This article examines the impact of government funding on nonprofit participation in policy advocacy. Previous literature has proposed that government funding may either encourage or inhibit nonprofit involvement in policy advocacy. This study, using a meta-analysis of 38 existing studies with 218 effect sizes, finds a slight positive association between the level of government funding a nonprofit receives and the level of policy advocacy the nonprofit participates in. Government funding could be a weak catalyst, rather than an obstacle, for nonprofits to participate in the policy process. Furthermore, the study finds that this effect of government funding might be generalizable to non-U.S. countries. Government funding is also associated with nonprofits’ increasing use of insider advocacy strategy. Overall, government funding seems not a key predictor of the level of nonprofit advocacy engagement. Nonprofit leaders should not consider government funding a barrier for them to fulfill their critical advocacy obligations.
Representation is a hallmark of democratic governance. Widely studied within traditional modes of governance, representation is less studied in alternative governance settings, such as collaborative governance arrangements. Collaborative governance arrangements are specifically designed to encourage inclusion and participation among a diverse array of stakeholders in some part of the policy process. Our research contrasts different forms of representation observed in a collaborative governance arrangement and identifies factors contributing to observed patterns in representation therein. We analyze descriptive representation (i.e., "representation in form") or substantive representation (i.e., "representation in practice") and look for inconsistencies between them. Our case study is a regional food policy council located in the Western United States. Among our findings is that discrepancies between descriptive and substantive representation can be explained by shared goals, local norms, organizational structure, and heterogeneity in member capacity. We conclude our article with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of this research.
Open government initiatives, which include not only transparency but also participation and collaboration policies, have become a major administrative reform. As such, these initiatives are gaining cohesiveness in literature. President Obama supported open government through a range of policies including the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a multinational initiative. The OGP requires member organizations to develop open government national action plans, which are used as the basis for my analysis. To frame this paper, I use and expand upon David Heald’s directions and varieties of transparency framework. A content analysis of the 62 commitments in the US Second Open Government National Action Plan was conducted. The analysis provides two findings of note: First, the traditional view of transparency was indeed the most prevalent in the policies proposed. In that respect, not much has changed, even with the OGP’s emphasis on a range moof approaches. Second, openness among and between agencies played a larger than expected role. While the OGP pushed an array of administrative reforms, the initiative had limited impact on the type of policies that were proposed and enacted. In sum, the OGP is an administrative reform that was launched with great fanfare, but limited influence in the US context. More research needs to be conducted to determine is the "open government reform" movement as a whole suffers from such problems in implementation.
Performance information (PI) is only valuable when decision makers use it to improve their organization. Despite its importance, evidence on PI use is still limited, particularly about PI use in different contexts and for specific purposes. This article examines managers’ use of PI for specific purposes (purposeful PI [PPI]) and compares cross-sector differences in reported PPI use with a survey of nearly 1,000 top-level hospital managers in public, private, and nonprofit hospitals in the United States, while controlling for task. Findings show significant cross-sector differences in reported PPI use in three decision areas: personnel, day-to-day operations, and service efficiency, and that public managers use PI significantly less than their private and nonprofit counterparts in most decision areas. Results are discussed within the literature on performance management and cross-sector differences.
The literature on representative bureaucracy argues that bureaucrats who reflect the diversity of citizens are more likely to be responsive to the public. Although substantial research has supported the claim, most studies are conducted in Western countries such as the United States, and the evidence from other contexts is extremely limited. This raises two important questions: Does the relationship remain valid in a centralized Asian country? If so, under what conditions does representative bureaucracy matter more? This study investigates these questions by using a data set on secondary education in South Korea. Findings suggest that female students perform better when they are taught by female teachers, which strengthens the external validity of the theory. The positive link between female teachers and female student performance is greater when teachers have more discretion and interact more with each other. However, value consensus weakens the relationship between gender representation and student performance. Clientele diversity matters in gender representation at the managerial level, but sector differences are not statistically supported. These findings illustrate the need to take both national and organizational contexts seriously in representative bureaucracy theory.
Public managers play a central role in the adoption and smooth implementation of social media tools in the workplace, with local governments increasingly expecting managers to utilize these tools. Nevertheless, we know little about how public managers perceive social media use for work activities and what factors shape such perceptions. Preliminary research has shown that social media use in government may enhance task efficiency, but it may also increase management complexity and workload. In this study, we draw from current literature on e-government adoption and use to investigate the role of personal and organizational use of social media, organizational culture, digital threats, and technological capacity in shaping public managers’ perceptions of social media use. Combining data from a national survey of 2,500 public managers in 500 U.S. local governments, Census data, and data collected from city websites, we find that perceptions of social media tools in the workplace are influenced by the interplay of personal and organization use of social media, an organizational culture of innovation, and formal guidance on social media use. Technological capacity and perceptions of digital threats are not significantly related to perceptions of social media. We conclude with a discussion of what these findings mean for research and practice.
This article examines the vertical diffusion of a policy between a state and its local governments. Although policy diffusion typically relies upon multiple mechanisms, diffusion between a state and its local governments relies primarily on coercion. Using a case study of state-mandated adherence to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), we show that the coercion mechanism is dependent upon the capacity of the state and local governments to adopt and implement a policy, as well as the discretion available to a local government. Utilizing data from all 50 states as of 2008, our findings show that the vertical diffusion of a policy is reliant on a state’s fiscal capacity and the personnel capacity of the local government. We also found that strong institutional autonomy at the local level leads a state to adopt a GAAP mandate.
State governments establish pension systems to provide retirement benefits to public employees. State governments as sponsors, state legislatures as policy makers, and public-sector unions as representatives of public employees may exert considerable influence over the decisions made in pension systems. This study applies a system framework to examine these influences. It focuses on four decisions in pension systems: benefits, employer contributions, employee contributions, and the asset smoothing period. The findings show that changes in the short- and long-term financial conditions of a state government have different influences on pension decisions, and that legislatures and public employee unions play important roles that affect these decisions.
This article examines the assignment of functional responsibilities to municipalities, contributing conceptualization and measurement for the analysis of breadth of those responsibilities across the American states. It also investigates determinants of functional breadth: alternative explanations are explored in an analysis of municipalities in metropolitan areas. Using data from the 2012 Census of Governments, two measures of functional breadth are reported, thus evaluating the reliability of the findings across alternative measurements of breadth. The main findings are that a diverse scope of functional responsibilities is prevalent across American municipalities and that the institutional environment of municipalities influences those diverse functional responsibilities. Additional findings are that certain factors differentially affect the scope of service responsibilities, according to a quantile analysis of the dependent variable’s distribution. Although its primary contribution is to the literature on functional responsibilities of governments, the article also proposes a political market approach to identify factors influencing functional responsibilities.
Since publication two decades ago, Moore’s theory of public value has become a significant concept in public administration, especially for teaching public managers. A feature of the theory is that public value is assessed by arbiters. These arbiters include a "public as a whole," which is a disembodied singular entity that is different from the sum of its parts. The idea of arbitration by a public as a whole is critically examined by considering its possible sources, comparison with individualistic bases for arbitration (especially democratic discourse), and exploring the implications of arbitration by the public as a whole. The conclusion is that the public as a whole is an unsuccessful concept which does not assist the theory of public value and which creates significant practical problems for practitioners by understating the degree of ambiguity that is inherent in the pursuit of public value.
Studies have argued that the higher levels of public service motivation (PSM) found in bureaucrats as compared with others lead to the positive civic and political behaviors seen in government employees. This study extends those findings to see if high PSM could have any negative effects on these same behaviors. Drawing from research on identity theory, it is hypothesized that a salient "public service identity" could contribute to bureaucrats being more apt than others to report that they have voted in elections when they actually had not. Logit models using data covering a span of almost 30 years in the United States find support for the hypothesis. This work suggests that viewing PSM through the lens of identity theory may have broad implications for the field of public administration.
Societal security poses fundamental challenges for the doctrines of accountability and transparency in government. At least some of the national security state’s effectiveness requires a degree of non-transparency, raising questions about legitimacy. This article explores in cross-national and cross-sectoral perspective, how organizations seek to manage their reputation by accounting for their activities. This article contributes in three main ways. First, it highlights how distinct tasks facilitate and constrain certain reputation management strategies. Second, it suggests that these reputational considerations shape the way in which organizations can give account. Third, it considers three domains associated with societal security, namely intelligence, flood defense, and food safety, in five European countries with different state traditions—the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. By using a "web census," this article investigates cross-sectoral and cross-national variation in the way organizations seek to account for their activities and manage their reputation. This article finds variation across tasks to be more dominant than national variation.
Within the representative bureaucracy literature, there are a variety of individual or professional incentives that may discourage movement from passive to active representation. This study presents two of these incentives by explaining the potential effects of professional socialization and individual career ambition. Using 3 years of survey and performance data from public schools, this research explores how professional socialization and ambitions of career advancement may promote specific behaviors that potentially support or discourage effective representation. The results indicate that professional socialization actually promotes representation by African American and Latino bureaucrats. The impact of Latino representation across values of professional socialization is also significantly different from that of White managers. The results also demonstrate varying effects for bureaucratic career ambition, as the effect of Latino administrators on student performance is minimized for administrators with higher levels of ambition. For African American administrators, the opposite is true as Black administrators with high levels of ambition are related to increasingly positive student performance. These results add to our understanding of representative bureaucracy by exploring how different values will interact with a minority bureaucrat’s decision to represent the interests of minority clients.
The governance of major metropolitan areas is often associated with a "fragmented" and "uncoordinated" multi-government apparatus, frequently sculpted from years of particularistic ad hoc administrative reforms. This image of dysfunctional structure gains high salience when the metropolitan context is accentuated by complexity and fluidity, especially where intense paradoxical forces of economic development and ecological sustainability are present. The most visible "solutions" for such a state often come from bureaucrats seeking to "streamline" government according to norms of standardization and hierarchy. But, calls for reform may also come from scholars of polycentric government, who see the problem as a misalignment of administrative structure with the metropolitan context. This article adopts the latter, less-appreciated perspective that argues such dysfunctions in a metropolitan multi-government network are essentially problems of adaptive organizational design. Different than the bureaucratic model, treatises on new public management or group-behavior theory, it emphasizes the contextual nature of public administration by employing the holistic framework of "organizational systems." It illustrates the logic by introducing a toolbox for multi-government design that speaks to the adaptive qualities of government networks in whole metropolitan areas. Its purpose is to reinvigorate this holistic approach in thinking about the way we look at multi-government networks in major metropolitan areas.
Diversity has long been recognized as a critical component of collaborative governance. Among many rationales, the representation of diverse perspectives and participants in collaborative governance arrangements is expected to facilitate holistic understandings of complex public policy and management issues while promoting principles of democracy and inclusion. Such outcomes, however, are typically only achievable if the process of collaboration similarly engenders these principles. In this article, we investigate the dynamic relationship between diversity and perceived procedural justice in the context of 10 collaborative policymaking groups involved in guiding U.S. marine aquaculture policy development. Among our key findings is that certain types of participant diversity (i.e., affiliation and intergovernmental diversity) and diversity in beliefs about science and local knowledge are significantly associated with perceptions of procedural justice among participants within the collaborative groups. We also find that the relationship between participant diversity and perceived procedural justice is curvilinear; the positive effect of diversity is highest when the level of diversity is moderate (an inverted U-shaped pattern). We conclude our article with practical implications and suggestions for future research on procedural justice within collaborative partnerships.
What is the role of culture in street-level bureaucrats’ bending the rules and accepting informal payments for health care? The literature on street-level bureaucrats stresses the importance of both individual and organizational factors in understanding how they use their discretion but usually neglects the importance of the culture in determining how far they are willing to go in exercising this discretion. Using data from 102 in-depth interviews with doctors and nurses in Israel, and by linking the literature about street-level bureaucrats to that of the research on informal payments for health care, we demonstrate that the culture plays a key role in decisions about accepting such payments. According to our findings, such payments are a phenomenon rooted in the culture and range from the extreme case of bribery to the fuzzier area of making exceptions for favored and sympathetic clients.
By comparing the French and the U.S. controversies on the appropriate position of public administration within the constitutional order of the state after World War II, this article aims to contribute to the historical clarification of the politics–administration dichotomy as one of the key ideas of administrative research and theory. The article underscores that the same phenomenon—the rejection of the dichotomy—has led to different conclusions among administrative scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, the dichotomy was rejected in favor of a reinforcement of the legislature and the judiciary as well as a more representative administration to preserve the plurality of interests of American society. In contrast, the French rejection was aimed toward strengthening the executive and the administrative elite as guardians of the general interest. The article illustrates how ideas and values about public administration change according to different spatiotemporal contexts. If these contexts are disregarded, understanding remains fragmentary at best, if not misleading.
The Great Recession resulted in fiscal crises for governments across the Western world. Significant cuts in government programs and in public administration itself were initiated as many governments scrambled to reduce their growing budget deficits. We are interested in how European governments have reacted during the most recent crisis. In particular, our article explores whether rationally oriented management approaches are associated with targeted and efficiency cuts rather than across-the-board cuts. The theoretical part of the article outlines the predictions about how the use of rational approaches will affect the types of cuts used by public agencies. In the empirical part of the article, we use the survey of 7,077 senior government officials in 19 European countries, undertaken within the framework of the Coordinating for Cohesion in the Public Sector of the Future (COCOPS) project. We find that several rationally oriented approaches—use of strategic planning, focusing on outcomes and results, rewarding goal achievement, and increased relevance and use of performance measures—are positively associated with the use of targeted and efficiency cuts. These findings suggest that rational management techniques adopted by governments over recent decades might be used by managers to help them make strategic decisions, even during times of crisis.
A now well-established link exists between passive representation of racial and gender minorities in certain bureaucracies and substantive benefits for the represented groups. However, few quantitative studies have distinguished between the multiple possible mechanisms by which passive representation might produce such effects. We conduct a novel set of empirical analyses aimed at determining whether or not passive representation produces effects only for those clients who directly interact with bureaucrats who share their demographic characteristics or if passive representation produces broader organizational-level effects. We find strong evidence that minority clients’ outcomes are positively associated with representation in portions of the bureaucracy with which they do not directly interact. This suggests that either passive representation produces substantial bottom-up, organizational-level effects or that managers who recruit minority personnel also adopt policies that are favorable toward minority clients.
