Distribution Of Public Resources Research Articles

The Impact of the D21 Method and Its Modification on Citizens’ Participation in Participatory Budgeting. The Case of the Czech Republic

Participatory budgeting (PB) is often discussed as a tool to support active participation of citizens in the decision-making in the matters of the distribution of public resources. However, little was said about the possibility that the choice of a voting method used in the voting phase of the PB process could affect the participation in PB. In the Czech Republic, the Democracy 2.1 (D21) voting method is often used in municipalities implementing PB and additionally, it is promoted as a method to encourage more people to vote. This article aims to determine Czech municipalities with the D21 method and its modification, and to evaluate the impact of choosing these voting methods on participation rate in PB. The study suggests that the choice of a voting method is relevant for citizens´ engagement in voting. Based on the empirical findings, the D21 method and its modification are associated with a higher voter turnout in PB than another voting method. Further, the results underline the influence of external organizations offering online platforms for voting.

Consequences of Administrative Burden for Social Safety Nets that Support the Healthy Development of Children

AbstractThrough the lens of administrative burden and ordeals, we investigate challenges that low‐income families face in accessing health and human services critical for their children's healthy development. We employ a mixed methods approach—drawing on administrative data on economically disadvantaged children in Tennessee, publicly available data on resource allocations and expenditures, and data collected in purposive and randomly sampled interviews with public and nonprofit agencies across the state—to analyze the distribution of resources relative to children's needs and provide rich descriptions of the experiences of organizations striving to overcome administrative burdens and support families. We also scrutinize the place‐based resource deserts and environmental contexts of resource gaps and deficiencies in public policies governing the distribution of public resources that exacerbate administrative burdens and inequities in access to public resources. Our insights into the costs imposed on individuals and organizations and how they impede or spill over into other aspects of organizational work point to specific state and local program and policy changes that could be implemented to address resource constraints and alleviate burdens on organizations and poor families.

Cripping the Welfare Queen

AbstractDrawing together feminist- and queer-of-color critique with disability theory, this essay offers a literary-cultural reframing of the welfare queen in light of critical discourses of disability. It does so by taking up the discourse of dependency that casts racialized, low-income, and disabled populations as drains on the state, reframing this discourse as a potential site of coalition among antiracist, anticapitalist, and feminist disability politics. Whereas antiwelfare policy cast independence as a national ideal, this analysis of the welfare mother elaborates a version of disability and women-of-color feminism that not only takes dependency as a given but also mines the figure of the welfare mother for its transformative potential. To imagine the welfare mother as a site for reenvisioning dependency, this essay draws on the “ruptural possibilities” of minority literary texts, to use Roderick A. Ferguson’s coinage, and places Sapphire's 1996 novel Push in conversation with Jesmyn Ward's 2011 novel Salvage the Bones. Both novels depict young Black mothers grappling with the disabling context of public infrastructural abandonment, in which the basic support systems for maintaining life—schools, hospitals, social services—have become increasingly compromised. As such, these novels enable an elaboration of a critical disability politic centered on welfare queen mythology and its attendant structures of state neglect, one that overwrites the punitive logics of public resource distribution. This disability politic, which the author terms crip-of-color critique, foregrounds the utility of disability studies for feminist-of-color theories of gendered and sexual state regulation and ushers racialized reproduction and state violence to the forefront of disability analysis.

Public Opinion Backlash against China’s International Expansion

ABSTRACT In recent years, China has attempted to expand its international power by initiating projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This article scrutinizes the potential obstacles to China’s expansion from a public opinion perspective. It argues that domestic public opinion may pose two challenges. First, xenophobic sentiments stimulate opposition to the inflow of foreigners and encourage social conflict. Second, the biased distribution of public resources between foreigners and Chinese citizens enhances the sense of inequality and relative deprivation. Nationalist sentiment plays an important role in shaping these two challenges. The authors show that the challenges can impede the implementation of expansive foreign policies. These arguments are supported by evidence from both qualitative and quantitative sources.

