Bevir - Democratic governance

Democratic Governance

Democratic Governance

Mark Bevir

princeton university press

princeton and oxford

Copyright 2010 by Princeton University Press

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work
should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,
Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bevir, Mark.

Democratic governance / Mark Bevir.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-14538-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-691-14539-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Democracy. 2. Public administration. 3. State, The. I. Title.

JC423.B428 2010 321.8dc22

2009052058

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon

Printed on acid-free paper.

press.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Harry

Contents

Chapter One
Interpreting Governance 1

Part I: The New Governance 15

Chapter Two
The Modern State 17

Chapter Three
New Theories 39

Chapter Four
New Worlds 65

Part II: Constitutionalism 93

Chapter Five
Democratic Governance 95

Chapter Six
Constitutional Reform 122

Chapter Seven
Judicial Reform 147

Part III: Public Administration 175

Chapter Eight
Public Policy 177

Chapter Nine
Joined-up Governance 199

Chapter Ten
Police Reform 227

Conclusion
After Modernism 251

Contents

Tables

2.1 The Rise and Varieties of Modernism 19

3.1 Theories of Governance 41

5.1 The New Public Service 103

5.2 Rethinking Democracy 105

6.1 Constitutional Statutes under New Labour 132

7.1 From Dicey to New Labour 148

8.1 Rethinking Public Policy 179

10.1 Narratives of Police Reform 230

11.1 After Modernism 258

Preface

Democratic Governance offers a genealogy of some problems confronting democracy. The genealogy focuses on modernist social science. Modernism has transformed our political practices. New theories of governance have contributed to the rise of new worlds of governance. The new governance challenges democracy. Policy makers have ignored the challenge, or responded to it in terms set by the theories that caused it. Democratic action has lost out to scientific expertise.

While the new theories of governance have roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the new worlds of governance did not appear much before the 1980s. I do not mention the 1980s to support the glib identification of governance with a reified, uniform, and unchanging set of neoliberal policies: the new worlds of governance have always been diverse and contested, and even when governments did adopt neoliberal policies, the policies rarely worked as intended so they have been replaced or supplemented with alternative policies. Instead, I mention the 1980s to suggest the new worlds of governance have coincided with my adult lifetime. When I have written on governance, I have narrated my times.

My narratives are my political action. When we describe the new worlds of governance and explain how they arose, we necessarily approve or critique the ideas embedded in those worlds. Our stories can challenge current ways of acting and suggest alternative possibilities. New stories do not create new practices, but they can prepare the way for them. I tell stories because I have little talent or taste for other forms of political action.

Acknowledgments

I thank Ben Krupicka, Rod Rhodes, and Frank Trentmann for discussions and collaborations on governance. Sage, Elsevier, and Oxford University Press kindly allowed me to draw on previously published essays: the introductions to M. Bevir, ed., Public Governance (Sage, 2007); Police Reform, Governance, and Democracy, in M. ONeil, M. Marks, and A-M. Singh, eds., Police Occupational Culture: New Debates and Directions (Elsevier, 2007); and The Westminster Model, Governance, and Judicial Reform, Parliamentary Affairs 61 (2008): 55977. Ian Malcolm of Princeton University Press has been an intelligent and supportive editor. Laura once again did the index, and once again the index is the least of the many things she does for which I am so very grateful.

Abbreviations

AMS additional member system

COPS Community Orientated Policing Services

CRA Constitutional Reform Act

DBERR Department of Business, Enterprise, and Regulatory
Reform

DHS Department of Homeland Security

DIUS Department for Innovation, Universities, and Skills

ECHR European Court of Human Rights

ECJ European Court of Justice

EU European Union

GLA Greater London Authority

HRA Human Rights Act

MBO management by objectives

MBR management by results

NHS National Health Service

NPM new public management

NRM natural resource management

OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development

PMCA Police and Magistrates Courts Act

PSA public service agreement

STV single transferable vote

TQM total quality management

Democratic Governance

Chapter one

Interpreting Governance

Once you start to listen out for the word governance, it crops up everywhere. The Internet faces issues of Internet governance. International organizations promote good governance. Hospitals are introducing systems of clinical governance. Climate change and avian flu require innovative forms of global and transnational governance. Newspapers report scandalous failures of corporate governance.

Unfortunately, the ubiquity of the word governance does not make its meaning any clearer. A lack of clarity about the meaning of governance might engender skepticism about its importance. The lack of clarity lends piquancy to questions such as: How does the concept of governance differ from that of government? Why has the concept of governance become ubiquitous? What is the relationship of governance to democracy? How do policy actors respond to the challenges of governance?

This book attempts to answer these questions. It argues that:

The concept of governance evokes a more pluralistic pattern of rule than does government: governance is less focused on state institutions, and more focused on the processes and interactions that tie the state to civil society.

The concept of governance has spread because new theories of politics and public sector reforms inspired by these theories have led to a crisis of faith in the state.

Governance and the crisis of faith in the state make our image of representative democracy implausible.

Policy actors have responded to the challenge of governance in ways that are constrained by the image of representative democracy and a faith in policy expertise.

While these arguments might seem straightforward, we will confront a host of complexities along the way. These complexities often reflect
the limited extent to which we can expect concepts such as governance
to have fixed content. Governance is a vague and contested term, as
are many political concepts. People hold different theories and values that lead them, quite reasonably, to ascribe different content to the
concept of governance. There are, in other words, multiple theories and multiple worlds of governance, each of which has different implications for democracy.