What is the effect of internal public management on individuals’ perceptions of managerial trustworthiness (MTW)? MTW is associated with a range of positive organizational outcomes, but research examining how a public manager might affect employees’ perception of MTW is sparse. This article complements extant research on MTW in public organizations with causal evidence from a randomized survey experiment among 1,829 U.S. residents. We examine how five aspects of internal public management affect individuals’ perception of MTW: (a) setting challenging but feasible goals, (b) making credible commitments, (c) encouraging employee participation, (d) providing frequent performance feedback, and (e) rewarding employees who perform well. We find positive effects of the "credible commitment" and "performance feedback" treatments on overall MTW perception. In addition, we find significant effects for four of the treatments (a-d) when looking separately at the three sub-dimensions that together comprise the multidimensional MTW construct (ability, benevolence, and integrity).
The research focuses on the impact of the restrictiveness of tax and expenditure limitations (TELs) on the credit ratings of 566 U.S. municipalities over the 2007-2010 time period. The credit ratings used are by Moody’s rating agency, and municipal fiscal data are drawn from the Government Financial Officers Association’s (GFOA) Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting program. Results suggest that more restrictive TELs imposed on municipalities by the states have a weak negative impact on credit ratings which will likely force municipalities to face higher interest costs.
Competition among local governments for business investment and residents is a key feature of metropolitan governance scholarship. Despite the excellent work exploring interjurisdictional competition, the conceptualization and operationalization of competition still lack the necessary complexity to fully capture the determinants of competition. In reality, the degree of competition between local governments is a multidimensional concept. How do the different dimensions of competition impact a city’s own-source revenue yield? Using a Spatial Durbin Model (SDM) to analyze a sample of 2,299 U.S. cities, this study finds that household income differentiation and manufacturing differentiation are important in a city’s revenue yield, and both types of differentiation limit head-to-head competition among local governments. In addition, the results indicate that entry barriers and collaboration affect a city’s revenue yields, while the number of cities in a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) does not influence those collections.
To address some of the inconsistencies in the literature regarding links between public service motivation (PSM) and individual performance, this study proposes and tests a three-path mediation model in public higher education in which the relationship is mediated by person–organization fit (P-O fit) and organizational commitment (OC) in serial. Based on a sample of 692 faculty at an urban public university, we find that P-O fit and OC as a causal chain mediate the relationship between PSM and organizational citizenship behavior and that this mediated relationship varies depending on the specific context of the performance dimensions. While PSM has positive influence on service through its effect on P-O fit and OC in serial, the results indicate an indirect negative effect on research productivity and no association with teaching. The results regarding both direct and indirect effects further reveal that the directions and significance of the relationships can vary depending on how performance is conceptualized.
Although a large volume of literature has documented the role of public service motivation (PSM) as altruistic work values, few studies directly examine PSM’s impact on job choice. Using longitudinal data, this article examines the factors that affect people’s career choices, specifically the extent to which individuals with different work values choose different sectors when considering job characteristics and person–job (P-J) fit. The analysis reveals that people are more likely to choose jobs in the private sector than jobs in the public or non-profit sector when they have opportunities to satisfy their altruistic work values through relational jobs. The findings speak to the importance of P-J fit when people choose their initial jobs. Contributions to existing literature and implications are discussed.
This article deals with the evolution of community self-organization in public administration. Within the literature of interactive governance, increasing attention is being paid to how communities take initiative in dealing with societal issues. However, we know little about the factors contributing to the durability of self-organization. We analyzed three cases of community self-organization in three different countries: the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Netherlands. We found that community self-organization initiatives are strongly embedded in governmental environments, leading to different modes of interaction that change from phase to phase and in response to reciptiveness (or the lack thereof) among government counterparts. These modes of interaction strongly influence the evolution of community self-organization efforts. Moreover, we conclude that it is important that self-organized citizen initiatives represent and capture the perspectives and interests of large groups of citizens. This condition positively influences the evolution and duration of citizen initiatives. Those who manage to link with other citizens, including via community and volunteer organizations, can succeed. Those who do not can lose their legitimacy and fail.
This article argues that analysis of meta-governance purely in terms of the actions of the state can obscure the significant, but less apparent, ways in which private actors may influence the choices and interactions of individuals within various modes of governance coordination. We investigate the networked governance of affordable housing impacts in the Marcellus Shale gas region of the United States to empirically illuminate the dynamics of state and private meta-governance. Drawing on a qualitative research approach, we identify public authorities as exercising what seems to be predominant responsibility for meta-governance, with state government having strong influence over the structure and resourcing of a networked governance response, and county government directly facilitating the collaborative engagement of actors at the local level. Although private oil and gas companies demonstrate little involvement in network governance, the presence of private meta-governance in the alternative form of the design of market governance is shown to have a number of countervailing implications for the form and function of network governance. We suggest that expansion of the concept of "framing" to account for strategies that structure how key governance actors understand a particular problem provides valuable insights for understanding private meta-governance in relation to network governance.
In 1995, U.S. News and World Report (U.S. News) released its first ranking of public affairs master’s degree programs. The rankings have been conducted every 3 years since and have grown in importance to public policy and public administration programs. This study considers the history and background of ranking public policy and administration graduate programs, the rationale used by U.S. News, and the methodology used by U.S. News. This is followed by a longitudinal analysis of these rankings from 1995 to 2016. Findings are presented in a conceptual framework of academic rankings using concepts of equilibrium, specialization, diffusion of innovations, and institutional isomorphism. The implications of this framework and the findings of our analysis are spelled out for public affairs deans, directors, and faculty seeking to improve their ranking as well as those seeking to hold on to their present rankings.
Despite mixed results, state government use of targeted economic development programs has escalated. This study evaluates the impact of motion picture incentive programs, an array of tax incentives employed by over 40 states to entice film and television productions out of California and New York, on labor and economic conditions from 1998 through 2013. Results suggest that sales and lodging tax waivers had no effect on any of four different economic indicators. Transferable tax credits had a small, sustained effect on motion picture employment levels but no effect on wages. Refundable tax credits had no employment effect and only a temporary wage effect. Neither credit affected gross state product or motion picture industry concentration. Incentive spending also had no influence. These findings demonstrate the heterogeneous impacts of different incentives offered under a single program and should inform future economic development policy design.
This study uses theories on dialogic accounting to assess whether online interaction through social media is used as a mechanism of public information and stakeholder engagement by Canadian and American public transportation agencies. We embraced a quantitative methodology in which content analysis was performed on the Facebook and Twitter accounts of 35 transit operators in Canada and the United States. We categorized the contents of 1,222 Facebook posts and 2,615 tweets, assessed which level and what type of interaction was effectively reached for every category, tracked whether and how agencies reply to comments on their posts, and assessed the general tenor of the discussion. Our results show that public transportation agencies often take advantage of their presence on social media to provide the public with information on their services and to perform activities associated with stakeholder engagement. However, we have found some significant differences in the utilization of social media by public transportation agencies, all of which are discussed in the "Conclusion" section of this article. Twitter is most often used for public information messages, while Facebook appears to be used more to publish content in a dialogic perspective that creates two-way, collaborative conversations with users. In terms of practical implications, our study suggests that a broader and more continuous commitment to interaction between users and stakeholders on social media would create new opportunities for improving transparency and, indirectly, the services of public agencies.
Although professionalism remains important to the study and practice of public administration, its features have remained unclear. Whether public managers share a professional identity has yet to be empirically tested. In this article, we test a model of professional identity among public managers, using a national sample of city managers, the first profession in public administration. Both public administration in general and city management in particular lack institutional characteristics—such as mandatory programs of specialized training or a monopoly over entry into the field—that mark traditional professions such as medicine or law. Using five commonly found professional identification attributes, we test a structural equation model of professional beliefs among city managers with data from a national survey. We find evidence of city managers’ professional identity across four attributes: belief in professional associations, belief in public service, belief in self-regulation, and sense of calling. City managers’ beliefs about autonomy, however, were unrelated to other aspects of their professionalism.
Citizen participation in government can provide a broad range of benefits to governments and citizens alike. Advances in information technologies have enabled new types of citizen participation with governments. However, we currently lack an understanding of how these new types of participation, particularly those that generate information on community needs, influence resource allocations. This article focuses on one of these new technologies, 311 systems, and how citizen requests might influence departmental budget allocations. We track budget allocation in the cities of Boston and San Francisco for 106 departments or subunits from FY2005 to FY2013. Our findings indicate that there is no significant resource benefit for departments using 311 versus those that do not. While departments using 311 do have larger budget allocations than those that do not, those departments had larger budget allocations prior to the implementation of 311. And while data generated in the 311-enabled citizen participation are increasingly used to measure departmental performance, the findings of this study show that this information has little to no effect on the allocated share of the budget for departments.
Supervisor support is often argued to be a meaningful predictor of employee engagement; however, existing research has yet to fully support this hypothesis. Drawing from the research on social exchange theory, organizational support theory, and job characteristics model, this study investigates the mediating role of perceived organizational support in the link between supervisor support and employee engagement. How this mediating effect might be moderated by learning opportunities in the job is also considered. Data from a sample of 1,251 employees from state and local government agencies show that supervisor support affects employee engagement both directly and indirectly through its influence on perceived organizational support. In turn, this influences the variance in employee engagement. Results further show that the path linking supervisor support to organizational support is moderated by learning opportunities, such that the positive relationships become invigorated among individuals who reported having opportunities to learn and grow in their job.
In the wake of the economic crisis in 2007, many municipal governments faced a variety of financial challenges. Scholars and practitioners call for citizen participation in various parts of government; however, it is unclear how efforts to engage the public can be sustained when municipalities undergo tough financial times. This research explores the impact of internal and external factors—(a) impact of financial crisis, (b) environmental and organizational complexity, and (c) administrative decentralization—on whether citizens are given the opportunity and resources to be involved in decision-making. Findings suggest that, despite their concerns for the diminishing fiscal capacity, local governments provide supportive institutional arrangements that may encourage public participation. Organizational complexity in local government also has a positive impact on facilitating public involvement and providing resource. Finally, the analyses indicate mixed findings for environmental complexity faced by local jurisdictions.
The proliferation of market-based public service delivery raises concerns whether the vulnerable are dully served and what mechanisms facilitate to serve them well. Focused on the availability of specialized substance abuse treatment programs for co-occurring, HIV, criminal and pregnant patients, this study adopts the dimensional publicness theory to examine how different dimensions of political authorities facilitate the provision of specialized programs for vulnerable groups. The multilevel analyses indicate that public funding and accreditation are two major dimensions promoting specialized programs. Environmental publicness exercises significant impact, contingent upon statewide policies and facility ownership. Differential effects are found both within and across dimensions, calling for a contingent approach to better understand both the theory and its implications.
The case for workplace flexibility has been largely established in the private sector, yet little is known about what facilitates or constrains employee access to flexibility options in governmental agencies. Focused on both flextime and flexible careers (career breaks, job sharing, and reduced hours), this study investigates how agency strategies, motives, resources, structure, and stakeholders shape employee access to workplace flexibility. The findings suggest that employee access to workplace flexibility is largely enhanced by strategic effort and agency motives, whereas agency structure shows limited impact. Agencies with bigger budgets provide employees more access to flextime, and those short of critical human capital tend to offer more options for flexible careers. This study concludes with the discussion of research findings and potential policy implications.
The question of managerial fit—the congruence between a manager and his or her environment—has become widely debated by policymakers, practitioners, and scholars from a number of fields as the occurrence of non-internal management hires has increased across many types of organizations. Although many assume that higher levels of fit in an organization will generate better performance, others argue that misfits are better suited at leading organizations as motivated change agents. In this study, a measure of person–organization fit is created using original cross-sectional time-series data on U.S. university presidents from 1993 to 2009. Findings indicate that maximizing fit is not always ideal and that fit has a nonlinear relationship with organizational performance such that some fit is healthy but high fit can be detrimental for student performance measures.
Western liberal governments increasingly seek to improve the performance of the public sector by spurring innovation. New Public Management reforms from the 1980s onward viewed strategic entrepreneurial leadership and public–private competition as key drivers of public innovation. By contrast, the current wave of New Public Governance reforms perceives collaboration between relevant and affected actors from the public and private sector as the primary vehicle of public innovation, and tends to see governance networks as potential arenas for collaborative innovation. The new focus on collaborative innovation in networks poses a fundamental challenge for public managers, elected politicians, and others aiming to metagovern governance networks. Hence, we claim that a specific metagovernance strategy is needed when the purpose of governance networks is to stimulate efficiency, effectiveness, and democratic legitimacy through innovation rather than incremental improvements. The article aims to sketch out the contours of such a strategy by comparing it with more traditional metagovernance strategies. The argument is illustrated by an empirical analysis of an example of collaborative innovation in Danish elderly care.
We add new data to the long-standing debate about the interface between politics and administration, deploying theory and evidence indicating that it varies. It can be either a "purple zone" of interaction between the red of politics and the blue of administration, or a clear line. We use survey responses from 1,012 mostly senior public managers in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, along with semi-structured interviews with 42 of them, to examine the extent to which public managers perceive that they "cross" the line or go into a zone, and the ways in which they do so. Our inclusion of a zone as well as a line recasts how roles and relationships between politicians and administrators can be conceived. Moreover, it raises questions about how particular contingencies affect whether public managers perceive and work with a line or a zone.
Recent research has shown that fluctuations in revenue availability over the business cycle cause the adoption of fiscal policy that amplifies economic cycles. Building on theoretical models that address the political economy of fiscal expansions and adjustments and the fiscal policy preferences of voters and policymakers, this article examines whether those procyclical effects are symmetric between boom and recession. The analysis reveals that the procyclical effects of cyclical revenue increases (in upturn years) on expenditures are smaller than those of cyclical revenue decreases (in downturn years), whereas the procyclical effects of cyclical revenue increases on tax rates are larger than those of cyclical revenue decreases. That is, policymakers prefer tax cuts to spending increases in pursuing expansionary fiscal policy during booms and spending cuts to tax increases in making fiscal adjustments during recessions. Taken together, the results suggest that cyclical fluctuations in revenue availability have procyclical effects on state fiscal policies in a manner that is asymmetric between boom and recession and fiscally conservative.
Researchers have focused on the role of managerial gender on attitudes toward diversity issues mainly in either the public or private sector, but there is little research that compares managerial attitudes on diversity across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. This article identifies important distinctions among the sectors that may influence gender differences in managerial priority placed on diversity. Using a national survey of nearly 1,000 top-level managers in public, private, and nonprofit hospitals in the United States, we analyze how managerial gender combined with cross-sector differences shape managerial priority on diversity. We find female managers place a higher priority on diversity than their male counterparts in nonprofit and private organizations compared with managers in public organizations. The differing effects of managerial gender on the priority placed on diversity are shaped by the organizational contexts of the three sectors. This research provides systematic evidence of sector differences in the patterns of managerial priorities regarding diversity.
