Governance

Amid the debate on globalization and its influence on domestic politics and institutional arrangements, it is intriguing to note the resilience of national institutions, policy styles, and perceptions of the role of the state in society. True, many countries that displayed significantly different governance arrangements a few decades ago today present a more common governance model. Even so, however, the legacy of—or more correctly, perhaps, the continued support for—traditions of statehood, governance, and collective action loom large. These traditions can be seen as value systems that have evolved over an extensive period of time, continuously reproduced in public policy and public discourse. If there is strong resilience in institutions and policy, this in part can be attributed to strong political and administrative tradition. This entry examines the nature of the contemporary state and then examines the different governance models as means of solidifying policy preferences.

Although it makes sense to think of these value systems as traditions, they can mostly be traced back to specific political contexts and policy choice (see, e.g., Francis Castles, 1993). For instance, the Asian “developmental state” (Chalmers Johnson, 1982) and the Scandinavian and continental European welfare state models (Gøsta Esping-Andersen, 1990) evolved through a series of political choices about the role of the state, the market, and civil society. Against this backdrop, the purpose of this entry is to explore the linkages between policy choice and models of governance. Conventional wisdom holds that policy choice is largely a product of institutional arrangements. The immediate interest in this entry is to see to what extent those institutions, in turn, can be related to a more overarching set of values and beliefs about the role of the state. (Value refers to everything that is considered to have a value, be it material, ideological, ethical, or other, by most people/citizens.) Should that be the case, we will be well under way to connect a typology of governance arrangements to broad categorizations of policy. There has been some work done on the relationship between different types of policy, drawing on the familiar typology developed by Ted Lowi, and the institutional arrangements of the state but this is a vast research field and much more work remains before we have a more complete account of the linkages between governance arrangements and policy styles.

This entry then looks at a couple of different governance models as a form of institutionalization of overarching policy choices in terms of [Page 984]constitutional and institutional arrangements. The underlying premise of this entry is that the institutions framing policy choice are themselves “locked in” by fundamental policy choices concerning the role of the state in society and its centrality in governance. The predominant governance model of a particular country is not a given but reflects entrenched notions about the role of the state, the market, and civil society.

These values and perceptions become deeply institutionalized over time and elevated into political culture above and beyond day-to-day policy making. Even so, however, when observed over a longer stretch of time distinct changes in these value systems can be observed. The role of government in the United States changed fundamentally from Lyndon Johnson's Great Society project in the 1960s to Ronald Reagan's neoliberal policy style in the 1980s; in Britain, Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown looked significantly different from Labour under Harold Wilson; in Japan, the relationship between the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the bureaucracy, and the corporate sector has changed profoundly since the 1960s; and in Scandinavia, the welfare state today has very different organization and modus operandi from those of the 1960s or 1970s, and so on. Thus, however entrenched and institutionalized these values may be, they do nonetheless change, sometimes abruptly, sometimes more subtly.

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