The GOVERNANCE blog

After the East Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, both Japan and South Korea undertook labor market reforms to enable firms to adjust swiftly to changing business environments.  But labor market insiders were often shielded from tough reforms, with the result that the gap between insiders and outsiders widened substantially.  In the current issue of Governance, Jiyeoun Song of the University of Oklahoma explains the politics behind these reforms.  Institutional structures, and the political dynamics which they engender, mean that the costs of reform are borne disproportionately by labor market outsiders.  Read the article.

In the lead commentary for the July issue of Governance, Theodore Marmor of Yale University examines the politics behind the Affordable Care Act of 2010.  Institutional and political considerations meant there was “a substantial gap between the diagnosis of America’s medical problems and the remedies the White House and Congress could agree to,” Marmor says.  The result was legislation that “neither created a coherent policy program nor achieved the political agreement that reformers anticipated.”  The 2010 deal might have been the only one feasible at the time, Marmor concedes — but if it is limited in substance and politically unstable, was it still a desirable reform?  Open access to the commentary.

Norway was not the only developed country to adopt a strong state role in the oil sector in the early 1970s.  But while other countries liberalized according to NPM principles in following decades, the Norwegian state “remained at the helm,” Ole Gunnar Austvik of Lillehammer University College says in the current issue of Governance.  Austvik charts the shifting role of government in oil and gas activities.  The Norwegian experience, he concludes, shows that “the state has a major role to play in sectors of strategic national importance.”  Read the article.

The advent of multilevel governance provides interest groups in European countries with the opportunity to seek influence in more places.  In the current issue of Governance, Jan Beyers and Bart Kerremans of the University of Antwerp conduct an empirical analysis to discover what actually shapes the venue shopping strategies of national interest groups.  “French organizations develop extensive multi-level strategies,” they find, “while the strategies of Dutch organizations are weakly Europeanized.”  Broadly, though, it is unproductive to draw national stereotypes.  A critical factor is the extent to which interest groups achieve access to domestic policymakers.  It is not that interest groups which are unsuccessful at the national level are driven to lobby elsewhere.  On the contrary, success at the national level seems to create the basis for more extensive activity at higher levels as well.  Read the article.

Full-text downloads of articles from Governance increased by 39 percent in 2011, according to the journal’s publisher, Wiley-Blackwell.  China now accounts for twelve percent of downloads — roughly equal to the share of downloads from the United Kingdom.

In the current issue of Governance, Jennifer Brass of Indiana University examines how a growing number of non-governmental organizations affect governance in Kenya.  There’s no neat division of steering and rowing responsibilities between government agencies and NGOs, Brass finds.  Instead, governance in Kenya has become “a complex and intertwined process.” NGOs have also helped to make the governance of public service provision “stronger and more democratic,” Brass says, although improvements in the quality of governance are not fully consolidated.  Read the article.