Choice and Voice – A Review

2008 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Greener

‘Choice’ and ‘voice’ are two of the most significant means through which the public are able to participate in public services. Choice agendas position public service users as consumers, driving improvements by choosing good providers over bad, which then thrive through greater allocations of funds as money follows their selections (Le Grand, 2007). Choice-driven reforms tend to be about trying to make public services more locally responsive (Ferlie, Freeman, McDonnell, Petsoulas and Rundle-Smith, 2006). Voice-driven reforms, on the other hand, tend to position public service users as citizens, suggesting an emphasis on accountability mechanisms to drive service improvements through elections, with the possible removal of low regarded officials, or a greater involvement of local people in the running of services (Jenkins, 2006). Voice implies that citizens hold the right to participate in public services either through the political process, or through their direct involvement in the running or delivery of the services themselves. Of course, it is also possible to combine choice and voice mechanisms to try and achieve greater service responsiveness and accountability. In this review, choice reforms will be treated as those which are based upon consumer literature, and voice reforms those based upon attempting to achieve greater citizenship.Citizenship and consumption are two areas with significant literatures in their own right, but whereas the citizenship literature is widely cited in the social policy literature, the consumption literature appears rather more selectively. This review examines each area in turn in terms of its application to social policy, and then presents a synthesis of commonalties in the two literatures, which represent particularly promising avenues for exploring the relationship between public services and their users.

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Tawanda Zinyama ◽  
Joseph Tinarwo

Public administration is carried out through the public service. Public administration is an instrument of the State which is expected to implement the policy decisions made from the political and legislative processes. The rationale of this article is to assess the working relationships between ministers and permanent secretaries in the Government of National Unity in Zimbabwe. The success of the Minister depends to a large degree on the ability and goodwill of a permanent secretary who often has a very different personal or professional background and whom the minster did not appoint. Here lies the vitality of the permanent secretary institution. If a Minister decides to ignore the advice of the permanent secretary, he/she may risk of making serious errors. The permanent secretary is the key link between the democratic process and the public service. This article observed that the mere fact that the permanent secretary carries out the political, economic and social interests and functions of the state from which he/she derives his/her authority and power; and to which he/she is accountable,  no permanent secretary is apolitical and neutral to the ideological predisposition of the elected Ministers. The interaction between the two is a political process. Contemporary administrator requires complex team-work and the synthesis of diverse contributions and view-points.


Author(s):  
Harius Eko saputra

Almost every day, in various mass media, especially in newspapers, it is found that there are so many complaints and unsatisfactory opinions from the community, as the customer, towards the current implementation of public service. These complaints and unsatisfactory opinions can describe how bad the quality of the current public service is, which is benefited by the community. It may be the right time for the community to be treated as citizens, who will have rights and give priority to their rights for being served afterwards. They are not anymore being considered as clients who previously have no any choice in choosing and in determining what kind of service that they really want to. There are so many results from research, seminar and writings that are conducted by experts in which their works talk about the implementation of a good and qualified public service. Currently, however, the qualified public service has not yet implemented as should have been. The implementation of public service still acts as however it please to be and only emphasize on its own interest without considering the consumer’s importance as the party that should really be served as well as possible. For this reason, a research, which is done in Service Integrated Unit of the Jember Regency, tries to find out any factors affecting quality of the public services. The main core of the public service implementation is the quality of norm of the service executor. The matter that should be realized is that the executor is the person who should serve for the community, and the community is the one who should be served as well as possible.Keywords: Implementation of public service, legislatif


Author(s):  
Guillaume Heuguet

This exploratory text starts from a doctoral-unemployed experience and was triggered by the discussions within a collective of doctoral students on this particularly ambiguous status since it is situated between student, unemployed, worker, self-entrepreneur, citizen-subject of social rights or user-commuter in offices and forms. These discussions motivated the reading and commentary of a heterogeneous set of texts on unemployment, precariousness and the functioning of the institutions of the social state. This article thus focuses on the relationship between knowledge and unemployment, as embodied in the public space, in the relationship with Pôle Emploi, and in the academic literature. It articulates a threefold problematic : what is known and said publicly about unemployment? What can we learn from the very experience of the relationship with an institution like Pôle Emploi? How can these observations contribute to an understanding of social science inquiry and the political role of knowledge fromm precariousness?


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 237802311668979 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph DiGrazia

Scholars have recently become increasingly interested in understanding the prevalence and persistence of conspiratorial beliefs among the public as recent research has shown such beliefs to be both widespread and to have deleterious effects on the political process. This article seeks to develop a sociological understanding of the structural conditions that are associated with conspiratorial belief. Using aggregate Google search data to measure public interest in two popular political conspiracy theories, the findings indicate that social conditions associated with threat and insecurity, including unemployment, changes in partisan control of government, and demographic changes, are associated with increased conspiratorial ideation.


Author(s):  
Thomas Olesen

The chapter’s premise is the social contract between media and democracy, which features strongly in the professional values of Danish journalists. Media have become so central to the political process that many refer to a mediatization of politics. At the same time, research points to a crisis of journalism with declining readership, trust, and professional authority. These challenges have been set in motion at least partly by new media consumption and production patterns. The crisis of journalism prompts two questions: is it reversing the process of mediatization, and does it erode journalism’s role as democratic watchdogs in Denmark? The chapter shows that the crisis of journalism must be considered in a comparative perspective and that the Danish media system demonstrates a degree of resilience to it. It also notes, however, that traditional media have indeed lost their privileged position as organizers of the public sphere. Rather than seeing a reversal of mediatization, it makes more sense to speak of a mediatization 2.0, and rather than identifying an erosion of the media’s watchdog role, it is more accurate to say that they now share it with a host of other agents in the current hybridized media system.