An Assessment of the Openness and Transparency of Local Budgets in Belarus

International experience shows that public participation in the budgetary process and openness in the public sector are necessary conditions for a proper economic strategy of the state. Financial openness, in the broadest sense, today represents an important feature of proper fiscal and monetary policy. In a narrow sense, it is more often associated with the openness of the budget process, especially at the local level. Financial openness contributes to the efficient collection and distribution of public resources. It increases the responsibility of governments, strengthens the trust of citizens, and eliminates opportunities for corruption. This paper attempts to develop and test a compact methodology for the operational analysis of online information openness and transparency of the budgetary process at the local level. The developed methodology involves the use of two criteria: (1) the level of transparency of local budget, and (2) an assessment of the efforts by authority in ensuring the transparency of local budgets. The basis of the methodology is expert assessments of the informational significance of particular parts of websites of local authorities in issues of local finance and budgeting. Based on expert assessments of the significance and actual availability of these information elements, we evaluate an integrated assessment of the information content of local authoritiy sites in 2020. We interpret the resulting assessment of the information content of the site with the local budget and finances data as the online openness and transparency of local budgets (Online Local Budget Index of Transparency, OLBIT). Besides, we evaluate what factors (financial, geographical and demographic) affect the transparency level measured by the OLBIT.

Социальные науки и глобальная турбулентность: перезагрузка мейнстрима

After the collapse of the bipolar world, the neoliberal mainstream emerged in the global hierarchy of social sciences, built on three axiomatic pillars: Western domination, capitalism (free market) and liberalism (the value of individual autonomy). Nowadays, one can more and more often witness criticism and disintegration of the mainstream, which claimed the universality of descriptions and legitimation of modern societies that have reached the end of history in the form of open-access liberal market democracies. The purpose of the article is to find out how transformations of the prevailing political and economic orders, configurations of the subjects of geopolitical dominance and their legitimate metaphors determine the direction of changes in the social sciences mainstream. The hypothesis of the research is that the prevailing principles of stratification and distribution of public resources will be less and less valuable and institutionally related to capitalism, market and democracy, since an appeal to the latter does not lead to an increase in the available opportunities for the majority of the population in practice. The global change in social ontology, the structure of economic reproduction and legitimate foundations of the political order bring about a drop in the credibility and relevance of mainstream concepts focused on the axiomatics of market values and liberal rhetoric. Intellectual attempts to restore the relevance of the neoliberal mainstream through the construction of local utopias (flat world, creative class, knowledge economy, etc.), the introduction of complementary concepts of civil repair (J. Alexander), sociocultural trauma (P. Shtompka), unworthy government (bad governance), dependence on previous development (path dependence) or gauge (N. Rozov) do not save from growing conceptual stretch. Formation of a society without tangible economic growth and a declining need for mass labor leads to the inevitable transformation of the mainstream. Alternative and peripheral theories that describe the contours of a global future mainly in non-market, non-capitalist and, possibly, non-liberal categories are becoming more influential. These are concepts that fix new formats for the distribution of public resources, less and less connected with the market, democracy and hegemony of the West, but increasingly – with rental mechanisms, distributive political regulation and differentiated value of different social groups for the national state. Acknowledgements. The article has been supported by a grant of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) and the Expert Institute of Social Research (“опн”). Project no. 20-011-31025 “Alternatives to Political Mainstream amidst the Crisis of the Global World Order”.

Sustainable Development and Justice between Generations in Latvia. Case of IT Professionals

The ideas of social justice between members of the same generation and between members of different generations are described in scientific literature as the main normative principles of sustainable development. Distribution of public resources between generations can be considered fair and honest, when each successive generation can expect the same care and benefits as the previous generation. But, in the modern world, it is almost impossible. Are there any intergenerational conflicts in Latvia connected with environmental and social justice? This question has become the main research issue of this study. The results of the study show that in Latvian society there is a certain understanding of environmental justice, as necessity to limit intensity of consumption in order to preserve the environment. In this issue, interests of all generations intersect, so environmental problems can be solved in society without intergenerational conflicts. Social justice issues are more complex for Latvian society. Even in high-income social groups, generational perceptions of how fairly the state redistributes public resources differ. This provokes a protest, which is expressed in unwillingness to pay taxes and justification of tax evasion.

