches. It covers formal, office-based as well as informal, emergent political leadership, and in both democratic and undemocratic polities.

The Leadership Capital Index develops a conceptual framework of leadership capital and a diagnostic tool - the Leadership Capital Index (LCI) - to measure and evaluate the fluctuating nature of the leadership capital of leaders. Differing amounts of leadership capital, a combination of skills, relations and reputation, allow leaders to succeed or bring about their failure. This book brings together leading international scholars in the field to engage with the concept of 'leadership capital' and use and apply the LCI to a variety of comparative case studies. The book provides an important, timely, and innovative contribution to the now flourishing academic discipline of political leadership studies. The LCI offers a comprehensive yet parsimonious and easily applicable 10 point matrix to examine leadership authority over time and in different political contexts. In each case, leaders 'spend' and put their 'stock' of authority and support at risk. United States president Lyndon Johnson arm-twisting Congress to put into effect civil rights legislation; Tony Blair taking the United Kingdom into the invasion of Iraq; Angela Merkel committing Germany to a generous reception of refugees: all 'spent capital' to forge public policy they believed in. The volume examines how office-holders acquire, consolidate, risk, and lose such capital, and concentrates predominantly on elected 'chief executives' at the national level, including majoritarian and consensus systems, multiple and singular cases, and also examines some presidential and sub-national cases. The Leadership Capital Index is an exploratory volume, with chapters providing a series of plausibility probes to see how the LCI framework 'performs' as a descriptive and analytical tool.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY NC ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. With so much media and political criticism of their shortcomings and failures, it is easy to overlook the fact that many governments work pretty well much of the time. Great Policy Successes turns the spotlight on instances of public policy that are remarkably successful. It develops a framework for identifying and assessing policy successes, paying attention not just to their programmatic outcomes but also to the quality of the processes by which policies are designed and delivered, the level of support and legitimacy they attain, and the extent to which successful performance endures over time. The bulk of the book is then devoted to 15 detailed case studies of striking policy successes from around the world, including Singapore's public health system, Copenhagen and Melbourne's rise from stilted backwaters to the highly liveable and dynamic urban centres they are today, Brazil's Bolsa Familia poverty relief scheme, the US's GI Bill, and Germany's breakthrough labour market reforms of the 2000s. Each case is set in context, its main actors are introduced, key events and decisions are described, the assessment framework is applied to gauge the nature and level of its success, key contributing factors to success are identified, and potential lessons and future challenges are identified. Purposefully avoiding the kind of heavy theorizing that characterizes many accounts of public policy processes, each case is written in an accessible and narrative style ideally suited for classroom use in conjunction with mainstream textbooks on public policy design, implementation, and evaluation.

The Oxford Handbook of Dutch Politics provides a comprehensive longitudinal overview of the state of the art of academic research on the Dutch political system: its origins and historical development, its key institutions, main fault lines, pivotal processes, and key public policy dynamics. In each of the chapters, researchers take stock of what - if anything - has changed over time, how scholars have conceptualized and studied these dynamics, and what key factors can account for the developmental patterns found to be at play. Notwithstanding its considerable degree of constitutional and institutional stability, Dutch politics has seen considerable step changes and occasional upheavals across the last half century. Influenced by long-term demographic, socio-economic, and cultural shifts the old social cleavages have waned. New social identities and dividing lines - such as ethnicity, education, place, and gender - have influenced Dutch citizens' political attitudes and behaviours, including their voting patterns. The media landscape and the information environment have been altered by new technologies that politicians and citizens alike have to navigate. This has produced changes in such pivotal components as the party system, coalition formation and management process, and executive-legislative relations, and many others. Moreover, public policy paradigms and the political coalitions that sustained them have ascended and lost traction in most of the eleven policy domains discussed in the Handbook. In all, this volume provides unique and indispensable insights into stability and change in a political system that once gained notoriety as an archetype of a consensual or consociational democracy.