Author(s):  
Peter C. Caldwell

The social rule of law, or social Rechtsstaat, was a second key term used in the first decade of the Federal Republic of Germany to justify extensive state interventions into society, so long as they preserved individual freedoms. Individual freedoms—such as the right to free speech, the right to enter and exit contracts, and the right to own property—required some kind of social supplement to ensure real freedom, or so the term suggested. By cementing this principle in the Basic Law, the founders opened up a debate about the justification, nature, and extent of the welfare state. Some, like Ernst Forsthoff, rejected the entire discussion as non-sensical; others, like Wolfgang Abendroth, viewed the constitutional concept as a spur to social reform. While this debate took place among lawyers, its real significance lay in the way it articulated the relationship between social policy and democracy.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0094582X2110293
Author(s):  
Tatiana Berringer

An analysis of the relationship between classes and class fractions and Mercosur under the PT (Workers’ Party) governments suggests that the transition from the open regionalism of the 1990s to the multidimensional regionalism of the 2000s and the crisis of the latter were linked to the overlap between the regional integration mechanisms Unasur and Mercosur and the social base of the neodevelopmentalist front. Multidimensional regionalism went into crisis after 2012, when the country began to suffer the impact of the 2008 financial crisis and changes in international politics and when the political process that culminated in the 2016 coup began. Uma análise da relação entre as classes e frações de classe e o Mercosul dos governos PT sugere que a transição do regionalismo aberto dos anos 1990 para o regionalismo multidimensional dos anos 2000 e a crise deste últimoestão ligados à imbricação entre os processos de integração regional, Unasur e Mercosur, e a base social da frente neodesenvolvimentista. O regionalismo multidimensional entrou em crise a partir de 2012 quando o país começou a sofrer mais o impacto da crise financeira de 2008 e das transformações na política internacional e iniciou-se o processo político que culminou no golpe de 2016.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 149
Author(s):  
FITRIA YULIANI ◽  
Rekho Adriadi ◽  
Linda Safitra

Along with  level of social media fame that higer than before, we cannot deny that now there is an expansion of social media "functions", where the social media is not only used as a medium of self-existence, but also the existence of groups, institutions and state institutions. Used not only for individual interests, but also for economic, social, political, and cultural interests. One of the social media functions “now” is the function of public services, where the social media is used as a medium of public service by institutions and state institutions like Ombudsman RI Bengkulu. Digital-based services through the internet network are carried out by Ombudsman RI Bengkulu as a way to reach the community. Such as through Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Instagram. Digital-based services via the internet by the Ombudsman RI Bengkulu can be said a manifestation of the Ombudsman service innovation to the public. Therefore it is interesting to see about how far the social media is used by the Indonesian Ombudsman Bengkulu for public service purposes. This study is a qualitative study that seeks to analyze and describe the use of Instagram in public services by the Ombudsman RI Bengkulu. The results showed that social media, by the Ombudsman RI Bengkulu, was used as a medium for socializing and raising complaints in the process of public service. Besides being used as a media for public services, there are positive and negative impacts arising from the use of social media in the public service process by the Ombudsman RI Bengkulu. However, the use of social media is considered effective and is considered to be able to facilitate the process of public service, besides that it is also a manifestation of the diffusion of innovation in the public service process by the Indonesian Ombudsman Bengkulu. Keywords: Utilization, Social Media, public services, RI Ombudsman Bengkulu, Innovation  


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (S4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Phuong Huu Tung ◽  
Le Thi Khanh Ly

The quality of public services is concerned and improved to meet the satisfaction of the people, which has made governments more aware of the need to provide public services according to the needs and preferences of the public. Most of the previous studies used qualitative methods to assess people's satisfaction with public services. The authors use a quantitative research method to explore the quality of public services in Vietnam using the Servqual model and explore the relationship between personality traits and satisfaction with public services. The study was conducted in OSS rooms in Hanoi city, Vietnam in June 2021, using the intentional sampling method. Collect data through survey of 500 votes, of which 350 valid votes of citizens. The results of analysis by SEM model show that all 5 elements of personality traits: Openness, Dedication, Neuroticism; psychic; Greablenes has a positive and significant influence on the remaining 5 factors through 2 coefficients, Regression Weights and P-value, both have reliable values. The conclusion of this study provides valuable data for Government policymakers.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (251) ◽  
pp. 37-54
Author(s):  
Mireia Vargas-Urpi

Abstract Catalonia is well known for being a bilingual region with language policies that give full support to promoting Catalan. More recently, the number of languages spoken in Catalonia has risen significantly due to immigration flows, while immigration policies encourage all citizens living in Catalonia to be able to communicate in Catalan with the public Administration. The same immigration policies, however, also acknowledge that interpreting (or intercultural mediation) may be necessary to facilitate immigrants’ rights to access public services during the first few years they are living in Catalonia. This article analyses the relationship between a minoritized language (Catalan), a dominant language (Spanish) and a group of recently arrived languages (Standard Chinese and other Chinese varieties) from the perspective of public service interpreting. It discusses some of the results of an empirical qualitative research which included: (a) interviews with public service interpreters and intercultural mediators working with Chinese living in Catalonia, (b) interviews with managers and coordinators in charge of interpreting or mediation services, and (c) questionnaires answered by Chinese users of public services in Catalonia. This research depicts a complex reality: it not only reflects interpreters’ and managers’ biases towards Spanish or Catalan, often motivated by their place of origin or life experience, but also the challenges when dealing with linguistic variation, i.e. the variety of languages (geolects and mutually unintelligible dialects) included under the umbrella term of Chinese.


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