Simon Bastow

Australian e-Government in comparative perspective

The initial emergence of e-governance appeared to be part of a more general government modernization process with the major focus concerning the potential for service delivery online and saving resources. Governments in Australia (and internationally) quickly raced towards grand e-government strategies. However, subsequent implementation has proved more problematic. e-Government has also raised wider questions about government policy making, structures of decision making and the perennial question of joined-up government. Drawing on empirical material from a seven-nation study (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, US, UK and The Netherlands), this article explores some of these themes in the Australian context and also seeks to place Australian initiatives in a comparative international context.‖

Modelling coalitions that cannot coalesce: A critique of the Laver–Shepsle approach

The Laver and Shepsle (LS) model assumes that coalition government partners can never co‐operate to agree policy jointly, but must allocate ministerial portfolios between them, with each sides ministers acting as partisan ‘barons ‘ in their departments. Portfolio allocations do indeed make some initial difference as a stage through which all coalition negotiations must pass. But in the LS pure model their empirical significance for a coalitions eventual policy stance is greatly exaggerated, ignoring the importance of a range of governance mechanisms in fostering policy coalescence. Theoretically, we should also expect two rational parties always to offer policy stance concessions in bargaining, which move away from the LS ‘lattice points’, in many circumstances maximising their joint welfare. Pressure from voters, activists, party backers and the media will be for a coalition deal more comprehensible than the lattice points for non‐elite audiences, located somewhere along the contract line from party As optimum to party Bs optimum.

Chronic Capacity Stress: A Complex Condition

When the experienced governor of a large local prison tells you that you have to go back to 1877 to get to the roots of the problem of prison crowding, it is a pretty clear indication that the issues that you are dealing with have something chronic about them. In that year, the Prison Commission was established, marking what is widely seen as the beginning of the modern-era prison system in England and Wales. The implication is that as the system has grown into a large and centralized modern bureaucracy, it has also become somehow less able to do the things necessary to impact positively and effectively on the lives of prisoners. Blaming the best part of 150 years of public administrative change for sub-optimality in today’s prison system is perhaps one of the more outlandish examples in this book of fatalistic response. Nevertheless, it illustrates nicely the kind of potentially paradoxical dynamics that can be found at the heart of a large and complex public-policy system.

A More Holistic Governance-Style Approach

We left off at the end of the last chapter with the idea that we had prepared some building blocks of possible theoretical explanations for chronic capacity stress (CCS), and laid them ready for reconstruction. Each of the three groups of theory has helped to shed light on different dimensions of CCS, yet have also shown certain limitations. The challenge in this chapter is to start to build them back up again into a schema that incorporates characteristics of each these theoretical approaches, but which builds them into a more integrated picture of a public-policy system operating dynamically. Rather than looking for meaningful distinctions and cleavages along theoretical lines, we are looking for them along analytical lines, and building these theoretical approaches into the process.

Privately Contracted Prisons: New Setting, Same Condition

The growth of the market for privately managed prisons and prison services is an important part of the story of chronic capacity stress (CCS). Accounting for around 15 per cent of total capacity in 2012, private-sector firms have established themselves as designers, builders, operators, and financiers of new prisons, as well as running other key services such as prisoner escorts and electronic-tagging schemes. The sector has done much to impact capacity. It has been a near-exclusive provider of new prisons since the early 1990s. And it has been used, in theory at least, as a source of leverage and innovation for improving the existing public-sector system. As the concept of constrained autonomy by now would have us suspect, it has partly been allowed to do this, and partly not.

Traditional Explanations of Capacity Stress and Their Limitations

Take a snapshot of any public-policy system at a particular moment in time, and you will see a picture of equilibrium between the demands made upon that system by governments and society, and all the things that the system does (and does not do) to somehow meet those demands. Continually evolving values and expectations are balanced against resources, capabilities, and efforts of actors involved, all of which sustains an equilibrium that allows the system, in one way or another, to fulfil its purpose, do its job, add value to society — in short, perform.

Performance and Capacity in a Managerialist Era

Probably the essential idea at the heart of the heuristic in the previous chapter is one of equilibrium between aggravating and compensating dynamics, and how these dynamics appear to co-exist as part of chronic capacity stress (CCS). One implication of these countervailing dynamics is that the system appears to incorporate elements of success and failure simultaneously. As we have seen, the prison system has been cast, almost serially, as a failing system, yet at the same time it has shown strong elements of coping. Indeed, as we will see in this chapter, it has not just coped, but in many ways has shown considerable improvements in basic aspects of its work. Another implication of CCS is that systems are also able to incorporate elements of relative under-supply and over-supply simultaneously. There are signs that the prison system has been squeezed and pared down as part of NPM change over the years (i.e. under-supply). Yet at the same time, there are also signs that the same system has been able to sustain quite striking levels of obsolescence and redundancy, both of which imply a kind of relative over-supply of capacity.

Senior Ministers and the Limits of Their Influence to Resolve the Capacity Problem

Political science has often tended to explain the outcomes of public-policy systems in terms of the ‘high politics’ involved. Rikerian notions of political strategy and manipulation, for example, are based on the implicit assumption that the success or failure of policies depend upon the ability of political elites to engineer them from the top down. Governance concepts of ‘steering’ also imply similar ‘dark arts’ of design and manipulation. The implication is that it is the politicians who are ultimately responsible for the success and failure of policy systems, and that if we want to understand the causes and dynamics behind CCS, we should look for the answers at the top of the system. Policy success or failure, we are led to believe, is a question of political leadership or lack of it.

Governors, Staff, and Strategies of Local Adaptation

For most prison governors,1 the idea that they and their staff can be implicated in sustaining crowding and chronic capacity stress (CCS) seems far-fetched. Conventional wisdom says that these are the concerns of ‘high politics’ and decisions way above their pay grade, and that the predicament of governors and staff is to cope with the stresses incurred and make the system work. Clearly, however, governors and staff form an important part of the prison system. Surprisingly, there are signs that they have been under-researched, despite the fact that their roles embody interesting and complex dilemmas of public management.2 Governors face challenges of constrained autonomy in much the same way as ministers and senior officials, and their choices and actions are therefore vital components of keeping the prison system as a whole in some kind of manageable and acceptable equilibrium. As Bryans (2007) writes: There will always be a tension that exists between control from above in the form of rules, regulations, and directives, and the governor’s autonomy, and the need for flexibility and personal influence in managing prisons, because of the very nature of penal institutions. (p. 181)

Top Officials and the Interface between Political and Operational

Attention turns in this chapter to the implications of constrained autonomy for senior officials.1 Public-policy and public-choice literature assigns considerable scope to the top officials in the executive to shape their world, behave strategically, or finesse their situations according to their own interests, and so on (Dunleavy, 1991; Page, 1992). Whether it be the traditional model of civil servant ‘mandarins’, or the managerialist model of CEO-style civil servants, the top bureaucratic officials in leadership roles in large public-policy systems are often attributed extensive powers of autonomy in one way or another. However, the constraints of the system are often as powerful, and this means that we should be careful about exactly how much autonomy we attribute to these top officials who work at the interface between political and operational aspects of the system.