ABSTRACT. As an applied field, scholarship and practice should be closely linked in public administration. However, numerous scholars have noted an ongoing disconnect and have called for concerted attention to bridging the divide (AbouAssi et al. 2019; Carboni et al. 2019; Carboni and Nabatchi 2019; Jilke et al. 2019; Ventriss et al. 2019). In this percolator session, we highlight the work of three centers that explicitly work to connect scholarship with practice: (1) the William D. Ruckelshaus Center, a partnership between Washington State University and the University of Washington; (2) the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration (PARCC) at Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs; and (3) the Civic Leadership Education and Research (CLEAR) Initiative at the University of Southern California Price School of Public Policy. While the focus of the centers varies, each is committed to using scholarship to inform practice. The objectives of this percolator session are to provide a space for discussion on connecting scholarship to practice and to establish community among faculty who are doing or would like to do this bridge building work. The percolator session will be a participatory discussion on best practices, successes, and challenges in connecting scholarship to practice.

ABSTRACT. Intergovernmental collaboration is vital for addressing cross-boundary challenges, requiring technical capability and institutional support. However, understanding of the relationship between collaborative behavior and network structure is limited. The study focuses on China's municipal governments developing diverse collaboration strategies for the Interprovincial Government Services initiative. A distinctive database captures 685 local governments' varied collaboration forms (including bilateral agreements, integrated platforms, and hybrid models) and over 23000 collaborative government affairs items is established by using news retrieval, government web scraping, and interviews. Case study reveal that the micro mechanism for achieving cross-boundary collaboration in government affairs lies in leveraging artificial intelligence techniques such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to facilitate remote approval processes. This aspect of semantic interoperability is of great significance within the realm of digital government. The Checklist System serves as a crucial institutional resource, providing clarity of roles and responsibilities necessary for effective collaboration. A quantitative model demonstrates that a tightly-knit collaborative network characterized by formal contracts places higher demands on implementing the Checklist System. Furthermore, unclear delineation of roles and responsibilities may result in agreements being left idle. Loose collaboration networks facilitated by integrated platforms necessitate greater technical input. Interestingly, as technology investment increases, the need for explicit delineation of roles and responsibilities within the loose platform network diminishes. Consequently, this study endeavors to examine the correlation between municipal collaboration strategies and the structure of cross-boundary collaboration networks, revealing a complementary interplay between technology and institutions throughout this process.

ABSTRACT. In the absence of effective national policies on most environmental issues, local government action has become critical to addressing sustainability worldwide. While local governments take cues from higher jurisdictions, they are left on their own on how to approach these problems. Environmental issues are well-known to be complex and multidimensional, requiring coordinated efforts to solve. At the same time, the principles of New Public Management (NPM) espoused by many governments promote disaggregation and specialization. Consequently, the extent to which local governments embrace calls for increased coordination when dealing with sustainability issues remains unclear. This study leverages 2015 survey data from the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) to examine the dynamics of intra- and inter-governmental coordination on sustainability issues in local governments across the US. We use logistic and tobit regression analyses to assess whether local governments are more likely to coordinate on sustainability issues than in other areas, and whether developing sustainability plans encourages them to do so. Furthermore, we investigate whether local governments’ experience with environmental crises, in the form of natural disasters where coordination is essential, contributes to their likelihood of coordinating on environmental issues, providing evidence of organizational learning. The results demonstrate whether local governments coordinate their efforts across many dimensions of public service or if they maintain NPM imposed patterns of siloization. Our findings shed light on how local government experiences and efforts impact their willingness to coordinate as well as informing practitioners about the state of the field and how sustainability issues are best approached.

ABSTRACT. Social network analysis is widely used in the area of interlocal cooperation. However, little of the current research uses longitudinal network analysis to examine the impact of the work experience network of city leaders on the formation of the interlocal cooperation network. This study offers social network explanations for understanding the impact of the work experience of local leaders on interlocal cooperation from a dynamic network perspective. Utilizing a data set of 9 prefecture-level cities in the Pearl River Delta urban agglomeration in China from 2004 to 2022, we construct the leaders’ work experience network and interlocal cooperation network. A descriptive analysis is conducted to demonstrate the evolution of the interlocal cooperation network. Then, employing a Stochastic Actor-Oriented Model to conduct a longitudinal network analysis, our hypotheses are partly supported by the results. We find that the positive effect of leaders’ work experience on interlocal cooperation only exists in cross-network dyadic effects, and the negative effect may arise in cross-network triadic effects. In other words, cities are more likely to cooperate with cities with whom they have personnel connections and cities are less likely to choose the same partners as those with whom they have personnel connections. Besides, endogenous network structures, social and economic factors also impact the formation of the interlocal cooperation network. This study reexamines the role of leaders’ work experience in interlocal cooperation, providing deeper insights into the cooperation network and public management practice.

ABSTRACT. Multi-level network governance addresses coordination of agencies in a network across the different sectors and levels of government (O'Leary & Vij, 2012). This study examines intergovernmental, interorganizational, and cross-sector coordination in building resilient communities (Nowell & Steelman, 2015). The study specifically addresses how resilience policies and plans impact regional multi-level networks coordination in response to disasters. Using resilience policies and plans at federal, state, and local levels in the East Central Florida region, this study analyzes the multi-level network governance design for stakeholders’ engagement as they need to coordinate functions for collective action in respond to disasters. In addition to plans and policies, the study uses data from Hurricane Irma in 2017 to compare planned regional coordination with actual response to the disaster. The primary method for the study is content analysis of plan and policy documents and frameworks and after-action reports addressing coordination issues during Hurricane Irma. The study highlights the designed coordinated effort with actual coordination in Central Florida region to compare and contrast how the various government agencies at all levels, private and nonprofit sector organizations coordinated their functions and efforts. Preliminary findings indicate that across the national, state, and seven counties in the region, there are significant coordination differences across the multi-level networks in the plans and policies and actual response operations. Understanding how these differences are manifested in practice can impact the coordination under stress and uncertainty within the context of disaster response and emergency management.

ABSTRACT. Placemaking is a popular practice in which a network of interested stakeholders leverage community assets to improve public spaces and foster equity. Placemaking is recognized for an array of benefits, including economic, revitalization, and enhanced civic engagement (Markusen & Gadwa, 2010). The use of placemaking by local governments grew rapidly and globally in the 2000s and remains a common municipal approach to improving the public realm. Public management best practices stress the importance of evaluation to enhance public transparency and accountability (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992). However, evaluation of placemaking projects has proven inconsistent.

Placemaking scholarship is dominated by theoretical contributions and case studies. Where evaluative studies have been undertaken, they tend to focus on economic outcomes. In a recent systematic literature review, it was identified that the field is complicated by differences in definitions and interests among the disciplines studying the phenomenon. Of 1,039 articles, 86 met the criteria for inclusion. Of those, just 39.6 percent reported outputs or outcomes. The measures employed were diverse and not easily categorized.

This research seeks to close the gap between recommendations and practice and answers the question: How can local government evaluate the social impacts of placemaking initiatives? Relying on engaged scholarship, the authors worked with a city in North Texas to evaluate placemaking outcomes. This paper presents how faculty and students worked with a local government to develop an evaluation system for the city’s placemaking projects, from selecting relevant metrics and conducting the evaluation to using the data to improve program performance.

ABSTRACT. Governments often prioritize arts and culture to revitalize communities (Polèse, 2012). Such strategies have led communities to spatially cluster cultural and artistic programs, initiatives, and buildings into cultural districts to foster economic progress and promote citizen engagement (Meyer, 2019; Santagata, 2002). The continued development of cultural districts and their significance to the trajectory of communities presents a unique opportunity to consider their value to society.

This study asks: What dimensions of equity and inclusion matter to the social impact of cultural districts? A comprehensive survey of 1237 North Texas residents from diverse backgrounds, segmented by race, income status, educational attainment, and proximity to major arts institutions, empirically analyzes social disparity and inclusion among community members in a burgeoning state-designated cultural district. Multivariate analysis reveals that non-white and low-income status is associated with increased perceptions of social inequality in resident attendance at art and cultural events and willingness to participate in arts initiatives. Unequitable engagement with the local cultural district challenges cultural districts' sustainability and potential benefits.

Our results will provide practical application for local municipalities seeking to leverage cultural districts for economic growth and community development during heightened social and racial inequity. Equity in resident participation in cultural districts is an understudied topic despite large and small cities needing to leverage cultural assets to engage long-term residents better and attract future residents. The study concludes with policy recommendations to spur shared engagement practices by diversifying cultural district leadership to customize better civic offerings to target diverse and vulnerable groups.

ABSTRACT. Arts organizations occupy a unique niche within the diverse American nonprofit landscape. Although governed by the same laws and regulations as many churches, private universities, charities, and other mission-driven entities, arts and cultural nonprofits typically have more nebulous, conceptual goals related to regional elevation and/or the cultivation or preservation of a local cultural identity (DiMaggio, 1986). Nonprofit scholars, cultural policymakers, and arts administrators are increasingly recognizing the need for more sophisticated research on these organizations. Although this body of research is rapidly developing, it is still nascent—often treating the arts as a homogenous collective or focusing on one specific type of organization (Woronkowicz, 2016). Such approaches may overlook fundamental differences in the operations of performing arts, visual arts, and other cultural organizations.

This article considers several previously validated statistical models, each of which represents a key dimension of arts nonprofits’ organizational health or operational performance. Each model is robust, but also omits consideration of type in favor of examining “the arts” as a whole. Using an updated and more comprehensive dataset than others previously available, this article compares the outputs generated by these models’ original forms with results from after the inclusion of additional categorical variables.

Cultural policymakers may benefit from this knowledge as they seek to cultivate arts-friendly communities, develop cross-sector partnerships, and leverage the economic potential of cultural nonprofits. Likewise, this research contributes to scholarly discourse by presenting an approach for studying organizational clusters within nonprofit subsectors and facilitating comparative analyses within the arts and culture environment.

ABSTRACT. Public administrators continue to struggle to make public spaces and services available, welcoming, and accessible to all. In the museum field, research finds Black individuals are less likely to attend an art museum than white individuals, but more likely to report cultural representation as a reason to attend (Olivares & Piatak, 2021). One way to diversify the arts and have greater cultural representation is to have diverse employees that bring their unique perspectives and cultures to their work in museums. Museums should reflect the communities they serve so that all members of the community feel welcomed in the space and represented in the art. Yet art museum staff are largely white, 64% (Sweeney et al., 2022). Drawing upon representative bureaucracy theory (e.g., Riccucci & Van Ryzin, 2017) and research on cultural representation, we ask: To what extent does representation on museum walls and in museum halls influence arts participation?

Using a 2x2 experiment designed in partnership with a local art museum, we examine how diverse representation in staff and cultural representation in the artwork influence arts participation. The experimental conditions on representation will also be interacted with Black and Latinx to see if greater representation, in terms of museum staff and artwork, has a greater influence on arts participation among Black and Latinx individuals. Findings have implications for research and practice in the museum field and beyond in demonstrating the value of representation in both the staff of organizations and the public services they provide.

ABSTRACT. Scholars of public values have made significant contributions to developing behavioral norms for public managers, playing a pivotal role in tangible government reforms (Bryson et al., 2014; Van der Wal et al., 2015). This study aims to extend the reach of public value theory (Benington & Moore, 2011), which has largely focused on the public sector.

Our research project addresses two critical dimensions: firstly, examining the extent to which public sector employees ground their decisions in public values, and secondly, conducting a comparative analysis of decision-making processes rooted in public values between public and private sector employees. Utilizing an empirical approach, respondents will be prompted to envision themselves working in a non-profit or quasi-public organization strategically positioned between the public and private spheres. Subsequently, they will navigate through a series of dilemmatic choices mirroring real-world professional scenarios, allowing us to assess the manifestation of public values in their decision-making.

To ensure a robust empirical analysis, we will employ gamification methods as the primary data collection strategy (Douglas et al., 2019). Rather than relying on conventional questionnaires, respondents will actively participate in a game, assuming the role of the protagonist in their career in a social enterprise. In-game incentives (i.e., promotions or salary increases) will be offered as rewards for step-by-step decisions in given scenarios. This innovative approach not only enhances respondent engagement but also provides a nuanced understanding of decision-making processes, shedding light on the influence of public values on choices within both the public and quasi-public sectors.

ABSTRACT. A robust collaborative relationship between scholars and practitioners is crucial for high-quality research, evidence-based decision-making, and improved public services. Despite the growing trend of practitioner-scholar collaborations at all levels of the US government, challenges such as divergent priorities and values persist. The effectiveness of these scholar-practitioner collaborations in achieving expected outcomes and generating public values remains largely unexplored.

To address this gap, this paper examines the public values that government officials seek when collaborating with researchers to tackle local sustainability and resilience challenges. Building on the collaborative governance regime and public values literature, we focus on three key values: effectiveness, equity, and accountability. Using a national field experiment involving 12,127 elected officials and managers in 1246 American municipalities with populations exceeding 30,000, we investigate whether local leaders are more or less likely to collaborate with researchers for equity (treatment 1) or accountability (treatment 2), alongside public service effectiveness (control). We sent email requests to discuss research collaboration for evidence-based decision-making with these local leaders and manipulated the email content to highlight different public values the collaboration could potentially create.

Preliminary findings indicate that including an equity goal in collaborations aimed at improving service effectiveness does not impact leaders' participation in these collaborations. However, the inclusion of an accountability goal in such collaborations hinders further collaborative actions by local leaders. Our study sheds light on the preferences of local leaders in utilizing evidence provided by researchers and highlights conflicting values that demand strategic consideration when researchers engage with local governments.

ABSTRACT. Good governance, rule of law and democracy are the cornerstones of the modern state and make up the structure of government institutions and the relationship between government and citizens. Good governance is considered a norm for government and implies that government acts upon public values. Due to the rise of digital technologies these values can come under pressure leading to discrimination and systemic inequities. Consequently, ethical codes for digital technologies at the national and international level are developed for providing guidance to government organisations in safeguarding public values. These codes often contain a certain set of values, but it is not always clear how these values relate to the conceptualization of good governance.

In public administration literature, there is limited attention for good digital governance. This study aims to fill this gap by developing and testing a good digital governance framework. First, we conceptualize good digital governance by building on three cornerstones of the modern state: democracy, rule of law and governing capacities. Second, based on an assessment of 45 digital ethical codes around the world, and 12 expert interviews, we identify principles and values related to these three cornerstones. This results in a Good Digital Governance Framework. Finally, we empirically test the framework in five local governments. Based on action research that consisted of participatory observation and design thinking workshops, we find that good digital governance requires (multidisciplinary) deliberation, identification of public values and organizational actions for embedding these values in government processes, and continuous organizational learning.

ABSTRACT. The United States is battling majority politics versus minority rights. The current political climate places public organizations in a position of being accountable to political officials while also engaging in work that is ethical, appropriate, and consistent with professional best practices.

Within public administration, there is a need to be equitable and accountable and provide services to the most deserving. However, the field never asks citizens their thoughts on these actions. Using a survey experiment and higher education as an environment, this paper sets out to understand how the public thinks about bureaucracy. American Political Science is divided into many parts, predominantly studying institutions and then public opinion. These scholars not only address the politicians but also what the public thinks. Why does the field of American Public Administration do different things? Citizens have thoughts on the bureaucracy; the public administration needs an entire component in theory building. Public colleges and universities are responsible to multiple actors: students, parents, alumni, and faculty but also the governor and the state legislator. Given the polarization and emergence of “anti-woke” legislation, higher education is losing its ability to be accountable to its diverse student populations. The politics-administration dichotomy would indicate that these public institutions should implement political decisions regardless of client (student) outcomes.

ABSTRACT. A high level of diversity in a team may create barriers for knowledge integration yet heterogeneity, whereby relationships cut across salient demographic boundaries, supports innovation (Reagans and Zuckerman, 2001). There are different dimensions of team diversity: discipline, tenure, rank, gender, race. Which dimensions matter more or less in team effectiveness? We study this puzzle in university-sponsored Grand Challenge multidisciplinary teams.

The University of New Mexico organized Grand Challenges targeting complex problems that require researchers to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries. In 2022, UNM provided seed funding to 10 teams, comprising faculty and staff from medical school, branch campuses and community partners. These teams compete for the next round of funding. The research topics include Data Science Education, Just Transitions (to Green Energy), Indigenous Child Development and others. We used Qualtrics and SumApp to conduct an online survey with the ten teams. We asked questions about respondent demographics, team belongingness, and the prior research collaborations in research grants and publications. The survey also collected data about 1-year after connections made on the team, including friendship, difficult to work with, learning from, and mentorship ties. We finished data collection in July and started qualitative interviews with teams. We also have administrative data about team requests for support and ranking of team proposals. We will use network analysis and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to discover the combination of factors leading to knowledge convergence and team effectiveness. Our research will have theoretical and practical implications for effectiveness of multi-disciplinary teams at universities.

ABSTRACT. Social equity has been at the center of discourse in the field of public administration. Yet, the topic of equity has not been systematically explored in the domain of public budgeting and financial management. Moreover, in the existing research that addresses equity issues in public budgeting and finance, the concept of equity remains ambiguous in both academic and practical contexts. This study aims to critically summarize how scholars in public budgeting and financial management have developed and employed various theories to integrate equity dimensions into their research work. Some key questions that this study answers include: Is equity defined as a process or an outcome? How is equity measured? How does this differ by policy domain? What are the key determinants of (in)equity? Conducted as a systematic literature review, the study spans diverse policy areas, including education, health, housing, transportation, disaster management, and environment. Additionally, it places specific emphasis on inequity issues associated with indirect governance tools, namely grants, contracting, loans, and co-production. Based on the literature review, the study constructs conceptual frameworks for defining, measuring, and understanding the determinants of equity from a public finance perspective. Through this process, it aims to enhance our understanding of how various theoretical approaches have contributed to the application of equity in the field of public budgeting and financial management. Furthermore, the study offers practical insights into potential governmental actions that could improve equity.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we draw on research in public management, higher education, and emergency management to examine the role of social vulnerability and disaster exposure, as an external shock, on student performance and success. We argue that college students are a population uniquely vulnerable to disaster and experience “double vulnerabilities”, both social and student-based, in terms of academic outcomes in citizen or public state interactions. Using the case of Hurricane Harvey, we find that poverty, both a social vulnerability to disaster and student vulnerability, helps explain poorer self-reported outcomes and more objective academic outcomes after disaster occurs. Similarly, housing-based dimensions are considered both related to social and student vulnerability, and we find that living in the dorm is associated with reduced harmful effects of the hurricane on student outcomes. Several empirical models suggest race and ethnic factors are also related to relevant academic and storm-based outcomes. Our research suggests that theories of social vulnerability may aid scholars of public management interested in performance measurement and management. Social vulnerability as an approach to natural hazards and disasters centers the role of demographic and human capital approaches to reducing or increasing vulnerability. Our results suggest both general and domain specific vulnerabilities influence performance outcomes of members of the public. Thus, we recommend scholars and practitioners develop both domain-specific and domain-general expertise and knowledge to best understand and manage for performance.

ABSTRACT. How do public management scholars engage in democratic development? While public administration continues to organize itself in an eminently fragmented and sectoral way, public problems become more complex and become increasingly wicked and even turbulent (Ansell, Sørensen, Torfing, 2023), requiring robust and transversal governance. Recognition of public problems complexity and the need to improve policies and institutions is rarely achieved by authoritarian leaders, even though their speeches and easy answers have had the capacity to convince broad ranges of the population, from North to South of the globe. In a scenario in which climate change, impoverishment of large sectors of the population simultaneously with the historic increase in income concentration, distrust of the role of science, and the emergence of health crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic are coexistent, the need to promote even closer ties among scientists, social movements and state actors to overcome contemporary dilemmas is imminent. In this sense, the encouragement of action research (Freire, 2022) with public institutions, social movements, socio-state interfaces and transversal public actions characterizes the Laboratory that proposes this Percolator Session and is eager to discuss with international scholars how, in many parts of the world facing similar challenges, engagement between academia and the community has been carried out aiming at democratic development in its broadest and most substantive sense.

