Improvement boards offer a new approach to supporting stronger performance by public service organizations, and especially those facing significant issues of change. They involve formalized peer challenge and support by senior politicians and managers from other agencies. The authors document...

The next big step in public management research is to move beyond the question of whether management matters to answer the question: does democracy matter? The public management discipline has largely ignored the impact of democratic structure on performance, partly because of limited variation...

<title/> Improvement boards offer a new approach to supporting stronger performance by public service organizations, and especially those facing significant issues of change. They involve formalized peer challenge and support by senior politicians and managers from other agencies. The authors document...

Some problems of governance regularly resurface, and the use and role of ‘quangos’— public bodies operating at arm's-length to ministers—is a case in point. The administrative history of the British state is littered with official reviews and political debates about quangos....

The transfer of responsibilities from central to local government has often been justified on the grounds of efficiency and democracy under the principle of subsidiarity. The existing models for mapping local government power in Europe, however, are often insufficiently detailed to allow...

Institutional designs for third-party governance have proliferated in the US and Europe, but there has been little systematic analysis of their democratic performance. A comparative analysis of business improvement districts (BIDs) in the US and UK documents an approach to the democratic...