David Nachmias

The politics of program evaluation

PART ONE: THE POLITICAL CONTEXT OF EVALUATION Introduction - Dennis J Palumbo Politics and Evaluation Where Politics and Evaluation Research Meet - Carol Weiss PART TWO: EVALUATION POLITICS AND THE POLICY CYCLE Linking Program Evaluation to User Needs - Eleanor Chelimsky Evaluations Political Inherency - Michael Quinn Patton Practical Considerations for Design and Use What Should Evaluation Mean to Implementation? - Angela Brown and Aaron Wildavsky Policy Termination as a Political Phenomenon - Peter DeLeon PART THREE: EVALUATION POLITICS AND RESEARCH METHODS The Countenances of Fourth-Generation Evaluation - Egon G Guba and Yvonna S Lincoln Description, Judgement and Negotiation The Influence of Theory on What We See - Lawrence A Scaff and Helen M Ingram The Political Uses of Evaluation Research - Susan Tolchin Cost-Benefit Analysis and the Cotton Dust Standard The Politics of Meaning - Rita Mae Kelly

Governance and public policy

(2001). Governance and public policy. Israel Affairs: Vol. 7, Public Policy in Israel, pp. 3-20.

The Quality of Work Life in the Federal Bureaucracy: Conceptualization and Measurement

This paper uses a dimensionalization approach to explore the complex meaning of the quality of work life in the federal bureaucracy. Based on the 1979-80 Federal Employees Attitudes Survey, five distinct dimensions are delineated: supervision, relations with co-workers, job task, relations among work groups and economic well-being. The policy implications of the findings are briefly discussed.

The preconditions for successful evaluation: Is there an ideal paradigm?

The dominant paradigm in evaluation research is undergoing serious challenge. This article explores the ideal role of evaluation in decisionmaking, the methodologies for conducting evaluations, the congruence between evaluation methodology and actual organizational behavior, and the relationship between evaluators and program managers. We conclude that although there are serious disparities between the ideal and the actual in each of these four areas, and especially in the congruence between evaluation methodology and organizational behavior, there is not likely to be a change in the dominant paradigm because it is difficult for practitioners to use the language and values of new organizational perspectives.

The Crisis of Governance: Government Instability andthe Civil Service

The governance capacity of Israeli governments has diminished throughout the years. A variety of large-scale projects have not materialized. Although policy design and long-term planning have progressed fairly well, the same cannot be said for policy implementation. Israels governments and the civil service continue to face obstacles that hinder the achievement of national goals. The main thesis presented in this article is that government instability coupled with the highly centralized public bureaucracy are the main factors that hinder the capacity to govern. In the next sections we first discuss the problem of inability to govern, and then present the theoretical framework that guides the analysis. Two groups of indicators, for political instability and administrative effectiveness, are used to analyze the complexity of the problem. Subsequent empirical analysis demonstrates the impact of the various indicators on governance crisis. By way of conclusion, several recommendations are advanced to enhance effective governance in Israel.

Policy Implementation in Israel: The Loss of Governmental Capacity

Abstract This article examines the governmental capacity and assesses the factors that prevent Israeli governments from achieving their specific goals. The case of the fuel and gas depot in Gelilot points to inherent structural difficulties in the implementation of policy in Israel. The theoretical framework makes use of three different conceptual approaches: policy networks, policy implementation, and a descriptive model that focus on intra-network dynamics. It was founded that different government agencies shaped policy that had been changed rapidly because lack of institutional stability and short ministerial term in office. These inherent changes turned the governmental capacity to a dead-end.

Governance dilemmas in an age of ambiguous authority

A convergence of functions, financing and governance arrangements between “public” and “private” sectors of society cloud the study and understanding of policy making, implementation and evaluation. Forces creating and shaping the interpenetrated society are trends toward professionalism and corporatism. The health industry provides an example. Increasingly, but with little formal guidance from political theory, the American system has authorized privately constituted citizen governing boards to spend tax dollars, make and implement policy choices, and evaluate outcomes. This essay argues for closer examination of the nature of representation and accountability in these little studied creatures of governance and introduces the subsequent articles addressed to the subject.

Bureaucratic Representation in Israel

The concept of representative bureaucracy has now occupied an important place in the literature of political science and public administration for some three decades. It has had significant application in such areas as civil rights and citizen equality, public policy making, and political development and nation-building. The concept nevertheless contains several ambiguities. One of its more serious shortcomings is that it docs not provide adequate guidance for interpreting descriptive or sociological underrepresentation of major social groups within public bureaucracies. An analysis of bureaucratic representation in Israel makes the important contribution of demonstrating that an underrepresentation of social groups can occur even where only a limited tendency toward discrimination against them can be found within the public personnel administrative system. Moreover, it also indicates that other possible causes of undcrrcprcscntation, such as inequality and discrimination in education and differentiated treatment based on time of arrival into a political community, if indeed they exist, may have no significant bearing on how groups fare in a civil service. The analysis, therefore, has widespread implications not only for Israeli politics and administration, but also for equal employment opportunity and similar personnel programs found elsewhere that assume a lack of sociological

Bureaucracy and Ethnicity

A theoretical controversy has developed over the impact of social background on the attitudes, values, and behavior of public bureaucrats. Empirical analysis of the attitudes of Israeli citizens and public bureaucrats toward their national bureaucracy indicates that becoming a bureaucrat and even achieving high rank within the bureaucracy does not overcome the effect of ethnicity upon attitudes in areas of high salience to specific groups.

A NOTE ON COALITION PAYOFFS IN A DOMINANT-PARTY SYSTEM: ISRAEL

COALITION governments in parliamentary political systems evolve from structural-competitive situations in which no single parliamentary group can attain control unless it forms an alliance with one or more other groups. Cabinet formation is an attempt to put together a durable majority coalition. Theory and research on coalition governments has focused mainly on fulifledged coalition situations. Gamson characterizes a full-fledged situation by the following four conditions: (a) there is a decision to be made, and there are more than two actors attempting to maximize their share of the payoffs; (b) no single alternative will maximize the payoffs to all participants; (c) no participant has dictatorial powers-i.e., no one has initial resources sufficient to control the decision by himself; (d) no participant has veto power-i.e., no member must be included in every winning coalition.’ To these conditions, Gamson adds assumptions on the availability of information, on the distribution of payoffs in the same payoff class, and on the rank ordering of non-utilitarian payoffs. He concludes: ‘Any participant will expect others to demand from a coalition a share of the payoffs proportional to the amount of resources which they contribute to a coalition’.* Another powerful theory which explains the distribution of payoffs to coalition partners in full-fledged situations is Riker’s ‘size principle’. Essentially, Riker suggests that ‘in -person, zero sum games, where side payments are permitted, where players are rational, and where they have perfect information, onlyminimum winning coalitions In the real world, however, the ‘size principle’ is modified by an ‘information effect’ that may increase the size of the coalition due to uncertainty over the actual resources of the members and the reliability of their up port.^ A third theory on full-fledged coalition situations is Leiserson’s ‘minimal range’, which takes into account the parties’ positions on political issues. The variance in compatibility of the parties’ ideologies leads their leaders to search among all winning coalitions for those that combine partners at a minimal ideological distance from each other. Leiserson’s ‘ideological space’ was constructed in such a way that, in most cases, the addition of a party increased the distance spanned by the coa l i t i~n .~ These three theories utilize different explanatory variables to assess the relationship between a party’s strength in the parliament and its prospective