TOWARDS A PARADIGM OF DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION: CITIZEN PARTICIPATION AND CO-PRODUCTION OF PERSONAL SOCIAL SERVICES IN SWEDEN

ABSTRACT:  Many countries in Europe are now searching for new ways to engage citizens and involve the third sector in the provision and governance of social services in order to meet major demographical, political and economic challenges facing the welfare state in the 21st Century. Co-production provides a model for the mix of both public service agents and citizens who contribute to the provision of a public service. Citizen participation involves several different dimensions: economic, social, political and service specific. The extent of citizen participation varies between different providers of welfare services, as too does user and staff influence. Empirical materials from a recent study of childcare in Sweden will be used to illustrate these points. However, the role of citizens and the third sector also varies between countries and social sectors. Third sector providers facilitate citizen participation, while a glass ceiling for participation exists in municipal and for-profit providers. Moreover, co-production takes place in a political context, and can be crowded-in or crowded-out by public policy. These findings can contribute to the development of a new paradigm of participative democracy.     

An empirical investigation of citizens' preferences among four energy scenarios

Within the context of the Jülich Compatibility Study on Energy Supply Systems the model of the planning cell was used to incorporate participation into the process of policy formulation and evaluation and to gain information about intuitive preferences concerning the four basic energy scenarios constructed by the Enquete Commission of the German Federal Parliament. Planning Cells consist of groups of citizens who are selected by random process and are given paid leave from their workday obligations for a limited period of time to work out solutions for social problems. A total of 24 planning cells were organized throughout Germany to evaluate the four energy scenarios and to formulate recommendations for the policy maker. As a result most citizens favored the more moderate scenarios [1, 5], but were almost equally divided in their preference distribution with respect to the pronuclear (option 2) and non-nuclear scenario (option 3). Using a simplified MAU-model to determine the preferences of each citizen, the surprising result was achieved that more than 40% of the participants reached the highest positive score for the most antinuclear, soft energy scenario. This result could be partly explained by cognitive factors and by preference group influence.     

On the voluntary provision of “weakest‐link” public goods: The case of private information

We characterize equilibria in a private‐provision public‐good game where individuals are allowed arbitrary contribution levels and the level of the public good equals the least contribution made by an individual. Equilibrium comparative statics are derived for the interim Pareto‐dominant equilibrium. First, improvements in the cost distribution of even only one player benefit all. Second, even with such “weakest‐link” public goods, for which greater similarity of preferences would seem to facilitate coordination, decreased heterogeneity can actually decrease payoffs. Indeed, increasing the riskiness of cost distributions has an ambiguous effect on welfare. Two mechanisms are provided for improving equilibrium payoffs: Technology transfer and cheap‐talk communication. While substantial welfare gains are possible, examples show that (a) technology transfer may be futile if a “regularity” condition is not satisfied and (b) cheap talk may be useless if the language for communication is not sufficiently rich.     

Citizen Preference and Public Education in Australia: An Analysis of Interstate Differences*

In the centrally financed public education system of Australia, interstate differences in per student educational spending have been interpreted as measures of efficiency. An alternative explanation is that the variation reflects differences in citizen preference. An analysis of a survey of citizen opinion demonstrates that, while the relative efficiency explanation cannot be ruled out, it is likely that the variance in per student expenditures is a reflection of the preferences of the citizens of each State. It appears that States come close to satisfying the demands of their median voter.     

