John Hudson

An interesting social policy making development in the USA: a judge has ordered a $5.6bn annual increase in school spending in New York and ordered an additional $9.6bn be provided to improve school facilities in the state after a pressure group claimed rights to a decent education were being undermined by a lack of funding.

A potentially useful illustration of the unintended impacts of institutions on policy outcomes perhaps?

The result of the North East Assembly referendum came as a disappointment to me - though hardly a surprise given the largely cynical mood I found on my visits back home to the region or on those sometimes uncannily accurate barometers of public opinion that are football message boards on the web.

(more…)

Says it all (from: Potlatch)

Some interesting thoughts on the possible impact of the Diebold voting machines on Chris Lightfoot’s site too.

Dust to dust

The Head of e-government, Ian Watmore, is interviewed today by BBCi:

“The getting 100% of services online target is something I inherited and the job is pretty much achieved. The real question is ‘where do we go from here?’”
The answer, he says, is moving on from the glut of information currently available to fewer and better targeted services.
“Let’s make them as good as we can and, most importantly, let’s move to the point where most people are using them rather than some people are using them.”

This follows on from an interview in the Guardian a couple of weeks back - his first since taking up the post:

Watmore said he is more interested in getting people to use e-services than in dogmatically ensuring that every single service goes online. “What we want to do next is to get a high take-up and high impact of services that really matter and which touch people’s lives.” But he said the 2005 target is still “business as usual” - and in any case, it is not in his power to change a directive from the prime minister.

And another in Computing magazine where he outlines the differences between his post (the ‘CIO of government’) and that of e-Envoy.

All this is laying the ground for a major new e-government strategy document due at the end of the month.

Have spent much of this week at the Australasian Political Studies Association (APSA) conference at the University of Adelaide.

There were too many interesting papers to list them all, but Jenny Lewis’
‘Impermeability, incorporation and transformation: ideation and health policy change‘, Geoffrey Anderson’s ‘Standard Bearers for the Markets: International credit rating agencies and the impact of economic globalisation on politics and public policy in the Australian states’ and Rod Rhodes’ (with Mark Bevir) ‘Interpretation and Its Others’ stood out in particular.

I’ll post a copy of our paper - ‘Comparing Welfare State Modernisation in Germany, Korea and the United Kingdom: The Institutional Shaping of Third Way Reform Trajectories’ - on the publications section of the site shortly…

Have just returned from the Social Policy Association annual conference at the University of Nottingham. Some papers are available online: those that stood out for me were two given by Michael Hill and Hugh Bochel on the policy process; a couple of interesting papers on e-local government by a team from Newcastle; and a series of comparative papers from a team headed by Peter Taylor-Gooby. The conference ended with a lively plenary on ‘Where Next for Social Policy?’ featuring Paul Spicker, Adrian Sinfield and Nick Ellison; this will be taken forward in the next issue of the SPA newsletter that I’ll blog about nearer the time.

There was also a formal launch of The Policy Press’ new Understanding Welfare book series, including the text penned by myself and Stuart Lowe: Understanding the Policy Process.

Schr

David Cameron has a piece in the Guardian predicting Blair will resign this year due to a combination of mounting pressures and the fact that the summer will mark his tenth anniversary as Labour leader. If it proves to be true and Schröder’s troubles deepen too our paper comparing the UK, German and Korean third ways will be in danger of being a piece of historical commentary by the time its finished!

Schröder’s woes continue with a resounding defeat in the Hamburg city elections - an area that was solid SPD territory until recently. This is where Blair has an easier time than his German counterpart: fewer tiers of government means fewer proxy-referrenda on his performance. (See earlier post on his recent troubles.)

However, Schröder has vowed to continue with his controversial welfare reforms (including increasing the stratification of the university system, the introduction of new health care charges and cuts/freezes in some benefit rates).