ABSTRACT. Street-level workers play important roles in defining policy implementation and outcomes through direct interactions with clients and discretionary decision-making. The organizational contexts in which they work, however, such as the resources available within the environment and the demands of stakeholders that agencies are beholden to, shape the choices available to street-level workers. This implies that the concept of place, or the physical and human characteristics of a geographic area, may be important to street level decision making, but exactly how is currently unknown. In this paper, I examine how place shapes street-level decision making through the case of public child welfare investigations in rural, urban, and suburban regions. Through analysis of qualitative interview data from child welfare investigators and supervisors (n=24) embedded in a comparative case study of four public child welfare offices in one Midwestern State, I find that place influences street-level decision-making through two primary mechanisms: (1) resource and service availability and (2) local politics, culture, and demographics. I conclude that street-level theory should further incorporate the notion of place, particularly given how it affects decision-making differentially in urban, suburban, and rural regions.

ABSTRACT. Hierarchy exists within bureaucratic agencies for several reasons, including to foster employee accountability. However, with hierarchy comes rigidity, and in times of emergency, this can stymie effective, expedient organizational response. Existing literature has examined the implications of hierarchy in emergency management, but limited work can speak to hierarchy’s impacts on frontline worker decision-making during crises. In this paper, we contribute to this literature through an exploratory examination of the role of hierarchy on officer decision-making in a state prison system during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on 50 interviews conducted amongst prison staff and incarcerated people, our results suggest that, during an emergency, developing and updating policy was extraordinarily difficult and resulted in policies that may not have been well-fit to the needs and constraints of various institutions or units within institutions. Thus, officers following policy to the letter, rather than enacting the spirit of the policy did not always produce ideal outcomes. Rather, reducing the influence of hierarchy may bolster officer autonomy, and this may improve their decision-making, particularly in ways that may leave incarcerated individuals under their care better-off.

ABSTRACT. The institutionalization of social rights has been a key component of welfare state expansion. Political battles and public debates revolve around the definition of citizens’ rights to specific benefits and services and the criteria for eligibility. Governments are obliged to fulfill these rights but also face budgetary constraints. We know that legal and budgetary demands put pressure on the administration to increase the efficiency and efficacy of social programs, but we know much less about how these demands are balanced inside public institutions themselves. When legal norms and manegerial norms conflict, how do professional bureaucrats respond? This study investigates whether local government economic and budgetary concerns infringe upon SLB’s professional judgement regarding citizens’ legal rights to benefits and services. We use registry data on 225.000 decisions taken by the Board of Appeal from 2014-2022 on the legality of local administrative decisions. We propose and test several hypotheses linking economic factors such as local governments’ financial constraints and budget overruns to variation in the legality of local administrative case-decisions. The results support that economic factors do affect the legality of the case-decisions in social programs. The findings thus suggest that street-level bureaucrats experience and succumb to pressures to control expenditures even when it compromises their obligation to abide by legal norms.

ABSTRACT. Police departments in the U.S. are facing challenges with recruiting officers (Edwards and Kotera 2021). These challenges are attributable partly to high-profile incidents of police brutality that have discouraged people from law enforcement careers (Copeland et al., 2022). To address these challenges, police departments are improving recruitment efforts, including job advertisements, to attract quality candidates (Donahue and Harrison 2022). The latter strategy raises the question of the job ad content that attracts the highest qualified applicants. The language of job advertisements is particularly important given its influence on the number and diversity of applicants (Linos 2018).

This research tests the relative effectiveness of two job advertisements, one emphasizing prosocial motivation and the other organization/group identification. Based on Esteve and Schuster’s typology of public sector work motivations (2019), we expect prosocial motivation to attract higher-quality candidates and organizational/group motivation to attract higher-performing candidates. Working with a medium-sized police department in the U.S., we use a sample of 1,000 pre-qualified job seekers obtained through a large job platform. The job seekers are randomly assigned to one of the two advertisements they receive via email from the police department. We then track applicants through the hiring process, comparing demographic characteristics and interview performance and outcomes. Overall, this research will contribute to the burgeoning public management literature on recruitment, with implications for police recruitment and street-level bureaucrats more broadly.

ABSTRACT. While a growing body of international studies demonstrates higher absence rates in the public sector compared to the private sector, there is limited knowledge regarding whether sector differences in employee absences exist in the U.S.; and if so, what accounts for these differences. Besides, existing studies rarely distinguish among public, nonprofit, and forprofit sectors. Using a nationally representative sample of U.S. full-time employees obtained from the Current Population Survey between 1994 to 2019, this study investigates employee absence gaps across these three sectors. After adjusting for individual, family, and work-related characteristics, the findings show that employee absences rates and time lost index are the highest in public sector, followed by nonprofit sector; and forprofit sector exhibits the lowest employee absences rates and time lost index. Empirical results also show that public and nonprofit sectors fail to retain individuals with low absence propensity despite attracting them successfully. Additionally, these public and nonprofit sector leavers further reduce their absences rates and time lost index after entering the forprofit sector. Therefore, the findings suggest that the sector differences in employee absences could be attributed to the selection of absent-pro employees and the impacts of sector-specific structural characteristics.

ABSTRACT. People with disabilities are far less likely than others to be employed, and they earn substantially less than others when they have jobs (Kruse et al. 2018). Although employees with disabilities also earn less than comparable others in the federal service (Lewis and Allee 1992), conditions should be better in the federal service today than in the past or in the private sector. Not only does the federal government have a long-standing general commitment to equity and nondiscrimination, Congress prohibited federal discrimination based on disability 17 years before it extended that principle to the rest of the economy. Recent executive orders and US EEOC guidelines have contributed to the pattern that people with disabilities make up a larger share of the workforce in the federal government than in other sectors (Lewis and Pathak 2023), but its progress on reducing pay disparities is less clear. Using OLS regression on the 2009-22 American Community Surveys, we examine pay gaps over time in federal, state, and local governments and in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. We compare annual earnings for full-time employees with and without disabilities who have the same race, sex, age, educational attainment, college major, veteran status, citizenship, and English ability. Veteran status may be key, as the public sector is more likely to hire veterans, especially those with service-related disabilities, and veterans with lower-level jobs usually experience public sector wage premiums. Our preliminary results show that disability pay gaps are smaller in the public and nonprofit sectors than for-profit sector.

ABSTRACT. In recent decades, public service delivery models have changed to include private and nonprofit sectors as service providers and implement cross-sectoral collaboration models. This study examines how sector bias and cross-sector collaboration influence citizens’ perceived legitimacy of service providers. We specifically focus on two questions: 1) Does cross-sector collaboration improve citizen perception compared to traditional, single-sector service delivery models? 2) How does sector bias affect perceptions of cross-sector collaboration and service providers from different sectors? While a few recent studies have touched upon these questions, their focus has been limited to specific contexts, such as the U.S., lacking comparative analyses. Our research employs a cross-national large-N survey experiment across four countries: the U.S., U.K., Australia, and South Korea. The experiment involves a 6x2 factorial design where the first part of the treatment groups is about different sectoral compositions of service providers both single sector and collaborative providers, and the second part of the intervention is about different levels of performance (high vs. low). Participants are randomly assigned to one of the twelve conditions and are asked to rate a given service provider with various perceptual and behavioral measures. By exploring public perceptions of emerging public service delivery models in various contexts, this study contributes to several literatures in collaborative governance and behavioral public administration with the focus on sector bias and the role of clear performance information.

ABSTRACT. The importance of participation (engaging citizens and service users in public service) has been widely discussed in the literature. Having direct inputs from service users via participatory processes helps organizations produce services that effectively reflect users’ preferences, thereby improving service quality and user satisfaction. While participation is regarded as important for all organizations, its significance is more heavily emphasized in public organizations, where democratic values such as participation are paramount. Citizens, therefore, may have a higher level of expectation for public organizations to be participatory and democratic, compared to nonprofits and for-profit firms. At the same time, many also believe that participation incurs additional costs to organizations, making government programs inefficient. The potential tradeoff between efficiency and participation has long been noted in theories on bureaucracy and democracy. Based on these theoretical linkages, this paper makes one of the first attempts to test the different effects of participation on public perceptions of government, nonprofit, and for-profit organizations. The paper uses the data from a randomized preregistered survey experiment in the context of US nursing homes. Preliminary findings suggest that participation positively affects public assessments of organizational performance in all three sectors, and that citizens do not necessarily regard participation as costly. We also find that the effect of participation on organizational effectiveness is greater in public organizations than in nonprofits and private firms. This study contributes to advancing our knowledge of public participation, sector differences, performance management, and public values.

ABSTRACT. This study explores job stressors' impact on job satisfaction among public employees, focusing on role conflict, goal ambiguity, and work overload within the framework of the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model. It reveals that these job demands negatively affect job satisfaction, aligning with the model's premise that such stressors deplete employees' resources.

Within the JD-R framework, the study emphasizes the moderating role of Public Service Motivation (PSM) in buffering the adverse effects of work overload on job satisfaction. Employees with high PSM exhibit increased resilience to work overload's detrimental impact on job satisfaction, highlighting the significance of personal resources in mitigating job demands' effects.

While the JD-R model primarily highlights external job resources, this study underscores PSM as an intrinsic resource. Although PSM may not directly moderate role conflict and goal ambiguity, its presence positively influences job satisfaction, reinforcing the JD-R model's idea that resources contribute to overall well-being in the workplace.

In summary, this research clarifies the intricate relationship between job stressors, job satisfaction, and the role of PSM within the JD-R framework. It underscores the importance of personal resources, like PSM, in mitigating the negative impact of job demands on public employees' job satisfaction, contributing to a deeper understanding of how individuals navigate and respond to stressors within organizational settings.

ABSTRACT. With the development of the mobile internet economy, emerging information technologies are widely applied by organizations, enabling employees to use mobile electronic devices for work-related communication and tasks after office hours. Accordingly, WCBA refers to employees participating in work in any place outside of working hours, seen as the product of a particular new model of work situation. However, existing studies have not yet delved into the mechanisms of WCBA's influence on in-role behaviors, extra-role behaviors, and its double-edged effects. Based on the Job Demands-Resources model, this study investigates the dual impact of work connectivity behavior after-hours on in-role and extra-role behaviors of employees, as well as the mediating roles of psychological job control and information and communication technology anxiety. Using survey method to text the above hypotheses and propose related theoretical and practical implications.

ABSTRACT. Extra hours organizational citizenship behavior (EOCB) is defined as the voluntary and discretionary behaviors of employees that exceed their formal job requirements and enhance organizational effectiveness. Despite the growing interest in EOCB, the factors that drive public employees to perform EOCB are still elusive. Specifically, we investigate the direct and indirect effects of job motivation and reward satisfaction on EOCB, and the moderating role of colleague support in these relationships. We test our hypotheses using the latest 2023 Australian Public Service Employee Census data (n=119,747), which provides a large and representative sample of APS employees and their work attitudes and behaviors. The results reveal a positive correlation among the three factors: job motivation, reward satisfaction, and EOCB. Results also indicate a partial mediation effect of reward satisfaction on the relationship between job motivation and EOCB. Interestingly, colleague support can crowd out the effect of job motivation on reward satisfaction, and the effect of reward satisfaction on EOCB. Compared with the tangible rewards in job design, the interpersonal relationship with colleagues has greater significance for EOCB. We find that colleague support has significant moderating effects on the effects of job motivation on reward satisfaction, and of reward satisfaction on EOCB. Specifically, as colleague support levels increase, the positive effects of job motivation on reward satisfaction and of reward satisfaction on EOCB become weaker, indicating that high-quality colleague relationships can substitute for the motivational and rewarding effects of job and rewards.

ABSTRACT. The literature reports mixed findings in relating public service motivation (PSM) to stress or similar concepts (Giauque et al 2013, Van Loon et al 215, Bakker 2015; Chiu et al 2023; Zhang and Liu 2023). Commonly, PSM is said to have an effect on stress. However, from a neurological perspective, the causality between PSM and stress may also be reversed, and stress can create or reduce particular strands or types of PSM. This where this paper would like to pick up the discussion.

(de-)Activation of the limbic-cortical system may cause either more affective or more non-affective types of PSM to (dis)appear (Van Witteloostuijn et al 2017). After all, stress impairs the function of prefrontal cortex (Shansky and Lipps 2013), whereas, when not stressed, non-affective PSM may be more likely. Given that cortisol has emerged as the most-often studied stress hormone and one of the most-used biomarkers of stress (Ganster & Rosen, 2013) and is known to impair the prefrontal cortex, this will be used as a biomarker to further investigate this relationship.

We will test this hypothesis on a sample of Belgian civil servants. In total 130 (T1) and 128 (T2) respondents participated in the 2-wave panel study (response rate of 40%). Saliva and hair samples are analyzed for their concentrations of cortisol. PSM is measured by means of the Kim et al (2013) measure. The data will be analyzed by means of first-difference regression approach (Allison 2005) in order to estimate the reversed direction of the relationship.

ABSTRACT. This study combines scholarship on administrative burden and digital government, putting forward the following key research questions: Does digital government hold its promise and reduce administrative burden for citizens? If so, do vulnerable citizens benefit from digital government to a similar extent as others?

Previous research on these matters is still sparse. Peters (2023) calls for a broader agenda of research on digital administrative burden. Larsson (2021) shows how low-income citizens are disproportionally excluded from an automated benefit-granting procedure and required to apply manually instead. These pieces suggest that digital government may create new inequalities to the further disadvantage of vulnerable people, who are supposed to be more at risk of being excluded from digital services than non-vulnerable citizens, thus carrying higher administrative burden.

This study builds on the 2021 wave of the Life Events Survey, designed for representativeness of the German population. The experiences of 5,293 respondents are analyzed for the impact of digitalization on the perceived administrative costs in 8,938 encounters with state agencies. Preliminary results show that the use of digital services is related to significantly lower administrative burden across different socio-demographic groups. Once vulnerable citizens use digital government, they benefit from it in a similar magnitude as more advantaged people do. However, the results provide evidence that some vulnerable groups are significantly less likely to use digital government, raising the question of how they can be empowered to use digital services.

ABSTRACT. Scholars of public administration have increasingly sought to expand the scope of administrative burden research beyond its implications for access to public benefits. Despite this, the literature concerning how administrative burden affects access to rights is limited. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, commonly known as Section 504, safeguards individuals with disabilities from discrimination based on disability. The Federal law entitles individuals to accommodation for declared disabilities.

Colleges and universities are one of the most common institutional settings in which people attempt to access rights guaranteed under Section 504, but there is evidence that students with disabilities encounter substantial burdens when seeking accommodation and that these burdens vary across institutions. Our research question is whether a university's characteristics, particularly its focus on student-centeredness, influences the degree of administrative burden for students seeking accommodations? This not is not only a contribution to the literature regarding administrative burden because of its focus on access to a civil right, it also adds to the literature by attempting to predict the level rather than the impact of burden across organizations.


Drawing on an original data from U.S. universities and the Johns Hopkins Disability Health Research Center (DHRC) University Disability Inclusion Scoring Data, this study examines administrative burden based on an organizational characteristic—student-centeredness. Addressing this question is essential for developing a thorough comprehension of how universities can alleviate the hurdles encountered by students with disabilities in their pursuit of accessing federal civil rights.

ABSTRACT. Rental housing assistance is typically heavily rationed in the United States, with only one in five eligible households receiving any federal supports. This paper leverages a unique moment - when government dramatically scaled up assistance to meet renters needs during the pandemic - to explore program take-up and the role of Community Based Organizations (CBOs) in overcoming administrative burdens in accessing housing assistance. Congress allocated an unprecedented $46 billion in emergency rental assistance programs (ERAP) to keep low- income renters housed during the pandemic, creating a unique moment where rental supports were widely accessible and available. This paper uses a spatial approach to estimate the gap between eligible households and program approvals in California, disentangling failure to apply and inability to get approved using household-level application data. Then, we employ a series of regressions to identify the dominant barriers to submitting an application and being approved, and we measure the role of CBOs in overcoming those barriers using novel data from California-based CBOs. Specifically, we use spatial temporal data on CBO outreach activities, in concert with CBO participation in applications, to measure the importance of community supports in mediating burden and facilitating equitable program access.

ABSTRACT. Prior research has warned that unequal political participation translates into unequal democracy (Bartels, 2016; Solt, 2008). While some groups tend to participate less in public life, they are also subject to burdensome policies. The literature on administrative burdens has demonstrated that burdens could limit citizens’ access to government services and ultimately affect the pace at which some groups access resources (Herd & Moynihan, 2018). While citizen participation is normatively desirable in a democracy, participatory processes are often beset with incumbrances that can produce burdensome encounters for citizens. This study analyzes the effects of burdens on citizen participation and possible mechanisms to attenuate them. We ask how the citizen’s decision to engage is impacted when the participation process is perceived as burdensome. We further test whether participation modality and the extent of power-sharing moderate the effect of burdens on citizen participation. The study uses an explanatory sequential research design. Specifically, we first draw on two survey experiments conducted with citizens from Milan, Italy, and then follow with interviews and focus groups to explain our quantitative findings.

ABSTRACT. The architects of New Public Management argued that contracting out was one of the foundational tenets of “Reinventing Government” (Osborne and Gaebler, 1993). Choosing to “buy” goods or services in the make-or-buy decision would result in lower total cost of services and maximize outputs. However, contracting concerns were well known, such as Incomplete contracting and capital asset investment, which could result in failed contracts, actually driving up the total costs of providing services (Domberger & Jensen 1997). Moreover, in-housing public services was seen was a way but progressive reformers in the early 1900s as a way to combat corruption; in-housing was a way to improve efficiency (Tolbert & Zucker 1983).

Theoretical conjecture contracting’s impacts likely depends on the implementation and management of contracts and unfortunately there is little systematic evidence in the modern context. There have a variety of papers on the subject (see Alonso & Andrews 2016; Buerger & Harris 2021; Bauer & Johnston 2020) but as with any single empirical paper, they results are time-and-place bound, and limited to the peculiar structures of contracts in their areas. This presentation will report results of a meta-analysis on the relationship between contracting out and organizational performance. After a systematic literature search, original papers will be coded using a coding instrument to provide some early evidence on the both whether and why contracting is (or is not) associated with organizational performance.

ABSTRACT. Under the new public management principles, government procurement has become a prevalent government tool in public service delivery in recent decades (Salamon, 2002; Savas, 2000). In this process, the focus on improving efficiency has gradually expanded to include other values, such as environmental friendliness (Behravesh et al., 2022). As a result, green procurement has been adopted, though at different stages, in several states in the US. This approach not only tackles complex environmental challenges but also fosters a shift towards a greener society by posing governmental influence across various sectors. (Dimand, 2022). Thus, this study aims to explore the factors and timing contributing to the decisions of adopting green procurement in the US state governments.

The preconditions of government green procurement have attracted scholarly attention in recent years (Dimand et al., 2023; Dimand & Neshkova, 2023; Rodriguez-Plesa et al., 2022). Based on existing literature, we consider government green procurement as an organizational strategy shaped by the government’s internal and external context. In this line of reasoning, we examine four groups of factors: political ideology, organization capacity, fiscal situation, and environmental evaluation. Furthermore, we adopt a survival analysis to estimate the factors promoting green procurement at a specific moment in time, while also considering the influence of timing (González-G ómez and Guardiola, 2009; Plata-Diaz et al., 2017). In conclusion, this study aims to deepen our understanding of the dynamics influencing the adoption of green procurement practices, contributing to the development of more effective environmental policies in the public sector.

ABSTRACT. Within the “hollow state,” elected leaders and public managers determine public priorities, which are then implemented through a complex web of service providers. While scholars increasingly recognize the ways that contracted service providers shape public service delivery, little research bridges across contracting, organizational characteristics, and participant-level experiences. This study conducts a multilevel analysis of a single government program to investigate how organizational implementation shapes individual-level experiences within a complex contracting environment. The context for this study is a local “Employment and Housing Program” (EHP) that is implemented through 12 nonprofit agencies. Our mixed-methods approach draws from 85 interviews with local government staff, provider agency staff, and program participants. Under complex contracts—where it is unclear whether contractors can meet local governments’ needs—we identify key organizational characteristics that can be used to improve contract performance and participant experience. Specifically, we focus on the ways that organizational mission alignment, lived experience of staff, and narratives of program participants shape participant experiences and outcomes.

ABSTRACT. Transaction cost theory is a go-to theory in research on government contracting and public procurement. It posits that contract designs will discriminately align with the properties of the underlying transaction. Its theoretical expectation is to find contracts that are finetuned to the transaction. The more asset specific, uncertain, and frequent the transaction is, the more complex the contract. If finetuning is unlimited, we face the fundamental problem of explaining why transactions would ever be taken off the market.