Effectively linking public administration theory to practical relevance has proven a difficult task. We argue, however, that the theory–practice conundrum is but a symptom of a more fundamental problem in public administration: the hollowing out of the field. Despite research advances, hollowing occurs because of the field’s conceptually muddled and decontextualized normative pillars, problematic macrodynamic foundations, and imbalanced scaffolding for integrating its multiple research narratives and methodologies efficaciously for both scholars and practitioners. To illustrate our points, we first critique the logic and empirical basis of two major pillars of public administration: efficiency and social equity. We then show how and why the field also has problematic macrodynamic foundations due to its failure to incorporate important developments in cognate fields related to administrative history, contexts, and processes. We next offer a problem-centered organizational framework for the field to help address the scaffolding problem in public administration.
This article revisits government failure theory by examining the relationship between government decentralization and the size of the nonprofit sector (NPS). Government failure theory posits that nonprofits are most active in regions where the largest gap exists between the homogeneous supply of public service and heterogeneous citizen demands. Following this theory, government decentralization should decrease the size of the NPS, as it increases the efficiency and heterogeneity of government services. This article tests this hypothesis using a sample of U.S. counties. Decentralization is measured in two dimensions: vertical decentralization and horizontal fragmentation. After using instrumental regressions to eliminate the endogeneity bias, we find that counties with a more horizontally fragmented governmental system are associated with a larger NPS. Vertical centralization leads to a denser NPS but has no impact on the NPS revenue or assets. The impacts of resident heterogeneity are also mixed. As such, government failure theory is only partially supported, at best. Contrarily, interdependence theory is supported by this study.
Prior research has indicated that information transparency in governments depends on institutional and environmental factors. Nonetheless, previous studies show heterogeneity in the results, and the academic researchers cannot make consistent conclusions. It makes it difficult to know the behavior of governments regarding their information policies. Therefore, making use of meta-analysis techniques, we integrate the empirical results reported by studies to determine the factors favoring the disclosure of public financial information via two modes of information disclosure—online versus hard-copy format. Several moderating effects—administrative culture, accounting regime, impact of measure used on determining variables, and level of government—have been considered and analyzed for their influence on the degree of correlation between the determinants and the disclosure of public financial information in both modes of information disclosure. Our study does not only show that the variables analyzed are positively associated with the disclosure of public financial information, but also that this depends on the context in which the research is conducted. The administrative style and the level of government are the main moderating effects that influence the results of analyzed studies.
Despite the potential of open government, earlier research has found that local governments vary significantly in their embrace of transparency. In this article, we explore the variability question through the innovative application of an alternative set of transparency indicators. We find that cities are more likely to make information about finance and budgeting and general administration accessible to the public, less likely to place information related to human resources online. We use the literature to derive a model to test five types of promising explanations for a city’s propensity for transparency. Our analysis suggests that community demand and a city’s organizational networks play an important role in fostering transparency, regardless of city size. Important differences do exist between large and small cities: Transparency in larger cities is spurred by political competition; in smaller cities, governmental resources and administrative professionalism influence transparency.
Public management research has paid little attention to the implementation processes through which public organizations implement cutbacks. In this study, we examine how the implementation of cutbacks is related to employees’ organizational commitment and work engagement in the Dutch public sector, and to what extent the use of change management practices may mitigate a negative relationship between cutbacks and these factors. The analysis of 6,066 employees indicates that cutbacks are negatively related to employee attitudes regarding their membership in their organization (organizational commitment), but not to attitudes regarding their work (work engagement). Moreover, although change management practices are only moderately applied in the implementation of cutbacks, the analysis indicates that these may partly alleviate the negative relationship between cutbacks and organizational commitment. The evidence presented in this study thus indicates that more attention should be given to the processes through which budget cutbacks are implemented in public organizations.
Transparency is an intrinsic value of democratic societies. Within the literature, there is an emphasis on access to information and the availability of information in relation to transparency. This study, however, takes a communicative approach to government transparency. It focuses not only on information access and sharing but also on how information is shared and to whom it is communicated. Within government agencies, government communication officials or public affairs officers are one of the central figures in information sharing with stakeholders and citizens. Yet, so far, little is known about how they perceive and implement transparency initiatives. This study aims to enhance our understanding of proactive government transparency and the value of communication by developing a model that explains the role of government communication officials in the implementation of transparency practices. The explanatory model is tested in two democratic countries: the United States and the Netherlands. An online survey shows that government communication officials in the United States and the Netherlands can enhance but also occasionally distort transparency. Furthermore, some differences were found between the countries: Americans are more involved in the proactive disclosure of information than Dutch government communicators.
Despite the growing body of literature on participatory and collaborative governance, little is known about citizens’ motives for participation in such new governance arrangements. The present article argues that knowledge about these motives is essential for understanding the quality and nature of participatory governance and its potential contribution to the overall political and administrative system. Survey data were used to explore participants’ motives for participating in a large-scale urban renewal program in Stockholm, Sweden. The program was neighborhood-based, characterized by self-selected and repeated participation, and designed to influence local decisions on the use of public resources. Three types of motives were identified among the participants: (a) Common good motives concerned improving the neighborhood in general and contributing knowledge and competence. (b) Self-interest motives reflected a desire to improve one’s own political efficacy and to promote the interest of one’s own group or family. (c) Professional competence motives represented a largely apolitical type of motive, often based on a professional role. Different motives were expressed by different categories of participants and were also associated with different perceptions concerning program outcomes. Further analysis suggested that participatory governance may represent both an opportunity for marginalized groups to empower themselves and an opportunity for more privileged groups to act as local "citizen representatives" and articulate the interests of their neighborhoods. These findings call for a more complex understanding of the role and potential benefits of participatory governance.
Extant public management studies examining the management of environmental challenges predominantly concentrate on the management of the erratic dimension of environmental challenges, that is, shocks. Whereas there is strong evidence that environmental shocks can be effectively managed, much less is known about more predictable environmental constraints that, likewise, challenge the organization’s functioning. The present article studies the moderating effects of managerial networking on the negative relation between environmental constraints—that is, red tape—on organizational performance. We hypothesize that red tape negatively affects public service performance. We further hypothesize that "downward," "upward," "sideward," and "outward" managerial networking orientations attenuate the negative effect of red tape on public service performance. The hypotheses are tested on a data set of Dutch primary schools (n = 523), which includes managerial networking and perceived red tape variables as well as objective, independently measured, school performance data. The results show that perceived personnel red tape negatively affects school performance but that perceived general external red tape positively affects school performance. The negative effect of personnel red tape on school performance is attenuated by "outward"-oriented managerial networking.
Scholars have argued that whistle-blowing is consistent with public service motivation (PSM), given that whistle-blowing is a form of self-sacrifice and concern for the public interest. Such a connection is also consistent with the Prosocial Organizational Behavior (POB) Model. However, only one article was found that examined the direct association between PSM and whether or not employees reported unlawful acts. Furthermore, no article was found to explore the relationship between PSM, whistle-blowing, and seriousness of wrongdoing—an important intervening factor that influences decisions to report. This is surprising because whistle-blowers can prevent detrimental harm to individuals and society and yet we still know little about the internal motives that cause them to come forward. Consequently, the connection between PSM and whistle-blowing was investigated further in this article. Consistent with the POB Model, PSM was positively associated with whistle-blowing generally, as well as internal and external whistle-blowing. Seriousness of wrongdoing was also found to have a positive effect on whistle-blowing. Furthermore, seriousness of wrongdoing was found to moderate the relationship between PSM and only internal whistle-blowing. The implications of the findings are discussed in the article.
This research focuses on public service provision in the context of an important emerging urban policy issue: increasing numbers of roaming animals in distressed cities in the United States. The case of urban animal welfare policy illustrates a policy domain that relies heavily on informal networks of nonprofit organizations for service provision. How these networks function and the interaction between nonprofit and public entities says much about how cities will be able to respond to increasingly changing policy environments. Based on survey and network analysis of organizations involved in animal welfare service provision in Detroit, the following conclusions are drawn: Urban animal welfare services are much broader than simple animal "control" and encompass the physical, behavioral, and emotional well-being of animals; less common aspects of animal welfare services evidence the highest levels of cooperation; a fragmented network of nonprofit rescues and public entities is providing animal welfare services in the City of Detroit although nonprofit providers dominate; and collaborative service networks vary greatly in size, density, and composition depending on different aspects of services provided.
Sustainable development has quickly become an important theme in local governments facing environmental challenges. Energy efficiency can be part of local efforts to sustain economic development while protecting the environment and natural resources. Based on a national database, this study examines U.S. city governments’ strategies to finance energy efficiency. The result suggests that energy efficiency financing (EEF) has become part of local sustainability strategies. In the study, we offer an explanation for energy efficiency funding that emphasizes political behaviors of institutional players in budgetary decision making. We examine factors influencing adoption and progression of EEF. The results highlight the importance of explaining results of EEF to citizens. Technical expertise from professional organizations helps start EEF programs. A Democrat-leaning consistency is important to adopt EEF, but only in cities without substantial strategies promoting EEF. Cities with revenue declines are less likely to implement EEF.
A core proposition of public service motivation (PSM) theory is that PSM is positively related to individual performance. Some studies, however, suggest that this relationship is mediated by person-job or person-organization fit. This study aims to further clarify the relationship between PSM and performance by, first, studying the mediation role of both person-job and person-organization fits and, second, by investigating this mediation for both in-role and extra-role behavior. Whereas in-role behavior is aimed at the individual task, extra-role is aimed at helping colleagues. This difference may matter for the role of PSM and fit. To this end, we conducted structural equation modeling with bootstrapping on self-reported survey data from public employees (n = 1,031). The analysis showed that person-job, but not person-organization fit, fully mediated the relationship between PSM and in-role behavior. The relationship with extra-role behavior was not mediated. The PSM-performance relationship may thus be more complex than previously envisioned, as both type of performance and person-job fit matter.
Collaborative partnerships and stakeholder engagement support an exchange of information, ideas, and resources that are critical to successful policy implementation in the 21st century. Such multiorganizational arrangements accompany expectations that collaboration will lead to improved policy outcomes and organizational performance that would not otherwise be possible in more hierarchical settings. However, our knowledge of how collaborative partnerships contribute to the full spectrum of potential impacts ranging from direct substantive outcomes to more indirect process-oriented improvements remains limited. Using data from a unique survey of 150 Indian education directors in New Mexico and Oklahoma, the following study explores how collaboration between public officials and Native American communities is related to perceived improvements in organizational performance across eight different direct and indirect measures. The results demonstrate that higher levels of collaboration are positively related to perceived improvements in direct substantive outcomes for Native American students. However, collaboration has less of an impact on more process-oriented outcomes including improved joint problem solving and cross-cultural learning with stakeholders suggesting the presence of differential effects. This research makes meaningful contributions to our understanding of the diverse impacts of collaboration, and the degree to which stakeholder engagement is related to more positive outcomes in public school districts.
This article focuses attention on the institutional context of cross-sector collaboration and its effects on partnership management. Drawing on fieldwork and 54 interviews from 2011 to 2013, we investigate an innovative public–nonprofit partnership within a local unit of the National Park Service. The collaboration demonstrates the power and potential of public–nonprofit partnerships while revealing tensions that cross-sector activities can provoke in an organizational field. We focus on two ongoing processes of institutional change in the nonprofit sector that shape these dynamics: (a) managerialism and (b) empowered agency. We illustrate these processes and suggest that they alter the context for partnerships in national parks, particularly with respect to capacity and control. We conclude by offering several propositions about institutional change and the broader implications of a shifting context for public–nonprofit partnerships.
Although public and private management approaches have been frequently analyzed for their outcomes along the lines of efficiency and equity, their relationship to fostering community resilience has been understudied. Public housing has undergone a market-based transition, devolving management and operations of its sites or tenants to private management companies. This multi-site case study evaluates different management contexts to understand how management processes encourage or discourage community resilience. Findings include that management can play an integral role in developing community resilience by providing spaces and opportunities for community engagement and resident empowerment. To better navigate in an era of austerity measures, this article recommends practitioners actively leverage and invest in citizen strengths to build more resilient programs.
Current research in public management generally hypothesizes that the involvement of external stakeholders by governments positively affects the performance of policies. Recent research, however, has demonstrated diminishing returns of involvement on performance, as well as different effects of involvement for different types of stakeholder organizations. The present article combines these insights. We distinguish between professional and client-interest stakeholder organizations, and assess the effect of their involvement on policy performance in terms of client outcomes. The hypotheses are tested using a combined longitudinal data set consisting of a representative sample of 69 Dutch local governments and 3,434 clients of the Social Support Act, which aims to increase the independent functioning of individuals with mental or physical impediments. Multilevel analyses show that only the involvement of professional stakeholder organizations is related to policy performance, with negative returns on policy performance at higher levels of involvement.
In considering how peer relationships can aid street-level bureaucrats in doing their jobs, existing literature has emphasized the importance of peers in providing the social and emotional support required to deal with uncertain and stressful working situations. By applying a social network perspective to examine the innovative behavior of a sample of teachers in a large urban high school, this article highlights the importance of an additional factor: the location of a frontline worker’s position in the larger structure of social connections within the organization. In particular, multilevel statistical models reveal a positive association between the extent to which an experienced teacher is located in a network position that bridges across different organizational subgroups and his or her level of innovation, suggesting that experienced frontline workers may benefit from the information diversity that comes from having multiple and diverse social contacts. More generally, the study highlights the value of complementing individual and organizational insights with network-level perspectives for understanding the discretionary behavior of frontline professionals.
This article investigates the impacts of partnerships on three aspects of nonprofits’ human resources capacity—paid staff, volunteers, and the professional development of staff of nonprofit organizations. Analysis of the seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR) suggests that partnerships may yield some human capacity improvements, that is, increasing the number of staff and opportunities for their professional development. The number of volunteers is not affected by partnerships but rather by other financial resources. The main implication of this research is that partnerships should be formed on the basis of their comparative advantages and focused on identifying suitable partners and cultivating these relations rather than collaborating with more organizations.
Citizen coproduction, that is, citizens’ input to the provision of public services, holds great potential to improve services provided to citizens. It is therefore important to understand why some citizens are more likely to coproduce than others. Citizens’ skills and knowledge to coproduce are argued to be crucial for their contribution to coproduction, but research on this topic is sparse. Building on coproduction theory supplemented with theoretical insights from social psychology theory, the main contribution of this study is to develop theoretical arguments that describe how self-efficacy perception may moderate the influence of knowledge of how to coproduce on citizen coproduction undertaken by individual citizens. A large-N study in the field of education is used to examine this relation.