Online Openness and Transparency of Local Budgets in Belarus

AbstractWorld experience shows that public participation in the budget process and openness in the public sector are the necessary conditions for a proper economic strategy of the State. Financial openness contributes to the efficient collection and distribution of public resources. It expands the responsibility of governments, strengthens the trust of citizens and prevents opportunities for corruption. Researchers around the world (Alt, Lassen, Skilling, Bernick, Gandía, Yannacopoulos, Darbyshire, Slukhai and others) and international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, OECD, the World Bank, the International Budget Partnership (IBP), the Global Initiative for Financial Transparency and the Open Government Partnership have shown growing interest in financial openness issues in recent years. This paper attempts to develop and test a methodology for the operational analysis of online information openness and transparency of the budget process at the local level. The developed methodology used two criteria: (1) the level of transparency of the local budget and (2) an assessment of authority's efforts in ensuring transparency of local budgets. It is based on expert assessments of the informational significance of particular elements of websites of local authorities in issues of local finance and budget. We interpret the resulting assessment of the information content of the site with the local budget and finances data as the online openness and transparency of local budgets Online Local Budget Index of Transparency (OLBIT).

Indigenous Peoples, Exclusion and Precarious Work: Design of Strategies to Address Poverty in Indigenous and Peasant Populations in Ecuador through the SWOT-AHP Methodology.

This research analysed the options that, following decent employment and the social economy, can allow the human development of poor, excluded and vulnerable indigenous populations in Ecuador. A set of strategies were developed which can be implemented by public authorities and by community organisations. They were designed from two types of expert consultations: the Delphi method and the analysis of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) combined with Analytic Hierarchy Process method (AHP) for hierarchizing the criteria collected and obtaining strategies. The proposed strategies are as follows: adopting appropriate legal frameworks, respecting peoples’ rights, better distribution of public resources, implementing monitoring systems, developing solidarity markets and recognizing the participation of the poor as a subject of rights. This investigation revealed differences between the state, which identifies the poor with monetary indicators, and the indigenous peoples, who see it as the lack of community links, by conceiving the poor as a beneficiary of official assistance, despite the fact that a strong community and peasant organisation could be used. The value of an economy based on reciprocity and confidence was also recognized, identifying niches of production and consumption to create partnerships and ensure the participation of indigenous peoples in decision-making areas.

The Limits of Capitalism: the Rent-Seeking Society as a Global Alternative

The natural limits of capitalism are expressed not only in the global suspension of economic growth, which has been considered endless. It is also a crisis of its non-economic legitimization, of those political forms that have made possible smoothing of inequality generated by capitalism. The nation-state, the model of social state and representative democracy were the mechanisms of access for the most citizens to the fruits of the economic growth generated by capitalism. However, the growth limits of available public resources did not significantly change the strategies of political and economic elites. Attempts to redistribute the non-growing public pie were expressed in neoliberal rhetoric; devaluation of the political nation model as co-citizenship; reduction of forms of social policy; the crisis of democracy, expressed in a return to its narrow interpretation as Schumpeterian competition of the elites. The tendencies related to the fact that the elites would like to keep receiving an additional piece of the public pie at the expense of the majority, reinforce inequality and deprive capitalism of convincing value-institutional regulation that have earlier ensured its stable existence. There is a growing demand in society for return to a more egalitarian model of the distribution of public resources. Its options are less and less associated with capitalism as a society dominated by market metaphor that ideologically represents modernity, but for many reasons has ceased to provide acceptable prospects for the majority. It seems that rental society is becoming an alternative to capitalism without economic growth and with a shrinking labor market. In the rental society, the key mechanisms of stratification and access to resources are again moving from the market to the nation-state, non-market types of public exchanges are strengthening, and social policy is striving for a model of basic unconditional income. The room for social construction is reduced to local utopias and virtues of various minorities, while populism becomes the dominant form of political discourse, which instead of decaying economic classes turns to the majority and is compatible with both the right and the left political value systems.

Social mobilization and tackling the performance of local government in rural Nepal

Abstract Based on extensive fieldwork in two rural villages, this paper qualitatively examines how social mobilization initiatives influence local government (LG) performance in Nepal. LG mobilized community people to empower them for their effective participation in local planning and decision-making processes. Comparing with the prior period of mobilization, evidence demonstrates that mobilization promises to boost LG performance through empowering communities to enhance their agency and entitlements, promoting democratic and effective citizen participation, and strengthening LG responsiveness and social accountability. But these connections are not straightforward, as there appeared discrepancies in parallel in recognizing equal participation rights of disadvantaged groups and equitable distribution of public resources among social groups. The findings imply that mobilization can be an effective strategy for tackling many challenges of participatory institutions, as it tends to create social pressures for making participatory institutions more democratic and changing the local power dynamics in favour of disadvantaged groups.