However, empirically observed contracts tend to be quite simple and look alike across levels of transaction properties. Contractual complexity research explains this finding. To avoid risk and effort, organizations select for convenient contract designs. They rely on contract templates that have ‘passed the test of time.’ Briefly, organizations design contracts for convenience.

We face a theoretical puzzle. On the one hand, the discriminant alignment mechanism in transaction cost theory generates a wide variety of contract designs. On the other hand, the convenience mechanism in contractual complexity research reduces the variety of contract designs. We do not know how the two mechanisms relate to each other.

We make a proposition to fill this theoretical gap. Contracts may be simple across levels of transaction properties. Here, the convenience of contracts is modelled as a constant term in the transaction cost function of market governance. Convenient contracts lower the transaction cost of market governance but also expose it to hazards. This explains why some transactions are taken off the market.

We discuss how the convenience of contract designs is socially constructed, in contrast to the underlying transaction properties. We highlight that the convenience of a contract is a central argument in favor of market governance.

ABSTRACT. Research has demonstrated that employee motivation is relevant for performance and can be affected by leadership behavior (Bellé 2013a, b). However, we know less about how motivation can be enhanced by joint training of employees and leaders. Such training can potentially enhance motivation through organizational learning about values (Ritz and Brewer 2013, 227), collective self-persuasion and deliberate beneficiary contact (Bellé 2013a). Joint training with these elements can enable employees to support each other’s motivation enhancement.

Analyzing public service motivation and intrinsic motivation, this paper tests whether joint training in motivation enhancement increases employee motivation. We expect higher motivation after training, and joint training in motivation enhancement (value learning, self-persuasion and beneficiary contact) is expected to increase motivation more than other joint training.

This is tested using data from a pre-registered field experiment providing joint training of leaders and employees in 129 units within Danish hospitals, employment units, social care, and police (129 leaders and 2,500 employees). These units were randomized into three experimental groups (goal-orienteered leadership, distributed leadership or motivation enhancement). To test whether joint training in motivation enhancement can foster higher motivation, we use data from pre- and post-intervention surveys, utilizing (1) the experimental variation between the three types of joint training and (2) the panel structure.

For research, the results are important, because the organizational aspect of motivation is understudied, and knowledge about joint training is sparse. Practitioners can use the insights on potentials for motivation enhancement, when they decide whether to prioritize between different types of training.

ABSTRACT. Following the “Great Resignation” in the United States, organizations are investing in professional development programs for employees at an increased rate. Empirical studies in the fields of public management and psychology have found that employee training programs provide long-term benefits for organizations. For employees, participating in professional development programs can lead to learning new skills, increased job motivation and empowerment (Aguinis and Kraiger, 2009; Kroll and Moynihan, 2015). Previous literature has studied the relationship between internal development programs and individual and organizational outcomes (Seidle et al., 2016), the relationship between public service motivation and performance outcomes (Belle, 2013; Naff and Crum, 1999; Perry and Wise, 1990), and how gender influences volunteer behaviors within professional settings (Fayall and Gazley, 2015). However, a gap exists as we know little about how civic engagement outside of the workplace, a dimension of public service motivation, is related to building leaders in the workplace. Based on social-cognitive theory and leadership theory, this study seeks to identify how diversifying employee leadership skillsets through civic engagement in communities may be related to self-efficacy within the workplace. This study utilizes a dataset of local government employees in the Southeastern United States from fall 2023. Relying on probit regression analysis, preliminary findings indicate that when mediated by supervisor support and gender, civic engagement has a modest, positive effect on self-efficacy, while civic engagement, mediated by organizational support, has a small, negative effect on turnover intention.

ABSTRACT. Research has long investigated the factors influencing turnover intentions of public employees, categorized by individual and organizational levels. Individual-level factors encompass pay competitiveness, role ambiguity, job autonomy, meaningfulness of work, value congruence, and relationship with the supervisor. Organizational-level factors include procedural justice, participatory decision-making, and innovative culture. However, most research relied on single-year cross-sectional data, and they acknowledge the limitation that the cross-sectional evidence engenders controversies about rigorous causality and directionality. We aim to address the limitation and extend the inquiry through time-variant characteristics of turnover intentions: do these factors remain consistent across different political and social contexts?

To fill in the dynamism, we utilize longitudinal survey data of public employee viewpoints, 2013 through 2023. The data are sourced from the Korean Institute of Public Administration, administering large-scale annual surveys to Korean public employees across all ranks and all departments in the national government, all provincial governments, and 17 metropolitan city governments, representative of the public sector workforce. For each survey, the sample size ranges from 4,000 to 5,000. During the period, there were two administration changes by presidential elections, switching between the two major parties. The general popularity on public service jobs has decreased over time. We combine the surveys and employ longitudinal data analysis. Specifically, we investigate what factors affect public employee turnover intentions, whether administration changes moderate these relationships, and how the causal patterns change by the decreasing popularity on public service jobs.

ABSTRACT. This article analyzes factors affecting turnover intention and actual turnover of new civil servants who passed the Civil Service Entrance Examination. By using the data from the seventh Taiwan Government Civil Service Survey (TGBS VII) survey investigated in 2020 and 2021, the sample contains 226 new public servants who passed the Civil Service Entrance Examination in 2019 and were trained by the National Academy of Civil Service and start working in 2020. Logistic regression was used to explore factors affecting the actual turnover, while ordinal logistic regression was used to examine factors affecting turnover intention. Our results found that among 226 new civil servants surveyed, a total of 15 resigned within two years of working, and the actual resignation was dominantly correlated with whether they were categorized as vocational workers rather than administrative servants. Although the job satisfaction of the resigned new civil servants was high, they actually left because the salaries of vocational technicians would be much higher in the private sector. As for turnover intention, person-job fit and job satisfaction are negatively correlated with all types of turnover intention (resign and leave the public sector, resign but retake the exams for another job in the government, switch jobs but still in the government), while job burnout is positively correlated with the newcomers’ intention to leave the public sector.

ABSTRACT. Network studies of collaborations, alliances, and partnerships have been one of the major themes in public management and policy research for the past three decades. While most varieties of network studies share a common intellectual heritage they have developed somewhat different theoretical frames and methodologies that they often apply to different types of empirical settings. This roundtable will ask scholars associated with each of the following “schools” of network studies to discuss the strengths of the approach compared to others and where they see it going in the next few years. This roundtable is targeted at junior scholars and graduate students who wish to understand the landscape of network studies, and which make the most sense for different types of empirical problems.

Convener, Brint Milward, University of Arizona

• Advocacy Coalition – Alejandra Medina, University of Colorado at Denver du) • Polycentricity/Ecology of Games – Mark Lubell, University of California, Davis • Governance Networks – Erik-Hans Klijn, Erasmus University • Collaborative Governance Regimes – Kirk Emerson, University of Arizona • Purpose-oriented Networks – Branda Nowell, North Carolina State University

ABSTRACT. Redressing the myriad environmental issues facing humanity requires engagement at all levels of government. This study reviews the last three decades of public management research centered on the natural environment. Journals were selected based on their ranking within the top two quartiles of Public Administration journals, as determined by Journal Citation Reports. From an initial sample of 1,928, articles were coded by a team to identify methods, data, research topics, and theoretical frame. Based on these data, this study focuses on two questions:

1. What areas of the natural environment (e.g., nonrenewable resource extraction, fishery collapse, etc.) have scholars focused on?

2. To what degree have scholars provided actionable suggestions or recommendations to public administrators to redress environmental problems?

Academically, this project will help inform future research by revealing gaps in the environmental topics studied by scholars. These gaps present opportunities to facilitate engagement between public administrators and the natural sciences. In terms of the article’s practical application, public management scholarship represents a potential link between the natural sciences, the physical environment, and public administration engagement. A synthesis of how and when scholars offer actionable advice to public administrators provides important context, illuminating the connections between moving theory and research into practice and action.

ABSTRACT. The tension between economic growth and environmental protection is a significant challenge, especially in developing nations. China has addressed this issue through environmental recentralization and campaign-style enforcement. However, this method is often criticized for exacerbating the trade-off between economic development and environmental protection due to short-term political pressure. This paper posits that the "economy-environment" relationship is a spectrum and that through the institutionalization of campaign-style efforts, initial trade-offs can eventually transform into complementary effects. These arguments are evaluated using China's Central Environmental Protection Inspection (CEPI) campaigns. The results indicate that CEPI initially led to substitutability in the "economy-environment" relationship, but after being institutionalized as a regular enforcement measure, it promoted their complementarity. Additionally, the study highlights how technology can further this complementarity by reducing the informational disadvantages of central governments and improving local environmental governance.

ABSTRACT. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems bring opportunities and challenges to public governance. The two perspectives of AI in public governance are identified in this study. First, AI seizes a critical role in smart city projects. The purpose of smart cities is to utilize smart technologies to address resident needs. City governments develop AI strategies to collect data and process information based on local contexts. Second, the strengths and weaknesses of AI and humans shape their collaboration in public service delivery. AI has the advantage of processing and analyzing big amounts of data, while humans outperform machines in generating creative policy solutions. The government develops strategies for human-and-machine collaboration in different policy contexts based on this nature. Various collaboration types result in different impacts on public values. Based on the two perspectives, we develop the research questions: (1) How do local governments utilize AI in smart city projects? (2) What are the impacts of AI applications on public values in different public services? We develop a framework to connect public service characteristics and public value creation for smart cities. Document analysis and semi-structured interviews will be utilized as primary research methods. We will analyze existing official documents relevant to AI adoptions and interview public managers in six municipalities to understand the policy areas to which this technology is applied and explore potential impacts on public values. Research findings are expected to clarify AI applications and connect service characteristics and public values.

ABSTRACT. The COVID-19 pandemic led the Tokyo 2020 Olympics to be postponed and held in 2021 without visitors and spectators. Given the economic shortfalls, this strudy examines whether the Olympics’ collaborative governance effectively responded to the pandemic and generated public value. The public value identification draws on a difference-in-differences design between 2019 and 2022 that compares Tokyo residents’ city government evaluations with those of other Japanese metropolitan residents (N = 6,876). It reveals the negative effects of the Olympics on Tokyo residents’ evaluations of policy outputs and processes (p < .1) and their trust in the government (p < .05). This study discusses the implications of the Olympics’ public value failure during the pandemic.

ABSTRACT. The digital transformation of the government serves as a crucial strategic pillar for constructing a Digital China. The question of how to propel this transformation has sparked extensive discussions within academia, yet few studies have delved into the regional similarities and differences in government digital transformation. Grounded in the theories of neo-institutionalism and dynamic capabilities, this paper employs Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) and Time Series Qualitative Comparative Analysis (TSQCA). It constructs an interactive framework of ‘pressure-capability’ to elucidate the behavioral similarities and differences in government digital transformation. The research reveals that mimetic pressure, normative pressure, adaptive capability, and absorptive capability are necessary conditions for high-performance government digital transformation. The interplay of multiple factors within the dimensions of pressure and capability gives rise to three paths in the construction of government digital transformation: pressure isomorphism, capability divergence, and synergy development. Moreover, these three paths can mutually transform under certain conditions. The ‘pressure-capability’ interactive framework expands the understanding of government digital transformation beyond a single-dimensional focus on pressure and capability. It provides new perspectives for comprehending spatial variations in the paths of government digital transformation and enhancing performance adaptively based on local conditions.

ABSTRACT. Historically, the scholarly focus has predominantly been on bottom-up information asymmetry, where lower-level entities as agents gather and control localized information, placing higher authorities in a disadvantaged position. Recent shifts in research have started to examine top-down asymmetry, especially as Government as a Platform (GaaP) initiatives encourage higher authorities to centralize government business systems and amalgamate information from subordinate levels. However, an interesting phenomenon of reciprocal information symmetry within multi-level agencies in the digital era remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap through the case study of managing mental disorder patients utilizing the ’Kuai big data platform’, examining how big data governance in China's local state is transforming bilateral information asymmetry, thus reshaping the relational dynamics between multi-level agencies. The "Kuai big data platform" introduces an innovative dual-channel mechanism: the 'data channel' allows lower-level agencies to retain localized task data, while the 'label channel' facilitates real-time transmission of task implementation information upwards. This model ingeniously balances data governance rights at the lower levels with information control at higher levels, allowing for a harmonious coexistence of centralization and decentralization, as power is categorically divided. Although this model enhances multi-level agency coordination and supervision responding to complicated governance challenges, it risks eradicating necessary ambiguous redundancies, potentially fostering an involution incentive structure among agencies. This could inadvertently lead to quasi-exit behaviors and fragmented coordination, threatening the success of digital multi-level governance pattern. Theoretically, these changes indicate a shift towards joint governance in multi-level agencies, signifying a trend in digital reform meriting further exploration.

ABSTRACT. Public organizations process – gather, interpret, and synthesize – information and evidence to reduce the uncertainty and ambiguity of decision-making in a complex context (Daft and Langel, 1986; Jennings Jr and Hall 2012). Based on machine-learning techniques analyzing large datasets, AI has the potential to improve the information processing capacity (Vogl et al., 2020; Son et al., 2023). Yet, little is known about how public organizations perceive the information credibility or trustworthiness of this technology. We ask: Do public organizations perceive AI to be a credible tool for informing decision-making? and What organizational contexts and tasks affect organizational perception of information credibility of AI and organizational intention to use AI?

Drawing upon information processing theory (IPT), we answer the research questions by exploring the impact of task characteristics, innovativeness, alternative information reliance, and public participation on perceived information credibility of AI and intention to use. For example, we expect routineness and task analyzability will be negatively associated with credibility of AI information and intent to use, while greater task discretion and organizational innovativeness will be positively associated with the credibility and intention. Associations with organizational reliance on external expert input and public participation are less clear, offering an opportunity to inform IPT theory. To test formal hypotheses, we use a unique 2024 nationally representative survey of 3900 top managers in 650 small- and medium-sized US cities (populations between 25,000 and 300,000). This study advances understanding and informs public managers about the evolving role of AI in public sector decision making.

ABSTRACT. Collaboration evolves over time. The relationship between trust and learning is enhanced; repeated, consistent interaction fosters new skills, values, resources, and shared consensus. However, collaboration may be more successful when organizations share an explicit understanding of the problem. Over time, mutual consensus may be strained as the collaboration extends to new geographic areas and service areas or welcomes new partners. Potentially formal contracts to promote accountability and anchor strategy might become necessary. It is not clear if the longer organizations work together the less formal their relationships are since they have already established a repertoire and now what to expect from each other; along the same lines, newer relations might require formality as a layer of protection. The same argument can apply to decision making. In newer collaborative relations, organizations might prefer to share the responsibility of making decisions; the longer they work together and build trust, the more willing they are to defer to others and give up that responsibility. The questions are: does the age of collaboration shape its arrangements? Does it shape the perceptions of its outcomes? In other words, how likely are newer collaborative efforts to generate positive perceptions of effectiveness, increased performance, citizens’ satisfaction, and trust between collaborators. To answer these questions, we use the lenses of resource dependence theory, transaction cost theory, institutional theory, and network perspectives to propose a set of hypotheses. We test these hypotheses using quantitative data from two national surveys targeting 1100 local governments and 650 nonprofits in Lebanon.

ABSTRACT. Abstract: How does public sector and platform enterprises interact in platform governance? While previous studies have explored the necessity and static nature of public-private collaborative governance in traditional contexts, few studies have analyzed the dynamic evolution of their interaction in platform governance. This article takes Taobao as a case to trace its regulation process from 2003 to 2023. By interviewing over 20 stakeholders within public supervision sectors and platform enterprises, the study identifies four distinct stages in the evolution of public and private interaction: self-regulation, no interaction, competitive and cooperative. This article develops a theoretical framework from the perspective of agile governance to explain the change of public and private interaction relationship, which includes the comparison of regulatory capabilities between public sector and private sector, the market development conditions of private sector. It sheds new light on the understanding of dynamic interaction between public and private governance in the realm of platform governance.

ABSTRACT. Amid increasingly wicked challenges, public leaders have embraced collaborative governance approaches as prevalent tools for designing, implementing, and evaluating the policies that shape community life. However, recent scholarship highlights vast variation in collaborative performance, finding that while some groups flourish, stabilize, and achieve or expand their goals, many stall, disband, or transform over time (Ulibarri et al., 2020). Despite massive investment in mandated boards, committees, and councils, we know little about why and how these local and regional efforts evolve, prompting calls from scholars and practitioners seeking deeper understanding of the longitudinal dynamics driving different collaborative trajectories. Our paper addresses this critical knowledge gap, leveraging data from 36 county-level Local Public Safety Coordinating Councils (LPSCCs) across the State of Oregon to ask: How do collaborative governance leaders identify the need for transformation and manage change over time? Building on work by Ulibarri and colleagues (2020), we use process tracing and a grounded theory approach — rooted in Imperial and colleagues’ (2016) collaborative lifecycle framework and Emerson and colleagues’ (2012) Integrative Framework for Collaborative Governance — to examine the conditions surrounding LPSCC activation, institutionalization, stabilization, and reorientation over three decades (1994-2023). We examine LPSCC documents, county-level public safety data, and stakeholder interviews to contribute a rich mixed-methods examination of group responses to declining performance, leadership transitions, policy developments, and evolving public demands, vetting longstanding theoretical assumptions shaping collaborative governance scholarship and practice. This medium-n case comparison advances our understanding of the complex relationships between collaborative context, leadership, and performance over time.

ABSTRACT. While the identification and recruitment of collaborative partners is one of the most critical activities for the ultimate success of the collaborative venture, the leader of a collaborative network does not always have the option to choose who the organizations involved in the network will send as their representative. Instead, it is the managers in the individual organizations that make that decision. However, little research has been conducted to understand how these managers make this decision. Who does a manger decide to send to collaborate, and why? Drawing on image theory and person-environment fit theory, this study explores the trade-offs that managers confront when deciding which of their employees to assign to a collaborative venture based upon the impact the assignment will have on the organization, the network, and the employee assigned to the network. To do this, a choice-based conjoint analysis experimental design of nearly 900 respondents was utilized. The findings show that managers confront trade-offs between making assignments that would benefit their organization, the collaborative network, and the assigned employee according to the importance they place on the work of the network, their views on collaboration, the sector in which they work, and their gender. This research has implications for both collaborative management theory and practice. It not only advances our understanding of how managers make collaborative assignment decisions, but also contributes methodologically by utilizing a conjoint design and furthers our theoretical understanding by applying person-environment fit theory in a novel way.

ABSTRACT. The delivery of public infrastructure projects—from local road repairs to new multimodal facilities—requires prudent management of resources. Faced with tight budgets and competing priorities, public organizations have deployed various methods to incentivize the involvement of private parties. Broadly, these mechanisms fall into four streams—financing, contracting, partnership, and privatization, ordered from low to high private participation. Because public value creation often depends on the private party’s financial capacity and subject-matter expertise, we test whether higher private sector involvement leads to more innovation. We distinguish among three dimensions of innovation: social, financial, and technological. For the empirical analysis, we retrieved the profiles of 316 projects in the United States from the Department of Transportation’s Center for Innovative Finance Support. The results show that partnerships have the highest positive effect on overall innovation. Bundled projects—those using a single contract for various facilities—lead to higher innovations, which we assume to reflect greater coordination. Broader project characteristics—such as size, region, and area— also have significant effects on the number of innovations, illustrating the complexities of environmental incentives and constraints.

ABSTRACT. Trauma-informed approaches (TIAs) have grown popular during an era of multiple societal-level traumas. Originally developed as an organizational change framework to help social service agencies better serve clients with histories of trauma, today TIAs are a loose category of policies and practices adopted by nonprofits, school districts, and healthcare systems to promote thriving. As they have spread, TIAs have been criticized for being challenging to operationalize and perpetuating the status quo of inequity.

In one state, the lieutenant governor formed the Trauma-Informed Ad Hoc Working Group (the Working Group) in 2021 to determine how to make the state trauma-informed. The interdisciplinary Working Group—made up of elected state representatives, local government administrators, nonprofit professionals, and clinicians—grappled with the potential and challenges of TIAs as it strategized for a trauma-informed state.

