Reforming governance in the Israeli welfare state: The role of organizational settlements beyond the state in instituting change

Welfare state governance reforms are established by new constellations of actors and experimental organizational structures. This paper analyses two most similar cases of governance reforms in two welfare state domains: (1) services for children and teens at risk; and (2) employment services and social security benefits. It utilizes a comprehensive empirical study that surveys reform initiatives and the establishment of innovative governance coalitions formed in order to enable the recalibration of the Israeli welfare state to changing conditions. In both cases, preliminary deliberations of senior bureaucrats were able to establish change coalitions, which were vital in order to overcome bureaucratic stalemates that result from path-dependent administrative legacies. Notwithstanding, governance coalitions differ in their ability to institutionalize new governance configurations within the state: while the new configuration for governing services for at risk populations won political legitimacy and was instituted, the workfare governance configuration suffered from political illegitimacy and was ultimately abolished. By focusing on the organizational aspects of welfare state reform, the paper argues that tentative coalitions' potential to transform into legitimate and sustainable governance configurations depends on their ability to establish inclusive organizational settlements between agencies with different interests, beyond the bureaucratic structure of the state.Wohlfahrtsstaatliche Regierungsreformen werden wesentlich von neuen Akteurskonstellationen und experimentellen Organisationsstrukturen bestimmt. Das Arbeitspapier analysiert zwei sehr vergleichbare Regierungsreformen in zwei Politikfeldern des Israelischen Wohlfahrtsstaates: (1) Leistungen für gefährdete Kinder und Jugendliche sowie (2) Arbeitsvermittlung und Sozialleistungen. Dafür wird auf eine umfassende empirische Studie zurückgegriffen, die sowohl Reformanstöße als auch die Etablierung innovativer Regierungskonstellationen untersucht. Und zwar jene, die eine Anpassung des israelischen Wohlfahrtsstaates an sich ändernde Rahmenbedingungen ermöglichen. In beiden Fällen wurde die Bildung neuer Koalitionen durch Beratungen von Dienstälteren ermöglicht. Für die Überwindung des bürokratischen Stillstandes, der als Resultat vorangegangener verwaltungstechnischer Altlasten im Sinne der Pfadabhängigkeitstheorie verstanden werden kann, waren diese unerlässlich. Ungeachtet dessen unterscheiden sich Regierungskoalitionen in ihrer Fähigkeit, neue Regierungsstrukturen innerhalb des Staates zu errichten: Während die Neugestaltung von Staatsleistungen für prekäre Bevölkerungsteile an politischer Legitimität gewann und demnach institutionalisiert wurde, fehlte es den sogenannten Workfare-Leistungen an jener Legitimität, was schlussendlich zu deren Abbau führte. Mit Blick auf die Organisationsaspekte von Wohlfahrtsstaatsreformen argumentiert das Arbeitspapier, dass das Entwicklungspotenzial von vorläufigen Koalitionen hin zu legitimen und dauerhaften Regierungsstrukturen vor allem von deren Fähigkeit abhängig ist, inklusive Organisationsstrukturen zu schaffen, welche Ausgleiche zwischen verschiedenen Interessensgruppen fernab der bürokratischen Staatsstruktur ermöglichen

Information flow, cell types and stereotypy in a full olfactory connectome

Funder: Howard Hughes Medical Institute; FundRef: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000011The hemibrain connectome provides large-scale connectivity and morphology information for the majority of the central brain of Drosophila melanogaster. Using this data set, we provide a complete description of the Drosophila olfactory system, covering all first, second and lateral horn-associated third-order neurons. We develop a generally applicable strategy to extract information flow and layered organisation from connectome graphs, mapping olfactory input to descending interneurons. This identifies a range of motifs including highly lateralised circuits in the antennal lobe and patterns of convergence downstream of the mushroom body and lateral horn. Leveraging a second data set we provide a first quantitative assessment of inter- versus intra-individual stereotypy. Comparing neurons across two brains (three hemispheres) reveals striking similarity in neuronal morphology across brains. Connectivity correlates with morphology and neurons of the same morphological type show similar connection variability within the same brain as across two brains

Translating social investment ideas in Israel: Economized social policy’s competing agendas

International organizations play a central role in disseminating social investment ideas, which serve to legitimize forms of public spending by stressing their future contribution to human capital and economic growth. However, the transition from a neoliberal to a social investment state is conditioned on national policymakers’ will to embrace a post-neoliberal macroeconomic philosophy and governance. Although such change lies in the professional purview of economist-technocrats, there is little empirical research on their role as national translators of social investment ideas. This article examines economists’ role in the translation of social investment ideas in Israel. By embedding specific social investment ideas within entrenched economic world views – including principles of ‘responsible’ macroeconomic governance – camps of Israeli economists articulate varying and sometimes competing social investment policy agendas. Lessons from Israel suggest that economists are non-negligible actors in the translation of social investment ideas. By advancing different social investment strategies, economists may assume different roles in the policymaking and politics of social investment. </jats:p

Beyond the Hegemony of Neoliberal Ideas: Ideational Diversity and Policy Variegation in the Neoliberal State

