Issue 2021 no6 contents:

Building a civil service that reflects the diversity of the population it serves can increase bureaucratic legitimacy and the fairness of public service provision. In this study, I draw on symbolic representation theory and argue that the impact of representative bureaucracy on trust in government can vary by citizen immigration status. Combining microlevel demographic and opinion data from respondents in 43 countries and country-level estimates of the representativeness of government personnel, I implement a series of multi-level models to test the theory. The analysis suggests that the representativeness of government bureaucracy does not affect trust in the average case but is a significant factor for first generation immigrants. This study provides new evidence for the trust-enhancing effect of representative bureaucracy among minority stakeholders. I discuss how a cross-national approach can further enrich the theoretical landscape of the representative bureaucracy construct.

This article focuses on public management reforms in Turkey and how the reform trajectory has changed over the past two decades. Reforms in Turkey represent a mixture of ideas and reform elements that are constantly evolving under the influence of foreign actors, especially the European Union, efforts to respond to global reform trends, and domestic political developments. The article is divided into three parts. The first part gives a brief picture of the political-administrative structure of the country. The second part provides a landscape of the reform initiatives in the last two decades. The third part examines the main challenges Turkey might face in the coming years in terms of implementing reforms and provides a discussion on how they can be addressed.

Hungarian public administration culture has traditionally been considered as overtly legalistic and proceduralist, which appears to be in contrast with claims of weakening the rule of law or facing sanctions under Article 7 of the Treaty of the European Union. This article offers an overview on the criticisms put forth by academic writers and EU institutions regarding the Hungarian development path and puts them into the wider context of democratization through transaction (transitology, democracy export) theory. The article compares findings of contemporary interventionist authors with the propositions of such iconic writers as Dankwart Rustow (1970) and Samuel P. Huntington (1984) and attempts to connect the dots between these realms of thought. These authors all share the view that democracy shall be exported the more and quicker the better. Transitology, though, has had its critics, while contemporary interventionist theory appears to be rather monolithic without considerable criticism. The article uses the approach of Payne (2006), and of other authors, to question various statements of contemporary interventionists.

Not least, recent developments in Afghanistan provide historical evidence that the ambitions of transactional democratisation are predetermined to fall short on non-democratic institutions imposing democracy using non-democratic measures on recipients of various sorts.

This paper presents the implementation and evolution of e-governance in Greece as well as offering insights, policies and suggestions for the design of e-government benchmarks. The research objectives of this article are to identify the appraisal of Greece in e-government over time and in relation to other countries as well as the role of internal audit and transparency related to digital public services. The method adopted is through an extensive bibliographic review of the Greek, European and international literature of the thematic field of e-government as well as the presentation of several frameworks to structure the discussion of e-government benchmark design based on a benchmarking with key indicators of published surveys from internationally reputable organizations. The findings of this paper are that Greece proceeded at a very slow pace in its digital transformation, shows shortcomings in e-government policies, records delays in adapting the services requested by citizens, and no matter the lack of investment in technological infrastructure, the effectiveness of e-governance presupposes proactiveness. Nevertheless, another key conclusion of the research is that Greece is far from the average performance of e-government in the European Union due to its chronic economic problems, the lack of technological equipment and the lack of overall orientation in e-government. Furthermore, this paper can be a measure of comparison for other countries that have similar characteristics to Greece in order to improve e-governance.

The main aim of the article is to present a model of monitoring of the quality of public services which can be used to enhance the quality of self-government in European post-communist countries. The secondary aim of the article is to identify factors which hinder the implementation of the model. The theoretical basis for the presented model comes from three earlier ones: the Deming cycle, the Boyd cycle, and the model of institutional development of organizations.

The model has been tested in 10 local administration units (LAU) in Poland. It consists of six stages presented in the article: decision to implement monitoring, its objectives and resources; selection of indicators; collection of data; analysis of the collected data and preparation of reports; use/dissemination of the reports; final evaluation of monitoring and implementation of conclusions. Three critical points were identified at which decisions to stop monitoring were often taken, namely: disappointment with the first main report which failed to answer all of the problems raised by the authorities, changes of the LAU authorities as a result of elections, and “indolence” of local authorities manifested in expecting support from outside.

In the public administration field, the legislative, executive and judicial frameworks should be consistent. The institutional framework of the Palestinian local government, however, seems largely impacted by an incoherent legal framework. Against this backdrop, this study describes the current local government institutional framework. Secondly, this study investigates the current issues relating to the legal and institutional frameworks of the Palestinian local government.

A qualitative research approach was adopted to collect data in order to achieve the objectives of the study.  The present research utilizes a combination of primary and secondary data. Nine interviews were conducted to gather the primary data, while scholarly works and government documents were used for gathering secondary data.

The results show that fully governmental institutions are the most active within the institutional framework while non-governmental institutions are less active. The results also show that the primary obstacle for an efficient legal framework is due to previous laws, overlapping powers and weak legal practices.  Furthermore, the institutional framework suffers from deformed structure and weak integration.

The discussion section revealed that the current local government system can be best described as a “Chaotic Hybrid System”. When comparing the empirical results with the theoretical concepts, it is indicated that the current local government structure reflects the Public Choice Theory perspective, which advocates for horizontal and vertical fragmentation. However, the Israeli occupation and international funds seem to contribute to complicating the fragmentation of the structure. The structure hence could be described as “Altered Fragmented Structure”.

The UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education, held in Paris, France in October 1998, adopted a universal declaration on the need for a new vision and paradigm in higher education responsive to the challenges of the 21st century. This study is an effort to answer this call but only in the limited field of public sector management education curriculum at the Master’s level. This study attempted an evaluation of existing curricula in terms of the responsive objectives in knowledge, skills, and values as well as the perceived gap between theory and practice. Further, it sought to identify any differences among school administrators, faculty, and students including practitioners in their perceptions regarding these objectives. The study used a three-staged survey to surface data as basics for the proposed curriculum. The first stage was a request for printed materials of the Master in Public Administration/counterpart courses from 66 educational institutions. The second stage was a questionnaire to which 69/132 (52%) school administrators, 112/198 (56.5%) faculty, 188/330 (56.9%) students, and 76/76 (100%) are practitioners, representing an overall 60.4 percent retrieval rate. The questionnaires sought answers to the specific sub-problems of the study. The third questionnaire was sent to all respondents who replied to the second questionnaire; their opinion on the proposed objectives and courses/subjects were sought.

Based on the findings, the researchers developed the proposed curriculum. This curriculum in conformity with the Commission on Higher Education standards consists of the following: 1. Core/Professional Orientation (12 units), Theory and Practice of Governance (3 units), Human Behavior in Organization (3 units), Leadership and Organization Change (3 units), Administrative Laws (3 units); 2. Research and Evaluation (6 units), Quantitative Methods of Management and Statistics (3 units), Research Techniques (3 units); 3. Major Subjects (15 units) on any of the following: Economic Development (3 units), Development Administration (3 units), Communication and Information Management (3 units), Public Management Issues (3 units), Ethics and Accountability in the Public Service (3 units), Environmental Management (3 units); 4. Thesis Writing (6 units). This study will be useful to schools or will offer a public sector management education course at the Master’s level as well as to the Commission on Higher Education for standard setting.