This ethnographic case study examines the Working Group to better understand how the macro-level processes of state-level transformation and institutionalization unfold in the micro interactions of professionals on the ground. Over the course of one year (January 2023 to December 2023), we conducted field observations of Working Group meetings, held informant conversations, and reviewed archival data. Our analysis leverages a novel combination of neo-institutional theory, cognitive approaches to policy implementation, and the science of trauma. We find that Working Group members make meaning, leverage expertise, mobilize resources, engage state policy levers, and ultimately develop the field of trauma-informed supports as they work to transform their state into one that promotes healing for all residents.

ABSTRACT. The surge in private sector involvement in municipal solid waste management aligns with the prevailing neoliberal governance paradigm, emphasizing efficiency, cost-sharing, and resource optimization while minimizing government intervention. Despite its widespread adoption, increasing privatization has led to deteriorating waste conditions, posing substantial threats to the environment and public health. To address the complexities of municipal waste governance, this paper delves into the multifaceted factors influencing municipal waste generation, focusing on the role of public authority involvement. In doing so, the study employs a multi-model approach, using ordinary least squares and fixed effects regressions along with moderation analysis to analyze data from 125 capital cities around the world. Our results indicate a positive association between population size and the volume of municipal waste generation, even when controlling the municipal GDP and public authority involvement. We also found a positive association between municipal GDP and the generated waste volume; however, this link does not hold true when accounting for other factors. Notably, increased public authority involvement correlates with reduced municipal waste generation. Moreover, moderation analysis suggests a diminishing impact of population size on waste generation with higher levels of public authority involvement. In summary, as a city grows and its economy expands, more waste is likely to be generated. However, increased public authority involvement can mitigate the negative impacts of population growth on a city’s waste generation. Consequently, this study urges researchers and practitioners to reassess public accountability in municipal waste governance.

ABSTRACT. Ensuring the supervisory responsibility of bureaucracies has been recognized as a key strategy for the implementation of public policy. Usually, the responsibility for ensuring that policies are implemented without bias is carried out by the functional departments to monitor the subordinate departments. However, in a multi-level government system, it is difficult to ensure that the functional departments of each level of government can faithfully fulfill their supervision responsibilities, which leads to policy implementation obstruction. In this study, we explore the impact of a particular type of supervision in China - "re-supervision" - on the elimination of policy implementation obstruction. "Re-supervision" is the indirect supervision carried out by discipline inspection and supervision organs at all levels, which supervision object is the performance of supervision responsibilities of functional departments, and urges functional departments at all levels to make rectification if they fail to perform supervision responsibility. Using a mixed method, we interviewed 45 civil servants and conducted "re-supervision" cases study in four fields: environmental protection, poverty alleviation, financial supervision, and engineering construction. We found that "re-supervision" can promote the return of the supervision responsibility of the government functional departments that have neglected their duties or performed their duties inefficiently by means of discipline enforcement, accountability, exerting political pressure and urging rectification，which has a significant positive impact on eliminating the obstruction of policy implementation.

ABSTRACT. In times of crises, political leaders and other key stakeholders are expected to communicate effectively with community members to provide the necessary information to restore a state of normalcy and ensure public safety (Jong, 2017). However, as the recent COVID-19 pandemic illustrated, different political leaders adopted approaches with varying levels of success in informing the public of the severity of the issue and enforcing public safety measures like mask mandates (Watkins & Clevenger, 2021), leading to differing COVID case rates. This research asks the question, “How do stakeholder tactics used by US governors during public briefings on COVID-19 influence the development of public safety mandates and affect the public’s response to such mandates?" We plan to study stakeholder tactics that include the speaker’s choices of phrasing, medium and visual cues and the involvement of other key stakeholders. To conduct this research, we plan to collect data from each US governor’s public briefings on COVID-19 at set times between April and October 2020 following the model used by Jensen et al (2023). The data focuses on the type of information presented by the governor (looking at a transcript of the speech) and the context of the speech. We focused on the two weeks preceding opinion surveys conducted between April 1 and October 1, 2020 to provide opportunities to examine the perceptions of community members in response to the governor’s actions. We also plan on utilizing semi-supervised machine learning pattern learning to explore and categorize our findings.

ABSTRACT. This study investigates the structural variances in accountability outcomes following significant emergencies.It delineates six pivotal factors that shape the accountability dynamics of officials: the incident’s severity, bureaucratic pressure, public pressure the structure of responsibility,type of responsibility, and the hierarchical rank of officials. An in-depth investigation of the interplay among these variables in the context of major emergency scenarios reveals a correlation between stress-oriented, accident-oriented, and position-oriented approaches and the rigor of accountability enforcement. A notable discovery of this study is the tendency for lower-rank officials, including deputies, to face more stringent accountability. These findings contribute to the existing body of literature on government accountability and offer valuable perspectives to policymakers aiming to enhance accountability frameworks.

ABSTRACT. The AI global governance system is considered a loosely fragmented regime complex, i.e., partially overlapping and diverse governance arrangements, with no clearly defined centralized institutions or hierarchy. However, it has been argued that the AI global governance system is polycentric and decentralized, but centered on the OECD. This research explores the complexities and nuances of global governance in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI). It would delve into how the collaboration between various stakeholders, including governments, private corporations, academic institutions, and civil society, is pivotal for the effective and ethical governance of AI technologies. This topic addresses the dual institutional logic at play: the first is the techno-economic logic, which emphasizes innovation, competitiveness, and market-driven approaches, and the second is the socio-ethical logic, which stresses the importance of ethical standards, public welfare, and human rights. We highlight the challenges and opportunities in balancing these sometimes competing logics, illustrating how they influence policies, regulations, and the overall direction of AI development and deployment. This research question is broken down into three recursive sub-research questions: 1) Analysis of Collaboration Patterns: what are the patterns of multi-stakeholder collaboration in the AI global governance system? 2) Factors affecting collaboration: what are the factors that drive multi-stakeholders to form collaborative relationships? 3) Assessment of the effectiveness of collaboration: what is the impact of different models of collaboration on the strategies and policies of AI global governance? How effective are they?

ABSTRACT. The ‘humanitarian-development-peace nexus (HDPN)’ has been a powerful concept within global society for effectively responding to multifaceted disasters that lead to forced migration by linking humanitarian and development assistance towards sustainable peace. From a public administration perspective, the HDPN offers an empirical portrait, emphasizing collaborative governance to enhance coherence among multi-sectoral actions. However, its operationalization remains vague, necessitating further research in theory and practice. Particularly, limited scholarship delves into multipartner governance, encompassing broad partnerships among the state, private and civil sectors, local communities, and hybrids (Emerson et al., 2011). From the collaborative governance aspect, what should we consider for conceptualizing and implementing the HDPN in forced migration situations? This study aims to draw critical implications for the collaborative governance of HDPN by applying Emerson et al.'s (2011) ‘Integrative Framework for Collaborative Governance (CGF).' Our literature review affirms CGF's applicability, offering key considerations: First, local capacity not only includes engaging host governments but also programming humanitarian resources in alignment with local institutions. Second, H-D-P is not a ‘linear’ process but rather operationalizes ‘concurrently with a great deal of dynamics.’ Based on our analysis, suggestions are made for the OECD DAC’s HDPN recommendations. The findings address knowledge gaps in collaborative governance for implementing HDPN, bridging the rhetoric-reality divide amidst a global crisis, and expanding the academic role of public administration.

ABSTRACT. The popularity of social media posed challenges to governments that once relied on traditional media for political propaganda. Beyond shaping political narratives, governments must diversify strategies to catch attention and disseminate information effectively in the online content flood. This is especially important when targeting Generation Z, deeply influenced by the Internet and disinclined toward traditional civic participation. This study uses mixed methods to explore innovative government strategies for engaging Generation Z through video-based social media, including clickbait titles (e.g., slang), catchy thumbnails (e.g., memes), non-political content, and government-influencer collaborations. Analyzing 24,136 videos from 24 government-related accounts on Bilibili, we found such strategies are widespread and efficient in increasing Generation Z engagement (e.g., views, shares). Further, we uncover Generation Z's favorable perceptions and concerns about these strategies. These findings reveal how government propaganda strategies evolved from censorship and disinformation to new strategies for engaging youth and adapting to social media mechanisms.

ABSTRACT. A central part of the administrative burden framework has been the potential for policy feedback effects, i.e. that administrative experiences, good or bad, will alter how people think about their relationship with government. This question has clear relevance to policymakers who see reducing burdens as a means of enhancing trust in government. However, we have little research on policy feedback effects of administrative burdens. We draw on representative samples collected in 2022 of residents in five countries (Denmark, Mexico, South Korea, UK, USA; N≈10,000) to explore the association between burdens and policy feedback outcomes. Respondents were asked to identify the time they spend on different administrative tasks (related to health, tax, social benefits and care work) to calculate a “time tax” associated with burdens. We then test the association between the time allocated to these tasks and a range of measures of policy feedback measures, including assessments of the agency (satisfaction and performance evaluations), trust in government, and civic behavior. In our regressions, we control for individual traits such as age, gender, health, ethnicity, and income. To look into heterogeneous effects, we furthermore test if the associations between time spent on administrative tasks and policy feedback outcomes are moderated by a) reported psychological burden associated with conducting the tasks, and b) country differences, taking advantage of our cross-country design. Intriguingly, we observe substantial differences in the association between time use and policy feedback measures across countries, suggesting that administrative tasks have different effects depending on how citizen-state interactions are organized.

ABSTRACT. Reductions in administrative burdens can increase access to public services, but policymakers also hope that they can increase trust in government. If the public does not notice improvements, this disrupts the virtuous circle of policy, where positive action gains political credit. To test this question, we leverage a policy change that reduces burdens. The state of Minnesota expanded the use of automatic renewals of Medicaid for its aged, blind and disabled population. For many clients, this meant they no longer needed to complete annual enrollment processes. We take advantage of this policy change with a randomized controlled trial to examine if this increased trust in public services. Our research design will survey trust across three types of clients: those who were not subject to automatic renewal, those who were, plus a treatment group who are also reminded of the automatic renewal via an informational flier sent by the government. The design allows us to assess a) if there are trust differences between those who benefited from automatic renewal and those who did not, and b) between those who were reminded of the automatic renewal process and those who were not. Thus, our approach provides estimates of both burden reduction on trust, as well as informational reminders about burden reduction on trust.

ABSTRACT. Means-tested public benefits programs provide a critical safety net for low-income households and have been shown to be highly effective at mitigating the effects of poverty. Yet, despite very clear evidence of net benefits for those who participate, about 20 to over 50 percent of households do not utilize programs for which they are eligible. A growing literature demonstrates that reducing administrative burdens – especially learning and compliance costs – can increase take-up in some contexts. We extend this literature by focusing on the role of stigma – an often cited, but rarely tested, psychological cost – associated with public benefits programs.

We conceptualize the stigma associated with poverty and government programs as three distinct, but interrelated constructs: societal, anticipated, and internalized stigma. In this project, we report a series of online survey experiments documenting two channels through which each dimension of stigma can influence take-up in government programs: directly by affecting prospective beneficiaries’ willingness to participate in benefit programs, and indirectly by influencing society’s willingness to support information and compliance burdens that have been shown to negatively impact participation. Specifically, these studies will (a) disentangle the causal effects of each dimension of stigma on take-up and burden tolerance, (b) experimentally test methods of reducing stigma, such as correcting misperceptions about beneficiaries or reframing participation to shift preconceptions about programs; and (c) examine moderators of these effects, including attributions for poverty and other prior beliefs.

ABSTRACT. Despite high levels of need, transgender people face unique barriers when seeking to access government safety net services. These barriers can be categorized as administrative burdens, which refers to the costs associated with interacting with government, especially when seeking benefits or services (Moynihan, Herd, and Harvey 2015). Prior research confirms that administrative burden not only prevents individuals from receiving important assistance (such as food stamps); it can also create psychological costs, such as stress and stigma (Herd and Moynihan 2018). While trans people are routinely socially construed (Schneider and Ingram 1993) as liars, frauds, and deviants deserving of punishment (Bettcher 2008), there are no studies that examine the administrative burdens of citizen-state interactions for trans people specifically. This paper explores how administrative burdens, specifically psychological costs, impact service-seeking behavior and service receipt of three major safety-net programs (SNAP, Medicaid, and Unemployment Insurance) among trans people. The goal of this study is to develop a detailed portrait of how stigma, stress, and loss of autonomy impact trans people and investigate whether these impacts have later-term outcomes that affect overall wellbeing. To achieve this goal, I investigate the psychological costs trans people incur when applying or attempting to apply for SNAP, Medicaid, and Unemployment insurance. Using interviews from 50 trans adults in the US who have previously participated in a related survey, I seek to answer how stigma and stress may impact service enrollment and/or receipt, as well as possible longer-term impacts on health and wellbeing stemming from these psychological costs.

ABSTRACT. This study investigates the impact of perceived organizational silence on organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and perceived performance among South Korean public officials. Organizational silence and OCB are explored as critical determinants of workplace dynamics and performance. Numerous scholars have analyzed that silence can hinder innovation, employee engagement, and organizational responsiveness, while OCB encompasses voluntary employee behaviors that substantially enhance organizational effectiveness. South Korea presents a unique context for this study, with its Confucian ethos emphasizing hierarchical and harmonious workplace cultures. These cultural norms potentially affect communication practices in South Korean public organizations. By shedding light on both the benefits and complexities of these organizational concepts, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of how silence and OCB can interact and ultimately provide valuable insights for organizations aiming to optimize their performance and foster a positive workplace culture. This study will utilize Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to analyze survey data from South Korean public officials, originally collected by the Social Science Korea Program under the National Research Foundation of Korea. In testing the proposed model using SEM, this study will seek to understand not only the direct relationships between these variables but also how OCB mediates the relationship between organizational silence and performance. Demographic factors such as gender, age, education, and years of public service will be controlled. This analysis will provide insights into the dynamics of employee behavior and organizational effectiveness, contributing to the literature on public administration and organizational studies.

ABSTRACT. Gaming behaviors in performance measurement are prevalent in the public sector causing information distortion and impeding substantive improvement. We develop a model of how agents’ gaming behaviors are elicited and relived by incentives and monitoring and identify three paths of effects that jointly determine agents’ choices between efforts or gaming, namely incentive effect, monitoring effect, and parallel effect. We use China’s national inspection on environmental protection as a case and measure the extent of gaming by examining the discrepancy between reported air pollution and satellite data. Empirical findings support our theoretical predictions that each of the three effects has a unique impact on the equilibrium relations between efforts and gaming. And their joint function can produce a situation where real efforts and gaming both increase, as indicated by a decrease in the actual level and a wider gap between reported and actual levels, respectively. These results implicate a fine-tuned balance between incentives and monitoring for performance management in public organizations.

ABSTRACT. The performance feedback theory scrutinizes the ramifications of performance information on managerial perceptions, decisions, and performance outcomes. Public administration (PA) research, drawing on theory and research from management, has cultivated an extensive body of empirical inquiry that refines initial assumptions while extending its practical applicability. This article presents the inaugural meta-analysis in PA of 33 studies, encompassing 124 effect sizes. The findings indicate that: (1) the provision of performance information below the aspiration level positively influences future performance, and (2) when performance is reported above the aspiration level, it does not have a significant influence. This underscores evidence supporting the problem-solving mechanism within the purview of public decision-makers. Meta-regression outcomes accentuate that performance feedback distinctly impacts perceptual assessments more than management decisions and future performance trajectories. Additionally, feedback from upper-level organizations holds greater sway over managerial responses when contrasted with feedback from peers, citizens, and self-evaluations. The conclusion deliberates upon prospective research directions for both scholars and practitioners.

ABSTRACT. Performance management scholarship often focuses on the effectiveness of performance evaluation systems in holding bureaucracies accountable and the factors influencing the use of performance information among various stakeholders (Moynihan & Pandey, 2010). Recent evidence suggests that civil servants prioritize work activities in response to those included in subjective evaluation systems (de Janvry et al., 2023), but few have examined the emotional consequences of performance evaluations that inaccurately or inappropriately assess bureaucratic job performance. Given the significant influence of bureaucrats' emotions on burnout and job satisfaction (Hsieh et al., 2011), the strong relationship between rigid performance measurement systems and employee burnout/turnover (Garcia et al., 2014), and the difficulty in accurately measuring bureaucrats’ job performance, it is crucial to understand how inaccurate evaluations affect individual bureaucrats. To understand these dynamics, we conduct a survey experiment using a sample of college administrators responsible for Title IX implementation. Preliminary findings suggest that bureaucrats are more likely to report feelings of shame and anger in response to an evaluation metric that inaccurately suggests improvement in client outcomes – even if their individual performance assessment benefits from the misinterpretation. Those reporting negative emotional responses indicate they would respond to these inaccurate evaluations by exerting more effort to their job responsibilities and filing formal grievances to organizational leadership. These findings suggest that bureaucrats may prioritize client outcomes rather than their own professional or emotional well-being and, when faced with these costs, bureaucrats respond by addressing the system internally rather than leave the organization.

ABSTRACT. This paper advances a theory of bureaucratic ideology in pluralist democracy. We argue that processes of selection and promotion shape the ideological composition of bureaucratic agencies in ways that lead to an ideologically centrist government workforce. When governments that staff agencies with meritocratic personnel policies in liberal labor markets, individuals with extreme ideological beliefs are unlikely to pursue government careers, and agency managers are unlikely to select ideologically extreme job candidates. Ideological outliers are unlikely to remain working in public agencies in the long term, either because they are dismissed from service or due to voluntary exit. Promotion to senior agency positions favors individuals whose ideologies align with those that predominate within the organization. Consequently, ideological variation among public employees is smaller than among the general public. To test our theory, we employ 1) a conjoint experiment to examine whether extreme job candidates prefer nonprofit or business jobs over government using MPA students and 2) a mass public opinion survey, which is launched specifically for this project, to investigate whether a senior administrator is more likely to have a moderate ideology compared to lower-level public employees. Our data collection will be completed by January 2024.

ABSTRACT. This research examines the impact of supportive relationships within organizations on employees' work behavior, with a focus on the moderating role of commuting-related autonomy. In the changing work environment, emphasis on physical presence has diminished, especially after three years of the pandemic. In the midst of the growing prominence of remote work, this study underscores the importance of observing employees who remain within their organization physically. Considering the disparities in the pace of change between the social environment and organizations, there may still be individuals who continue to commute despite their willingness to engage in telework, especially in public organizations. Therefore, it is crucial to examine the impact of commuting-related autonomy on work behaviors within public organizations. While understanding the significance of commuting autonomy, the research delves into the impact of supportive relationships within organizations, which remains especially crucial for commuters. Using the data from the 2022 Federal Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) conducted by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the study employs multiple regression and logistic regression analyses. The results indicate that supportive relationships positively influence organizational engagement and reduce turnover intention, while a lack of commuting autonomy is associated with decreased organizational engagement and an increase in turnover intention. The study further explores the nuanced moderating effect of commuting autonomy, highlighting the intricate relationship between autonomy in both work behaviors. Based on the findings, the research advocates for continuous managerial discussions to foster supportive relationships and encourages ongoing dialogue on commuting autonomy for adaptable managerial strategies.

ABSTRACT. The study of public service motivation has been embedded practically in multiple research fields for organizational behavior on performance evaluation as well as on the civil servants’ commitment and contribution recently. However, the relevant references almost focused on the correlation between turnover intention and public service motivation (PSM) in which the study of interpersonal relationship and network establishment are inadequate on the disclosure and evidence-based research. Hence, this paper emphasizes on the results of network-relationship establishment and satisfaction to explore the cognition and PSM for the newly-recruited civil servants qualified from the civil service senior examination. Following the analytic results, we found that female and highly educated civil servants have preferred to manage the external emotional network relationships firstly. Second, the relationship satisfaction with their supervisors and colleagues was influenced by self-goal achievement of contributing professional knowledge and serving for the society and country. Third, the workplace atmosphere of supervisors’ attitude on communication and patience.