THE RE-MONETARIZATION OF WELFARE BENEFITS: Entitlements, liabilities and transaction costs in the relationship between citizens and public agencies: the US EBT system and the outlook for European citizen cards

ABSTRACT*: The revolution in transaction costs brought about by new technology can make it economically efficient to restore purchasing power to citizens in the case of in-kind benefits. Analysis of the economic and institutional evolution of the US electronic benefit transfer (EBT) experience shows that a system of welfare payments can evolve either towards monopolistic (or semi-monopolistic) solutions promoted by government or towards competitive, open-market solutions. The EBT system has addressed the diseconomies created by the high proportion of unbanked citizens among welfare recipients by creating electronic pseudoaccounts for the unbanked piggybacked on the commercial payments infrastructure. The EBT card is the first obligatory payment card to be issued by a government, albeit through the intermediary of a government-designated issuer (GDI). Moving to chip cards, the problems posed by setting up a large-scale network of terminals and the fact that 'universal' welfare cards are born as 'natural' government monopolies may lead banks, governments and central banks to consider the great economies of scale and of critical mass for migration that can be offered by combining various functions in a single, universally distributed 'citizen card'. Starting with health care, European citizen cards could gradually take over functions such as the transfer of benefits to specific groups of citizens, payment for other public services, payment of national and local taxes, and payment for utilities. This would make explicit the level of subsidization now implicit in the provision of benefits in kind. The clear indication of deductions, reimbursements and subsidies in the context of payment would mark a considerable advance in the transparency of the welfare market.     

Multi-attribute preference modelling and regional land-use planning

Forest management policy decisions are complex due to the multiple-use nature of goods and services from forests, difficulty in monetary valuation of ecological services and the involvement of a large number of stakeholders. Multi-attribute decision techniques can be used to synthesise stakeholder preferences related to regional forest planning because it can accommodate conflicting, multidimensional, incommensurable and incomparable objectives. The objective of this paper is to examine how the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) can be used to incorporate stakeholder preferences in determining optimal forest land-use choices. The Australian Regional Forest Agreement Programme is taken as an illustrative case for the analysis. The results show that the AHP can formalise public participation in decision making and increase the transparency and the credibility of the process.     

IS MARKET‐ORIENTED REFORM PRODUCING A ‘TWO‐TRACK’ EUROPE? EVIDENCE FROM ELECTRICITY AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS

ABSTRACT: The European Commission has formally recognized that adequate provision of basic household services, including energy, communications, water and transport, is key to ensuring equity, social cohesion and solidarity. Yet little research has been done on the impact of the reform of these services in this regard. This article offers an innovative way to explore such questions by analyzing and contrasting stated and revealed preferences on citizen satisfaction with and expenditure on two services, telecommunications and electricity, in two large countries, Spain and the UK. We find evidence that in telecommunications, but not in electricity, reform has led to a ‘two‐track’ Europe, where citizens who are elderly, not working or the less‐educated behave differently in the market, with the result that they are less satisfied with these services than their younger, working, better‐educated, counterparts.     

Allowing for Household Preferences in Emission Trading – A Contribution to the Climate Policy Debate

In the context of emission trading it seems to be taken as given that people's preferences can be ignored with respect to the whole process of fixing emission targets and allocating emission permits to polluters. With this paper we want to reopen the debate on how citizens can be involved in this process. We try to show how citizen preferences can be included in the process of pollution control through emission trading. We propose an emission trading system where all emission permits are initially allocated to households who are then allowed to sell them in the permit market or to withhold (at least some of) them in order to reduce total pollution. This proposal tries to overcome the fundamental disadvantage of traditional permit systems which neglect consumer preferences by solely distributing emission permits to producers / polluters. In our system the property right to nature is re-allocated to the households who obtain the opportunity of reducing actual emissions according to their personal preferences by withholding a part or all of the emission permits allotted to them. Such a change in environmental policy would mark a return to the traditional principles of consumer sovereignty by involving households (at least partially) in the social abatement decision process instead of excluding them. Another advantage of admitting households to the TEP market as sellers or buyers of permits is that this increases the number of agents in the permit market and thus significantly reduces the possibilities of strategic market manipulations.     

Why do (some) ordinary Americans support tax cuts for the rich? Evidence from a randomised survey experiment

Why do (some) ordinary citizens support tax cuts for the rich? We test four prominent explanations – unenlightened self-interest, fairness considerations, prospect of upward mobility, and trickle-down beliefs – using a randomised, online information provision experiment, embedded in a representative survey of around 3000 US Americans. The results show that preferences for taxing the rich are fundamentally affected by information that shifts citizens’ core fairness beliefs, as well as information on the past trajectory of top tax rates. In contrast, we find no evidence in support of the unenlightened self-interest or prospect of upward mobility explanations. Overall, our results align with theories of tax policy preferences that emphasise the importance of fairness perceptions and reference points.     