Government increasingly relies on complex arrangements of providers to deliver public services. There is burgeoning public administration literature on contract management and performance. This literature emphasizes contract management strategies such as contract design and ex post monitoring and relationship building to promote contractor performance. The literature does not examine effects of structural variables on contract performance in ex post contract markets, though work on interorganizational networks has long established that structural factors influence individual performance. This study examines the influence of structural variables on publicly funded contract performance in networked structures of exchange using 5 years of state-level contract data. Network concepts are used to develop contracts as networked exchange structures and develop measures of structural embeddedness for individual programs. Findings include that the structural embeddedness of individual programs influences individual contract performance on quality and cost dimensions over time.
The objective of this study is to provide a more nuanced assessment of the relationship between public sector transparency and trust in government. Specifically, we examine how different tools used to enhance transparency—social media and e-government websites—relate to citizens’ perceptions of government trustworthiness. We then examine how these relationships vary according to how frequently citizens exercise voice. Findings indicate respondents’ use of public sector social media is positively related to perceptions of government trustworthiness. E-government website use lacks a significant relationship to perceptions of government trustworthiness. However, a strong negative relationship emerged between e-government website use and perceptions of trustworthiness as respondents’ frequency of voice increased.
A negative revenue variance (also known as a revenue shortfall) is generated when the actual inflow of revenue falls short of the budgeted revenue. In an environment constrained by a balanced budget requirement, a negative revenue variance may result in a compensating cut in program expenditures. As such, it is imperative to explore the drivers of negative revenue variance. To answer these questions, we take a look at the states’ revenue mix, specifically, the diversification and elasticity of a state’s revenue structure. We establish a quantitative model to capture factors that affect the occurrence and magnitude of negative revenue variance. Our findings suggest that revenue diversification reduces both the occurrence and the size of a negative revenue variance. Elasticity, on the contrary, increases the occurrence but reduces the magnitude of the negative revenue variance. These findings provide additional evidence for the importance of fiscal planning and design of revenue structure that includes consideration of both diversification and elasticity of the revenue portfolio. Specifically, elasticity and diversification can be used in tandem to address an existing revenue shortfall.
Although we still lack objective data on treatment of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgenders (LGBTs) in the federal service, a huge recent survey of federal employees allows us to compare LGBT and heterosexual employees’ perceptions of the treatment they receive. LGBTs have several reasons for more negative perceptions of their treatment: 70 years of federal policies that explicitly discriminated against LGBTs in large and small ways; sizable minorities who still condemn homosexuality even as public attitudes are increasingly accepting; and continuing pay gaps between comparably educated and experienced gay, bisexual, and transgender (GBT) and heterosexual men in the general economy. We examine differences in satisfaction with pay, performance appraisals, promotions, raises, prohibited personnel practices, commitment to diversity, agency leadership, and relationships with supervisors and co-workers. LGBTs are less satisfied with their treatment across the board.
The research presented in this article is a product of my U.S. Supreme Court Fellowship in the Office of the Counselor to the Chief Justice. Founded in 1973 by former Chief Justice Warren Burger, the purpose of the Supreme Court Fellows program is to bring mid-career professionals interested in judicial branch governance to Washington to help advance the mission and goals of the judiciary. Working for an office that serves as an extension of the Chief Justice’s Chambers provided unparalleled access to learn first-hand (a) how the federal courts are managed and operated; (b) how the Chief Justice of the United States directs the managerial, budgetary, and policy priorities of the federal judiciary; and (c) how the Chief Justice and members of the Supreme Court cultivate relationships with members of the legislative and executive branches to secure the resources needed for the federal court system to carry out its constitutional obligations and judicial responsibilities. This article focuses specifically on sequestration, the most important policy and budgetary issue currently affecting the U.S. federal court system, and a topic that was a focal point during my Fellowship year. Currently, extreme budget cuts are prohibiting the federal courts and judicial branch agencies across the country from carrying out their responsibilities to the individuals they serve. If Congress continues enforcing the sequester, the third branch of government will no longer be able to contribute to the American constitutional order in an efficient, effective, and responsive manner. Consequently, the rule of law in the United States is in jeopardy.
Administrators and policymakers increasingly rely on collaborative policymaking groups to inform policy development. While this trend is observed in a wide array of policy domains, it is particularly common in the regulation of natural resource-based industries which requires the simultaneous consideration of an interrelated set of economic, technical, and social factors. In this article, we examine outcomes associated with collaborative policymaking groups involved in informing state aquaculture policy, referred to herein as aquaculture partnerships. We define outcomes here as consequences on relevant contextual conditions (social, political, and environmental) that follow from the work or design of collaborative processes. Using data collected through an online survey of partnership participants (n = 123), we examine individual and procedural factors that significantly associate with partnerships’ positive or negative influence on a set of policy and social outcomes, as perceived by their participants. Overall, we find that participants’ ability to mobilize scientific and technical resources to achieve group objectives, perceptions of procedural fairness, and individual-level learning are all positively associated with partnership influence on policy and/or social outcomes. We conclude our article by highlighting the value of this research for both scholars and practitioners interested in better understanding collaborative group dynamics and outcomes relating thereto.
A top manager’s social capital is considered a critical resource for determining organizational outcomes. However, little is known about the impact of social capital on public organizations’ performance. By dimensionalizing social capital into two subdimensions, this study investigates the impact of a superintendent’s bonding and bridging social capital on the performance of school districts. This study’s findings show that bridging social capital has positive impacts on organizational performance, but in a time of financial difficulty it worsens the negative shocks of the difficulty. Bonding social capital is found to be exactly the opposite. This study argues that choosing between bonding and bridging social capital is not an "either-or" question, and top managers are required to balance the two, depending on the situations that their organizations face.
Collaborative management is thought to enhance policy implementation in urban settings by overcoming governmental fragmentation, creating greater goal consensus, increasing access to resources, and facilitating policy learning. However, empirical studies of this relationship are conspicuously absent, limiting researchers’ ability to predict how collaborative tools will directly and indirectly affect local implementation outcomes. This article investigates the effects of inter- and intralocal collaboration on the implementation of urban sustainability practices, and investigates interaction relationships to test whether two managerial environmental factors—administrative capacity and stakeholder support—influence the effectiveness of collaborative tools. Drawing data from a national survey, the analysis finds evidence that the effectiveness of collaborative tools depends on the policy target, and that administrative capacity and stakeholder support influence the effectiveness of collaboration in policy implementation. These findings have theoretical and practical implications for how public managers utilize collaborative tools in urban sustainability governance.
Past efforts to reform defense acquisition have been based in New Public Management assumptions that certain attributes of program managers (PMs), such as their training and experience levels, are important for improving outcomes. This article documents an effort to examine the relationship between such PM attributes and program outcomes using data drawn from annual Department of Defense Selected Acquisition Reports for major defense acquisition programs between 1997 and 2010. The findings provide little support for these assumptions. They point instead to the potential for institutionalist theories to explain acquisition outcomes, which can enable more nuanced reform policies in the future.
Recent headlines suggest that state revenue volatility has important consequences regarding public administration and the choices state governments make. This work explores the connection between fiscal limits—specifically, tax and expenditure limitations (TELs), balanced-budget rules (BBRs), and super-majority voting requirements (SMRs)—and state revenue volatility. While growth is the most common measure for judging the impact of fiscal constraints, there is a growing literature that argues that volatility, or risk, of state revenue streams is equally important. This work looks at 48 states (Alaska and Nebraska are dropped) over a 37-year period (1969-2005) to assess how fiscal constraints are associated with the volatility of state revenue streams. The evidence suggests that states with strict BBRs and SMRs tend to have lower levels of revenue volatility, while strict TELs tend to be associated with higher levels of revenue volatility. However, given that states often have adopted more than one of these limits, the evidence suggests that strong BBRs have a very strong moderating effect on the impact of TELs. States with super-majority rules tend to start at lower levels of volatility; however, they have little influence on the impact of the other limits.
Beginning with the odd finding that "peace research is just the study of war," this article explores "positive peace" as an important yet neglected notion in public administration. It does this by examining the ideas of Nobel Peace Prize winner, Jane Addams, a pioneer in public administration and peace theory. More than 100 years ago, Addams refined an expansive notion of peace that incorporated social justice and social equity. Addams’s feminist, pragmatist ideas of peace, which we call peaceweaving, emerged from her critique of municipal government and her experience as a settlement worker in Chicago. Her ideas are placed in historical context, and applied to an essential problem facing contemporary peace operations, which is how to prepare troops and other state agents for the seemingly contradictory demands that come along with today’s security problems, both intra- and internationally.
This study analyzes the diffusion of public sector pension reforms across the American states between 1999 and 2012, a policy area notable for its fiscal implications as much as its recent political polarization. Previous enactment in other, non-contiguous states was the largest and most consistent driver of reform. Otherwise, empirical findings suggest that reform antecedents varied by reform type. Existing funding levels reduced the likelihood that states would cut benefits, change pension governance, or reduce cost of living allowances, but had no effect otherwise. Evidence for partisan legislative influence is weak, although Republican control had partial, positive effects on the enactment of pension governance reforms and increases to the retirement age. Across the board, other relevant factors such as constitutional pension protections, collective bargaining rights, and union membership density had no effect. That external contagion pressures have a more robust influence than endogenous conditions raises questions about the future efficacy of pension reform.
This article examines whether the racial context within local communities influences the assignment of disciplinary policies in public schools. First, we consider whether different policies may be assigned to similar target groups across varying racial contexts. Then, we consider whether the racial context moderates the transition from passive representation to active representation among bureaucrats. We draw from two theories of intergroup relations—group contact theory and group threat theory—to help explain the passive-to-active representation link. Using a sample of Georgia public schools, we find that schools rely more on more punitive disciplinary measures in school districts characterized by greater segregation and that this occurs especially among schools with sizable African American student populations. We also find that active representation appears to occur more often in segregated environments, perhaps because of the greater salience of race within these communities.
Reducing employee turnover in the U.S. federal government has been an ongoing goal of policymakers in Washington, D.C. A large literature emerging during the last three decades has identified a range of antecedents of turnover intention and actual turnover, including individual characteristics, employee attitudes, organizational conditions, and managerial practices. Little research has been done, however, on the impact of employee empowerment as a multifaceted managerial approach on turnover options in the public sector. This study proposes a theoretical model of the direct and indirect effects of employee empowerment on turnover intention in the U.S. federal bureaucracy. The model is tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) and data from the U.S. Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS). The empirical results support the hypothesized model. Employee empowerment has negative direct and indirect effects on turnover intention. In addition, the negative effect is greater on the likelihood of intention to leave to another federal agency and intention to leave the federal government than on the intention to retire.
Initiatives to boost public trust of government often rely on better reporting of the efforts and accomplishments of government agencies. But if citizens disbelieve the performance reports of agencies, especially information about good performance, then these initiatives may be do little to enhance trust. We ask the following questions: Do citizens find performance information from government agencies to be credible, or do they trust more in independent sources? Do they believe some agencies more than others? And does credibility of the agency itself as a source depend on the level of performance that is being reported? To address these questions, we designed an experiment to test the credibility of a customer satisfaction index for two U.S. federal agencies, with random allocation of the specific agency (one politically less attractive, the other more so), the source of the index (the federal agency itself or an independent rating firm), as well as the level of performance reported in the index. Results from an online sample of nearly 600 U.S. adults show that credibility is lower for the politically less attractive agency and that citizens are especially doubtful about good performance reported by the government agency itself (as opposed to the independent rating firm). These results suggest that independent sources can boost credibility when reporting good news about government performance.
Given the complexity of their work, street-level bureaucrats rely on their professional networks to access implementation resources and information. Despite the acknowledged importance of these networks, little research exists on how network structure and composition influence frontline performance. This study analyzes a unique data set that includes the professional networks of more than 420 teachers in 21 public schools along with 3 years of administrative data on student test scores and student demographics. Using value-added models derived from the student test data, objective measures of teacher performance were calculated. The results suggest that street-level performance is influenced by both network structure and composition. Thus, the actions of street-level workers are not independent responses to individual dilemmas, but rather are developed and shaped by specific features of the social structure in which the individual bureaucrat is embedded.
There are few who would question that within their everyday discretionary choices and decision making, public servants can develop into consequential and dynamic actors in the policy process. Participation in policy formulation is a particularly meaningful stage within which administrators can make a noticeable impact in shaping public policy. Whether they do so or not often comes down to an individual choice. Yet, while there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence regarding public servants’ involvement in policy formulation, there is relatively less empirical research in the area. In particular, there is little known about the conditions under which some public administrators are more likely than others to seek to become involved in policy formulation. This study explores the effects that stakeholders’ expectations, self-expectations, administrative discretion, and tenure have on administrators’ predispositions to seek opportunities to participate in the formulation of public policy issues they find important.
The implementation of organizational change is a considerable challenge for public organizations. Recent studies have highlighted the importance of leadership in change processes in public organizations, but limited empirical evidence exists. Moreover, the contribution of change leadership in organizational change is likely to be dependent on the particular characteristics of public organizations. This study concerns the relationship between direct supervisors’ change leadership and the commitment to change of change recipients, and examines to what extent this relationship is related to the bureaucratic features that often characterize public organizations. The findings indicate that change leadership contributes to change recipients’ commitment to change by providing high-quality change communication and stimulating employee participation in the implementation of change. However, the findings also indicate that red tape perceptions of change recipients and a low reliance on a transformational leadership style impede the potential of change leadership to bring about employee participation in the implementation of change.
This article presents a case study of the Louisiana Broadband Technology Opportunity Program (BTOP). An initial consideration would portray the events described herein as a policy implementation failure, but the investigation revealed something more profound. Extensive interviews and investigation of official documents, including transcripts of meetings, revealed the ambiguity of failure and the invisibility of power in administrative contexts. Hendrik Wagenaar’s argument that administrative action is underlined by an administrator’s deep understanding of the rules is used here to show the important relationship between the visible aspects of legible rules and the invisible dimension of using the rules. The Louisiana BTOP grant highlights the important tension between closure through administrative rationality and the resistance to such closure through channels of contestation.
