scholarly journals The Vexed Question of Market Stewardship in the Public Sector: Examining Equity and the Social Contract through the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 387-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gemma Carey ◽  
Helen Dickinson ◽  
Eleanor Malbon ◽  
Daniel Reeders
Keyword(s):  
Public Sector ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Disability Insurance ◽  
Insurance Scheme ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Vexed Question

Public Sector Employment as a Social Welfare Policy: The “Social Contract” and Failed Job Creation for Youth in Egypt

2021 ◽  
pp. 234779892110507
Author(s):  
Yusuke Kawamura
Keyword(s):  
Public Sector ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Welfare Policy ◽  
Accurate Information ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
Public Sector Reforms ◽  
The Social

Although the IMF and the World Bank have advocated public sector reforms for market-oriented economic development, Egyptian authoritarian leaders have avoided such reforms. Egypt maintains a large public sector with a significant number of young Egyptians among its ranks. However, the public sector has shortcomings such as overstaffed government departments, deteriorating working conditions, and employee protests. This study uses the “social contract” concept to understand why Egypt’s political leaders have preserved this inefficient institution. The logic of the “social contract” works under two conditions: generous welfare as the main source of the regime’s legitimacy and a lack of accurate information concerning the extent to which people can tolerate painful reforms under authoritarian rule. Contrary to the conventional understanding, a lack of democratic institutions imposes “shackles” upon authoritarian leaders rather than giving them wide discretion regarding policymaking and the manipulation of institutions for their survival. The findings thus offer important insights into the dynamics of authoritarianism.

Social insurance for individualised disability support: implementing the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS)

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiane Purcal ◽  
Karen R. Fisher ◽  
Ariella Meltzer
Keyword(s):  
Social Service ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Disability Insurance ◽  
Insurance Scheme ◽  
Action Research Project ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Public ◽  
Service Support ◽  
Disability Support ◽  
Insurance Model

Australia is implementing an ambitious new approach to individualised disability support based on a social insurance model. In a world first, the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is funded through a levy on income and general taxation and gives Australians with disability an entitlement to social service support. This chapter describes the NDIS approach and implementation so far and summarises concerns and challenges about the NDIS discussed in the literature. It uses data from an action research project to inform feasibility questions about how people find out about and receive the individualised support they need. The chapter highlights a basic gap in people’s familiarity with what individualised support is, how it works and how they might benefit from the new approach. A policy implication is that, with the expansion of individualised support, the public is likely to need various opportunities and forms of information sharing, to explore and learn from each other about what the new approach is and what its possibilities are.

Another Voluntarism

Legitimacy ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 43-66
Author(s):  
Paul Weithman
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Social Contract Theory ◽  
The Public ◽  
Corporate Body ◽  
The Social ◽  
Real Work ◽  
Moral Claims ◽  
Philosophical Questions

John Rawls’s presentation of his famous principle of legitimacy raises a number of exegetical and philosophical questions which his texts leave unresolved. The key to their solution lies in a claim Rawls makes about the character of political power. Rawls uses language familiar from social contract theory to describe that power, saying that it is the power of the public as a corporate body. This chapter considers but ultimately rejects the suggestion that Rawls’s treatment of legitimacy is Lockean. Rather, Rawls follows Kant in thinking that talk of a contractual incorporation is best understood as a way of expressing fundamental moral claims about the object of a constitution, about citizens’ standing, and about legislators’ duties. These are the claims that do the real work in Rawls’s account of legitimacy. To show this, the chapter lays out Kant’s conception of the social contract and argues that we can draw on that conception to understand Rawls’s account of political legitimacy. It then spells out the philosophical pay-offs of the reading offered here by showing how it solves some textual puzzles and how Rawls’s account differs from others that have recently been defended in political philosophy. The chapter concludes by mentioning some lingering questions about Rawlsian legitimacy.

From the Politics of Bureaucracy to the politics of representative bureaucracy

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 494-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eckhard Schröter
Keyword(s):  
Public Sector ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Representative Bureaucracy ◽  
Organisational Performance ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Potential Benefits ◽  
Treat All

The Politics of Bureaucracy provides an important impetus for the research of representative bureaucracy and at the same time serves as an analytical frame for a research agenda on representativeness in the public sector. The major impetus comes from one of the book’s core messages that public administration is tightly interwoven with politics and society. As a reform paradigm, representative bureaucracy aims for a public sector workforce that mirrors the social composition of the society it is supposed to serve. If successful, this measure is expected to improve organisational performance, relations with social groups and also overall political legitimacy. However, representativeness is no panacea to treat all problems of diverse societies and non-responsive bureaucracies. Rather, potential benefits have to be discounted against likely pitfalls and extra costs incurred through the pursuit of representativeness. What is more, the inherent tensions with competing reform paradigms have to be taken into account.

scholarly journals New terms for collective action in the public sector in Denmark: Lessons learned from the teacher lock-out in 2013

2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (5) ◽  
pp. 593-610 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laust Høgedahl ◽  
Flemming Ibsen
Keyword(s):  
Public Sector ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Finding ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Labour Disputes

This article investigates the use of collective action in the public sector by analysing the Danish teacher lock-out in 2013. The social partners in the public sector in Denmark (and the other Nordic countries) engage in negotiations and reach agreements regarding wages and working conditions in accordance with an institutional set-up developed in the private sector. This also applies to the use of the so-called weapons of conflict – strikes/blockades and lock-outs/boycotts – in connection with labour disputes if the parties are unable to reach agreement through negotiations or mediation. But there is a big difference in the premises and conditions upon which collective industrial conflict as an institutionalised form of collective action proceeds when comparing the public and private sectors in Denmark. The article shows how the use of collective industrial conflicts in the public sector has a number of built-in systemic institutional flaws, as the public employers are the budgetary authority and legislators at the same time. This is not a new finding; however, these multiple roles become problematic when public employers use the lock-out weapon offensively in combination with state intervention to end the dispute, which was the case during the teacher lock-out in 2013 in Denmark. The article concludes with the presentation of a number of proposed institutional adjustments for bringing the public bargaining model into balance.

scholarly journals Od demokracji bezpośredniej do rządów zgromadzenia? Rousseau i problemy republikańskiego konstytucjonalizmu

2018 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-210
Author(s):  
Rafał Lis
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Direct Democracy ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Public Authorities ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Emergency Measure ◽  
The Government ◽  
Direct Government ◽  
The Relationship

The following article considers the problems connected with the relationship between the principles of the direct democracy and the gouvernement d’assemblée. The values contemporarily ascribed to these principles are often counted among different, sometimes even opposing, traditions of republican constitutionalism. However, the proposed analysis of Rousseau’s thought suggests that the general intellectual tendencies that are attributedto both systems might originally have had a lot in common. Furthermore, they embody the two different republican ways of implementing the very ideas of popular sovereignty and the accountability of the public authorities to the citizens. The undertaken juxtaposition of the contents of the Social Contract and of the Considerations on the Government of Poland may even point to an evolution of Rousseau’s stance. It can be discerned especiallyin the approval in the second work, which pertained to one of the largest European states of that time, as it conveys the need to shift the responsibility for law-making to the assembly of deputies (the Sejm). The proposition of transferring this responsibility to a quasi-representative body corresponds perfectly with the warnings against the abuses of an unchecked executive, which are equally stringent in the Social Contract. This actuallydenoted that Rousseau was ready to accept some sort of gouvernement d’assemblée in large states. In the end however, it did not mark a departure from the ideals of the direct government, especially after taking into consideration Rousseau’s extraordinary appreciation of the institutions of deputy directives and – treated already as an emergency measure – confederation.

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