This book examines both the scope and consequences of the dispersal of the leadership role in democratic societies, a topic that has been relatively neglected by a political science literature dominated by studies of executive power. Individual chapters investigate the many loci of leadership found in modern democracies, some ancient and some newly emergent, some institutionalised and some ad-hoc, some self-consciously political and some avowedly a-political. In assessing the effects of leadership dispersal, the book argues that understanding how policies are shaped in a democracy requires balancing the usual person-centred approach with one that is more contextual, institutional, and relational. The public leadership role of people in business, the media, non-governmental organisations, bureaucracy, law, show-business and many other areas are instructively investigated to enhance our appreciation of the complexity of democratic political systems and to allow us to assess the effects, both good and ill, of democratic leadership dispersal.

The Real World of EU Accountability reports the findings of a major empirical study into patterns and practices of accountability in European governance. The product of a 4-year, path-breaking project, this book assesses to what extent and how the people that populate the key arenas where European public policy is made or implemented are held accountable. Using a systematic analytical framework, it examines not just the formal accountability arrangements but also documents and compares how these operate in practice. In doing so, it provides a unique, empirically grounded contribution to the pivotal but often remarkably fact-free debate about democracy and accountability in European governance. With four empirical chapters covering the Commission and its agencies, the European Council, and Comitology committees, it shows that a web of formal accountability arrangements has been woven around most of them, but that the extent to which the relevant accountability forums actually use the oversight possibilities offered to them varies markedly: some forums lack the institutional resources, others the willingness. But in those cases where both are on the increase, as in the European Parliament's efforts vis a vis the European Commission, fundamentally healthy accountability relationships are developing. Although ex-post accountability is only part of the larger equation determining the democratic quality of European governance, this study suggests that at least in this area, the EU is slowly but surely reducing its 'democratic deficit'.

Dispersed Democratic Leadership examines both the scope and consequences of the dispersal of the leadership role in democratic societies, a topic that has been relatively neglected by a political science literature dominated by studies of executive power. Individual chapters investigate the many loci of leadership found in modern democracies, some ancient and some newly emergent, some institutionalized and some ad hoc, some self-consciously political and some avowedly apolitical. In assessing the effects of leadership dispersal, the book argues that understanding how policies are shaped in a democracy requires balancing the usual person-centred approach with one that is more contextual, institutional, and relational. The public leadership role of people in business, the media, non-governmental organizations, bureaucracy, law, showbusiness and many other areas are instructively investigated to enhance our appreciation of the complexity of democratic political systems and to allow us to assess the effects, both good and ill, of democratic leadership dispersal.

Political leadership has made a comeback. It was studied intensively not only by political scientists but also by political sociologists and psychologists, Sovietologists, political anthropologists, and by scholars in comparative and development studies from the 1940s to the 1970s. Thereafter, the field lost its way with the rise of structuralism, neo-institutionalism, and rational choice approaches to the study of politics, government, and governance. Recently, however, students of politics have returned to studying the role of individual leaders and the exercise of leadership to explain political outcomes. The list of topics is nigh endless: elections, conflict management, public policy, government popularity, development, governance networks, and regional integration. In the media age, leaders are presented and stage-managed--spun--as the solution to almost every social problem. Through the mass media and the Internet, citizens and professional observers follow the rise, impact, and fall of senior political officeholders at closer quarters than ever before. This Handbook encapsulates the resurgence by asking, where are we today? It orders the multidisciplinary field by identifying the distinct and distinctive contributions of the disciplines. It meets the urgent need to take stock. It brings together scholars from around the world, encouraging a comparative perspective, to provide a comprehensive coverage of all the major disciplines, methods, and regions. It showcases both the normative and empirical traditions in political leadership studies, and juxtaposes behavioural, institutional, and interpretive approaches. It covers formal, office-based as well as informal, emergent political leadership, and in both democratic and undemocratic polities.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century prime ministers loom larger in the consciousness of their nations than perhaps in any previous era. But how well do we really understand the variables of prime-ministerial performance, and, specifically, why some prime ministers apparently flourish in the role while others wither? This study examines how prime ministers perform as leaders of their governments, parties, and nations. It offers new ways of thinking about prime-ministerial power and leadership, and systematic empirical studies of prime-ministerial leadership practices in four Westminster democracies: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The volume features contributions from leading political scientists from all of these countries and is organised into three major sections: understanding power in prime-ministerial performance, prime ministers and their parties, and evaluating prime-ministerial performance. Through its collaborative and multifaceted approach the volume demonstrates that there are no hard and fast propositions or rules of thumb to capture what it is that makes us think of some prime ministers as so much more effective than others. Instead it highlights the importance for students of executive government to grasp the contingent interplay between personal, institutional, and contextual factors in understanding and evaluating prime-ministerial performance.