Public encounters, the micro-level relational process of face-to-face contact between public professionals and community members, are argued to have a meaningful effect on the outcomes of governance activities. In turn, the specific characteristics of these encounters are constrained by institutionalized macro-level structures, yet the variety of contexts and associated relational styles have not been carefully explored. Therefore, in this article, public encounters are considered in light of a particular governance typology to (a) clearly differentiate macro-level contexts, (b) clearly differentiate the associated styles of relating in each type of public encounter, (c) describe the ways in which these interactions hinder or foster productive processes and outcomes, and (d) identify a preferred approach for potentially more fruitful results. In this way, the article provides a theoretical platform for future analysis of empirical cases. This theoretical analysis reveals the pathological dynamics in public encounters produced by typical approaches to governance and offers an alternative approach that may produce more effective public encounters. Specifically, using the method of integration described by Progressive Era scholar Mary Follett, we argue fruitful public encounters entail a relational disposition, a cooperative style of relating, a collaborative mode of association, and a method for achieving integration that enables constructive conflict through disintegration of a priori positions; collaborative discovery of facts and values; revaluation of desires and methods through dialogue; creative and integrative determinations; collective responsibility; and experientially founded commitment.
Nonprofit enterprises may play an important role in revenue diversification from a government perspective, especially when local governments suffer from revenue shortages. This study attempts to examine whether an increasing number of nonprofit enterprises influence revenue diversification, as measured by the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI), as well as volatility using a panel data set from 2007 to 2012. The results indicate that local governments can secure more diversified and increased income sources as more nonprofit enterprises are created throughout the county. Moreover, nonprofit enterprises with stable business categories contribute more and therefore actively improve revenue conditions of local governments.
The present study seeks to answer the question how, and to what extent, environmental turbulence—measured as percentage change in the number of pupils—affects organizational performance. We examine how different managerial networking orientations moderate the effect of percentage change in number of pupils on school performance. We hypothesize that percentage change in the number of pupils negatively affects school performance. We further hypothesize that different managerial networking orientations moderate the effect of percentage change in the number of pupils on school performance. The hypotheses are tested on a dataset of Dutch primary schools (n = 546), which includes information about school principals, school characteristics, and school performance. Results of the analyses show that our measure of environmental turbulence negatively affects school performance. Moreover, internally oriented networking activities (team involvement and networking for coproduction), rather than externally oriented networking activities, attenuate the negative effect of environmental turbulence on school performance.
Although popular thought often portrays patronage and political connections as the primary factors associated with bureaucratic advancement, a long history of merit and performance-based reforms have sought to minimize the influence of politics on promotion in government. Although a great deal of research investigates how merit reforms have influenced perceptions of advancement at the federal level, little research investigates the factors individuals perceive as important for advancing in local government. This research seeks to understand municipal government managers’ views of the role of merit and political connections in getting ahead, and how those views vary by sex and race. Results indicate that sex, entrepreneurial work environment, department type, and previous private sector work experience are significantly related to the level of importance municipal managers ascribe to the role of merit for getting ahead. Race, entrepreneurial work environment, department type, age, previous non-profit work experience, type of government, and right to work policies at the state level are significantly related to the perceived importance of connections for advancing one’s career. We conclude with a discussion of the findings.
This article attempts to evaluate the role the legislative budgetary oversight plays in enhancing budget transparency. This relationship has not been empirically tested so far. For a sample of 93 countries surveyed by International Budget Partnership in 2010, we show that, as expected, legislative budgetary oversight has a positive influence on budget transparency. Besides, the legal system, political competition, and economic level are also found to affect budget transparency. As an additional analysis, we investigate the determinants of legislative budgetary oversight along the budgetary process. In this vein, the type of legislature, legal system, Supreme Audit Institution’s budgetary oversight, economic level, and democratic level determine legislative budgetary oversight.
This article recognizes that institutional survival alone is an important, but ultimately insufficient, goal for public and non-profit organizations. Instead, the article approaches organizational sustainability as a two-level concept that includes both institutional survival, as a baseline for sustainability, and intergenerational or longer term sustainability, understood as the ability of public institutions to persist and fulfill their purpose in the long run. The article is based on the findings of research conducted on a variety of public and non-profit cultural organizations, including museums, music and performing arts, and literature. However, the case of museums is used to illustrate two narratives of intergenerational sustainability: institutional resilience and institutional distinctiveness. The article notes that these narratives co-exist, although at times they contradict each other. It is the task of museum managers to reconcile the tensions embedded in these narratives via sustainable management practices. The broader implication of the study is that truly long-term sustainability, which secures the rights of future generations, requires sustainable stewardship today, and organizational sustainability should be viewed not as an outcome but rather as a process and an ethic.
Public management literature has previously examined privatization in which government contracts with private firms or other organizations to provide goods or services to the public. However, privatization of organizational structure through the creation of special purpose organizations remains relatively underexplored. This study examines the policy consequences of privatizing state lottery organizations by comparing the revenue returned to state governments from lotteries managed by independent state agencies to lotteries managed by privatized special purpose organizations. Using data on the organizational structure and revenue returns of the state lottery administrations in the United States from 1985-2008, fixed effects analyses demonstrate that independent state lottery agencies are more effective than privatized special purpose administrations. The revenue costs of lottery administrative privatization are robust to multiple measurements and specifications, and suggest that choosing a privatized organizational structure can cost states tens of millions of dollars in lost lottery revenue annually. Special purpose lottery administrations maximize returns to state governments in average-sized states with low African American populations. State-agency lottery administrations maximize returns to state governments in small- or large-sized states with high per capita income and high population density. Implications of state special purpose administrations and future research opportunities are discussed.
Although existing studies uncovered how controversial policies are adopted across American States, little is known as to how regulatory policies are diffused that are technically complex and yet have low political salience. Drawing on existing theories of policy adoption and diffusion, this article identifies the determinants of building code mandates in U.S. state governments. Using original data from state legislatures and administrative agencies from 1980 to 2006, this article finds that both emulation from neighboring states and innovation within the state government increase the likelihood of statewide building regulations. Code adoption follows a hybrid diffusion pattern, whereby external and internal mechanisms occur simultaneously rather than independently from each other.
This article examines the tension between transparency and privacy that public administrators face as they build multi-agency integrated data systems and work with researchers to harness the power of administrative data to inform policymaking. Analysis of qualitative data from 71 interviews with administrators and university researchers in four State Longitudinal Data System (SLDS) states (Maryland, Texas, Virginia, and Washington) and the U.S. Department of Education indicates the important effect that executive leadership, consistent and sound legal advice, and assessment of risk tolerance at the agency level can have on the structure and function of the overall project. Learning how to navigate this challenge and foster agency–researcher partnerships is fundamental for generating evidence-based research in public administration and policy.
The concept of frames or framing, especially cast as "frame analysis," has an established history in public policy. Taking off from the work of Donald Schön and Martin Rein, we develop the idea of policy analytic framing, the more dynamic of the two terms, in ways that strengthen what we see as its promise for a more process-oriented and politically sensitive understanding of the activities it is used to characterize. We argue that such an approach needs to engage the following aspects of the work that framing does: sense-making; selecting, naming, and categorizing; and storytelling. In addition, frame theorizing needs to engage not only the way issues are framed but also the intertwining of framing and frame-makers’ identities, and the meta-communicative framing of policy processes.
During the years that have elapsed since the publication of Moore’s and Bozeman’s quite different theories of public value, a great deal of attention has been focused on the public value(s) topic. In this essay, we discuss the evolution of the respective approaches, but particular attention is given to the criteria Bozeman established as "public values failure criteria," a set of ideas juxtaposed against and influenced by market failure criteria. We suggest two new criteria worth adding to the original Bozeman model. The first of these is related to Moore’s work on the "public sphere." We offer a somewhat different definition of "public sphere," one that seems compatible with public values failure criteria. The second criterion pertains to "progressive opportunity," a criterion taking into account the injurious potential of social inequities. We show the two criteria are especially relevant to the concerns in contemporary political economy disputes and that the two desiderata reinforce one another.
Bureaucrats have considerable formal policymaking authority. Yet policymaking discussions often overlook the role that bureaucrats play in the policy process. Current theories suggest that bureaucratic policymaking outputs are shaped largely by political signals sent by elected officials. While these external influences are crucial, current theories understate the role of internal organizational dynamics. This study builds on the bureaucratic response and organizational attention literatures to differentiate internally organized attention from externally organized attention in public agencies. It then conceptualizes two ways that public managers can internally organize agency attention to influence formal bureaucratic policymaking in the context of contracting and procurement. This study adds to the public management literature by showing how internal managerial strategies and activities can influence bureaucratic outputs.
This analysis explores the options for a theoretical model to guide regional collaboration by local governments that is both politically feasible and consistent with core public administration values. The analysis first examines the research on the adoption, implementation and performance of political consolidation. We then examine the theory and research that underlie functional consolidation and assess both types in lieu of the values of public administration. We find that local government managers and elected officials need a theoretical model for regional collaboration that addresses a key obstacle to service consolidation among local governments: the perceived loss of political power and control associated with consolidation efforts. We suggest multilevel governance theory and the concept of shared sovereignty offer an approach to regional problems with an eye to the political as well as administrative issues, and with instruments that promote core public administration values. The concept of shared sovereignty that underpins the regional collaboration of the countries in Europe has both descriptive and predictive theoretical potential as a multilevel governance theory. The EU functions from a web of interlaced, interdependent agreements to share sovereignty in ways that manage political issues, economic factors, and administrative values, and in a fashion aligned with core PA values in the US.
In public service motivation (PSM) literature, PSM is assumed to have a positive effect on performance. Even though frequently mentioned, this assumption has proved difficult to verify empirically. In this article, we argue that individual interpretations of what it means to serve the public interest need to be considered to get a grip on the concept of PSM and its behavioral consequences. As interpretations of "the public interest" vary depending on the roles people occupy in society, so too does the meaning of PSM. A theoretical argument is developed that helps to clarify the meaning of PSM and its relationship with performance by introducing insights derived from identity theory. This is illustrated empirically by a study of veterinarian inspectors. The theoretical, empirical, and practical relevance of this new approach to PSM is pointed out.
The contextual nature of management approaches is important for understanding administrative centrality in governance networks in the public values process. This is of particular concern in a policy domain such as community development, which is characterized by the extensive involvement of nongovernmental actors in determining what ought to be done as well as carrying out those objectives. Using qualitative data, I explore the management approaches and policy tools used to fulfill Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) objectives in two different management contexts to analyze administrative centrality in governance networks in the public values process. Two different approaches emerge, suggesting different administrative trajectories to public values authorization and creation. Furthermore, the findings suggest that administrative centrality in the public values process may be influenced by the management context in which local agencies are embedded.
Good governance codes usually end with a list of public values no one could oppose. A recurrent issue is that not all of these values—however desirable they are—can be achieved at the same time. With its focus on performance and procedural values of governance, this article zooms in on the conflict between two different types of values, signifying and exemplifying how output and outcome on one hand and the process of governance on the other may coincide or collide. The main research question is, "What is the nature of value conflict in public governance and what specific conflicts between performance and procedural values do public actors perceive?" A literature review and two case studies involving aldermen and the most senior public administrators in public governance set out to answer these questions. The most frequently perceived conflict is between lawfulness and transparency in procedure, on one hand, and the attainment of effectiveness and efficiency as performance values on the other.
In this article, we examine the legacy of four progressive reforms intended to secure "good" government—the model city charter, the council-manager plan, city management professionalism, and bureaucratic service delivery. Our analysis integrates research by historians, political scientists, sociologists, and public administration scholars, and provides a unique multidisciplinary perspective on the legacy of success and adaptation of the municipal reform movement. We use Hofstadter’s concept of a reform "impulse" in American political culture to frame our analysis. We conclude with four observations on the future of municipal reform, ultimately arguing that the impulse to "reform" continues to be a dominant driver across both local government management and institutions.
Contracting for complex human services has presented the field of public administration with a number of difficult and enduring questions. Emergency medical services (EMS) provide an ideal arena for further investigation into this topic. We utilize a relational contracting framework to examine key questions associated with trust in the collaborative provision of EMS. The findings indicate that contract specificity, provider performance, and administrative professionalization influence trust in these relationships.
Although empirical evidence abounds on the determinants of intergovernmental transfers in the decentralized context, not many studies focus on the career and educational characteristics of local elected administrators. As local governments around the world are assuming increasingly more revenue authorities and expenditure responsibilities where local administrators play the role of managers as well as politicians, examining how local fiscal strategies are formulated is of critical importance for designing and managing intergovernmental fiscal relations. Utilizing fiscal data on Korean local governments from 2007 through 2010, this article provides some evidence that local governments with elected administrators who have previous business careers are less effective in securing external subsidies, but better at raising revenues from their own sources, relative to those with political experience. We also report that local administrators who graduated from the nation’s top universities are substantially more capable of attracting subsidies. Our findings suggest that local managers’ individual characteristics are an integral component of the game between the central and subnational governments in the distribution of intergovernmental transfers.
Public values are being promoted as a core concept in the study of public administration, in particular, in discourses surrounding Moore’s public value management and Bozeman’s public value failure. This article outlines the approaches to the concept of values and public values. Particular attention is paid to the founding distinction between facts and values, which proves to be less clear than usually assumed. After discussing a range of possible characteristics of public values, an encompassing definition is attempted, which consequently has to accommodate opposing characteristics. It is concluded that the concept of public value is a fuzzy concept, and that is probably "as good as it gets."
The study of managerial networking has been growing in the field of public administration; a field that analyzes how managers in open system organizations interact with different external actors and organizations. Coincident with this interest in managerial networking is the use of self-reported survey data to measure managerial behavior in building and maintaining networks. One predominant approach is to generate factor indices of networking activity from ordinal scales. However, when public managers answer survey questions with ordinal scales to describe their networking activities, the answers may be subject to various response biases. Consequently, the use of factor indices may lead to biased measurements that misrepresent managerial networking. As an alternative, we build on studies that apply the item response theory (IRT) as a measurement strategy and propose a Bayesian alternative. To tap managers’ latent effort put in networking activity, the Bayesian Generalized Partial Credit Model allows us to select a one-dimensional networking scale from multiple ordinal survey items. Using 12 such items in a mail survey of nearly 1,000 American hospital managers, we demonstrate the advantage of using the Bayesian IRT model over factor-analytic models in a substantive test of how managerial networking affects organizational performance.
Social media technologies present a new way for government agencies to connect with, and potentially collaborate with, their residents. Police departments (PDs) are a setting ripe for use of social media as an extension of their community policing efforts. In this article, we explore the use of social media by PDs in the top 10 most populous U.S. cities. We analyze police-initiated posts on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube over a 3-month period to determine what accounts PDs use, if they use social media for information transmission or interaction, and if they use the accounts for dialogue that might make collaboration possible. We find that while PDs have and use social media, and while citizens are responsive, there is much less interaction in part due to nonresponsiveness of PDs themselves. We thus conclude that though the existence of some PD-resident dialogue is promising, very little was collaborative.