ABSTRACT. Public management research suggests that job seekers’ attraction to work for the public sector is shaped by their perceptions of fit between their values and goals and the attributes of public-sector organizations and jobs. Studies further point to concrete values and goals that job seekers aim to fulfill, including public service motivation, and other intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Conversely, the congruence between job seekers’ partisan identity and the party composition of the governing coalition has not been examined as an antecedent of their attraction to work in the public sector. However, the global experience of tense animosity between rival political camps, alongside politicians’ attacks on democratic institutions, renders this omission untenable. This article thus examines to what extent do individuals’ support for the opposition (vs. the governing coalition), and their divergent perceptions of the governing coalition’s actions as a threat to democracy, shape their attraction to civil service jobs. Empirically, we carried out a two-staged survey with 1,861 Israeli panel respondents, aged 21-30, during the government’s attempt to curtail the powers of the judiciary and legal advisers within the government (hereafter: the Judicial Overhaul). We find that supporters of the opposition are significantly less attracted to a job in a government ministry compared with an identical offer in the business or nonprofit sectors. This relationship is mediated by perceptions of the Judicial Overhaul as a threat to Israel’s democracy. These findings reveal an overlooked explanation for the well-known crisis in governments’ human capital and the limited representativeness of their workforce.

ABSTRACT. The impacts from changes in the climate are particularly acute for women who make up a large proportion of the global poor and who depend heavily on natural resources for their livelihoods and have limited means to adapt. In response, research on environmental justice within the broader agenda of climate policy studies has developed over the last few decades, pointing to key priorities for addressing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) considerations in climate policy. Within the broader scholarship of environmental justice, the interrelated concepts of DEI are increasingly being reflected in climate policy writing as the unintended consequence of lacking effectiveness in climate policy implementation comes under sharp focus. Much of the discussion around bringing the voice of the vulnerable not only for problematizing climate change and its impacts but also for the design of appropriate solutions have the idea of fairness and justice at the core.

While burgeoning literature now exists on the gender repercussions of climate change geographically by region and by policy sector, comparatively less scholarship explicitly links gender to climate policymaking. This paper brings in a discussion of Diversity, considering issues around adequate gender representation in climate policies; of Equity, considering issues around climate policies and adaptation and mitigation decisions being fair and equitable given gender-differentiated vulnerabilities, and that of Inclusion considering whether there is participation of the most vulnerable communities such as women in decision-making related to the climate.

ABSTRACT. Public management research must practically help administrators better understand the meaning of the linkages between diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Despite its importance, the acronym is often used as a buzzword in most organizational and policy circles, and the terms are used interchangeably. Current scholarship in public administration does not sufficiently integrate the distinct concepts in DEI. The forthcoming Handbook of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Public Administration (Elgar) (Sabharwal, McCandless, & Viswanath) seeks to address this gap through 25 chapters that integrate the knowledge of DEI at the individual, organizational and societal/policy level. This presentation explores one of these chapters, namely on gender's complex influence on public administration, emphasizing its multifaceted nature. The presentation briefly examines terms like gender identity, roles, and biological sex, highlighting their social construction. The historical evolution of gender roles and their modern challenges manifesting in public service institutions are discussed through feminist perspectives further highlighting the intersectional nature of gender. Additionally, the authors highlight gender disparities in public administration and analyze the data available on the efficacy of promising strategies for achieving equity, focusing particularly on the following: Addressing the prevailing white male privilege within public administration, querying masculine values, promoting fair HR practices, ensuring accountability of managers and leaders for their behaviors and implementation of anti-discrimination policies at work, combating anti-Trans violence, and promoting trainings on intersectionality. By recognizing the spectrum of gender and its role in governance, this presentation contributes to fostering inclusivity and equality.

ABSTRACT. Public management research must practically help administrators better understand the meaning of the linkages between diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Despite its importance, the acronym is often used as a buzzword in most organizational and policy circles, and the terms are used interchangeably. Current scholarship in public administration does not sufficiently integrate the distinct concepts in DEI, for example, intersectionality and social identity formation. The forthcoming Handbook of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Public Administration (Elgar Press) (Sabharwal, McCandless, & Viswanath) seeks to address this gap through 25 chapters that integrate the knowledge of DEI at the individual, organizational and societal/policy level. This chapter discusses the myth of a homogeneous Muslim community and how intersecting identities shape the lived experiences of Muslim Americans by focusing on the formation of one of the prolific Islamic nonprofit organizations in the USA, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Muslim Americans have often been subjected to discrimination based on their intersecting religious, ethnic, and racial identities. While there are ongoing external challenges such as Islamophobia faced by the Muslim community within the USA, they also face intra and inter-group conflicts. The chapter elaborates on the multilayers of challenges faced by immigrant Muslims and African-American Muslims and how they shape their individual and group identity formation. The goal is to highlight the complex nature of multifaceted challenges faced by Muslims and how understanding the challenges is important for attaining social equity.

ABSTRACT. The United States (U.S.) Department of Homeland Security (DHS) widely utilize algorithmic decision-making based on artificial intelligence (A.I.) to assist or replace human decision-makers while offering effectiveness and efficiency gains. However, in cases such as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement using AI-based databases to track vehicles in real time for preventing domestic terrorism, controversy has already risen about the fear of widespread deportations of individuals for political reasons. However, the Algorithmic Accountability Act of 2023 in the U.S. sparked some debates surrounding the lack of guaranteed algorithmic transparency in the A.I. because the act only requires big tech firms to conduct privacy impact assessments before the A.I. implementation, rather than mandating broader transparency policies such as E.U.’s A.I. Act requiring the government to register the high-risk AI algorithms in a nationwide database. In this regard, we conduct an online survey experiment (n=509) to understand how the A.I. adoption influences perceived government performance, specifically, whether algorithmic transparency enhances or buffers the positive effects of the A.I. adoption on government performance. The A.I. adoption effect was strongest when it is algorithmically transparent, demonstrating that the government performance in the adoption of A.I. is more positively evaluated when the algorithmic transparency of the A.I. technologies is assured. This study adds to our understanding of the relationship between citizens’ perception of algorithmic transparency and their trust in government, including how they verify the A.I. adoption, and has practical implications for government’s commitment to algorithmic transparency in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

ABSTRACT. Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is increasingly widely used in the development of smart cities, along with the growing challenges and risks. Good governance as a perspective related with public interest and public actions, has given high hopes to deal with AI governance issues, in terms of accountability, transparency, responsibility, participation, etc. Previous studies explores AI adoptions in public administration, data governance for trustworthy AI, risk and guideline-based integrative framework for governance of AI. However, as the basic raw material for the development of AI, existing research on AI data governance in smart cities still has gaps from good governance to help achieve sustainability and smartness goals. This study adopts the method of systematic literature review to conduct the research of AI data governance from the aspects of digital inclusion, data compliance, data quality, data interoperability, data security, and data innovation. Then, it develops a good governance framework for AI data governance in smart cities. Finally, the requirements for AI data governance from the good governance perspective in smart cities are clarified. This study is supposed to give a view to providing data governance support for AI governance, as well as good governance support for AI data governance, so as to building a bridge between addressing data governance issues and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals through good governance in smart cities.

ABSTRACT. There is a lack of empirical research systematically investigating how and why employees adopt artificial intelligence (AI) in specific organizational contexts, including different types of organizations and positions. This study focuses on AI as a decision-making agent operating within organizational administration, with a specific emphasis on the case of ‘basic AI’ as a form of supervised machine learning that involves greater characteristics of control. I review existing literature on organizational innovation adoption, drawing insights from classic works in administration, information processing, and organizational sensemaking to develop an integrated theoretical and analytical lens.

For empirical testing, I utilize survey experiment data collected from National Taiwan University (N=1,200), consisting of responses from employees working in both public and private organizations. The experiment includes a decision exercise in which all participants were involved, allowing for pre- and post-perception measurements. The treatment group experienced AI intervention during the decision exercise, while the control group did not. To analyze the data, I employ a difference-in-difference (D-i-D) analysis. The results indicate that only employees of public organizations who experienced AI intervention during the decision exercise are more likely than others to agree with the utilization of AI for conducting organizational operations.

Accounting for institutional configurations, organizational mechanisms, and various AI’s mechanistic and discretionary features, I highlight theoretical and practical implications. The cognitive impact of AI on agents’ perception of agreement to use AI in different types can be characteristically moderated by agents’ affiliated organizational types and managerial positions, substantiating operations of organizational administration.

ABSTRACT. As the adoption of new information and communication technologies in the public sector has evolved significantly since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, a variety of emerging technology tools related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) have become more relevant to and available for use by local government organizations. We explore how local government officials perceive the potential for adoption and use of AI in their daily public service delivery work, focusing on emerging issues related to various advantages and challenges in two management domains—(1) internal operations and human resource management and (2) external relationships and citizen engagement. Specifically, we focus on three key areas—opportunities, challenges, and public values—associated with AI adoption and use by local government officials within these two management domains. To that end, we will collect data from local government officials in Midwest cities and townships and employ a mixed-method research design that involves a qualitative investigation, which includes focus group interviews, and a quantitative approach, which entails the administration of an online survey. This research project will leverage noteworthy findings derived from an examination of local government practices in the Midwest.

ABSTRACT. Diversity issues within the federal workforce have become increasingly politically polarized in recent years. In 2011, President Obama issued Executive Order 13583, which explicitly outlined the efforts that the federal government would take to diversify the federal workforce. However, efforts to meet the mandate of the order were mixed and varied by agency, with certain agencies having more success in meeting the standards set forward by their plans. Following this, the Trump administration issued Executive Order 13950, repealing many of the elements of the preceding order. This rapid shift in priorities is likely to have impacted federal employees’ perceptions of workplace diversity and should be examined.

This study seeks to understand the potential impact of political pressure on perceptions of diversity in the workplace and the connection to executive orders, measured using the 2013 and 2022 Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys (FEVS). Using an ordered logistic regression analysis, we probe how views of diversity in the federal government change based on the political context of the organization, recent executive actions, and if these views differ based on the race of the employee. We hypothesize that both perceptions of political pressure and race of the employee are likely to influence the views employees have of the promotion of diversity in the workplace. Preliminary analysis suggests that minority employees who feel that they might be subject to political coercion or pressure in the workplace are more likely than their peers to report that their workplace is not dedicated to the promotion of diversity.

ABSTRACT. Although governments have promoted gender equality in workplaces, glass walls, and ceilings are still evident in governments. Previous studies discussed that male-dominated positions and gender job segregation are prevalent in governments (Miller, Kerr & Reid, 1999; Seed, 2007; Bishu & Headly 2020). The representative bureaucracy theory postulates that the government’s performance and represented democratic values will be enhanced if the demographic makeup of its agencies’ workforce reflects the served population (Mosher, 1968; Riccucci, 2015). Gender inequality in workplaces has been created by glass ceilings and walls and reproduced by gendered organizational culture, such as hierarchical and bureaucratic culture in governments, leading to inefficiency and decreased responsiveness in governmental services (Seed, 2007; Choi, 2015). Using the Financial Disclosure Statements (2019) of local government officers in New Jersey, this study examines gender job segregation in local governments and public authorities. The FDS provides a comprehensive list of high-level officers elected or appointed to positions in local governments and special entities including their commission & board members, and trustees. Through the "Gender" R-package analysis and the “Dissimilarity Index” suggested by Lewis and Nice (1994), this study will explore gender-based occupational segregation across local public authorities and boards. Furthermore, this study will use and extend the typology of functions in governments (e.g., distributive, regulatory, redistributive, financial administration, and general control) to examine gender-based occupational segregation in local public authorities and boards.

ABSTRACT. The effect of implicit bias on merit-based hiring practices has been a long-standing concern of public administration scholarship and practice, but has been difficult to address owing to ongoing commitments to merit-based systems (Foley and Williamson, 2019). Despite this tension, scholars have been able to directly observe differential treatment in the hiring process based on race and gender (Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2004). Numerous studies outside of public management have shown that some level of anonymization can benefit historically marginalized groups in the hiring process (Aslund and Skans, 2012), and popular press has highlighted the potential of procedural shifts (Bortz, 2018). Despite this attention, public administration with its focus on merit, has often lagged behind and trusted the merit process. However, these processes have also been cited for having disparate impacts (Riccuucci and Riccardelli, 2014). Our purpose is to investigate whether anonymizing certain elements of application materials has an effect on the propensity to interview and subsequently hire women and persons of color. We utilize a novel dataset of public agency personnel processes for over 600,000 job processes in the U.S. in 2021 and 2022, some of which included anonymized elements. Specifically, we will explore the likelihood of women and people of color being selected for an interview and hired during the job process when their application materials have been anonymized. We also offer descriptive insights from the dataset about disparate impacts to various groups. Combined, our findings will address public administration’s implicit bias challenge.

ABSTRACT. While both active representation and symbolic representation occur in policy implementation processes and citizen-state interactions, we know little about citizens’ expectations and evaluation of active and symbolic representation (Headley, Wright, and Meier 2021; Stauffer 2021). However, as Saward (2010, 36) argued, “Representation is an ongoing process of making and receiving, accepting and rejecting claims.” Indeed, public perceptions of representation could say more about what active representation and symbolic representation are and what they mean (Peyton, Weiss, and Vaughn 2022; Stauffer 2021). The criteria for what constitutes active representation is unclear (Riccucci and Meyers 2004), and people might perceive different types of representation as having different levels of relevance (Mansbridge 1999). In addition, politicians, bureaucrats, and the public could perceive the same type of representation in various and sometimes even opposite ways (Yildirim 2022, Riccucci and Meyers 2004). Hence, it is necessary to explore the effect of not only the reality of representation but also public perceptions and expectations of representation on their attitudes toward organizations (Stauffer 2021, Headley, Wright, and Meier 2021).

This study focuses on public perceptions of women's representation. It examines whether correcting citizens’ perceptions of representation can affect their attitudes toward the organization. The survey experiment establishes citizens’ perceptions of representation as a baseline and randomizes adjustments to participants’ underestimation or overestimation of women’s representation in supervisory positions. Citizens will then be asked questions about organizational favorability and their support for affirmative action.

ABSTRACT. In this paper we explore the dramatic improvements from 2014 through 2023 in the performance of a nonprofit organization (the Metropolitan Economic Development Association, or MEDA) headquartered in Minneapolis whose purpose is to support minority business enterprises (MBEs). We are particularly interested in the role two strategic planning efforts played to guide the improvement effort. Most of the goals in both plans were achieved prior to the plans’ end dates, prompting a new round of strategic planning and implementation. What helped and hindered the two processes? What changed, and what did not? What new, emergent features of the context and processes occurred; what disappeared?

The organization offers what it calls the “3Ms” to MBEs. The 3Ms include: (1) loan (and soon equity) capital (money), (2) business consulting (management), and (3) connections to markets (markets). Over the study period, loan capital has grown from $8.00M to $85.00M. In-house consulting staff have been bolstered by development of a network of over 160 volunteer consultants from major corporations. Connections to markets have grown to include training of yearly cohorts of minority entrepreneurs on how to gain entry to corporate supply chains and 16 major business “anchor institutions” interested in bolstering their MBE suppliers.

We draw on extensive data sources, including 87 monthly interviews and cognitive maps of three successive MEDA CEOs, other interviews, participant observations, reflection notes, and archival data. We offer several observations about the role and limitations of strategic planning in this generally quite successful organizational change effort

ABSTRACT. As digital and intelligent technologies are increasingly applied to government governance, public concern about risks such as privacy security and digital divide is also rising. To address public risk perception, the Chinese government has been strengthening its reputation management of digital governance. Previous studies have highlighted the role of government reputation management in defusing social disputes and improving public support for the government. However, most studies focus on the strategy selection of reputation management and the underlying motivations of the officials. The influences of different strategies on public psychology and the micro-mechanisms remain to be further explored.

This study introduces behavioral insight into the analysis of the influences of different reputation management strategies on individual psychology. Based on the division of performative reputation, moral reputation, procedural reputation and technical reputation and the distinction between individual risk and collective risk, this study constructs eight different reputation management strategies of digital governance. 5265 subjects recruited from the network platform are randomly divided into control group and eight experimental groups applying different strategies by using the method of post-test scenario simulation questionnaire experiment.

The experiment results show that the procedural reputation strategy for collective risk can significantly reduce the public’s risk perception, while the technical reputation strategy improves the public’s risk perception. The performative reputation strategy improves government trust, but has no significant effect on public risk perception. Government trust plays a significant mediating role between moral reputation and public risk perception, as well as between procedural reputation and public risk perception.

ABSTRACT. This proposal examines the use of strategic program management (SPM). SPM is an application of strategic management that has not hitherto been examined (Bryson and George 2020). This study defines strategic program management (SPM) as a process for formulating and implementing key program strategies to address the important challenges facing it. Programs are important vehicles for addressing important issues and longstanding concerns exist that programs are not always managed strategically (Poister et al 2010). This study identifies two types of SPM use, namely, in-program and cross-cutting SPM use. SPM differs from organization- and jurisdiction-wide applications by emphasizing ‘downstream’ matters of the program context which highlight public value realization and ensuring that programs address new priorities and challenges.

Programs are typically headed by civil servants and questions arise about the nature of SPM use and factors furthering it. While examining a broad range of levers. we focus on performance accountability, not previously examined in SM (Overman and Schillemans 2022). Data are based on SPM use in two national governments (Indonesia and Brazil), which, we argue, form a comparison with features of a natural experiment involving performance accountability (Gomes and Berman 2020). The multi-method study uses surveys, interviews, and administrative data, recently completed. Results show that both in-program and cross-cutting SPM use are unevenly used, and that performance accountability is an important driver increasing leadership for SPM. This study adds to knowledge by drawing attention to SPM as an understudied application of strategic management that has widespread, global use.

ABSTRACT. Albeit not perfect, collaborative cross-sector governance, co-creation, and varieties thereof, like co-delivery and co-assessment, offer viable platforms to identify and discuss problems in society. However, some problems arise exactly from, or are entrenched in, government action. In other words, there are issues that public organizations are somehow causing, inadvertently or otherwise, and for which someone in their midst may be responsible for addressing. Our initial research question is thus: How do cross-sector arrangements enable us to incorporate the perspective of impact communities to address problems inherent in government policies and practices? To explore our question, we conducted an inductive case study in the empirical context of a novel arrangement in England and Wales for civil society organizations to raise evidenced ‘super-complaints’ about problems in policing that they allege cause public harm (including violence against women and girls, racial equality, and civil liberties) as an instance of cross-sector collaboration geared towards social accountability. Our preliminary findings, based on the thematic analysis of extensive archival data corroborated by 51 interviews, illustrate the role of civil society organizations in filtering the voice of impact communities. They indicate both a substantive and symbolic role of confrontation. They point to evidence as a relational mechanism between stakeholders, and they shed light on the sense-making efforts of the orchestrators, which remain attentive to the voice and view of marginalized groups without disregarding those of the public sector, to prevent frame-based resistance, hence the relevance of the arrangement as a mechanism for social accountability.

ABSTRACT. Academics and practitioners alike recognize collaboration as a necessary approach to response to increasingly complex and multifaceted public problems. The collaboration literature in public administration and management has focused to a large extent on social service needs and governmental and nonprofit actors with limited attention on the role of judicial actors. While scholars such as Osorio and O’Leary (2016) examine the relationship between the courts and public institutions they also note the parity of research that looks at the roles of judges and courts with mainstream public management literature. This research will focus on the role of limited jurisdiction trial court judges within community collaboratives created to respond to complex problems including the opioid epidemic, school to prison pipeline, the mental health crisis, and issues of youth protection.

This exploratory case study seeks to better understand the placement, role, impact, obstacles and drivers for judicial actors to engage in collaborative responses. Judges for example must consider ethical rules constraining behavior, re-election, and perception as they engage in community-based responses. This single state case study examines the role of limited jurisdiction trial court judges in North Carolina, who are referred to as district court judges. District courts have jurisdiction in family law cases, child welfare and juvenile delinquency matters, general civil matters, and have exclusive, original jurisdiction over criminal actions below the grade of felony. Qualitative interviews with judicial officials and content analysis of collaborative documents and plans are used to gather both perceptional and context data.

ABSTRACT. Neighborhood associations are sites for public participation in municipal governance to mobilize constituents, balance political power, and adopt policies through localized knowledge. It is problematic, however, that given the deepening crisis of our democracy scholars seldom attend to neighborhood associations and their roles in the democratization of public administration. There is hope, though, based on evidence of improved local governance through political institutional reforms that integrate neighborhood associations within civic participation systems.

The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to share the results of 10 years of research data focused on neighborhood associations located within two municipalities of the United States. The research entails qualitative multiple case studies, grounded in an interpretive paradigm, with municipal historical data to contextualize the cases. Specifically, case-level qualitative data consists of interviews and focus groups with leaders of 17 neighborhood councils within one municipal citizen participation system and 31 voluntary neighborhood associations within a second municipality.