This book considers some recent and spectacular failures in policy-making and asks what is meant by policy 'disaster', the different forms that they can take and why they have occured. These issues are explored in nine contrasting cases drawn from both the European Union and its member states. These include: the devastating crisis in the Belgium political system following the exposure of a paedophile ring; the crisis in the Dutch fight against drugs; 'Mad Cows', the 'Arms to Iraq' affair in the UK; monetary union between West and East Germany; the Swedish monetary crisis of 1992; and the EU's common fisheries policy and policies towards civil war in Yugoslavia. This book is an excellent study of how and why policies can go wrong and highlights the limits of what governments can achieve in Western Europe.

The constant threat of crises such as disasters, riots and terrorist attacks poses a frightening challenge to Western societies and governments. While the causes and dynamics of these events have been widely studied, we know little about what happens following their containment and the restoration of stability. This volume explores 'post-crisis politics,' examining how crises give birth to longer term dynamic processes of accountability and learning which are characterised by official investigations, blame games, political manoeuvring, media scrutiny and crisis exploitation. Drawing from a wide range of contemporary crises, including Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the Madrid train bombings, the Walkerton water contamination, Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia and the Boxing Day Asian tsunami, this is a ground-breaking volume which addresses the longer term impact of crisis-induced politics. Competing pressures for stability and change mean that policies, institutions and leaders may occasionally be uprooted, but often survive largely intact.

The constant threat of crises such as disasters, riots and terrorist attacks poses a frightening challenge to Western societies and governments. While the causes and dynamics of these events have been widely studied, we know little about what happens following their containment and the restoration of stability. This volume explores 'post-crisis politics,' examining how crises give birth to longer term dynamic processes of accountability and learning which are characterised by official investigations, blame games, political manoeuvring, media scrutiny and crisis exploitation. Drawing from a wide range of contemporary crises, including Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the Madrid train bombings, the Walkerton water contamination, Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia and the Boxing Day Asian tsunami, this is a ground-breaking volume which addresses the longer term impact of crisis-induced politics. Competing pressures for stability and change mean that policies, institutions and leaders may occasionally be uprooted, but often survive largely intact.

A crisis of governance is widespread in western societies. Public administration is caught in a web of personal and organizational inter-dependencies that require continuous awareness and readjustment on the part of its practitioners. Understanding Policy Fiascoes applies policy analysis to come to terms with policy fiascoes, with a full appreciation of its limits. Despite the fact that policy failures may seem universal, they are in fact better understood as social, political and academic constructions. Bovens and 'tHart trace how and why certain episodes of public policymaking become labeled as "fiascoes." They highlight the analytical and political biases that shape our judgments of policy outcomes and the performance of policymakers and institutions.When put in their proper historical, institutional, and policymaking perspective, many policy fiascoes could easily have turned out quite differently. The authors show that the fact that these policy episodes unfolded as they did does not mean that they were inevitable. Careful analysis indicates that a whole series of variables, if not always manageable, can, through careful configurations of decisions, alter the course and outcomes of policies and programs, as well as the post-hoc judgments made about them.In examining public policymaking, certain questions arise: If public policymaking has failed so miserably, what does this tell us about the state of policy analysis? While policymakers are facing a crisis of legitimacy, policy analysis have been forced to reconsider the validity o their knowledge claims and the extent of their impact on the practice of policymaking. Understanding Policy Fiascoes will provide social scientists, policymakers, and political scientists with compelling perspectives on old problems and a path-breaking way to handle new problems.