While business and psychology researchers have strived to identify effective strategies to reduce occupational stress, public administration scholars have paid insufficient attention to this issue. This article examines the role of motivational bases in the stressor–wellbeing relationship, a nascent research area in business and psychology, focusing on a particular type of motivation that is salient in public organizations: public service motivation (PSM). Based on a survey of 412 police officers from a large metropolitan city in eastern China, this study finds that PSM moderates the relationship between work stressors and individual wellbeing. Respondents with higher levels of PSM can better handle the increase of stressors so that their physical and mental wellbeing will decrease more slowly. Overall, respondents with higher levels of PSM tend to experience higher mental wellbeing but lower physical wellbeing than their low-PSM colleagues.
The scarcity of citizen involvement in the public sphere is an ongoing concern within the literature on democratic citizenship. This study examines two dimensions of engagement—attentiveness and participation—in several political voice activities, looking at citizens working in the public and non-profit sectors in comparison with private-sector employees. Government employees serve the public interest by providing public services in various ways, but they are also individual citizens with varying values, opinions, and attitudes. How does this dual role shape their civic engagement behaviors and habits of political attentiveness? Are they more politically attentive or more likely to engage in political voice activities than individuals working in other sectors? How do non-profit workers fare? Are they more similar to public workers or private workers with regard to participation in these activities? Using the Current Population Survey (CPS) Special Supplement on civic engagement, the analyses here indicate that both government and non-profit employees are significantly more likely to engage in political voice activities than those working in the private sector. By focusing on political voice activities, knowledge, and media use, the study contributes to the literature by providing a more comprehensive profile of individual participation by sector. The findings generate new questions about what such participation might mean for democratic citizenship.
Twenty-five years after Nobel Laureate economist Robert Solow observed "seeing computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics," the question of productivity gains from information technologies (IT) remains unanswered. This study examines the role of IT on one of the major indicators of police productivity: crime clearance rates. Relying on a two-wave cohort panel research design of roughly 700 police agencies, the study reveals that significant IT advances were made between the pre and post time periods in the provision of computerized crime data, crime analysis capabilities, and real-time communications. Nonetheless, using multiple hierarchical regression analysis, the study provides robust evidence for suggesting that computerization had little influence on productivity gains. The results of this study raise several very important issues pertaining to the goals of public organizations. While this study is limited to policing, a narrow time period, and internal IT systems, the results are nonetheless noteworthy. The research illustrates that conventional explanations for the IT productivity paradox do little to explain the shortfall. In closing, the article offers rival, but yet untested, explanations that may prove worthy of additional research.
The scholarship on contracting generally argues that markets for social services are weak and lacking in competition. Using data gathered from Florida’s largest social service agency, the Department of Children and Families, this article adds to the discussion by constructing a more rigorous measure of competition that accounts for the quality of bidding entities. The findings indicate that while the measures used in earlier studies align reasonably well with the raw number of initial responders to competitive solicitations, they tend to overestimate competition when the quality component is included in the analysis. That is, social service markets may be even weaker than previously reported. Furthermore, an examination of the relationship between competition and performance fails to find a significant association.
Public engagement is an umbrella term that encompasses numerous methods for bringing people together to address issues of public importance. In this article, we focus on direct public engagement in local government, exploring what we know and proposing areas where more research is needed. We first define direct public engagement and distinguish it from related concepts and terms. We then introduce a simple framework for exploring variations in direct public engagement at the local level. Next, we use this framework to examine the extant literature on why, how, and to what effect direct public engagement in local government is used. Finally, we identify gaps in the literature and propose a research agenda for the future.
Public managers and elected officials are generally restricted from supporting election campaigns with public resources. In the case of legislative referenda, the public stakeholders responsible for putting a policy question on the ballot must play a neutral role when acting in their official capacity. A system where private money supports public goals has emerged as regulatory provisions simultaneously restrict direct private giving to elected officials and public support for election campaigns. Using campaign finance disclosures, election results, and municipal bond issuance data, we find that post-election fees paid to firms making political contributions are significantly higher than for non-contributors. The finding improves the understanding of how private dollars support public policy outcomes, raises questions about the circumvention of laws restricting the use of public resources in election campaigns, and informs ongoing consideration of the need for additional regulatory action and disclosure requirements to address issue committee campaign contributions.
This study examines the relationship between property tax caps and citizens’ perceptions of local government service quality using data from the 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Hoosier Surveys conducted by the Bowen Center for Public Affairs at Ball State University. These surveys include questions asking respondents whether the quality of local government services in various categories has improved, declined, or stayed about the same over the previous year. Analysis of these data using generalized ordinal logistic regression indicates that urban residents of counties experiencing relatively large revenue cuts from property tax caps are significantly more likely to report declines in the quality of fire and police protection. Urban and rural residents of high-impact counties are significantly more likely to report declines in the quality of schools. Citizens’ perceptions of road maintenance, which is funded through shared state gas tax revenues rather than property taxes, are not significantly influenced by the impact of property tax caps.
Although transformational leadership and whistle-blowing have been extensively examined, only one article was found to explore the relationship between these factors. This is despite research suggesting a connection between leadership practices and whistle-blowing attitudes. This article built on and extended leadership and whistle-blowing theories by investigating the relationship between transformational leadership and whistle-blowing attitudes, as well as how this association might be mediated by public service motivation (PSM) and organizational commitment. Furthermore, the examination was conducted on local, state, and federal government employees in the United States. The findings indicated that transformational leadership had a direct, positive impact on whistle-blowing attitudes, as well as an indirect one through organizational commitment. In addition, PSM had an indirect effect on whistle-blowing attitudes through organizational commitment. On the other hand, PSM was not found to mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and attitudes concerning blowing the whistle.
Among the plethora of public values, one special class is that of "regime values." This notion plays a central role in the constitutional approach to public administration mainly developed by the late John A. Rohr. In this article, an attempt is made to assess the viability of Rohr’s concept of regime values and its applicability outside the United States. After brief overviews of the constitutional approach in general and Rohr’s use of the concept of regime values in particular, it is argued that Rohr’s conceptualizations of "regime" and "values" are too narrow and result in ambiguities within the concept of "regime values" itself. The applicability of the concept of "regime values" is unnecessarily affected by the typically American reference points Rohr uses and can best be improved, it is suggested, by treating "regime values" more frankly as an inherently normative concept.
While effectual decision making has been studied in the private sector entrepreneurship literature as a way to explain the entrepreneurial start-up process, it also has potential application in the public and nonprofit sectors. Effectuation can be used to explain the decision process used by actors in the nonprofit sector, particularly in understanding how social entrepreneurs make decisions during the development of a nonprofit or social venture. We distinguish between causal and effectual decision making and illustrate the latter through two case studies of nonprofit start-up in the community development arena. These studies indicate that effectual decision making is particularly suited to the start-up social entrepreneurship venture. Differences between causal and effectual decision making influence the way actors prepare for the future and have pedagogical implications for how we teach social entrepreneurship. Training social entrepreneurs in effectual decision making has potential to better mirror real-world applications and may increase a venture’s ultimate success. Effectuation could also potentially explain decision making in other public arenas.
Employee empowerment practices have been widely adopted in public organizations in Europe, the Pacific Rim, and North America. In this study, employee empowerment is conceptualized as a multifaceted approach composed of various practices aimed at sharing information, resources, rewards, and authority with lower level employees. Self-Determination Theory is used to theorize about the effects of these different empowerment practices on job satisfaction. The results of the empirical analysis, based on 2010 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) data, indicate that empowerment practices aimed at promoting self-determination (i.e., sharing information about goals and performance, providing access to job-related knowledge and skills, and granting discretion to change work processes) have positive and sizable effects on job satisfaction. Conversely, empowerment practices that undermine autonomy (i.e., offering contingent-based rewards) have no meaningful effect on job satisfaction.
Based on data drawn from the Office of Personnel Management’s Federal Human Capital Survey, as well as from data provided in written interviews, this study offers empirical evidence that followership mediates the relationship that exists between participative leadership and public organization performance.
The more prepared people are, the less harm they will suffer when disaster strikes. Yet anecdotal and empirical evidence shows that people overestimate their preparedness and are underprepared. While a robust literature has matured around hazards, risk, and vulnerability, and disaster policy, politics, and management, the literature about individual preparedness is much more limited and inconsistent. We know little about why people prepare (or why they do not), and what would make them prepare more. As a result, public managers are at a loss about how to design effective preparedness programs. In this paper, we survey the literature on preparedness to crystallize the gaps in our understanding of when and how citizens react to the threat of disaster. We then examine and compare the views of risk and preparedness held by individuals and government officials drawing on insights from a 4-year study that involved three national surveys and intensive studies in two communities. We use this analysis to address two questions: What do citizens think and do about risks and preparedness, and why? How do local government officials understand what citizens think and do about risks and preparedness?
This study examines the hypothesis that a community’s heterogeneous demands for public service, represented by a community’s income inequality and racial-ethnic diversity, together with its level of political engagement, help explain the density of nonprofits in a local area. Using data on more than 3,000 U.S. counties, empirical analyses reveal that communities with a higher level of income inequality and political engagement tend to have more nonprofits per resident than otherwise similar communities. This pattern holds for the nonprofit sector overall and for 6 of the 10 major subsectors examined. These findings suggest that nonprofit organizations may fill a gap in the delivery of public services, especially when a community has a great variety of social and economic needs. This study thus highlights the role of income inequality as a factor in explaining the density of nonprofit organizations at the local level. Implications for public policy and administration are discussed.
Using a sample of U.S. counties, this article explores the relationships between community level resilience, represented by capacity (social capital), information (uses of technology), and motivation (perception of threats to county,) on the one hand, and county levels of emergency management (EM) collaboration on the other. We hypothesize that the greater relative presence of bridging social capital networks will be associated with greater levels of collaboration in county EM planning, while the greater relative presence of bonding social capital networks will be associated with lower levels of collaboration. Results indicate that first there are two collaborative environments to assess—the formal and informal—and, second, the presence of political networks (seen as predominantly bridging) relative to the presence of religious networks (viewed as predominantly bonding) has a significant and positive effect on informal collaboration levels, but not on formal collaboration levels. These findings provide insight into how community context in the form of network social capital matters for collaborative EM planning efforts. These results add to prior research that focuses primarily on organizational and institutional sources of collaboration and much less on the community level contextual factors at play.
For the past two decades, many developing countries have begun to experiment with results-oriented reforms to make their governments more competitive. However, very few studies explore the question of the applicability and appropriateness of Western-oriented reforms in non-Western contexts. Based on theories of new institutionalism and institutional logics, this article examines some of the organizational, cultural, and political assumptions that are implicit in Western-styled reforms; how they may conflict with the institutional contexts of many developing countries; and how the conflicts may impact reform strategies and results. The article then recommends how future comparative research can focus more on inter-institutional layering problems. It also suggests a few hypotheses for future empirical works that are interested in exploring further the dynamics between institutional gap, implementation strategies, and leadership characteristics of results-oriented reforms.
In this article, the local government (LG) administrative implications of the movement from government to governance, involving multiple ties and externalized services operations, are examined from a cross-national perspective. Derived from a series of studies of LGs in multilevel systems, this article examines key patterns of cross-agency administration. First, administrative intergovernmental relations (IGR) are defined. Then common trends in local governments in their IGR arenas are identified. Next, changing managerial paradigms in outward as well as inward directions are introduced. Then a series of managerial challenges, including system development, IGR politics, collaborative knowledge development, network management, and interoperability are introduced. A research agenda for multilevel system local governments in IGR in the governance era concludes the article.
This study examines gender dimensions of managerial values at the local level of government. We test for alternative explanations, in particular whether the organization and profession are socializing forces with similar or larger influence on managerial values. The data for this study come from Phase IV of the National Administrative Studies Project (NASP IV). The dataset includes the U.S. senior local government managers in communities with populations over 50,000. We expect the values of men and women managers to differ even when we account for professional and organizational forces. Preliminary findings support this hypothesis. Women not only differed from men on the values of equity, long-term outlook, sense of community, and representation, but also differed with respect to the values of efficiency, effectiveness, and expertise. We discuss these findings and their implications.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has used a partnership planning model of implementation to address the protection of critical infrastructure and key resources (CIKR). The partnership relies upon existing regulators and operators to secure CIKR with little ability of DHS to compel action. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security acts to define and draw attention to tasks related critical infrastructure protection. This article analyzes Government Accountability Office reports to characterize variations in success of the partnership by assessing the extent to which DHS has addressed key components of partnership planning: creating a structure that encourages collaboration, establishing trust across partners, monitoring partners’ performance, attending to differences in partners’ organizational culture, identifying and leveraging existing relationships among partners, and instilling a sense of a common mission in the partnership. The findings underscore the limitations of partnership approaches in addressing complex problems that lack strong leadership and clear policy goals.
For passive representation to translate into active representation, bureaucrats must have discretion. Despite its importance to representative bureaucracy theory, though, discretion has received little empirical attention in public administration. We seek to address this shortcoming by examining the determinants of bureaucratic discretion, paying particular attention to how the demographic characteristics of clients and bureaucrats interact to influence the amount of discretion that individual bureaucrats possess. Specifically, we examine whether the amount of discretion that minority bureaucrats have is positively related to the percentage of an organization’s clients who are from the same minority group. We argue that there are three reasons to expect a positive relationship: client demand, managerial deference to bureaucratic expertise, and bureaucratic appropriation. Our findings suggest that a positive relationship exists for African American bureaucrats, but not for Hispanic bureaucrats.
This article examines three major characteristics—themes, research methods, and authorship—of Korean public administration research written in the Korean language during 1999 to 2009. It suggests that this research has evolved and advanced both quantitatively and qualitatively. Recent Korean scholarship can be characterized as consisting of more reform-oriented topics, more quantitative methods, and more diversified authorship. These characteristics were partially caused by increasing social demand for government reform and growing emphasis on methodological rigor in public administration research, as well as increased government research funding for graduate programs. This also concludes that the Korean public administration research has advanced greatly in past decades but needs a better thematic and methodological balance as well as balance between theoretical and prescriptive studies.
Employees with a desire to help others provide benefits to their organization, clients, and fellow workers, but what do they get in return? We argue that the prosocial desire to help others is a basic human goal that matters to an individual’s happiness. We employ both longitudinal and cross-sectional data to demonstrate that work-related prosocial motivation is associated with higher subjective well-being, both in terms of current happiness and life satisfaction later in life. Cross-sectional data also suggest that perceived social impact (the belief that one’s job is making a difference) is even more important for happiness than the prosocial desire to help. The results show that the relationship between prosocial motivation and happiness is not limited to government employees, suggesting that in this aspect of altruistic behavior, public and private employees are not so different.