Outsourcing to Not-for-Profits: Can Judicial Enforcement of Charity Law Provide Accountability for the Performance of ‘Public’ Functions?

Governments increasingly rely on charities to provide services on behalf of government. Decisions on outsourced functions can relate to the distribution of public resources, such as the provision of housing, education or legal assistance. Accordingly, such decisions can be contentious and outsourcing potentially places that contention in the private sphere rather than the public sphere. This article examines the extent to which outsourcing service delivery to charities affects the ability of current or potential service recipients to hold decision-makers accountable. It argues that outsourcing government functions to charities will often place such functions beyond the scope of public law judicial review. However, charity law contains accountability mechanisms that have the potential to fill the gap. These mechanisms are identified and then compared with the availability of judicial review for government decisions by reference to scope, grounds, standing, time limits and remedies. This article finds that in many circumstances there should be no diminution of legal accountability. Nevertheless, charity law is less tested than administrative law, is not as effective in dealing with service decisions made by front line employees and does not as readily guarantee procedural fairness. Balanced against this, charity law may provide more generous time limits and better enable systemic issues to be addressed.

Politics in Poor Places? Clientelism and Elections in Democracies

We review a decade of literature on clientelism, a central topic in the study of developing democracies. We define clientelism as the discretionary distribution of public resources by politicians. We distinguish clientelism that occurs in the pre-electoral period (electoral clientelism) from that which occurs between elections (welfare clientelism). We provide new cross-national evidence questioning whether clientelism is actually effective in the sense of securing reelection for the politicians who engage in it. We offer ideas to understand why politicians continue to practice it nonetheless. Finally, we suggest that clientelism evolves with economic development, assuming new forms in highly developed democracies but not disappearing.

Why did Turkish democracy collapse? A political economy account of AKP’s authoritarianism

After decades of multiparty politics, Turkey is no longer a democracy. A theory-upending case, the country has descended into a competitive authoritarian regime under the Justice and Development Party ( Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—AKP), despite rising income and education levels and strong links with the West. What accounts for democratic breakdown in such an unlikely case? Instead of ideological and institutional factors, we offer a political economy account. We contend that the coalitional ties that the AKP forged with businesses and the urban poor through the distribution of public resources has altered the cost of toleration for the party leadership and their dependent clients, while reducing the cost of suppression for incumbents. This new political calculus led to increasing authoritarianism of the AKP government through securitization of dissent, mounting repression, and systematic violation of civil liberties.

Chasing votes with the public budget

This paper examines the distribution of public resources by an incumbent seeking re-election. I present a model to explain the behavior of an incumbent redistributing public goods and cash transfers. According to the model, politicians use the government budget as a portfolio for electoral investment and diversify expenditure in order to target different groups of voters at the same time. I construct a unique data set of the promises made by the president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010 to municipalities throughout the country's various regions. The empirical results show some evidence that promises of cash transfers targeted swing voters, promises of public goods simultaneously targeted both core and swing municipalities, while opposition municipalities received few promises of cash transfers and public goods, which is consistent with the prediction of the model.

YATIRIM TEŞVİKLERİNİN TRA2 BÖLGESİNDEKİ İŞLETME FAALİYETLERİNE EKTİSİ

State incentives have a great importance in state policies that implemented for progress and development of countries and for the fair distribution of public resources. However, in order to ensure more efficient and effective use of incentives, the needs of enterprises, sectors and regions that benefit from incentives should be determined accurately and their satisfaction levels should be evaluated. In this study, importance level of regional problems for sectors in TRA2 region which consists the provinces in the Eastern Anatolia Region (Agri, Kars, Igdir and Ardahan) have been examined. The regional problems affecting sectors are; the distance of the region to raw materials, problems arising from infrastructure, distance to the market, transportation problems, lack of qualified personnel in the region and lack of market gap in the sectors. It has been tried to determine whether the incentives affect the negative conditions in the region in terms of increasing the production and employment in the region and in making future investment decisions. In the study, it have been examined the establishment purposes, establishment locations and the problems of regional enterprises that are benefitting from incentives.