Sociologists commonly adopt a bifurcated understanding of the neoliberal state, showing how neoliberalism’s advance coincides with the growing authority of specific actors and ideas inside the bureaucratic state as others’ authority declines. This article complicates this view by probing the dynamics of non-neoliberal action inside the state, demonstrating the ways even demoted state actors can strategically muster power resources to forward distinct policy agendas. Taking a long-term perspective on social policy developments since the early 2000s, this article reviews the case of Israel, where neoliberal policies' new hegemony and adverse outcomes triggered counter-actions inside the state, ultimately leading to policy change. Paying particular attention to the role of ideas, this article argues that by rearticulating their policy mission to align with market conventions, non-neoliberal actors were able to persuade neoliberal actors to support their policy proposals, succeeding to advance creative policy alternatives under hostile political conditions. Highlighting this strategic capacity and ideational resilience and acumen in adapting to neoliberal critique reveals how demoted state actors can manage to sustain entrenched organizational goals and institutional motivations even as they help ease the adaptation of their historical mission to the neoliberal zeitgeist. </jats:p

Public Service, Private Delivery: Service Workers and the Negotiation of Blurred Boundaries in a Neoliberal State

Neoliberal restructuring blurs the state/market boundary in introducing the position of ‘private state workers’: employees of for-profit providers who deliver publicly funded, state-prescribed services. Despite their prevalence, these workers have received scant scholarly attention. Addressing this gap, this article studies Employment Goal Planners (EGPs) employed at private for-profit providers of activation services in Israel. Drawing on extensive ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews, it argues that far from detached ‘mercenaries’, private state workers are committed actors who advance a distinct vision of public service delivery suited to the neoliberal state. These workers navigate their liminal position along an ever-shifting state/market divide by intertwining contemporary market tropes onto outdated schemas of state work. While the literature commonly views the market as an imposition on public service workers, this study finds that the market can also serve as a resource for inspiring alternative public service ethics and work models. </jats:p

Austerity Beyond Crisis: Economists and the Institution of Austere Social Spending for At-Risk Children in Israel

AbstractAusterity is frequently associated with crisis-enabled spending cuts. What happens when the crisis is over? This article’s original contribution lies in its in-depth exploration of one mechanism that help explain austerity’s endurance post-crisis, when state elites face increased popular resistance and pressure to reinstate social spending. This mechanism calls attention to the role of economists in Central Budgeting Offices as agents of technocratization and de-politicization within social policy domains. These economists may institute an austere spending mode by changing social spending’s norms and instruments. To demonstrate economists’ role in mediating macroeconomic fiscal goals and social policy design over time, the article examines the development of child welfare policy in Israel before, during and in the aftermath of economic crisis. In this case, austerity attained hegemony when economists were able to delegitimize and shelve an ‘irresponsible’ social spending proposal – and in response to post-crisis demands for compensation – introduce an austere policy instrument to cap social spending during a period of social policy expansion. This analysis suggests that scholars regard relations between austerity and social spending as dialectical.</jats:p

Interneuron diversity in the Drosophila antennal lobe promotes computational flexibility and adaptive coding properties

Animals have a remarkable ability to function over a wide range of environmental contexts and across large shifts in natural statistics. In contrast, engineered solutions often fail to produce the same degree of computational flexibility in response to changes in input statistics, highlighting the difficulty of the problem at hand. How is this degree of adaptability achieved? To answer this question we turn to a highly tractable model for sensory encoding, the Drosophila antennal lobe. A remarkable feature of the Drosophila antennal lobe is the diversity of local interneurons (LNs) it contains, which exceed the number of excitatory output projection neurons (PNs). These interneurons are frequently inhibitory and have been attributed to several important computations including, divisive normalization, temporal whitening, and stimulus lateralization. Yet no studies to date have linked specific interneuron types to these functions, nor described the functional advantage of interneuron diversity. We set out to study the contributions of specific LN types to odor encoding using a combination of connectomics, in vivo physiology, optogenetic perturbation, and computational modeling. We discovered LNs that can be described as either downward compressors - which can perform input or response gain control, and LNs that can be described as downward expanders - which can function as noise-gates. Within two types of LNs that perform gain control we note that one type (LN2F_b) preferentially targets olfactory receptor neuron (ORN) axon terminals, while another (LN2P) preferentially targets PN dendrites. Through computational modeling we demonstrate fundamental differences between presynaptic and postsynaptic gain control on encoding stimulus dynamics and intensity. We test these predictions by optogenetically perturbing LN2F_b and LN2P and observe results that closely match our model. Furthermore, we find that these LN types differ in the spatial scale of their activity - with LN2F_b acting globally, but LN2P acting locally through compartmentalized activity. We note that these LNs form inhibitory connections on one another, and trade off depending on odor breadth context. Finally, we observe that recruiting inhibition with odor recruits presynaptic-like and postsynaptic-like effects with different temporal dynamics - indicating that these forms of gain control may also trade off depending on whether odors originate from the same source or not. In conclusion, we propose that antennal lobe LNs can be thought of as one of four functional super-types: 1) Global presynaptic inhibitory LNs, 2) local postsynaptic inhibitory LNs, 3) global postsynaptic disinhibitory LNs, and 4) global excitatory LNs. These super-types serve distinct roles that vary based on environmental context and input statistics, allowing for greater computational flexibility and adaptive coding properties