The initial findings reveal limitations with regard to neighborhood association capacities concerning constituent advocacy and public participation, and significant constraints as a result of mutable political legitimization, unstable municipal resources, and fluctuating community demographics. A more detailed discussion of the forthcoming findings will provide directions for improved public participation in local governance. Additionally, it is expected that the findings will add to our understanding of how to activate a more engaged citizenry and advance the democratization of public administration.

ABSTRACT. Collaborative public participation processes have been a hallmark of many public lands policies enacted over the last two decades, but a combination of cultural, structural and bureaucratic challenges have limited its wide-spread adoption and implementation. Less understood is how and why front-line workers within land management agencies overcome these challenges and actively build and promote new ways of doing business in support of collaborative governance. Using interviews with Forest Service employees engaged in collaborative processes in Idaho and Montana, we find support for previous research that participatory decision-making processes operate within an organizational context typified by a lack of clear guidance and incentive structures that are exacerbated by frequent turnover in leadership positions. Yet, collaborative institutions are developed and persist as a result of the critical institution-building activities of front-line staff which operate to moderate the negative effects of leadership transitions by actively maintaining the informal norms and rules that demonstrate responsiveness to and enable influence from collaborative processes. These findings shed light on the ways in which individual agency, institutional structures and organizational culture interact inside the “black box” of a federal land management agency and contribute to scholarship on New Public Governance and the changing archetype of bureaucratic actors.

ABSTRACT. Collaborative governance is heralded as a tool to enhance social capital to solve policy problems. However, understanding whether collaboration builds social capital–relationships that create access to new resources and knowledge–or simply borrows pre-existing social capital–relationships or resources that pre-date the collaboration–is critical for understanding whether collaboration adds new capacity or expands on existing capacity.

Using a dataset of 1056 collaboratively-developed Community Wildfire Protection Plans from the fire-prone western US, we assess the factors associated with the presence and quality of collaborative groups. If social capital is built, we expect that variables endogenous to wildfire (e.g., burn severity, burn frequency) drive collaboration. If social capital is borrowed, we expect that variables exogenous to wildfire (e.g., demographics, community infrastructure) drive collaboration. Because both variable types may impact the likelihood that collaboration occurs and its subsequent quality, we use a spatial Poisson hurdle model to evaluate the relative importance of each class of variable using data from CWPPs along with spatially explicit covariates from national census datasets, remote sensing, and other publicly available sources.

By assessing whether collaborations arise because of need versus capacity, this research addresses theoretical tautologies in the concept of social capital and clarifies the role of collaboration in perpetuating the status quo versus enabling transformative change. If the presence and/or quality of collaboratives is aligned with affluence rather than wildfire risk, identifying ways to build social capital to meet the needs of higher risk populations and places is warranted.

ABSTRACT. Research on the role of governance and metagovernance of drinking water provision tends to focus on only one specific policy solution rather than a set of options (Pahl-Wostl, 2019). Additionally, past studies often depend on policy and planning regions that are externally defined or regulated (Amsler & Vieilledent, 2021), rather than those that can be defined using a more nuanced variety of political, social, economic and administrative boundaries (Bendz & Boholm, 2020). In public management literature, drinking water governance challenges are often addressed with myopic policy guidance, without offering, nor assessing, the viability of alternative solutions (Koliba et al., 2010). To address this gap in public management studies, we ask 1) What heterogenous aspects of pre-defined governance regions result in challenges for drinking water planning across community water systems? and 2) What are the ways in which governance regions can be restructured to address challenges? We present options for a variety of drinking water governance models, utilizing quantitative and qualitative data from a three-year study of drinking water policy and provision across the state of Illinois. Our findings suggest that there are multiple ways to establish provision and planning boundaries, and we present a process to weigh governance options for municipalities to establish sustainable and equitable drinking water collaborations.

ABSTRACT. Climate change has and will continue to have a profound effect on both individuals and the communities in which they reside (Nature Climate Change, 2019). A pressing question is how communities forced to confront climate-induced catastrophe—including both rapid and slow-onset hazards—undertake the decision of how and when to relocate, particularly given the multiple scales at which decision-making processes play out and the broadly-felt social, economic, and environmental implications that arise from the resulting decisions (Mortreaux et al., 2018; Loughran & Elliott, 2019). Some communities have already begun to face the challenge of relocation through planning processes designed to manage their response to these pressures over time by creating formalized plans. These plans are windows into the complex, intersecting, polycentric environment that local government organizations face. This study posits that the plans provide a snapshot into the institutionalization of the system required to address a cross-jurisdictional management challenge. Using three cases of official government managed climate induced retreat, we document institutional structure and explore the polycentric characteristics that the system exhibits in relation to expectations (Carlisle & Gruby, 2019). Specifically, we identify the key entities the plans reference and the regulatory infrastructure that the plan exposes. We review how different initiators of plans create constellations of governance and divergent expectations. This project provides an archival document lens as an alternative way to construct a model of polycentric governance systems and demonstrates the value of using adopted plans to explore areas of interest for public management.

ABSTRACT. While collaborative governance is greatly advocated by policy stakeholders as a means for solving complex policy problems like water insecurity, citizens are largely overlooked as key actors (and likely coproducers) in collaborative governance. In a context where water politics, conflict, and scarcity are intensified- the Southwest U.S. with more than two decades of mega drought- citizens’ views on various policy tools including collaboration and regulation needs to be better understood to inform policy making. While we have major policy breakthroughs and innovations ‘at a high level’ including consensus-based water conservation in the Colorado River Basin in 2023, we lack understanding about how citizens evaluate and view various policy tools. Particularly, we believe that citizens’ views on water shortage issues are conditioned by issue framing and blame attribution. Blame attribution is an important theoretical mechanism of how policy discussions are shaped and is believed to affect various attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. We use survey experiment to understand how blame attribution of water shortage problems --external actors, political actors, individual citizens-- affect citizens’ preferences on policy tools, collaborative governance, and willingness to coproduce. This study will help contribute to behavioral understandings of environmental policy and public participation in high conflict settings.

ABSTRACT. There have been multiple studies analyzing the impact of hydraulic fracturing or (“fracking”) across different dimensions, including water quality, adverse health effects, and a variety of other risks. Additionally, research has delved into economic aspects focusing on financial benefits. Yet, in-depth analysis on local public fiscal effects associated with fracking at the local government level is missing, especially related to fiscal health and governance challenges. Governments tend to experience substantially increased revenue associated with fracking but also face increased demand for services (costs), which calls for a comprehensive analysis of its impact on the fiscal health of local governments. Therefore, this paper examines the local public fiscal effect of fracking using the changes resulting from a ban in New York and the allowance of fracking in Pennsylvania employing a difference-in-differences methodology. Specifically, the study uses data from municipal governments in New York and Pennsylvania and financial data from Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFR) to examine the effect of fracking local finance. Overall, the study suggests that research needs to address the uncertainties surrounding fiscal conditions when adopting fracking policies.

ABSTRACT. The intricate relationship between food security and environmental development poses a challenge within the SDGs Action Framework, especially in the Global South. Despite numerous studies on this topic, there dynamic case studies from this region is scarce. This paper examines the Chinese Beidahuang State Farm (北大荒国营农场) as a case, exploring how it constructs a unique model under the national policy Ecological Civilization (生态文明), delving into the interactions of balancing the two issues. The case illustrates a threefold complexity: the objectives, the core actors' identities, and the participating actors. Firstly, being a major grain-producing region, the Beidahuang has been tasked with ensuring food security before. However, it also has taken on a new responsibility in response to the Ecological Civilization policy these years. The case study exposes the intricate dynamics of balancing these two policies within a multi-objective framework. Secondly, as influenced by SOE reforms, the fram's actions are also shaped by market and third-party factors, the analysis uncovers the nuanced role of the farm. Thirdly, it investigates how a hybrid state-led approach integrates with state farms, cultivators, food companies, and consumers to foster the multi-stakeholder environmental outcomes. This study reveals the interplay of different governance models under state direction and their collective impact on sustainable practices. Ultimately, the paper aims to analyze how various factors, such as natural resources, market demands, administrative prerequisites, and others, in shaping the model of Ecological Civilization and its resulting environmental outcomes, offering novel insights into governance models for sustainable development within hybrid environments.

ABSTRACT. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) created by the United Nations aimed at addressing complex transnational problems by incorporating sustainable development issues into the broad economic, environmental and social frameworks of countries. The inherent complexity in implementing the SDGs necessitates partnerships and collective actions across multiple levels. Particularly in emerging economies striving to tack action on the SDGs, the lack of resources and limited institutional capacities compel these countries to formulate various collaborative networks that aims to leverage pooled resources and expertise. While networks in addressing sustainable development issues promise positive collective outcomes, their effective implementation often faces significant hurdles. A central issue is the complex and puzzling relationship dynamics on how strategic actions are to facilitate intensive and enduring interactions among actors within these networks. This study examines the strategic actions that influence network outcomes in achieving SDGs of combating desertification. The following research questions will be examined in the study: What network management strategies are adopted by network administrators from the key actors to improve SDGs implementation, and how do these strategies work? We will specifically focus on the national desertification programs implemented in Minqin County of China where has a strategic position in global efforts of anti-desertification. This study attempts to contributes to the literature on network theory by enriching our understanding the strategic actions that influence network outcomes in implementing UN’s SDGs. We will also discuss policy and practical implications of our findings in emerging economies where lack of network implementation capacity is salient.

ABSTRACT. To achieve the goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, sustainable and innovative policy solutions and collaborations for climate change, biodiversity, and environmental protection are needed for emerging complexity and cross-boundary policy issues. However, some renewable energy development has potential risks that may trigger issues of environmental injustice that impact the local environment and community. There are not sufficient studies examining the roles, dynamics, and types of strategic collaboration strategies (Ward, Mason, Park, & Fyall, 2022; Fyall & McGuire, 2015) utilized by environmental nonprofits to advocate for various social changes in the process of just energy transitions to balance renewable energy development and local environment for both rural communities and sea animals. This research focuses on how environmental nonprofits advocate, leverage, and stabilize their critical resources for critically endangered sea animal conservation (Taiwanese Humpback Dolphin, alias Taiwanese White Dolphin and “Matsu’s Fish”). Specifically, different from past socioeconomic developments along the west coast of Taiwan, how would environmental nonprofits and their nonprofit coalition respond to the hurried offshore wind farms and renewable energy policy? With multiple sources of archival data and in-depth interview data (virtual and in-person semi-structured in-depth interviews with nonprofit leaders and influential actors), the preliminary results demonstrate challenges and barriers to sustaining cross-boundary collaborations and balancing disharmony goals or actions in the policy process of just energy transitions.

ABSTRACT. Can nonprofits lead collaborations to enhance natural resource management through their advocacy for participant diversity? Second, can these collaborations contribute to improving environmental justice? Existing literature primarily uses supplementary or complementary models to describe government-nonprofit relationships, usually positioning the government as the leader in both. Contrary to this, I propose a novel theoretical approach wherein nonprofits act as leaders, coordinating cross-sector collaborations. Furthermore, I argue that nonprofits play a pivotal role in fostering participant diversity in collaborations, thereby enhancing environmental performance and justice.

I explore these arguments in Oregon watersheds using multiple data sources, including: (1) water quality index data from 160 water monitoring stations; (2) establishment data for 82 nonprofit watershed councils; (3) details of 22,920 collaborative restoration projects from the Oregon Watershed Restoration Inventory; and (4) block-level demographic data from the Census Bureau. I have aggregated these data sources to construct a watershed-year panel dataset spanning from 1980 to 2021. I analyze the data in three stages, starting with the staggered difference-in-differences method to identify the impact of watershed council establishment on water quality improvement. Second, I perform a mediation analysis to explore how participant diversity influences the link between watershed councils and water quality improvement. Finally, I perform subgroup analyses to compare the effects of water quality improvement in both high- and low-income areas, as well as in areas with white-majority and nonwhite-majority populations.

Through these analyses, this study is the first research endeavor to investigate the influence of nonprofit leadership on environmental management and justice.

ABSTRACT. Despite nonprofit organizations’ essential contributions to society, the public appears ignorant about them. Yet, little scholarship measures how much the public really knows. This project asks three questions. How much does the public know about the nonprofit sector? If the public knew more, would people’s behavior be different? And do the preferences of high-knowledge people dictate what causes get supported? Based on insights from the political knowledge literature, I expect that people with more nonprofit knowledge will be more likely to donate or volunteer, and will tend to support different causes than their less knowledgeable counterparts. I also expect that certain demographic groups, such as women, more affluent, more educated, and white people will systematically display higher nonprofit knowledge. As a result, we should also expect that the nonprofits and causes that receive the most support will reflect the preferences of these groups at the expense of lower-income, minoritized, and marginalized communities. This paper presents an exploratory analysis of the relationships between nonprofit knowledge, trust, and giving/volunteering based on a convenience sample of 400 undergraduate students at one American university. In the future, the project will expand to the general public. Theoretically, the project’s focus on the unequal distribution of nonprofit knowledge could be critical to understanding the scope and size of the nonprofit sector. This research also has practical implications for democracy. If members of the public cannot identify nonprofits, they cannot hold nonprofits, or the governments that rely on their services, accountable.

ABSTRACT. This study investigates the use of capacity building strategies in enhancing the organizational sustainability of community-based development organizations (CBDOs), vital for community economic development and public service co-production. The significance of this research lies in addressing a critical gap in existing literature regarding the organizational sustainability of nonprofit organizations. While studies have highlighted the role of nonprofits in community economic development (Marwell, 2009; Wright, 2018), there remains a lack of focused analysis on how these organizations maintain their own sustainability while pursuing community goals. The research, based on survey data from about 600 U.S. CBDO managers, introduces a framework for measuring capacity building in nonprofits engaged in community economic development. It examines the relationship between capacity building strategies and organizational sustainability in CBDOs through multivariate analysis. Key findings identify five dimensions critical to CBDOs' organizational sustainability: Political, Network, Resource, Programmatic, and Organizational Capacity. These factors play a significant role in the effectiveness and resilience of CBDOs, highlighting the importance of organizational sustainability in their long-term impact. The study's insights are crucial for CBDO leaders, policymakers, and stakeholders, providing them with strategies to enhance organizational sustainability. This not only ensures their continued role in community development but also aligns with the broader objectives of sustainable development. Consequently, this research contributes significantly to the understanding of nonprofit sustainability and offers practical approaches for sustaining the essential work of CBDOs in diverse communities.

ABSTRACT. In the U.S. foster care system, caseworkers are charged with preparing older adolescents for independent adulthood if they are unlikely to be reunified with their families or to get adopted. An important process is the co-production of the youths’ transitional independent living plan (TILP), where workers collaboratively engage youth in planning for their future, identifying goals and service needs (Park et al., 2022). TILPs can guide which Independent Living Program services (ILPs) youth may receive. Depending on youth’s goals and needs, ILPs may include services focusing on education, career, parenting, and other areas. Past research focused on the availability and effectiveness of ILPs and TILP planning (Delgado et al., 2022). Less is known about whether the frequency of TILP engagement is associated with ILP service use. Using linked survey and administrative data, we examine relationships between TILP development and ILP utilization among youth in California foster care.

Our results show that youth develop less than one TILP per year, use about one ILP per month, and use four different types of ILPs. Our regression results demonstrate that youth with more TILPs are expected to use more ILPs and a broader range of ILPs. Our results also highlight associations between the county’s administrative contexts and the frequency and scope of youths’ ILP utilization. Our study offers rare empirical evidence that underscores the importance of regularly co-producing future plans with youth, training caseworkers to work collaboratively with youth in decisions about their lives, and reducing between-county variation in TILP and ILP practices.

ABSTRACT. Incentives play an essential role in motivating individual co-production. The ongoing debate regarding the effectiveness of using monetary rewards and prosocial appeals to motivate individuals to coproduce desirable outcomes with regular service providers lacks consensus. Further investigate into their independent and combined effects on individual coproduction is imperative. The study aimed to improve student’s coproduction activities regarding their health habits and educational outcomes within a higher education setting. The study conducted a 21-day field experiment to examine individual co-production under various incentives: monetary, prosocial, mixed, and no incentives. The study further investigated the sustainability of co-production after incentives were discontinued. 141 students were recruited and instructed to wake up 30 minutes earlier than their normal routine, which was established by recording their wake-up time through an online system without any incentives for six days. After establishing the baseline, students were randomly assigned to monetary, prosocial, mixed, or no incentive (control) groups for 10 days. A comparison of their changes in co-production outcomes was performed subsequently. Incentives were then discontinued to assess the sustainability of co-production incentives over time. Results show that, compared to no incentives, mixed incentives were the most effective in motivating individual coproduction, followed by monetary and prosocial incentives. However, prosocial incentives sustain individual coproduction most effectively, while monetary incentives significantly backfire on co-production sustainability. These findings offer valuable insights for public organizations seeking to better utilize incentives in motivating individual co-production.

ABSTRACT. Public-sector frontline service scholarship in the field of public administration has been conducted under relatively limited circumstances and contexts. While literature focusing on the topic has been prolific, the context and lenses through which “frontlineness” has been viewed and observed are more limited (Chang & Brewer 2022). The scholarship on street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) has focused on a well-defined, though narrow, set of workers and work environments (e.g., teachers and nurses; schools and hospitals); those concentrated and consistent parameters may present an opportunity for greater generalizability of our understanding of SLBs than previously realized. We seek something of a new beginning: for theoretical exploration, clarity, and eventual reassessment of what frontlineness is and what it means. Healthcare has been a field in which public administration scholars have—either adjacently or directly—explored the nature of frontline work. We hypothesize, however, that there is much territory that goes unexplored due to siloing of disciplines, narrow definitions of what it means to be on the “frontline,” and more limited use in public administration scholarship of available evidence synthesis methods. One such method, scientometric analysis, provides useful tools to explore the potential of fields such as healthcare, with its results providing the “lay of the land” for further exploration. Using a scientometric analytical approach, this paper offers an answer to the following research question: What is the potential for existing research to describe the proximal relationship between a frontline healthcare employee and the frontline itself?

ABSTRACT. This percolator session would bring to the table pressing concerns about extreme politicization of the public sector with the rise of populist and authoritarian-minded political leaders. Focusing on the United States, the most pressing threats are 1) the revival of Schedule F, an executive order that would vastly increase the number of political appointees, and allow the firing of tens of thousands of career civil servants who would lose job protections, and 2) the promise to prioritize political loyalty over expertise when it comes to the appointment of political appointees. Plans for politicization are well-developed, and a priority within the Republican Party, who argue it represents the original intent of the constitution and a means of improving democratic accountability. If they succeed in winning the 2024 presidential election, it will trigger the most fundamental changes to the federal personnel system since the creation of civil service laws in 1883. Salient topics include • How can the public management academic community convey evidence-based guidance to the public and policymakers about the risks? • What are the long-term implications for accountability to the public and Congress? • What are the democratic risks if extreme politicization is combined with authoritarianism? • What are the effects on public employee recruitment, retention and morale? • What are the effects on public sector capacity and performance? • Models of policy implementation assume relative stability and competence among federal employee. How will those models change under conditions where presidential changes generate more extreme policy swings between administrations?

ABSTRACT. Recruiting diverse talent is vital for the stability of the government workforce and supports a representative bureaucracy. Over the past two decades, public sector fellowship programs – which are designed to bring diverse talent into government – have proliferated in the US. Yet, there is little evidence on the impact of these programs. In this project, we create a novel dataset to examine how participation in public sector fellowship programs influence attitudes and beliefs about the public sector, and the likelihood that fellows pursue a career in public service.

In collaboration with four public sector fellowship organizations, we bring together data from three sources: (1) we conduct a survey of over 400 prior applicants and fellows to measure beliefs about public service, public servants, and government; (2) we collect publicly available data on the career trajectories of all prior applicants and fellows (N ~ 2,000); and (3) we combine these data with administrative data from each fellowship organization including demographics. We then measure mindset and career outcomes for fellows compared to similarly-qualified applicants – those who reached the final stage of the interview process, but weren’t selected for a fellowship (“finalists”). In so doing, we aim to estimate the causal impact of participation in a government fellowship program. By building evidence on the impact of early-career exposure to public sector jobs, this research contributes to our understanding of how to develop diverse talent for government and how employment in the public sector changes employees.