БЮДЖЕТНЕ ФІНАНСУВАННЯ ВИДАТКІВ НА ОХОРОНУ ЗДОРОВ’Я: СУЧАСНИЙ СТАН ТА ТЕНДЕНЦІЇ РОЗВИТКУ

У статті здійснено аналіз практики бюджетного фінансування видатків на охорону здоров’я за період 2014–2018 рр. Встановлено, що в останні роки в Україні отримали розвиток альтернативні форми залучення коштів до фінансування охорони здоров’я, зокрема добровільні лікарняні каси. Апробація нових моделей бюджетного фінансування медичних установ проводиться в ряді пілотних регіонів. Однак механізм бюджетного фінансування системи охорони здоров’я не зазнав суттєвих змін порівняно з радянським періодом. Обґрунтовано, що упродовж 2014–2018 років видатки зведеного бюджету України на охорону здоров’я збільшилися на 66,3 %, що має більше номінальний характер і пояснюється значними темпами інфляції, а не реальним зростанням видатків, оскільки у відсотковому відношенні до ВВП та загальних видатків зведеного бюджету видатки на охорону здоров’я не демонстрували зростаючої тенденції.

CONTESTED SPACE IN COASTAL CITY. A Case of Conservation, Community and Tourism Development in Manado – Indonesia

The growth of coastal cities has experienced a shift and brings changes in the space value in coastal areas of production to the consumption. Capitalist mode of production spread evenly in areas previously held by various traditional modes of economic and social exchange. The role of the tourism and development market strongly determined the changes that often lead to contradictions and conflicts of spatial function. This paper explores the reasons of spatial competition and possibility to make more just spaces on the coast by seeking spatial balance between traditional and modern one, capital space and indigenous as well. Using a multilayered approach in the case study research, this paper revealed the phenomenon of contested space, particularly on the power relation framework on the specific sites using by different groups of interests: Littoral fishermen, recreation and tourism, and private company. Paper attracts attention to the capitalist policies that is the main reason of spatial tension that produced domination and resistance on the modern coastal space. Architects and urban planners should routinely assess the spatial equity of public resources such as coastal resources because understanding the vagaries of public resource distribution can help to facilitate provision of the public good and ultimately social justice.

Historia y memoria nacional en el discurso jurídico − el juicio de ADPF 186

El presente artículo busca discutir sintéticamente los argumentos del debate sobre el sistema de cuotas para negros en la enseñanza universitaria, objeto de un intenso debate en la última década y de la decisión de la Suprema Corte Brasileña en la Acción de In-cumplimiento de Precepto Fundamental n. 186. Examina de qué modo la referida decisión judicial, al declarar la constitucionalidad del Plano de Metas de Inclusión Étnico-Racial, instituido por la Universidad de Brasilia, recurrió a argumentos sobre la historia brasileña y la identidad nacional. Examina cómo la igualdad y la diferencia fueron articuladas a la narrativa sobre el pasado de las instituciones jurídicas y sociales, y de qué modo la decisión pretendió revisar las presuposiciones de una identidad nacional homogeneizada cuyo paradigma fue construido, sobre todo, en la década de 1930. La decisión puede ser identificada como un nuevo momento de la retórica identitaria por aceptar la existencia de espacios de conflicto en la comunidad nacional que se expresan no sólo en demandas por una distribución equitativa de los recursos públicos destinados a la educación, sino también por la construcción de la memoria colectiva. La decisión propone el debate sobre el modo en que las instituciones jurídicas redimensionan las identidades nacionales, teniendo en vista las demandas por la tutela de los derechos fundamentales.

A choice-based model to reduce primary care load on tertiary hospitals

ABSTRACT In developing countries like India, patients bypass primary health centers (PHCs) and visit larger hospitals for minor ailments and thereby overburden the facilities responsible for specialized consultative health care. This is an undesirable phenomenon and governments are spending more on primary care and setting up more community and primary health centers. In this article, we propose an integer linear programming model for locating PHCs with the explicit objective of reducing unwanted load on tertiary care hospitals. The model offers holistic utilization of existing and new facilities. Moreover, the question of equity in allotment of more desirable facilities which can be built only in limited numbers, is discussed for the first time. This article contributes in the following ways. It describes a decision problem which has social relevance. The dual issues of excessive uneven distribution of health service workload and equity in distribution of public resources in the context of primary care are discussed. Using the novel optimization model developed in the article, major policy directions can be derived. The implementation of this model should ensure better utilization of public money and greater service to the target population. This is also demonstrated through a small real-life case study. A heuristic algorithm has also been proposed for solving the optimization model.