This article presents a description of the discipline of public administration in Taiwan and a survey of research on the subject. A total of 1,090 articles appearing in five public administration journals during the period of 1990 to 2010 were examined from three aspects: authorship and productivity, research subject and keyword, and research purpose and method. Comparisons were made across time (1990-1999, 2000-2010) and by type of journal (TSSCI and Non-TSSCI). Research findings indicate that, in Taiwan, the focus of public administration research has been on such topics as public policy, new public management (NPM), public organization management, and intergovernmental relations. The style of scholarship is typically not empirical, though there is evidence of change here over time. In a broader perspective, public administration research has been conducted in an increasingly very competitive circumstance. It is argued that there will be ample opportunity for dialogue between scholars of public administration in Taiwan and the international community in the field.
Conflict is part of every organization. Scholars have studied the effects of conflict on organization dynamics and their outputs. Literature suggests that not all conflict is detrimental for organizations—some conflict actually helps bolster and refresh organizations. One concern for organizations is the vertical strategic alignment of management strategies. Vertical cohesion or conflict impacts an organization’s ability to reach optimal performance. In the setting of English local governments, this study uses vertical strategic differences among two levels of management as the measure of conflict in organizations to examine, one, how it impacts organization performance, and two, if conflict has a nonlinear relationship with performance. Results indicate that conflict on single strategies has no bearing on organization performance. Total strategy or multidimensional conflict, however, negatively impacts performance. There is little support for a nonlinear relationship between conflict and performance. Further analyses indicate that the negative impact of conflict is amplified for smaller organizations.
When seeking to accomplish public ends in a prudent manner, administrators are occasionally put in precarious situations that require a degree of metis. Metis is a distinct form of knowledge characterized by a mixture of wile and wisdom and is valuable because it can offer viable alternatives for solving complex problems in contingent situations. Individualized problems often require administrators to forego routinized recommendations and pursue a path to prudence through shrewd thinking and action. However, if metis is not properly contained, it runs the risk of sinking under the weight of unscrupulous motivation and of negatively affecting the legitimacy of administrative action. What is important is that a crafty ethos is bound within a proper sphere. This is why a bounded metis informed by a modified version of intermediate scrutiny may provide a meaningful guide that legitimizes the ability of administrators to handle ambiguous situations in a prudent manner.
The study of public values (PVs) is generating growing interest in public administration and public management, yet many challenges and unanswered questions remain. For the study of PVs to progress, we need to go beyond the traditional boundaries of public administration and management, to explore how and why scholars in different disciplines use the concept, and how and where approaches to the concept differ and overlap. This article represents the first step in that effort. Specifically, the article uses a meta-analysis of 397 PVs publications from across 18 disciplines to generate a preliminary map of the PVs research terrain. Our findings show an increasing number of PVs publications over the decades, but with particular growth since 2000. Moreover, although PVs research is flourishing in public administration, it appears to be subsiding in other disciplines. Implications of these and other findings are discussed.
The desire to increase domestic revenue mobilization has made tax reform a priority for governments in many developing countries. Addressing the tax problem, however, is often a complex process that involves reforming the tax system, as well as setting up effective administrative structures to administer that system. Many see the revenue authority (RA) model as the solution to these problems. Developing an RA model in Ghana began in the mid 1980s; it was not, however, fully operational and integrated until 2010. Using social learning theory, we argue that Ghana’s successful readoption of the RA model can be attributed to the lessons learned both in its own first attempts and from the successful tax reform experiences of other countries.
Scholars have suggested that the delineation of a field’s "big" questions is critical for its cohesive and practical intellectual growth. Instilling a habitual practice of focusing inquiries on fundamental questions is particularly warranted for fledgling areas of research. Currently, while there is already a rich body of literature that addresses administrative, computer, information, and cyber ethics, only a limited number of writings discuss ethical problems specifically within the e-government context. It can be argued that the e-government condition introduces a distinctive type of ethical problems; questions regarding which have yet to be properly framed. This article suggests five critical questions of e-government ethics at the organizational level that justify notable academic attention.
This article examines the use of performance information by public managers. It reviews literature on the impact of attitudes and social norm and puts forward a psychological-cognitive model based on the theory of planned behavior. The article finds support for this model emphasizing that performance data use is a goal-directed, reasoned action. Another critical result is that managers who consciously intend to use performance data also make sure that the data in their division are of good quality which, in turn, fosters information use. These findings indicate that—in addition to organizational routines—cognitive factors are promising starting points for interventions to foster managers’ data use. The article is based on survey data from German cities.
Organizational socialization is the process by which newcomers adapt to their organization and learn how to become productive organizational members. Organizations employ tactics such as classroom training, mentoring, orientation sessions, and on-the-job training to assist new employees in their transition. At the same time, newcomers engage in their own proactive efforts to seek information and establish ties with experienced organizational members who have access to valued resources. While scholarship has noted the importance of both socialization and employee intraorganizational networks within public sector organizations, little research has focused on these areas. This article links the organizational socialization and social network frameworks by examining how the networks of new employees in a state agency change over time. Based on our findings, we offer implications for rewarding core advisors, mentoring programs, and fostering interactions between newcomers and experienced organizational members.
This article is about the specificity of change management in public organizations. We analyze change management in a core-governmental type of public organization, that is, ministerial departments. Using six case studies of ministerial reorganizations, we address the question what specific characteristics the conditions for successful organizational change can have there. The case studies show that some of the success conditions did apply to these public organizations, some could be refined and specified, and others did not apply. The case studies also show that the conditions for successful organizational change were not the major explanations for success and failure of change. Change management in this type of public organization is not simply a straightforward application of generic management science insights.
This article evaluates the utilization of workforce planning by municipalities across the United States with data derived from a survey of local government human resource professionals. The research demonstrates that certain aspects of workforce planning such as assessments of employee retirement, long-term recruitment and retention, and training and development have been integrated into the human resource functions of several municipalities. The authors also find that local governments that recognize the importance of training and development, information management, managing diversity, unions, and council–manager forms of government are more progressive in their implementation of workforce planning initiatives. However, many local governments still fail to recognize the opportunities that comprehensive workforce planning presents in developing and achieving the strategic goals of their organizations and managing human capital, especially given the political and economic climates.
This research explores the relative effectiveness of a comprehensive set of local economic development incentives and focuses on two questions: What contributions do common development tools make to the economic health of municipalities?; and, Are there other types of local activities, not typically considered as development tools, that might be more effective in contributing to local economic prosperity? It finds that the factors most consistently and positively related to economic health are investments in the downtown, spending on basic local public services, and using no economic development incentives at all. These findings suggest one primary policy recommendation: the wisest course of action for most cities would be to eschew particularized development incentives, especially those that require tax expenditures.
Over the last few decades performance management (PM) has invaded the public sector in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. More recently, we have seen increasing demands for evidence-based policymaking (EP). This article critically discusses the political implications of PM and EP by regarding them as particular forms of governing. Accordingly, PM may be viewed as a form of governing hinging on the regulated and accountable forms of freedom exercised by public administrators. In contrast, EP may be regarded as a technocratic and potentially authoritarian form of governing depending on quite narrow and exclusive forms of knowledge production. EP then seems to be directly at odds with PM and sits uneasily with neoliberal forms of rule.
While much of our knowledge about public sector values is generated from surveys of public managers, this study explores the official core value statements of 75 U.S. government agencies. These values represent the characteristics with which the agencies want to be associated, rather than the values that guide the administrative behavior and decision making of public officials. A key finding in this study is that values that have been set as standards in many OECD countries, and reiterated in ethical guidelines for the U.S. federal government, are not among the most frequently stated on agency web sites. In light of these findings, the study discusses the role of public sector values in relation to agency identity and image.
Questions have arisen about the added value of public encounters for participatory democracy: Do problems with living up to its promises occur because of or despite public professionals and citizens coming together? This article presents the findings of a study that examined their public encounters, or communicative "in-between," in participatory projects in three European cities. A narrative analysis revealed how the communicative capacity of public professionals and citizens is imperative and yet largely overlooked, that is, their ability to recognize and break through dominant communicative patterns by constantly adapting the nature, tone, and conditions of conversations to the situation at hand. Less time, energy, and resources will be lost if they pay more attention to how they communicate (process) rather than what they talk about (substance). As this proves to be inherently difficult in everyday practice, researchers could play an important role in cultivating communicative capacity.
The article combines research on postconflict management with public administration research by presenting a single case study on the United Nations interim administration in Kosovo. To investigate the reasons for the UN mission’s failure to implement its policies on minority relations, the study turns toward local municipal bureaucracies and offers a two-part causal argument that derives from principal–agent theory and bureaucratic representation theory. First, due to a lack of political and administrative oversight by Kosovar institutions and the UN peacebuilding mission, local municipal authorities experienced a high degree of autonomy. Second, those units within municipal administrations that were responsible for minority policy implementation did not include minority bureaucrats who could have acted as their communities’ advocates. In the absence of such active representation and a lack of top-down supervision, the municipal civil service departed from its mandate to implement affirmative policies serving the Serb and Roma community in Kosovo. The article finds that this ethnic bureaucratic drift constitutes a central explanation for the lack of minority policy implementation in Kosovo between 2001 and 2008.
The purpose of this study is to examine how cyclical fluctuations in tax revenue affect state fiscal policies, using a state panel data set. In particular, the study develops a measure of revenue gap—the cyclical component of tax revenue—by calculating the orthogonal deviations of tax bases from the trend, and then analyzes its effects on the level of spending and taxation—as measured by expenditure gap and overall tax rate—using a dynamic panel-data model. The analyses reveal that revenue gap is positively related to expenditure gap and negatively to overall tax rate. These results clearly show the procyclical patterns of state fiscal policies and further suggest the association between revenue volatility and fiscal instability. Based on the results, the study discusses the spending stabilization rules as a policy solution to the recurring state fiscal crises.
NGO collaborations and government–NGO relations have become popular subjects of inquiry in public administration. Building on contemporary trends in the field, this exploratory study adopts a transnational governance perspective to examine the collaborative propensities of transnational NGOs registered in the United States. Unlike prior scholarship focusing on subnational samples of domestic organizations operating within single sectors of activity, findings are based on a mixed-method analysis of in-depth, face-to-face interviews with top organizational leaders from a diverse sample of 152 transnational NGOs spanning all major sectors of NGO activity. Analysis discovers that leaders’ organizations exhibit either an "independent" or an "interdependent" collaborative propensity. As members of global civil society, many transnational NGO leaders are reluctant, if not averse, in their attitudes toward collaboration with actors outside of civil society, particularly government agencies. Leaders of independent transnational NGOs evince concern over the implications of intersectoral collaboration for organizational legitimacy, whereas leaders of interdependent transnational NGOs appear to be attracted to the increased funding and recognition that intersectoral collaborations may provide. Further analysis of the perceived benefits and obstacles to collaboration reveals additional insights about the factors influencing leaders’ decisions to engage in or not to engage in intersectoral collaboration.
Recruiting high quality employees is one of the key functions of public human resource managers and a critical component of effective public service delivery. This is particularly true in education but little is known about public sector or teacher hiring patterns in areas that are predominantly rural, poor, and isolated from other locales. This article begins to fill that gap. We find that rural educational agencies employ the new teachers of lowest observed aptitude, implying that organizational outcomes associated with these districts may differ in systematic ways that reinforce longstanding gaps in quality. As such, human resources strategies for increasing the attractiveness of geographically and culturally isolated regions for high quality public service are needed. These strategies are likely to require different policy prescriptions than those utilized to enhance the attractiveness to employees in urban areas.
The bureaucratic response literature has focused on the quantity and timing of agency outputs in response to political signals. This focus on quantity rather than more qualitative measures such as the content and character of response has made it difficult to fully understand the causes and conditions under which response occurs in relation to a given signal. In the context of minority preference purchasing policy in the State of Florida, this study examines the relationship between political signals and the content and character of bureaucratic response—what is referred to here as the nature of bureaucratic response. A theory is developed and supported through interview and archival data to suggest that bureaucratic actors evaluate signals and policymaker intentions in determining if and how to respond. The article also provides one of the first in-depth examinations of the inner workings of minority preference purchasing.
Despite their common roots in the early theories of organization, public administration and organization studies have evolved separately. This article explores the conditions that favor and initiate the cross-boundary exchange of knowledge between these two fields. The study applies bibliometric methodology and advances standard methods of science-mapping by combining different levels of analysis in a two-mode network, drawing on citation data from 16 European and North American top journals in organization studies and public administration, spanning the period 2000 to 2010. None of the 18 clusters of current research extracted from these data can be traced in both organization studies and public administration, however closer analysis reveals two strong links between these fields and indicates that the boundaries between them are semipermeable, allowing the unidirectional, rather than bidirectional, transfer of knowledge from organization studies to public administration. This study argues for greater rapprochement between these two fields and suggests ways in which this could be achieved.
Privatization has increasingly become a policy option for government agencies struggling to meet rising demands for services but with fewer resources. In the transportation arena, many state departments of transportation (DOTs) have privatized by outsourcing highway functions to the private sector. But the outsourcing of technical and expert services such as those related to the design and construction of highway infrastructure may result in a smaller or less knowledgeable DOT workforce that is unable to perform the necessary contract management to ensure the quality of the work done by contractors. We posit an outsourcing process in which DOTs respond to the combination of increased demand for highway services and growing workforce constraints by contracting out much of the work formerly performed by in-house personnel. This, in turn, can produce perceptions of quality problems regarding the outsourced work and a subsequent expansion of the workforce. We examine the extent to which different highway-related tasks are being outsourced, the effect of workforce and employment factors on outsourcing, the perceptions of highway officials regarding the impact of outsourcing on cost-effectiveness and the service quality of the outsourced work, and subsequent employment levels.
Performance management is widely assumed to be an effective strategy for improving outcomes in the public sector. However, few attempts have been made to empirically test this assumption. Using data on New York City public schools, we examine the relationship between performance management practices by school leaders and educational outcomes, as measured by standardized test scores. The empirical results show that schools that do a better job at performance management indeed have better outcomes in terms of both the level and gain in standardized test scores, even when controlling for student, staffing, and school characteristics. Thus, our findings provide some rare empirical support for the key assumption behind the performance management movement in public administration.
How do accountability policies affect failing organizations? Are additional interventions used to improve underperforming agencies effective in raising performance outputs? This article investigates the effectiveness of turnaround policies in organizations that persistently fail to meet accountability standards. Using Performance-Based Monitoring Analysis System data from169 school districts in Texas, this article shows that turnaround interventions have only limited success. While monitoring strategies work for the most salient performance indicator in the short term, improvements quickly dissipate following an intervention. Supporting the notion that management matters, results also show that the type of monitor assigned to a failing school can affect the extent of improvement in performance.