Public manpower planning for senior citizens

During recent decades, major employment alterations have been occuring. This has been particularly important for senior citizens. The senior citizen in our society has been faced with decreasing employment opportunities coupled with rising living costs. Additionally, the senior citizen population has been increasing due to better medical care. To deal with these problems, governmental units have begun to examine the desires and needs of these senior citizens in both rural and urban areas. Quantitative manpower techniques have been developed and are now being utilized to examine the plight of these people. This paper examines the employment changes and problems facing senior citizens and a public sector forecasting and planning technique which can be used to alleviate these problems.     

(Un)fair Delegation: Exploring the Strategic Use of Equity Rules in International Climate Negotiations

We provide a new approach for identifying a strategic use of equity arguments in international (climate) negotiations. We first develop a theoretical model of strategic delegation which accounts for both environmental as well as equity preferences. We show that the strategic use of equity arguments qualitatively depends on the extent to which environmental preferences can be misrepresented: representatives from different countries may be expected to have similar equity views rather than widely differing perceptions of a fair share. Based on survey data on climate negotiations, we then provide empirical evidence for differences between equity preferences of citizens from Germany, China, and the U.S. and the perceived view on the position of their respective countries.     

Ecological Intuition versus Economic “Reason”

This paper discusses the discount rate to be used in projects aimed at preserving the environment. The model has two different goods: one is the usual consumption good whose production may increase exponentially, and the other is an environmental good whose quality remains limited. The stylized world we describe is fully determined by four parameters, reflecting basic preferences, “ecological” and intergenerational concerns, and feasibility constraints. We define an ecological discount rate and examine its connections with the usual interest rate and the optimized growth rate. We discuss, in this simple world, different forms of the precautionary principle.     

The political agenda effect and state centralization

We provide a potential explanation, based on the “political agenda effect”, for the absence of, and unwillingness to create, centralized power in the hands of a national state. State centralization induces citizens of different backgrounds, interests, regions or ethnicities to coordinate their demands in the direction of more general-interest public goods, and away from parochial transfers. This political agenda effect raises the effectiveness of citizen demands and induces them to increase their investments in conflict capacity. In the absence of state centralization, citizens do not necessarily band together because of another force, the escalation effect, which refers to the fact that elites from different regions will join forces in response to the citizens doing so. Such escalation might hurt the citizen groups that have already solved their collective action problem (though it will benefit others). Anticipating the interplay of the political agenda and escalation effects, under some parameter configurations, political elites strategically opt for a non-centralized state. We show how the model generates non-monotonic comparative statics in response to the increase in the value or effectiveness of public goods (so that centralized states and public good provision may be absent precisely when they are more beneficial for society). We also suggest how the formation of a social democratic party may sometimes induce state centralization (by removing the commitment value of a non-centralized state), and how elites may sometimes prefer partial state centralization.     

Religious Charities and Government Funding

The government has the responsibility of providing a social service to its citizens. It decides whether to award funds to a religious nonprofit, secular nonprofit, or to produce the service itself. Religious charities are willing to provide the service at lower costs if they can use the funds as an opportunity to proselytize their doctrine. This proselytizing alters the religious preferences of believers in society. In a situation of equal grants to religious charities, this has the consequence of reducing the number of extremists. Furthermore, conservative religious denominations may discriminate against non-religious individuals in the provision of the social service.     