ABSTRACT. Attracting top-tier talents is now more pressing than ever for public sector organizations since they grapple with an unprecedented human capital crisis (Jacobsen et al., 2023), and a diminishing allure of public sector jobs (Fowler & Birdsall, 2020). This decline may stem from ingrained perceptions about the public sector itself (Ritz et al., 2023), based on sector-based cues influencing the attractiveness of specific public employers (Lee & Jilke, 2023). While empirical explorations of the impact of stereotyped views on public sector employment are limited (Papermans & Peiffer, 2022), it is crucial for public organizations not only to evaluate the role of these stereotypes but also to comprehend how to craft their employer branding value proposition (EBVP) to counteract this trend. This study, to the best of the authors' knowledge, is the first to undertake such an effort, leveraging the stereotype content model (Fiske et al., 2002). Specifically, the research examines the impact of different EBVPs, manipulating stereotyped perceptions of warmth and competence concerning potential public employers, while accounting for this effect across both central and local administrative levels. Data were collected through an online experimental survey conducted in Italy in 2023, for a total of 800 respondents. Study’s results show that an EBVP highlighting the public employer's competence (emphasizing high-skills and quality output delivery) effectively increases individuals' propensity to apply for a public sector employer. Regarding warmth treatments, signaling consideration toward external users proves to be effective, while the same does not hold true for cues about collaborative work environments.

ABSTRACT. Decades of research have demonstrated persistent hiring discrimination, with no discernible decrease in biased personnel selection decisions (Quillian et al. 2017). This study focuses on the process of assessing job candidates in public personnel selection, aiming to investigate whether artificial intelligence (AI) applications can alleviate biases in this process.

In Study 1, we present field experimental evidence examining how recruiters and AI applications assess real-life job candidate profiles on social media job platforms (n = 2,000). The findings reveal that humans exhibit more bias than AI concerning job candidates’ ethnicity, while the results for gender are mixed. This suggests that integrating AI support into human decision-making has the potential to mitigate ethnic bias in candidate selection.

Building on the insight that AI may enhance bias reduction, Study 2 explores whether and to what extent recruiters would be receptive to using AI advice, considering potential algorithm aversion (Keppeler 2023). Results from a pre-registered survey experiment with recruiting public managers (n = 507 with 4 observations each) indicate that recruitment practitioners assign greater weight to AI application advice than advice from a colleague when that advice is combined with a debiasing reminder.

This manuscript contributes by bridging research on hiring discrimination with the literature on augmented decision-making and the implementation of AI applications in the public sector. Furthermore, it adds to the discourse on algorithm aversion/attraction among public employees, with implications for personnel selection to public sector jobs.

ABSTRACT. The public sector faces urgent challenges with both environmental sustainability and human capital. This makes it critical for public organizations to both prioritize environmental attentiveness amidst the climate crisis (UNDP, 2021) and retain talent in fast-aging societies with shrinking workforces (Vogel & Satzger, 2023). Private sector scholarship has linked the two challenges within the “green HRM”-framework (Cooke et al., 2022; Dumont et al., 2017), indicating that employers’ sustainability action can strengthen for example employee retention (Bode et al., 2015). Meanwhile, public administration research has not yet explored whether public organizations’ sustainability action can affect employee retention, as a recent meta-analysis indicates (Hur & Abner, 2023). This study contributes to closing this research gap theoretically and empirically by theorizing and bridging research on sustainability action, public values theory (Jørgensen & Bozeman, 2007), and public sector human resources management. Analytically, I employ a mixed methods approach to study if, when, and how employers’ sustainability action matter for public employees. Based on a pre-registered survey data analysis among 4.181 Danish local government employees, I show that environmental sustainability action of the employer correlates positively with employees’ retention intentions. To triangulate and gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms at play, I conduct interviews (data collection ends in March 2024) with local government employees displaying why and how sustainability action matters. This mixed methods approach contributes with novel and nuanced theoretical and empirical perspectives on how public organizations can address two of the most pressing societal challenges.

ABSTRACT. E-participation, as a key element in E-Governance, has been identified as an important way to fulfill transparency, accountability, and equity. Studies have shown that government response is key to the success of E-participation system, as it increases citizens' satisfaction (Kim and Lee, 2012; Sjoberg et al., 2017).

Existing literature shows that citizens will adopt some strategies to attract government’s attention when they communicate with government. However, the government may also response strategically by using some communication skills since the resource is limited. Therefore, in many cases, the aim of the response is to comfort citizens’ negative emotions and avoid conflicts. But only few research pay attention to government’s emotion-based response strategies and whether they can lead to high satisfaction.

The data comes from Chinese People's Daily “Message Board for Leaders”, which is a nationwide online platform for citizens to request government services. We first use text analysis to analyze the characteristics of government’s response. Then 1,000 messages are selected and then manually coded. And machine learning is used to train a model and predict 370,000 government responses. We then test whether government’s EI management affect citizens' satisfaction with the response attitude.

This research contributes to understanding the relationship between governments’ responsiveness and citizens satisfaction in e-participation platform. In terms of mythology, it measures governments’ response EI by using big data, providing an objective way to access government response performance.

ABSTRACT. Resources and discretion are important elements for street-level bureaucrats to effectively implement policies. Street-level bureaucrats often face the issue of heavy workloads and limited resources available to them. Current literature has explored how bureaucrats cope with such challenging situations, the use of formal resources and informal personal resources, as well as the factors that influence their utilization. However, how contextual factors and aspects of clients influence the utilization of the resources remain understudied. In this paper, we use a qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews of American social workers to explore how street-level bureaucrats’ use of resources differs by organizational contexts. We seek to study how social workers from public, private, and/or nonprofit agencies use resources differently. We hypothesize that organizations from different sectors offer different types of resources to social workers and have different constraints on the use of them, which then leads to different ways of resource utilization. We further extend the street-level bureaucracy literature and link it to the theory of representative bureaucracy, which argues that sharing a similar identity with bureaucrats would benefit clients through improved outcomes, to examine how clients’ characteristics affect the allocation of resource. In this paper, we explore how sharing a similar socioeconomic background with clients affects street-level bureaucrats’ use of resources. We hypothesize that bureaucrats would sympathize more and connect with clients who share a similar background and life experience. They would be more willing to use informal personal resources to help those clients.

ABSTRACT. All civil services face a conflict of interest simply because of their public life in nature (Van Ripper 1976; Waldo 1948). Compared to private employees, civil services use bureaucratic discretion when delivering services (Lipsky 1980) especially when their policy goal is ill-defined (Chun & Rainey 2005) but required to distribute public resources to citizens they serve as a citizen agent (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2000). Nonetheless, when they behave as a rogue agent, corruption is likely. The early theories believed that such conflicts could be curtailed through an external control (Finer 1941). Nonetheless, as shown in the cases of the Watergate scandal in the U.S. and LH rent-seeking scandal in Korea, what we saw is a growing number of well-contrived corruptions in that civil services exploit their privilege for their personal gains, so-called conflict-of-interest violations.

The primary goal of this research to examine the effects of ethics reform on civil services’ compliance with a macro-level ethics reform through an experimental approach. Drawing on the theories of social psychology and literature on street-level bureaucracy (SLB), we test the two treatment effects of the Conflict-of-Interest Prevention Act of 2022, centering our focuses on SLB’s compliance with the reform. Findings from a list experiment from the representative sample of Korean civil services (n=approximately 2,000) suggest that an ethics reform can induce SLBs’ compliance with the new rules. We argue that it is imperative to take a closer look at the behavioral changes of target population, to better discuss the effects of ethics reform.

ABSTRACT. Personal interactions between civil servants and citizens significant in explaining performance of civil servants. Citizen contact is an important feature of civil servant work. Based on job design literature, we try explain how citizen contact impacts civil servants’ service organizational citizenship behaviors. We propose that citizen contact gives rise to perceived social impact and organizational pride. Results from a survey study in China showed that perceived social impact and organizational pride can both strengthen organizational identification of civil servants, which increase their service organizational citizenship behavior. Thus, relational job design can enhance the service organizational citizenship behaviors of civil servants.

ABSTRACT. Policy implementation is a complex process influenced by various factors, including policy design, resource allocation, relationships, and causal theories (Mazmanian & Sabatier, 1989). Despite the extensive literature on policy implementation, limited research focuses on regulations or programs aimed at government change. This knowledge gap necessitates a deeper exploration of compliance with public management policies within government entities. This paper leverages. May and Winter's compliance model to analyze the motivations and capacities influencing public employees' compliance with their job responsibilities (May & Winter 1999; May 2005; Winter & May 2001). It examines compliance motivations – calculated, normative, and social – within the framework of public administration traditions like the principal-agent model, oversight systems, authority, and public values. Additionally, the paper underscores the importance of clear rules and organizational resources in the compliance model. In the context of the Colombian national government, the paper addresses the research question: "Which characteristics of public employees enhance their likelihood of increased compliance with job responsibilities?" Data from the Colombian Employee Viewpoint Survey, organizational archives, and administrative datasets from 2019, 2021, and 2022 are employed for this study. This paper contributes to the field in two significant ways. First, it elucidates the factors that drive or hinder public employees' compliance with their roles and responsibilities. Furthermore, it explores whether organizations' compliance with public management regulations influences individual public employees' adherence to their roles. This research provides valuable insights into enhancing the effectiveness of public management policies, promoting transparency, and fostering greater accountability in government entities.

ABSTRACT. Addressing wicked problems endures as a fundamental issue in public administration despite the amount of attention and resources in research and practice devoted to the topic. Head and Alford (2015) identified three broad ways of addressing wicked problems: broader ways of thinking, collaboration and coordination, and new leadership roles. How do we translate these broad approaches into strategies that public leaders can implement? We draw on our engaged research with one innovative case to extract specific strategies that were employed and the results of those efforts. The case, Focusing on Communities Utilizing Services (FOCUS) in Southwest Virginia is a rural local government-initiated purpose-oriented network with the aim of improving the lives of residents in the most disadvantaged county neighborhoods. Our mixed method study consists of the public safety usage data gathered by FOCUS, surveys, interviews and observations. We employed quantitative analysis to examine the impact FOCUS had on the community. We then qualitatively analyze network processes, through interviews with network members and observations, to unpack the specific strategies employed and why those strategies resulted in successes. Our findings indicate government leadership recognized the need to learn from residents and viewed their role as facilitators, used data to broaden thinking and frame the problem as surmountable, and built a strong network by meeting providers where they were willing to engage and forging a safe space united around a broad purpose. Our findings offer implementable strategies for public managers to achieve broader ways of thinking, collaboration and coordination, and new leadership roles.

ABSTRACT. Policy implementation can entrench existing racial, political, and economic inequities when processes are not inclusive of diverse viewpoints. To address this, state governments often seek to include relevant stakeholders, such as nonprofit and community leaders, in participatory processes. However, it is not clear if the use of such processes leads to differences in policy implementation outcomes, more inclusive policy choices, or shifts in the understanding of state administrators.

In this paper we examine different participatory strategies that two states took to improve equity when implementing a specific federal policy: the Families First Prevention Services Act. We compare their actions and experiences to ask: What is the relationship between cross-sector collaboration in policy implementation processes and the eventual enactment of equity-advancing policies? We integrate three theoretical lenses (Arnstein’s ladder of participation, Ray’s theory of racialized organizations, and strategic action field theory) and analyze qualitative data across the multi-year, multi-stakeholder implementation processes enacted in each state, including over 50 interviews with key stakeholders and structured observation of participatory meetings.

Despite different administrative systems, we find both states implemented the policy similarly and did not significantly address the concerns of marginalized advocates. Notably, the state with more inclusive implementation processes did not produce more responsive policy, largely because participatory processes were decoupled from formal policymaking and rulesetting, resulting in a reinforcement of racialized practices. In both states we see that participatory processes intended to adance equity-advancing policies were ceremonially enacted, one potential reason why racially disparate outcomes may persist across policy areas.

ABSTRACT. The Families First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) of 2018 aims to improve the child welfare system by focusing on prevention to keep children out of foster care. FFPSA intends to spark innovation by allowing states to receive Title IV-E reimbursement for using evidence-based practices (EBPs) chosen from a federal clearinghouse through state-developed implementation plans. Child welfare advocates hailed FFPSA as landmark legislation with the potential to transform how families interact with the system by tailoring high-quality “proven” services to diverse family needs.

We explore whether this federal policy incentivized innovation and customization at the state level by using 35 state-level plans to compare service selection choices and two extensive case studies of implementation in Minnesota and Washington. Although FFPSA aims to disrupt the status quo, we find states choose a very narrow band of practices, in spite of wide variation in state populations and structures. In practice most states are implementing only 1 or 2 low-cost programs, typically those easiest to implement but arguably also the least likely to promote transformative change, especially for families of color and Tribal communities. Case studies of Minnesota and Washington suggest that the federal requirements for funding, implementing, and evaluating program delivery limit experimentation. As a result, community-based and culturally-relevant programs are often excluded. The federal choice of FFPSA policy tools results in constrained state innovation and a dampening of service variation to might meet expressed parent needs and service demands.

ABSTRACT. More than 50 years since the seminal work in community participation, the question of how to meaningfully involve communities in decision-making around infrastructure remains unanswered, though research has uncovered some best practices. This research explores a best practice case to develop an understanding of participants’ experiences and lessons learned. King County Metro, Seattle’s largest transit agency, convened its Mobility Equity Cabinet in May 2019. The goal of the Mobility Equity Cabinet is to center the leadership of low- and no-income people, black, indigenous, and people of color, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, and members of limited-English speaking communities, bringing their experience and expertise into the transportation decision-making sphere. The aim of this research is to 1) illuminate how the members experienced their role as community representative and how King County staff were changed through the experience of staffing the cabinet, 2) analyze to what extent did the best practices of compensation, placing equity first, community member selection, and community-directed science address common community member experiences of powerlessness and voicelessness with respect to transportation decision-making, and 3) trace how the Mobility Cabinet intervened to shape the mobility framework used to guide King County decision-making. The research uses 23 semi-structured interviews with King County Metro staff and cabinet members, as well as analysis of meeting materials and the mobility framework document. I find that the cabinet did reduce feelings of powerlessness and voicelessness and meaningfully shift decision-making institutions while also raising interesting questions about the concept of community representation and membership.

ABSTRACT. Studies found positive effects of passive representative bureaucracy on the coproduction of recycling (Riccucci et al., 2016), policing (Hong, 2017), firefighter services (Andrews et al., 2014), and education (Vinopal, 2020). However, most studies focus on street-level bureaucrat representation, leaving a gap in understanding the relationship between representation at the upper-level public officials and coproduction. Public management scholars started to pay attention to the impact of symbolic representation on coproduction (Holt & Gershenson, 2019; Riccucci & Van Ryzin, 2017), but additional research on the different policy contexts and coproduction types is necessary.

With a survey experiment, this study investigates the impact of symbolic representation on coproduction in the context of public education. Specifically, we examine the effect of racial representation of school principals on parents’ involvement. We will recruit participants from Amazon MTurk and use survey questions such as age and number of children to identify the potential parent status of the participants. The experiment will use several vignettes that vary in principals’ race and parent involvement activities (such as volunteering and serving on a school committee) to explore whether parents’ involvement varies based on their racial congruence with the principal and the participation types. The findings will provide insights to better promote the coproduction of racial minority parents in public education. The study also yields two primary theoretical contributions. It offers unrevealed determinants of coproduction: racial representation of the leadership. Also, the findings enhance the knowledge of the relationship between symbolic representation and coproduction.

ABSTRACT. Despite a well-developed body of research on the individual antecedents of citizens’ willingness to coproduce public services, relatively little work has explored the impact of perceptions about organizational performance on coproduction. Because the findings from that research are mixed, we develop two competing theoretical models of the relationship between service user satisfaction and their willingness to coproduce including: one where citizens step in to fill the gap between performance levels and expectations and one in which they seek the efficiency and reputational benefits of working with organizations that are already performing at a high level. We test these using a longitudinal panel of 11,000 parents observed across four years from over 1,000 schools in the United States. We factor analyze numerous activities, such as attending PTO meetings, volunteering in a classroom, or assisting with activities such as a science fair to create a measure of coproduction. Results from a model including individual and year fixed effects and numerous school and neighborhood-level controls suggest that parental dissatisfaction with the school in which their child is enrolled leads to less co-production, not more. This supports the theoretical argument that people may be drawn to working with high performing organizations because they believe in the capacity of the organization to convert their labor into outcomes and/or because of the reputational benefits of being part of a winning team. Unfortunately, the results challenge the assumption that coproduction is a means for poor performing organizations to improve through the commitment and capacity of service users.

ABSTRACT. This paper evaluates the use of technologically enabled coproduction at the local level. Air quality monitoring is increasingly monitored at the hyper-local level with the advent of relatively inexpensive internet of things (IoT) enabled air quality monitoring devices. The deployment of these devices is growing exponentially (doubling in numbers from 2020 to 2022). However, governments do not necessarily deploy these devices, instead they are deployed by individuals—more often by individuals with higher income levels and higher concentrations of white residents (Clark, 2021; Clark and Matonte, 2022).

We have conducted two surveys of Oregon residents (English and Spanish) and one convenience sample of sports fans to better understand how people adapt to the increased risk of wildfires and related smoke using a co-assessment lens. The paper will assess how technologically-enabled co-assessment changes behavior in practice.

Prior research shows (Clark, 2021; Clark and Matonte, 2022) that this type of co-assessment is biased in where it is found and consequently excludes large segments of the population from the benefits. Decision-making based on these devices could provide inconsistent information availability; thus, considering where they are deployed is an important consideration for governments. We will be able to provide an assessment of who can access these hyper-local data and how they are using it.

ABSTRACT. Over the years, immigration has become a canon of political debate among policymakers in the US. With the United States being “a melting pot” of diverse races, groups, tribes, and tongues; the government through its immigration laws endeavors to control immigration excesses. However, more and more local jurisdictions around the country have disassociated themselves from federal immigration enforcement efforts by adopting a sanctuary policy or becoming a sanctuary city (in the case of cities). Scholarly literature have examined the practices associated with this policy, as well as its effect on a region and its population. However, this timely and significant research adds to the growing body of knowledge on government-nonprofit intersectoral relationship by examining the effect of the immigrant-serving nonprofit sector on the adoption sanctuary policy in a county. This study also examines the effect of immigrant-serving nonprofit sector on the intensity of sanctuary policy that is adopted in a county. Regression analysis on the total population of 3,142 US counties were conducted to examine these relationships. Preliminary findings suggest a significant positive relationship between the size of the immigrant-serving nonprofit sector and the adoption of sanctuary policy in a county.

ABSTRACT. Nonprofit organizations occupy a unique space in policymaking and implementation as intermediaries between citizens and government institutions. Their positions as advocates and service providers make them experts on issues affecting their respective communities and regions as well as on the type of policy approaches that are most suitable to address these issues, making nonprofits a beneficial actor to include in collaborative efforts. However, for nonprofits’ expertise to be known and utilized by decision makers, they must be able to participate in and influence governance. Understanding how nonprofits navigate the choice to engage with governments can shed light into their decision-making process and identify factors that promote or inhibit their involvement.

This research evaluates how nonprofit organizations perceive their role in public management through interviews with California-based nonprofits about their engagement in drought governance. Drought is a complex policy problem given its diverse causes and manifestations, the challenges around delineating its boundaries, varying perceptions about it, and its diverse impacts. Interviews are being conducted with nonprofits across the state whose mission statements reflect interest in water issues. Additionally, organizations with varying capacities and focus areas – such as those interested in the environment, labor, and social justice – are also being targeted to capture different perspectives on and experiences with drought governance. Questions that are asked during the interview include what type of governance activity their organization engages in, who they see as key players in decisions around drought, and what they would like to see as a response to drought.

ABSTRACT. This research aims to elucidate the trust-building process in public-nonprofit collaboration, translating concepts from the inter-organizational trust literature in organizational studies into the context of collaboration. Trust is often stated as an important driver of collaboration in public administration research (e.g., Vangen and Huxham, 1998; Bryson et al., 2006; Rigg and O’Mahony, 2013). However, few studies have examined how trust develops in collaboration contexts, and most studies view trust in a simplistic way, for instance, as a unilateral concept (Lee and Dodge, 2019; Getha-Taylor et al., 2019). Integrating insights from trust research in organizational studies, this paper introduces a conceptual framework for trust-building in collaboration settings and responds to limitations in the previous literature. Specifically, this study conceptualizes trust as a multi-dimensional concept and highlights that different dimensions of trust can matter at different stages of collaboration. Before collaboration sets off, calculative trust plays a significant role for nonprofits in deciding whether to join collaboration or not. During the collaboration, nonprofits either confirm the trustworthiness of their partners or experience violated expectations. As a result of evaluating the interactions, nonprofits can choose to stay or leave collaboration, according to the different development patterns of affective and calculative trust. This study employs in-depth interviews with the staff of social service provision nonprofit organizations who have participated in public-nonprofit collaborative projects. While the organizational studies literature suggests features of trust-building, as noted above, these will be rigorously tested using a grounded theory.

