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This paper examines and compares, according to the New Public Management approach, the U.S. watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, in its ability to oversee and call to account the executive branch of government, and its U.K. counterpart, the National Audit Office. Results of this examination indicate that the Government Accountability Office is more effective than its U.K. counterpart. Its greater effectiveness is attributable to the fact that it derives its powers and legitimacy from a written constitution; in contrast, in the United Kingdom there is no equivalent document defining the relationship between the state and the citizenry. As a consequence, the powers, duties, and self-perception of the National Audit Office are significantly weaker and more mutable than those of the Government Accountability Office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction of public problems has a lasting influence on implementation in a given policy subsystem. National and sociopolitical contexts influence issue definition differently across nations. However, the degree to which nation-specific issue definition takes place has been insufficiently explored. In recent years, the growing incidence of autism has led to a quest for causal factors. One hypothesis posits that the use of mercury in vaccines may be a culprit. This paper examines the definition of the mercury and autism issue in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Insights into the comparative elements of issue definition are suggested by the case. These insights are of particular importance to administrators, as agencies are deeply involved as objects and actors in the process of issue definition and are often responsible for implementing new and redefined policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What intellectual influence, if any, have British public administration scholars had on their American counterparts since World War II? In this article, the author briefly reviews the major areas of theory and research in the British study of publication administration, further identifying important contributions by British scholars in the areas of modernist-empiricism, the new public management, regulation, policy networks and governance, and interpretive theory. Although there is a discernible American influence on British public administration, there is little British impact on U.S. public administration; nowadays it is a one-way street. Increasingly, British scholars are involved in a growing community of European public administration scholars with whom they share active, two-way connections. Recent European developments suggest that American and European public administration academics are growing further apart. Due to the immense strength of modernist-empiricism throughout American universities, plus the interpretive turn to a European epistemology of “blurred genres,” these twin, traditionally self-referential, communities seem to be parting company with an attendant danger that future intellectual engagement may be a dead end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Significant changes in the political management of local authorities in the United Kingdom are now taking place as a result of legislation passed by the Labour government since 1997. The new political management models aim to modernize local governance by strengthening local leadership, streamlining decision making, and enhancing local accountability. These changes owe much to U.S. experience: They involve the introduction of a separation of powers between an executive and an assembly, and they allow local authorities to introduce directly elected mayors for the first time ever. Is U.K. local government beginning to adopt what might be described as U.S.-style approaches to local governance? The evidence suggests the new institutional designs for U.K. local authorities represent a radical shift toward U.S.-style local leadership and decision making. However, the U.K. central state remains heavily involved in the details of local decision making, to an extent that would be unthinkable in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the principal motivations for the reinvention of many central governments over the last two decades is the need to deal with chronic budget deficits. As budget surpluses reappeared at the end of the 1990s, the pressure to restructure seemed to ease in some countries. However, observers suggested the relief was only temporary, and aging populations would soon put more stress on government budgets, creating a need for further retrenchment. This article assesses the vulnerability of three central governments—the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States—to aging-related fiscal stress. Because of institutional differences, the U.S. government is likely to be hit hardest by this demographic change. This may imply that public-sector reform will take a different path in the United States than it will in the United Kingdom or Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on welfare system in Great Britain. The belief that the welfare system in Great Britain is in need of fundamental revisions is held by all major shades of political opinion. The efforts of both the previous Labor and Conservative governments to introduce basic alterations in the system were truncated only by their unexpected defeats in the last two general elections, and the Conservative scheme in particular is likely to be revived as soon as it becomes feasible to do so. Unlike the situation that prevails in most other countries, the present British social security system is a model of clarity and coherence, founded upon the well-developed principle of the National Minimum. This fundamental principle that social health is not a matter for the individual alone, not for the government alone, but depends essentially on the joint responsibility of the individual and the community for the maintenance of a definite minimum of civilized life has governed British social thought and social policy since at least the 1890s. A main thrust of the Conservative critique has been that the economic machine has done exactly that. Enterprise has been dampened, initiative thwarted, freeloaders succored, the frugal expropriated.

This article focuses on the developments made in the field of public administration. One of the important developments in public administration is the spread of planning programming budgeting (PPB) system from federal to state and local government in the United States is no longer news, but now it appears the movement has crossed the Atlantic to Great Britain. An even more serious problem, according to "The Economist," relates to implementation of the system. Most of the money is actually spent by local authorities, with the help of a very nonspecific rate support grant. The journal concedes are putting PPB to work on their budgets, but adds there is no assurance that these units will define their objectives the same way as the national government. There is a development of new principle in the field of public administration. According to thinkers, bureaucracy is obsolete. Its rigidities encumber modern organizations. Their need is to be adaptive, with capacity for rapid response to rapidly changing environments, problems, and objectives. This capacity is optimized by organization on a fluid work-team basis, with project-oriented teams formed, changed, disbanded, and formed a new as work requires. Work-team organizations have in fact existed, under various names, for some time. Project management, product management, program management, task forces, matrix management all are premised on the assumption of work-team design.