Suchergebnisse

This study addresses enforcement styles of regulatory inspectors, based on an examination of the municipal enforcement of agro‐environmental policies in Denmark. Our findings make three contributions to the regulatory literature. One contribution is to add empirical support for theorizing about inspectors' enforcement styles as consisting of multiple components, rather than a single continuum. We show that inspectors' enforcement styles comprise the degree of formalism and the degree of coercion that they exercise when carrying out inspections. A second contribution is in showing the relationship of different types of enforcement styles to the two underlying dimensions of the concept. A third contribution is an examination of the ways in which inspectors' enforcement styles relate to their enforcement actions. The consistency of our findings with those of other studies suggests that the dimensions and types of inspectors' enforcement styles that we observed in Denmark can be generalized to other settings.

This article examines if and why mechanisms exist at the individual citizen level that may contribute to public sector growth - and whether such mechanisms can be altered through provision of information about the costs of public services. We test and find empirical support for the theory of fiscal illusion according to which citizens underestimate the costs of public services and therefore demand more public spending than if they had heen fully informed. We also develop and find empirical support for a theory of asymmetrical illusions. This theory claims that producers and users of public services are more spending-minded than ordinary taxpayers - and that limited rationality contributes to this difference. However, the provision of information about the unit costs of public services can weaken these mechanisms of fiscal illusion and asymmetrical illusions. The test is based on tabular, logit, and experimental analysis of survey data from Odense, a Danish city with 175.000 inhabitants. (European Journal of Political Research / FUB)

Examines how municipal enforcement of regulations affects compliance, based on 1997 study of 258 municipalities that have farms with animal husbandry and are subject to agro-environmental regulation.

This article addresses the influence of politicians, managers, and the dispositions of street-level bureaucrats in shaping actions at the frontlines of policy implementation. We investigate these for the implementation of employment policy reforms in Denmark. Our findings show a large percentage of caseworkers emphasizing actions that are consistent with the national employment reform goal of getting clients into jobs quickly. The influence of politicians and managers in bringing this about is relatively limited in comparison to the influences of caseworkers' understanding of policy goals, their professional knowledge, and their policy predispositions. Our main contribution is an unpacking of the political and managerial influences on caseworkers' policy emphases. We find direct effects and, more notably, indirect effects that operate on the influence of caseworkers' perceptions of policy goals and their knowledge. These findings provide a more nuanced and positive assessment than much of the implementation literature of the way that higher level policies are translated into actions at the frontlines. Adapted from the source document.