Leadership has never been more important – and divisive – than it is today. The idea and discourse of the leader remains a critical factor in organizational and societal performance, but there is evident tension between the persistent focus on the critical importance of individual leaders and the increasing emphasis on collective leadership. The Routledge Companion to Leadership provides a survey of the contentious and dynamic discipline of leadership.This collection covers key themes in the field, including advances in leadership theory, leadership in a range of contexts and geographies, leadership failure, leadership process, and leadership development. Topics range from micro studies to wider political analyses of leadership, taking in unusual but important aspects such as portrayals of leadership in architecture, media, and science fiction. Contributions from 61 internationally renowned authors from 16 countries make available the full range of perspectives, approaches, and insights on the idea of leadership. Providing both a social sciences and a psychological approach, these go beyond common themes to offer diverse perspectives on such topics as emotion and leadership, portrayals of leadership. This volume situates leadership debates and evidence within contemporary leadership crises, while ensuring that the explorations of the issues are of enduring relevance.With wide and critical coverage of the key topics and potent contextualization of themes in current events, The Routledge Companion to Leadership is the ideal resource for graduate study in leadership.

Crisis management has become a defining feature of contemporary governance. In times of crisis, communities and members of organizations expect their leaders to minimize the impact, while critics and bureaucratic competitors make use of social media to blame incumbent rulers and their policies. In this extreme environment, policymakers must somehow establish a sense of normality, and foster collective learning from the crisis experience. In the new edition of this uniquely comprehensive analysis, the authors examine how strategic leaders deal with the challenges they face, the political risks and opportunities they encounter, the pitfalls they must avoid, and the paths towards reform they may pursue. The book is grounded in decades of collaborative, cross-national and multidisciplinary case study research and has been updated to include new insights and examples from the last decade. This is an original and important contribution from experts in public policy and international security.

Crisis management has become a defining feature of contemporary governance. In times of crisis, communities and members of organizations expect their leaders to minimize the impact, while critics and bureaucratic competitors make use of social media to blame incumbent rulers and their policies. In this extreme environment, policymakers must somehow establish a sense of normality, and foster collective learning from the crisis experience. In the new edition of this uniquely comprehensive analysis, the authors examine how strategic leaders deal with the challenges they face, the political risks and opportunities they encounter, the pitfalls they must avoid, and the paths towards reform they may pursue. The book is grounded in decades of collaborative, cross-national and multidisciplinary case study research and has been updated to include new insights and examples from the last decade. This is an original and important contribution from experts in public policy and international security.

Leadership has never been more important – and divisive – than it is today. The idea and discourse of the leader remains a critical factor in organizational and societal performance, but there is evident tension between the persistent focus on the critical importance of individual leaders and the increasing emphasis on collective leadership. The Routledge Companion to Leadership provides a survey of the contentious and dynamic discipline of leadership.This collection covers key themes in the field, including advances in leadership theory, leadership in a range of contexts and geographies, leadership failure, leadership process, and leadership development. Topics range from micro studies to wider political analyses of leadership, taking in unusual but important aspects such as portrayals of leadership in architecture, media, and science fiction. Contributions from 61 internationally renowned authors from 16 countries make available the full range of perspectives, approaches, and insights on the idea of leadership. Providing both a social sciences and a psychological approach, these go beyond common themes to offer diverse perspectives on such topics as emotion and leadership, portrayals of leadership. This volume situates leadership debates and evidence within contemporary leadership crises, while ensuring that the explorations of the issues are of enduring relevance.With wide and critical coverage of the key topics and potent contextualization of themes in current events, The Routledge Companion to Leadership is the ideal resource for graduate study in leadership.

