Reforming state budgeting in the vortex of policy conditionality, political instability and technical support flux

Purpose Greece had to undertake several reforms under intense policy conditionality pressures – stemming from the three financial support programs agreed between the Greek Government and the Troika – and political instability. Within this context, this study aims to analyze the role of politicians and technical assistance staff in the administrative reform of the Greek state budget. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts the approach of an extreme country-case study which is analyzed through a theoretical framework with insights from the resource dependency theory and the concept of policy conditionality. The theoretical framework is supported by documents of the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission, including the technical Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) and their progress reports and is informed by the outcome of interviews with General Accounting Office executives. Findings While the budget reform eventually met the MoU requirements, the frequent changes at the government level, the constant renegotiations with the Troika that initiated changes to the plan and the instability of the technical assistance teams formed to support the reform contributed to important implementation delays. Originality/value The study contributes to the research agenda on accounting reforms during periods of financial crises by providing evidence on the role of politicians’ level of ownership and technical assistance staff contribution.

Citizen Participation in Political Markets: Extending Service-Dominant Logic to Public Policy

While service-dominant logic prescribes consumer participation with firms, some theorists of elitist democracy oppose citizen participation in governance because these theorists perceive citizens as being incompetent in political matters. This study, grounded in political marketing theory, suggests that citizens do, indeed, have the competence for participating in governance through the thin-participation methods (i.e., those not requiring citizen interaction in groups) presented herein. These methods feature relatively short amounts of time needed for individual respondents to learn about issues in an online environment and to take a survey including trade-off tasks as part of a discrete-choice experimental design. Set in the context of a budget crisis for a state (Wyoming), this study assessed citizens’ thoughts about the state’s political processes as well as about policy preferences for seven important policy areas of state budgeting. The results of this study provide evidence that citizens have the crucial operant resources (knowledge and skills) to participate in all types of political markets (electoral, governmental, and intragovernmental). The study offers researchers knowledge for further developing service-dominant logic in government ecosystems of service.

The Journal of the Ministry of Education in the Time of A.V. Nikitenko as Editor

The article presents a detailed analysis of the structure and contents of the Journal of the Ministry of Education before and in the time of its editor A.V. Nikitenko in the years 1856-1860. The author studies and analyzes the articles published in the Journal and their impact on the educational community of those days. The research reveals the problems in the sphere of education in the country, as well as identifies the change in the Journals development that followed the policy of the Ministry of Education in the period under review. Despite some controversy in interpreting the efficiency of the new editor, the benefits are obvious. With A.V. Nikitenko as editor, the Journal received better state budgeting, introduced a new theme - pedagogy, established cooperation with famous scientists and social activists, whose works were regularly published on its pages. All this greatly added to its popularity and to the increase in the number of subscribers. The author resumes that the new editor was the founder of the liberal development of the Journal.

Uphill Battle

The link between human rights and public budgets is both evident and controversial. It is evident in the sense that in practise, the realization of all human rights is tied to the drafting and implementation of budgets. It is, however, also controversial in that there is plenty of contestation around the nature of obligations human rights set on state budgeting. This is caused partly by the indeterminate nature of human rights: instead of clear quantified standards, human rights set general guiding principles for public budgeting. This chapter examines the challenging road ahead for ‘budgeting for human rights’. More specifically, the chapter will focus on four key challenges that emerge in deliberation towards human rights compatible pubic budgets: transparency, compliance, siloed governance, and participation.

From Maximizing to Minimizing: A National Study of State Bureaucrats and Their Budget Preferences

Since the 1960s, public choice theorists have stigmatized bureaucrats as budget maximizers who only care for expanding their own agencies. Despite evidence revealing much more diverse budget behaviors, scholars have almost exclusively focused on studying budget maximizing and its associated factors. To address this limitation, this study employs a multi-level cross-classified logistic regression model to explore factors associated with budget-minimizing preferences or goals instead. While budget preferences may differ from actual budget requests, where administrators may ask for higher or lower funding, they are the initial goals for strategic budgetary requests and deserve attention. Using four decades of the American State Administrators Project (1974–2008), we analyzed responses from eight surveys reflecting the views of approximately 9,500 state agency administrators across all years. We found a notable number of state administrators holding no aspirations for agency or state budget expansion—budget minimizers. As is the case when administrators formulate their actual strategic budget requests, agency heads’ ultimate goals are shaped by not only the characteristics and internal attitudes of administrators but also by the entire context in which agency heads are embedded. Governors, clientele groups, state budgeting rules, and the fiscal environment all played a role when state administrators formed minimizing budget preferences. Interestingly, while some of these actors continually helped shape budget minimizing over time, others had more limited or time-bound effects.

Give me liberty or give me money: the fiscal decentralization and autonomy of regional governance in Slovakia

The aim of this study is to focus on fiscal decentralization and regional financial autonomy in Slovakia. The public administration reform and fiscal decentralization process in Slovakia ought to increase the autonomy of the multi-level governance and to decrease its dependency on state budgeting and other transfers. We argue that regional territorial governance is greatly dependent on financial incentives from central state financing, which limits the expected effect of decentralization and regional fiscal autonomy. By collecting quantitative data on state transfers and revenues to regional governments we demonstrate the limits of spatial, financial and decision-making autonomy within particular regions. The selected time frame 2005-2016 reflects all stages, reforms and changes in the fiscal decentralization of the second level governance in Slovakia.

Resisting austerity measures to social policies: multiple explanatory case studies

Since Margaret Thatcher reached power in the United Kingdom, European governments have increasingly turned to neoliberal forms of policy-making, focusing, especially after the 2008 Great Recession on ‘austerity policies’ rather than investing in social protection policies. We applied a multiple explanatory case studies methodology to examine how and why challenges and resistance to these austerity measures are successful or not in four settings for three different social policy issues: using a gender lens in state budgeting in Andalusia (Spain), maintaining unemployment benefits in Italy and cuts to fuel poverty reduction programs in Northern Ireland and England. In particular, we intended to learn about whether resistance strategies are shared across disparate cases or whether there are unique activities that lead to successful resistance to austerity policies. As our approach drew from realist philosophy of science, we started with initial theories concerning collective action, political ideology and political power of affected populations. Our findings suggest that there are similarities between the cases we studied despite differences in political and policy contexts. We found that joint action between advocacy groups was effective in resisting cuts to social spending. Evidence also indicates that the social construction of target populations is important in resisting changes to social programmes. This was observed in both England and Northern Ireland where pensioners held significant political clout.

COBIT 5.0: Capability Level of Information Technology Directorate General of Treasury

Information system is one of the most important things that can help every companies to improve the performance of their company. The Directorate Generate of the Treasury is one of the government agencies that already use information systems to support their performance to handle the entire transaction of state budgeting and also they provides information systems to serve their users. That system must have a priority of the security and reliability. To ensure that the system has both of the priority, it is necessary to holding of the information systems auditing to ensure that capability level of their governance. The author doing the audit of information system using framework of COBIT 5.0 and doing measurements with Capability Level. EDM 01 (Ensure Governance Framework Setting and Maintenance) and EDM 02 (Ensure Benefits Delivery) are the two main processes of that government needs to do an audit, because they want to make sure that the system can running well and can deliver every benefits to their users. Based on the measurements that have been done using a capability level, both of the main processes are stalled on level 4 and could not reach the level of target on level 5 because there are some activities that cannot going well and can be inhibit the others process to reach their goals.