In February 2006 a group of social service executives in the Dutch city of Rotterdam founded what they called the Münchhausen Movement. This movement is an initiative to improve collaboration between public institutions that service vulnerable members of society, such as the homeless, addicts, people with mental health impairments, and frequent recidivists. The members of the Münchhausen Movement explicitly refer to their collaboration as a "Movement." This is a new concept in the world of multiagency collaboration. Coordination of social services is generally seen in terms of public management, organizational innovation, citizenship, or a relational, interpretive effort. This study aims to demonstrate that the concept of a social movement is a useful perspective for understanding and promoting multiagency coordination. This concept is elaborated by using the methods of grounded theory to unravel the initiators of the Münchhausen Movement’s central ideas, values, and practices. This case study results in a critical evaluation of the added value of social movements for multiagency coordination between public institutions., It analyzes the mechanisms, such as trust building, realizing small, but highly visible successes, and value articulation, by which collaboration is achieved. It concludes with the finding that a social movement can contribute to cultural change in fragmented organizational fields and to the enhancement of the density and effectiveness of the professional networks of representatives of the involved organizations but that further dissemination of the movement’s principles and modes of action is essential for its wider success.
Public and private differences have been a central topic in public administration research. This study explores electric utilities’ voluntary disclosure of environmental performance and examines if private (investor-owned) and public (government-owned) utilities have different drivers for voluntary disclosure. In particular, this study analyzes the panel data on electric utilities’ participation in the Department of Energy’s Voluntary Greenhouse Gas Registry program (VGGR) from 1995 to 2005 and attempts to explain the different participation patterns between public and private utilities based on two perspectives—public–private distinction and corporate environmentalism—which probes private firms’ voluntary environmental actions in particular. The findings show that private utilities tend to participate in the VGGR program when they have better performance, higher consumer interaction and market pressure, and also when they anticipate further regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. This is consistent with the existing theoretical and empirical studies on corporate environmentalism, which suggests private firms under intensive government regulation and market pressure actively use voluntary disclosure strategy to preempt future regulations and to gain economic benefit or legitimacy. On the other hand, it is found that public utilities tend to participate in the VGGR program when other related mandatory rules exist. This suggests that public utilities’ voluntary disclosure is primarily being driven by other mandatory requirements.
Government should serve the public good. Yet critics argue that "big government" is a major cause of corruption. This article assesses the empirical validity of their argument through cross-national statistical analysis, addressing two of previous research’s key weaknesses: lack of controls for potential reverse causation and for the likely confounding impact of nonprofit sector size. Contrary to critics’ claims, the analysis presented here finds no evidence that a larger government generally contributes to higher corruption. Instead, both government and nonprofit sector size generally have an inverse relationship with the level of corruption. To combat corruption, therefore, public administrators should be skeptical of recommendations for sweeping government cuts and should instead consider policies that strengthen the public and the nonprofit sectors.
Participation in collaborative advocacy organizations is one of the most common advocacy tactics pursued by nonprofit organizations. However, field-level dynamics and norms around collaboration may be changing with the growth of public-private intermediary organizations. Using a lens that brings together theories of structuration and institutional entrepreneurship, this research investigates (a) how intermediary organizations structure advocacy opportunities and institutionalize new advocacy practices at the field level, and (b) how member organizations interpret those opportunities and practices. Qualitative findings from a regional homeless services policy field demonstrate that intermediary organizations gain members and thus, power, based on their position in the policy field and through their ability to connect members to valuable government contacts. In this field, participation in public-private intermediary organizations has surpassed involvement in traditional advocacy coalitions as providers are motivated to meet organizational legitimacy goals as much as advocacy goals.
The city manager’s role in policy-making has long been recognized in the public administrationliterature. However, it remains unclear why city managers participate in policy-making at different levels. Two alternative models have been proposed in the literature: the substitution model and the collaboration model. The present study considers multiple dimensions of political leadership and advances a more comprehensive theoretical framework. It then undertakes an empirical examination, using survey data collected from city managers in Georgia. The results uncover more complicated configurations of political dynamics in local government than described by either the substitution or the collaboration model.
This article investigates competing visions of how regional organizations influence cooperation among individual local governments within a metropolitan area. As network brokers among local governments, regional organizations can reduce the transaction costs of self-governing solutions to regional problems through bargaining and contracting among local units, but their centralized activities might also crowd out interlocal exchanges. Florida Regional Planning Councils are examined to test competing hypotheses based on these two visions, identifying the influence of regional organizations’ governance and activities on interlocal revenue transfers among municipal governments. Evidence that regional organizations can complement as well as substitute for interlocal cooperation is reported. In conclusion we discuss these findings in the context of vertical and horizontal federalism and theories of institutional collective action.
Emotional labor that requires workers to suppress their truly felt emotions and create a fake emotional display has negative consequences for workers including psychological distress and lowered job satisfaction. This type of emotional labor, called surface acting, is often necessary in public service work. In an effort to identify ways to reduce the harmful effects of emotional labor for workers, this research further specifies the relationship between emotional labor and worker well-being using data from a large sample of public service workers working in a variety of occupations (n = 1,395). The analyses test a mediator and moderators of the relationship between emotional labor and worker well-being. The findings suggest that surface acting emotional labor is harmful to workers because it increases feelings of self-estrangement. In addition, a worker’s sense of self-efficacy in emotional labor performance is shown to reduce the negative effects of surface acting.
This research adds to an existing body of research that suggests that the adoption of investment return assumptions associated with public sector defined benefit (DB) pension plans may partly be explained by political opportunism. This research adds to this literature by examining how oversight and monitoring efforts and investment boards’ relative independence from the political process influence adopted investment return assumptions. Based on a multivariate regression analysis of data on 88 state DB pension plans in the United States, the results of this study suggest that adopted investment return assumptions are partly determined by investment boards’ affiliation with the political process. The results also indicate that the adopted assumptions are influenced by asset allocations and the fiscal condition of pension plans. The findings of the study are important in part because they draw attention to possible linkages between the quality of financial information that is reported about the financial condition of public pension funds and their surrounding governance structure. Reliable information about the actual size of unfunded pension liabilities is critical in political environments, where there tend to be a bias toward shifting pension obligations to future constituents.
Government job satisfaction has been shown to reflect individual, job and organizational characteristics, but important national crises or events that dramatically alter the image of public service in society and the meaning of work in the public sector may also play a role. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, are an important example, yet it is not known how the attacks and their aftermath may have influenced the everyday job satisfaction of government workers in the United States. Using a difference-in-difference regression strategy and data from the General Social Survey, this study compares change in job satisfaction of government workers to that of private sector workers before and after the attacks. The findings indicate that 9-11 may have boosted government job satisfaction 5 to 10 percentage points, representing 1 to 2 million additional satisfied government workers in the United States. Thus important national crises may causally influence government job satisfaction in nontrivial ways.
Local governments in the United States have adopted and implemented e-government as a means of delivering services to the public and encouraging citizen participation. We use data from a national random survey of 902 government managers from 500 local governments in the United States to examine factors that explain the adoption of two types of e-government technologies: e-services, which enable electronic delivery of services, and communication technologies, which enable one- and two-way communication with citizens. We find that managerial perceptions of the organization, such as personnel constraints and organizational centralization, are negatively related to the adoption of e-services while citizen demands are positively associated with the adoption of e-services. In comparison, we find that public managers perceiving higher levels of external influences and citizen demands report increased adoption of communication technologies. The results contribute to the e-government literature by indicating the importance of distinguishing between communication technologies and e-services and the factors that explain the adoption of these technologies.
Although public-sector motivation is conceived of as dynamic, and responsive to organizational stimuli, few empirical works have treated it as such. As a result, we have little understanding about how bureaucrats’ motivations change over time or about the relative impacts of intra- and extraorganizational influences. This study contributes by examining an entering group of police officers during the first 2 years of their employment. Its findings show modest change across a variety of motives over the course of the study. At each time they were contacted, the strongest predictors of an entrant’s motivations were his or her entering motivations. However, formal and informal organization influences were also associated with entrants’ motives and the amount of change appeared to increase over time. The article concludes by considering the implications of these findings for public management research and practice.
Although traditional models of bureaucratic politics have relied on the old assumption that information is expensive, information is prevalent nowadays; the monopoly of bureaucratic expertise has been undermined as interest groups have significantly developed and are professionalized. As a result, what is really important in current bureaucratic politics is not just neutral expertise, but the political capacity to affect the behaviors of information sources. Through mediating conflicts of interest and minimizing unnecessary contingencies, agencies can persuade their stakeholders not to provide information to legislators and, therefore, indirectly affect legislators’ decisions on delegation and oversight. Different from traditional principal–agent theories, this article suggests the "administrative broker" model in which politically influential agencies can block information leakage to legislators and enhance their own discretion. Moreover, the administrative brokers occasionally transform traditionally hostile principal–agent relations into more favorable ones.
Research suggests that an undercount of ethnic population groups may be present in United States Census Surveys due to classification error. Using data from the American Community Survey (ACS), the article estimates the extent to which an undercount of Hispanics and Hispanic ethnic groups results from variations between individual reports of identity and the official definitions used to measure Hispanic ethnicity by the United States Census Bureau. The findings are analyzed within the context of issues of governmentality and highlight the implications that the presence of an ethnic undercount in population estimates due to classification error presents for public administrators and policymakers. Ultimately the article argues that the official enumeration classifications used by government agencies must take into account changing discourses surrounding ethnic and racial identity in the United States to help promote equitable, effective, and efficient systems of policy and governance.
Financial crises, municipal bankruptcies, and fear of contagious sovereign default have raised questions about the competency and character of politicians and public managers, but the credibility of private sector credit rating agencies and bond ratings may be the more relevant target of scrutiny. This article examines the credibility of government bond ratings in light of market institutions creating incentives to inflate ratings. Using yield spreads as interval indicators of bond ratings and historical ratings of state general obligation (GO) bonds from 1975 to 2002, a Granger-causality and vector autoregression analysis of the average ratings in the Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s portfolio of state GO bond ratings indicate that ratings are sensitive to market dynamics. Such market endogeneity confirms concerns about the credibility of government bond ratings and points to the necessity of considering institutional reform in the bond rating market.
Many local councils aim to (re)connect citizens to public planning. This article presents the Collaborative Communities through Coproduction (3C) method as a way to establish cooperation between residents and professionals in improving neighborhood livabiliy. The authors describe common challenges to citizen participation and identify the dilemma of sustainable cooperation as an additional challenge for citizen participation efforts that aim to establish coproduction. To deal with this dilemma, the 3C method was designed as a continuous, circular process of plan making, plan implementation, and plan evaluation. The authors describe the implementation of the 3C method in two neighborhoods in the Netherlands. Findings from the two case studies demonstrate workable solutions to the dilemmas of citizen participation. Nonetheless, the study findings show that shifting council priorities pose an additional risk to the sustained continuation of coproduction efforts.
The new media have been argued to strengthen the coproduction of safety by reducing the costs of interactions between government and citizens and providing new communicative potential. Does that lead to relevant additional input from citizens in police work? Or are preexisting interactions reproduced online? This empirical study of police practices in the Netherlands shows that new media indeed strengthen the coproduction of safety by enabling the police to reach more citizens and contact them 24/7. The police build new connections to citizens: mediated citizen networks form an important addition to offline networks. The costs are reduced most in a situation where new media replace face-to-face contacts between police and citizens, that is, in the coproduction of police patrol work. The article concludes that new media support the trend of responsibilization: the police use new media to build virtual networks with citizens and engage them anywhere and anytime in the coproduction of safety.
The expansion of e-government is reshaping how disadvantaged groups access the social safety net, yet very little is known about clients’ experiences with modernized systems. We examine client experiences applying to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program in one state that has recently moved to an "online-only" system. Overall, more than half of the 26 applicants stated a preference for the traditional caseworker model, even though some of them identified benefits to the modernized, online system. Based on respondents’ experiences, we identified four points where the system proved problematic for applicants: (a) Accessing the call centers; (b) completing an eligibility interview; (c) using the paperless system to submit documentation; and (d) obtaining personal assistance to complete the application materials. Findings are relevant for state administrators of social safety net programs, e-government researchers in the public management and public administration fields, and social stratification researchers interested in how institutional processes influence patterns of inequality.
According to a popular belief, private participation in infrastructure service improves overall service efficiency. However, empirical evidence is mixed. In particular, private participation likely creates a potential agency problem, which may adversely affect service efficiency. This implies that proper government regulations can control opportunistic misbehaviors of private participants and reduce their behavioral uncertainty. Therefore, the effects of private participation on the efficiency of the power service can be hypothesized to be positively augmented by the level of government regulations. We developed an empirical model based upon key institutional, political, and socio-economic variables. The results suggest that private participation is in fact negatively associated with the efficiency of the power service. However, the results also show that the overall effects of private participation on efficiency are positively augmented according to the level of government regulations.
It is commonly posited that for-profit, nonprofit, and other government vendors have fundamental differences, which make one or the other the superior choice depending on the circumstances of service delivery. Past research, focusing on service and market characteristics, finds support for this proposition. In this article, we investigate not only the typical theoretical expectations regarding vendor traits, service characteristics, and market conditions associated with the sectors, but also the presumed trustworthiness and management practices that are argued to differentiate them in an effort to better understand the roles played by each in local government contracting. Our findings indicate that as expected, nonprofits are most commonly employed when dealing with hard to define, "soft" services with weak markets. However, contrary to expectations, nonprofits are not generally considered more trustworthy than for-profits and are not managed more "loosely" (i.e., more ambiguous contracts, more discretion exercised in sanctioning) than their for-profit peers. Rather, public vendors seem to be the most trusted and are managed less rigidly than contractors from the other sectors.
Following the conceptual framework developed by the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants, which is based on three broad dimensions of sustainability, flexibility and vulnerability, this paper proposes a method for evaluating the financial health of municipalities. This methodology could be useful for performance assessment in any country and framework. An aggregate indicator has been obtained for each municipality that covers all the aspects analyzed. For this, multivariate statistical techniques of principal component analysis and discriminant analysis are combined. The proposed method overcomes the problem that we detected in the literature related to the weighting of variables, optimizing the measurement of the variability of all indicators that are included in the financial condition. The indicator evaluates and ranks the degree of financial health of each municipality and serves as a tool to study how different factors might have an impact on its financial health. The performance of the indicator has been contrasted with the socioeconomic variables of population size and geographic location. The proposed method has been applied to 5,165 Spanish municipalities.