A new edition of a popular textbook that provides a systematic and up-to-date introduction to the different approaches to understanding leadership in the public sector. This text draws together a wide range of enduring and cutting-edge scholarship to provide a clear and concise overview of the area. Written by two of the field’s leading experts, it uses real-world case studies to unpack the dilemmas and complexities facing leaders in contemporary democracies. Now streamlined to further help students navigate this widely debated area, this is the ideal text for undergraduate and postgraduate modules on leadership on public administration and management courses. Moreover, with its balance between theory and applicability it is also a valuable resource for training courses for public sector professionals.New to this Edition:- Streamlined chapter structures and improved pedagogical features that are even more useful for students- A new co-author bringing added insights from organizational science and quantitative methodologies- Revised to address the most up-to-date developments in thinking about leadership in the 21st century

A crisis of governance is widespread in western societies. Public administration is caught in a web of personal and organizational inter-dependencies that require continuous awareness and readjustment on the part of its practitioners. Understanding Policy Fiascoes applies policy analysis to come to terms with policy fiascoes, with a full appreciation of its limits. Despite the fact that policy failures may seem universal, they are in fact better understood as social, political and academic constructions. Bovens and 'tHart trace how and why certain episodes of public policymaking become labeled as "fiascoes." They highlight the analytical and political biases that shape our judgments of policy outcomes and the performance of policymakers and institutions.When put in their proper historical, institutional, and policymaking perspective, many policy fiascoes could easily have turned out quite differently. The authors show that the fact that these policy episodes unfolded as they did does not mean that they were inevitable. Careful analysis indicates that a whole series of variables, if not always manageable, can, through careful configurations of decisions, alter the course and outcomes of policies and programs, as well as the post-hoc judgments made about them.In examining public policymaking, certain questions arise: If public policymaking has failed so miserably, what does this tell us about the state of policy analysis? While policymakers are facing a crisis of legitimacy, policy analysis have been forced to reconsider the validity o their knowledge claims and the extent of their impact on the practice of policymaking. Understanding Policy Fiascoes will provide social scientists, policymakers, and political scientists with compelling perspectives on old problems and a path-breaking way to handle new problems.

In an era of low trust in government and a pervasive negativity bias, this volume goes against the grain. It examines the foundations, practices and tools of a distinctly positive strand of public administration (PPA).This book asserts that there is a perennial need for social, evidence-based learning on what to aspire to and what works in public administration. Responding to this need, scholars from five continents present research that has been designed to do just that. Employing an array of frameworks and methods, they present studies of high-performing policies and programs and explore what makes them tick and what might be learned from how they were designed and delivered. Taken together, the 27 contributions make a powerful case for the added value of PPA as an intellectual and practical endeavour.Laying out a future agenda for the field, this book is invaluable for students and scholars of public administration and management, public policy, regulation and governance. Theoretically grounded and conceptually innovative, it is also beneficial to policymakers seeking evidence for their belief that when done well, government does make an immensely positive contribution to society.

Why do some policies succeed so well while others, in the same sector or country, fail dramatically? The aim of this book is to answer this question and provide systematic research on the nature, sources and consequences of policy failure. The expert contributors analyse and evaluate the success and failure of four policy areas (Steel, Health Care, Finance, HIV and the Blood Supply) in six European countries, namely France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Spain and Sweden. The book is therefore able to compare success and failure across countries as well as policy areas, enabling a test of a variety of theoretical assumptions about policy making and government. The book also sheds more light on the legitimacy of governance in Western Europe and goes beyond understanding the concepts of success and failure to explaining their genesis empirically.Success and Failure in Public Governance will be of interest to academics and researchers of political science, public policy and public administration as well as to practitioners of public policy.

Why do some policies succeed so well while others, in the same sector or country, fail dramatically? The aim of this book is to answer this question and provide systematic research on the nature, sources and consequences of policy failure. The expert contributors analyse and evaluate the success and failure of four policy areas (Steel, Health Care, Finance, HIV and the Blood Supply) in six European countries, namely France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Spain and Sweden. The book is therefore able to compare success and failure across countries as well as policy areas, enabling a test of a variety of theoretical assumptions about policy making and government. The book also sheds more light on the legitimacy of governance in Western Europe and goes beyond understanding the concepts of success and failure to explaining their genesis empirically.Success and Failure in Public Governance will be of interest to academics and researchers of political science, public policy and public administration as well as to practitioners of public policy.

This open access book presents case studies of twelve organisations which the public have come to view as institutions.