Outcomes For Citizens Research Articles

Bureaucratic Representation, Distributional Equity, and Democratic Values in the Administration of Public Programs

Work on bureaucratic representation suggests that minority citizens benefit when the programs that serve them are administered by bureaucrats with similar characteristics. This literature has not sufficiently dealt with the long-standing concern that minority benefits may come at the expense of citizens from other groups, which some critics argue makes representative bureaucracy irreconcilable with democratic values. This article suggests distributional equity as a potential moderator of bureaucratic representation and as a potential source of reconciliation. It tests for the effects of representation under different distributional conditions in a policy area in which outcomes approach a zero-sum game. Analyses of a nationally representative sample of public organizations find a relationship between bureaucratic representation and citizen outcomes only in those instances where program benefits are being inequitably distributed to the relevant group. The article concludes with a discussion of the significa...

Capitalism and its Regulation: A Dialogue on Business and Ethics

This dialogue engages with the ethics of politics of capitalism, and enacts a debate between two participants who have divergent views on these matters. Beginning with a discussion concerning definitions of capitalism, it moves on to cover issues concerning our different understandings of the costs and benefits of global capitalist systems. This then leads into a debate about the nature and purposes of regulation, in terms of whether regulation is intended to make competition work better for consumers, or to prevent negative outcomes for citizens. The conclusion speculates about the usefulness or otherwise of this Socratic method of dialogue.

The Politics of the Welfare State: Canada, Sweden, and the United States

The Politics of the Welfare State: Canada, Sweden, and the United States, Gregg M. Olsen, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. vi, 258This book presents a familiar puzzle in comparative politics: how are we to understand variation in the design and scope of social programs and substantive outcomes for citizens in the three welfare states under scrutiny. As Olsen argues, all three cases are “advanced, industrialized, and highly affluent capitalist nations…. and all three nations enjoy average per capita incomes and standards of living that are among the highest in the world” (10). Yet we find great variation on a number of social indicators such as poverty levels, and income and wealth disparities. All three have also “experienced marked increases in inequality and welfare state retrenchment in recent years” (11) but yet “they continue to differ along these dimensions, even in the face of similar domestic strains and other exogenous pressures related to global integration” (11). The question is how do we account for the variation in the use of social policy to assuage inequalities and respond to these exogenous pressures.