基于熵权-AHP法的商品住宅价值评价研究

本文利用价值工程原理界定商品住宅价值,将熵权法和AHP法相结合来建立商品住宅价值评定模型,以避免仅利用AHP法进行价值评价时主观性太浓的弱点并弥补熵权法缺乏专家经验知识的不足,使评价模型在追求客观实际的同时结合各项目的独特性和专家的经验判断。最后,通过实例验证了该评价模型的科学性和实用性。     

Politically influenced counterterrorism policy and welfare efficiency

The paper examines how two targeted countries strategically deploy their counterterror forces when lobbying defense firms influence counterterror provision. For proactive measures, lobbying activities in a single targeted country lessen underprovision, raise overall counterterrorism, and reduce terrorism. Welfare decreases in the lobbied country but increases in the other targeted country owing to enhanced free riding. Lobbying influence on the targeted countries' welfare is tied to terrorists' targeting preferences and how the lobbied government weighs citizens’ welfare. Lobbying in both targeted countries may result in the first-best equilibrium. International policy coordination may lead to less efficient outcomes than the noncooperative equilibrium.     

Prioritising alternatives for sustainable end-of-life vehicle disassembly in China using AHP methodology

The projection on Chinese increasing end-of-life vehicle (ELV) volumes indicates that the volume in 2020 will be about threefold that in 2015. The issue of scrapping vehicle upsurge relative to capacity crunches and environmental impacts perplexes Chinese dismantlers and it is intractable and urgent to choose an appropriate dismantling mode. The purpose of this study is to prioritise four potential dismantling modes and provide decision-making reference for dismantlers with a view to such criteria as environmentally sustainable considering constraints involving economy, technique, ecology and flexibility over changing condition. The conducted evaluation by the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) methodology takes sensitive and problematic aspects into account through questionnaires. The whole evaluation process supported by expert preferences, provides a simple and intuitive knowledge to construct arguments for ELV decision-making process. Results show that disassembly line involves the highest global weight of 0.363 and is concluded to be the best compromised ecological alternative.     

Choice modeling at the “market stall”: Individual versus collective interest in environmental valuation

The market stall, or valuation workshop, has recently been proposed as a way of addressing some of the limitations of conventional stated preference analysis. In this paper, we attempt to combine a participatory technique similar to the “citizens' jury” with choice modelling, a stated preference technique increasingly being applied in environmental economics. Our focus is on how changes in the context of decision-making (between choices made in isolation and those made in a group setting, and between choices made on individual well being versus collective criteria) produce differences in estimated welfare measures. The empirical context used is that of water quality improvements under the Water Framework Directive, the most significant reform in water legislation in the European Union for many years. We find that the choice experiment format can be successfully implemented in a valuation workshop and that moving from individual to collective choice produces, in this instance, a rather interesting change in both values and preferences which depends on the respondent's interests.     

Design of reforms with time‐inconsistent voters

Widespread agreement that a political reform is necessary is no guarantee that it is actually undertaken in a timely manner. There is often a delay before action is taken and reform packages that would be most efficient to implement all at once are often done only gradually. We propose a theoretical model explaining this behavior and show that when voters have present‐biased, time‐inconsistent preferences, gradualism can arise in equilibrium and be welfare‐enhancing. This is because without the possibility for gradualism, time‐inconsistent voters would delay implementing the reform even more. Using a citizen candidate model, we allow the agenda setter, who decides which reform schedule to put to vote, to be endogenously determined. We show that voters who are aware of their own time inconsistency can use the election of the agenda setter as a commitment device and appoint an agent who is more patient than the median voter in order to avoid full procrastination and to achieve efficiency‐maximizing gradualism.     

Testing Social Preferences for an Economic “Bad”: An Artefactual Field Experiment*

We test for social preferences over a commodity in an artefactual field experiment using the random price voting mechanism. Subjects are university staff members, and the commodity is water “contaminated” by a sterilized cockroach. Our results suggest that social preferences exist with respect to commodities and “bads”, supporting a more general utility framework for social preferences. Our empirical test allows for the coexistence of three social‐preference models; our results support the models of Fehr and Schmidt (1999) and Charness and Rabin (2002), but not the model of Bolton and Ockenfels (2000). Also, we find that incorporating social preferences improves the efficiency of majority‐rules voting.