ABSTRACT. In 1980 the field of public administration's leading journal, Public Administration Review (PAR), published a symposium acknowledging that the quantity and quality of rural administration research needed to be increased and improved (Zody, 1980). In the following decades, research on rural administration has ebbed and flowed. Special issues on rural issues in other public administration journals followed (e.g., Slack, 1990; Isett, 2016; Accordino, 2019) as did research on rural areas by leading scholars. However, recent reviews of the state of rural public administration research continue to echo concerns similar concerns to those voiced in the 1980s PAR symposium.

This article fills this void by synthesizing the public administration literature on rural areas between 1980 and 2020 and providing a systematic literature review of 11 public and nonprofit administration journals. To date, no systematic research overview of rural administration has been created. This leaves the rural administration literature somewhat disjointed and unstructured, which could hamper future research. This systematic review examines seven key aspects of the literature on rural administration: the frequency of research on the concept, table of rural definitions, the most prominent studies based on referencing network analysis, the most frequent publication outlets, geographic distribution of empirical research designs, as well as an examination of both conceptual and empirical designs. Finally, lines of inquiry and patterns of empirical findings are explored, and implications for practice are drawn from the publications reviewed. Strengths and weaknesses of the existing literature are identified, and future research directions are proposed.

ABSTRACT. Research on the governance of purpose-oriented networks has advanced enormously during the past decade. Yet this research subfield needs to increase its conceptual depth and embrace large-N research designs. We build on Kiser and Ostrom’s Three Worlds of Action framework and propose to use boundary objects in future research to address these shortcomings. The Three Worlds of Action framework can provide a strong basis to conceptualize governance rules, while boundary objects, such as contracts and terms of reference, can codify governance rules and mechanisms. The first objective of this paper is to develop a theoretical framework—based on Kiser and Ostrom’s (1982) Three Worlds of Action--that allows us to determine how texts are used to create rules, and at what levels of organizational activity the rules apply. The second objective of the paper is to connect collaborative processes with boundary objects to see if it is possible to use the latter to approximate the governance of the former. The third objective of this paper is to create a path—using machine learning and natural language processing techniques—by which boundary objects and the rules they contain can be used to conduct comparative research on PONs, leading to much larger n studies than are currently possible using interviews and surveys alone. The paper will include a small sample of networks to demonstrate how a study could be conducted on a larger scale.

ABSTRACT. In our prior research of citation networks in public administration journals, based on the citation data in the Web of Science, we found that the academic journals of public administration were isolated from the journals of other fields, but they were not insular. Public administration journals cited journals in other fields, particularly political science, and business management, but the former were not cited at similar rates by the latter. What can account for this state of the scholarly literature in public administration? In this presentation, we propose two broad explanations for the levels of isolation and insularity of public administration: the unique nature of the field and its intellectual crisis.

The unique nature of the field requires that it is open (not insular) to many other disciplines for data and knowledge. Its unique “public” role in society may also contribute to a level of isolation. Also, the intellectual crisis in the field fosters its isolation by other disciplines. We suggest that the intellectual crisis of public administration has four components: lack of core theory; lack of methodological rigor; the emphasis on values, not empirical evidence in public administration research and scholarship; and a lack of a common identity. Each of these considerations may offer explanations as to why the literature of public administration is not cited with great frequency by other disciplines.

ABSTRACT. Our paper is not a dispassionate analysis, but rather normative and prescriptive. We reflect on the role of public administrators in preserving U.S. democracy. While well positioned as potential guardians of democracy, public administrators sometimes face risks when undertaking this role, especially when their political superiors are complicit in undermining democracy. The ethos of the apolitical Weberian bureaucrat, who exercises neutral competence and responds not only to legal mandates but also the political will of superiors is foundational for many aspects of U.S. governance. Often, the rationales for neutral competence are unassailable. However, neutral competence and an apolitical bearing do not suffice when a nation is faced with what we refer to as “deformation of democracy,” our term for threats promoted by the very political officials who exercise legitimate political authority and whom citizens expect to preserve democracy. However, the decades-old theory counter to Weber, the New Public Administration and the "self-actualizing" public administrator has proved ephemeral and largely ineffective. Our paper examines brings public administration theory to bear on the possible roles for public administrators to protect democracy, developing criteria that, when combined with theories, suggests and advocates some alternative choices for politically concerned public administrators. Among the prime theoretical lens are public values theory, 'guerilla government,' ethical covenants, institutional theory and 'exit' strategies (from exit, voice, loyalty). We evaluate the value of each as moral and pragmatic strategies for public administrators faced with dilemmas pitting routine job requirements against the requirements of democratic citizenship.

ABSTRACT. As globalization deepens and the information age develops, there is a close relationship and mutual promotion between the innovation-based economy that relies on knowledge transfer and learning and the world city network. Therefore, this study explores how Chinese cities' international friendship city relationships promote regional innovation. It focuses on how institutional differences affect the role of international friendship city relationships in regional innovation. Against the backdrop of social network theory, this study integrates regional innovation systems, knowledge transfer theory, and institutional theory. The framework proposes that the development of IFC can be seen as a dynamic social network process. Through network construction, relationship maintenance, and other steps, international friendship cities can conduct knowledge spillover and transfer. This can affect regional innovation, while examining institutional differences' moderating effect. This paper collects international friendship city relations and regional innovation data between 308 Chinese cities and 1,771 foreign cities in 157 countries around the world between 2003 and 2022 using official websites of foreign affairs offices of various provinces and cities in China and the "China Statistical Yearbook." Through linear regression analysis using a fixed-effect model and adjustment effect analysis, the results of this paper are obtained. The research findings indicate that establishing friendship city relationships and engaging in mutual activities have a positive impact on regional innovation. Interaction with developed countries can further promote innovation. Therefore, policy and practical recommendations should focus on institutional differences, strengthen international friendship city relationships, and promote cross-border regional innovation and sustainable development.

ABSTRACT. In today's dynamic and resource-constrained administrative environment, organizational success hinges on innovation, emphasizing the need for innovative work behavior (IWB) among employees (Janssen, 2003). Drawing from the social exchange, self-determination, and job characteristics theories, this study explores the link between transformational leadership (TL), job autonomy (JA), and innovative organizational culture (IOC) driving IWB in public employees, enhancing organizational adaptability.

This study focuses on the impact of TL on public employees' IWB. Existing research highlights TL's direct positive influence on IWB (Afsar et al., 2014), as well as mediating and moderating mechanisms (Reuvers et al., 2008; Stanescu et al., 2019). However, few studies holistically explore the moderated mediation in the TL-IWB relationship. The study aims to uncover how TL influences IWB, with JA as a mediator and IOC potentially enhancing JA's role as a moderator. Using Hayes' (2013) approach with the PROCESS macro, the study analyzes data from the 2021 Korea Public Employee Perception Survey. Preliminary findings suggest that TL's influence on IWB operates through JA, and this relationship is moderated by IOC levels.

Providing job autonomy allows public sector employees to exercise creativity and problem-solving. Organizational culture should be reshaped to embrace innovation, viewing mistakes as learning opportunities. This strategic alignment creates an environment where leadership practices, job autonomy, and culture work together, driving the public sector toward sustained success and innovation. Overall, the study underscores the value of public organizations nurturing an innovative culture to optimize the positive outcomes of TL efforts, ultimately leading to higher levels of IWB.

ABSTRACT. This article focuses on the specific role of history in policy adoption. In other words, how does path dependency influence policy adoption? In the US, most public health policy is a matter of state and sometimes municipal decision-making. Although the public health field increasingly emphasized “personal responsibility” for health in the 1970s, smoking continues to be framed in terms of industry manipulation. In the absence of federal policy on e-cigarettes for more than a decade, some cities and states imposed stringent regulations involving limitations on where and to whom e-cigarettes might be sold. Additionally, it offers a fresh viewpoint from which to reevaluate whether smoking ban policies in the same areas have an impact on these vaping policies due to path dependence.Therefore, we focus on the choice of policy tools for each state. By analyzing the three stages of path dependence, we want to explore how a former policy impacts a later one.

ABSTRACT. With the rapid advancement of digital technologies, their darker aspects and consequences have become a crucial concern. This paper presents a systematic review on the impacts of dark digital innovation. It aims to synthesize previous research and provide a comprehensive analysis of the societal impacts of such innovations, addressing two fundamental research questions: (1) What impacts does dark digital innovation bring to society? and (2) What factors cause the dark impacts of digital innovation?

These innovations, while often revolutionary, can have unintended negative consequences, such as privacy violations, misinformation, cyber threats, and ethical dilemmas. The review highlights how these innovations, while propelling technological and economic growth, can simultaneously pose significant risks to individual rights, societal norms, and ethical boundaries. Furthermore, the review explores the root causes of these negative impacts, emphasizing factors such as lack of regulatory frameworks, ethical oversight, and the rapid pace of technological advancement outstripping society's ability to adapt.

We review 129 articles (still increasing) on dark digital innovation using database and website searching. Drawing from our research outcomes, we (1) derive a novel definition and propose a new framing of current conceptualizations of dark digital innovation, and (2) establish a structured framework to categorize dark digital innovation studies into five primary categories: economic, emotional, cultural, social, and environmental. Our study culminates in pinpointing two areas that hold significant potential for further investigation.

ABSTRACT. This study frames organizational routines as the locus of innovations in public organizations. A significant part of innovations in public organizations involve managerial efforts to routinize successful practices into formal structures, the foundation that enables an organization to maintain consistent performance.

However, organizational routines have been traditionally viewed as barriers to a responsive and flexible public administration. Heavily inspired by the public management model by O’Toole and Meier (1999), public administration research stressing that “management matters” have downplayed the role of structure and elevated the role of the manager in enhancing organization performance.

In doing so, scholars have largely overlooked that the O’Toole and Meier model views the relationship between structure and management as a dynamic process in which increases in management activities are reactions to temporary misfits between structure and environment. Management and structure are substitutes, and as management activities are translated into organizational routines, the fit between structure and environment is restored.

This research builds upon insights from the O’Toole and Meier model and Routine Dynamics Theory (Feldman & Pentland, 2003) to elucidate the dynamic relationship between management innovation and organizational structure using examples from education and transportation. In a quantitative study of school districts, I find innovative management efforts are focused on stabilizing performance in high performing districts. In an ongoing qualitative study of managing risks in transportation infrastructure delivery, I trace best practices identified in previous projects being iteratively routinized into formal procedures for later projects, contributing to not mere enhancement but increased predictability of performance.

ABSTRACT. Along with the challenge of rural decline in the global south, industrial innovation such as cultural exhibition and agri-tourism is paid more attention due to their contribution to both livelihood and cultural development. However, limited physical resources hindered development input in marginalized areas, while plentiful cultural resources have been ignored and even disappeared during modernization process. After the implementation of cultural revitalization projects in rural China, some communities involved had been reshaped with improved traditional cultural assets, living environment, innovative and competitive industries and returning labor. This paper explores how traditional culture, e.g. architecture and inhabitant house, custom and arts, farming system, was regenerated for both rural industrial diversity and cultural conservation in 9 villages in China. This study found (1) the added value of traditional culture could be identified through local stakeholders’ participation, government intervention, social and academic organizations and private sectors’ engagement; (2) making use of traditional culture needs to integrate modern knowledge of management and competitiveness; (3) regenerative traditional culture contributed to rural industrial diversity and cultural conservation through in-flow of external investment, returned youth and rehabilitation of public space. This paper implies: (1) the importance of building up adaptive and collaborative mechanisms engaging internal and external stakeholders; (2) the necessity of creating a community-based and market-oriented institution for enabling the environment for innovation. (3) contextualizing the Civic Wealth Creation framework proposed by Lumpkin and Bacq in 2019 by introducing unbalanced relationship among key actors and proving the possibility of their joint-action.

ABSTRACT. Nonprofits are increasingly active in service and resource provision in both immigration and education policy arenas. There is evidence from prior studies that nonprofit practitioners are collaborating with local government actors in deviating or sanctuary counties, those that resist or subvert more harsh immigration enforcement environments at the state and federal levels. This study examines and develops a comprehensive understanding of the collaborative dynamics—the direction, composition, motivation, and challenges of relationships between local government educators and nonprofit practitioners. These dynamics will be examined in two metropolitan areas in states with harsh immigration enforcement environments—Atlanta, Georgia and Charlotte, North Carolina. These municipalities are both located in deviating or sanctuary counties within states with harsh immigration enforcement environments. Employing qualitative methods including interviews with nonprofit practitioners and educators, this study provides a more comprehensive understanding of relationships between local government and nonprofit actors.

ABSTRACT. Collaborative governance neither remains in a static state nor proceeds in a linear way. Instead, it consistently evolves over time and makes adaptive responses to its outcomes. While the dynamic nature of collaborative governance has gained growing attention from scholars, little is known about how collaborative outcomes lead to adjustments in various aspects of collaborative outputs. To bridge this gap in the literature, we examine whether and how collaborative watershed management adapts to its water quality improvement outcomes by altering the number, size, goals, and resources of future collaborative projects. Analyzing 24 years of panel datasets collected from the Oregon Watershed Restoration Inventory and water quality monitoring stations in Oregon, we test competing hypotheses on the adaptation of collaborative outputs. Specifically, we explore whether watersheds with high performing projects are rewarded with stronger support for their future collaborative efforts or watersheds with low performing projects attract greater investment to make up for their outcomes. This article has theoretical and practical implications for performance information use, viability, and resilience of collaborative governance regimes.

ABSTRACT. Public managers navigate in and govern a complex set of goals and values that have expanded to include climate concerns and promoting the green transition. However, climate is essentially a transnational and cross-sectoral governance issue that requires collaboration between governments and businesses. While the public management literature has long acknowledged leadership as an essential driver for achieving collaborative advantage, we still have limited knowledge on how leadership enables or impedes goal-attainment in collaborative arrangements. The purpose of this paper is to further explore this important question by focusing on the link between different types of collaborative leadership and goal attainment, specifically climate-related outputs. We use the case of transnational multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSP) in sustainable shipping – a sector that represents the collaborative and transnational nature of climate governance with partnerships ranging from 15-400 participants. Drawing on two case studies of green shipping MSPs, we employ a qualitative approach, conducting a document study and interviews with key actors in the MSP cases supplemented by interviews with experts in sustainable shipping. Our preliminary findings suggest that agile leadership, where MSP leaders deploy a mix of direct and indirect leadership strategies, are associated with higher climate-related goal attainment. We use these findings to build an analytical framework of agile collaborative leadership, thus contributing with new theoretical insights to the collaborative governance literature. Our findings provide valuable knowledge for governments and businesses on how to collaborate more efficiently to promote the green transition.  

ABSTRACT. Many studies have analyzed the challenges and benefits of collaborations between social science scholars and practitioners across various sectors, including government, non-profits, and businesses. As technology and society become increasingly intertwined, the need for more effective collaborations between scientific and engineering researchers and practitioners grows. However, there is still a significant gap in understanding how these collaborations can effectively connect technology and social aspects to benefit communities.

To address these research challenges, this study evaluates whether and how collaborations between scientific and engineering researchers and practitioners in the NSF Smart and Connected Communities (S&CC) program stimulate smart technology-related activities among practitioners. It investigates the extent of influence the S&CC program has on practitioners’ engagement with smart technologies. The study focuses on the impact of S&CC program participation on both NGOs, assessing their activities in learning, adopting, and promoting smart technologies, and government agencies, evaluating the potential increase in smart technology initiatives, policies, and collaborations. The emphasis is on tangible actions demonstrating active engagement in smart technology integration and advocacy.

This study employs event study analysis to assess changes in smart technology activities among NGOs and government agencies before and after joining the S&CC program. It also identifies factors influencing the program's effectiveness in enhancing smart technology efforts in non-academic institutions. The findings will provide insights into the program's role in smart technology engagement, smart city development, and public sector technology integration, and will inform academic researchers, practitioners, and funding agencies on designing collaborations that effectively connect science, technology, and society.

ABSTRACT. This study uses an audit experiment to examine whether federal and state Superfund program managers respond in a different way to the inquiries from immigrants of different regional origins. Our conceptualization and research strategy contribute to the exploration of an important question: the extent to which bureaucrats play a role in shaping the inequities in public service delivery to marginalized populations. With immigrants as the target group, we argue that the perceived deservingness of government service recipients is affected by their immigrant background and race/ethnicity (Liang, 2018). We hypothesize that bureaucrats are less responsive to non-white immigrants with less perceived deservingness of governmental service, compared to their white counterparts. This study enriches experimental research on bureaucratic discrimination and uneven distribution of policy benefits (Jilke et al., 2018; Olsen et al., 2022). Further, this study connects environmental justice, underscoring the fair treatment of all social members in environmental policy implementation. Present studies find that minorities are more likely to experience environmental policy implementation inequities, but they largely examine aggregate-level correlations between government’s actions and local communities’ demographic and socioeconomic characteristics (Konisky, 2015). Our research adds evidence regarding bureaucratic behavior as the possible cause for the observed inequitable policy implementation outputs. Our experiment will send out interventions through emails to Superfund program managers. Whether an email is responded to and if so, the quality of the response, are outcome measurements. Each email manipulates the sender’s regional origins and race/ethnicity to examine the causal role of these two factors in explaining discriminatory responses.

ABSTRACT. Green technology transfer can help sustainable development go hand in hand with local innovation-driving economic growth, which becomes one of the key measures of environmental governance performance. Employing the multi-period Difference-in-Differences method to conduct a quasi-natural experiment based on the Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI), this study use the panel data of Chinese cities over the period 2005-2018 to investigate how environmental information disclosure influences green innovation transfer. The results verify the significant promoting effect of PITI information disclosure on local green technology transfer. It also reveals that public opinion and government attention are crucial mechanisms that help environmental information disclosure better fulfill its role. Meanwhile, the effect can also be more prominent with higher level of industrial development, which shows information facilitates the allocation and utilization of innovation resources towards the green transition path. Our findings reflect information interaction of multi-agents can shape environmental collaborative governance for guiding technology transfer to better adapt to environmental needs.

ABSTRACT. State and local governments across the US are increasingly responding to the calls for local climate action by investing in green infrastructure. Sub-national agencies have sought to leverage the market for climate finance by issuing green municipal bonds to fund projects aligning with climate goals. However, the municipal bond market is largely unregulated, lacks uniform standards, and measurable outcomes. Consequently, it remains unclear whether green municipal bonds are likely to make substantive headway towards sustainability or if issuing these instruments is merely a symbolic move by public agencies. Public management scholarship reveals similar outcomes in other contexts where agencies strategically adopt programs aimed at generating short-term benefits rather than focusing on long-term sustainability goals. Borrowing the concept of greenwashing from corporate sustainability scholarship, this study analyzes green bonds to determine whether and to what extent these instruments articulate public values addressing sustainability. We conduct in-depth text-analysis of all municipal green bond issuances by 31 agencies at different levels of government to assess the substantiveness of claims relating to sustainable development. We analyze the use of proceeds in the context of other bond characteristics such as certification status and issuing agency and year uncover spatial and temporal patterns. The analysis reveals varying levels of disclosure and greenwashing, leading to long-term infrastructure lock-ins, limited environmental outcomes. The mixed outcomes jeopardize public values of sustainability, accountability, and responsibility for sub-national governments. The findings highlight a need to establish clear standards addressing disclosure, transparency, and accountability for public managers.

ABSTRACT. As a distinctive environmental governance system in China, the positive list policy of ecological environmental supervision and law enforcement centers on precision pollution control. By reducing on-site law enforcement inspections for law-abiding exemplary enterprises and intensifying positive incentives, it promotes differentiated supervision to achieve the dual objectives of environmental governance and economic development. This paper utilizes panel data from Chinese industrial enterprises, employing the regression model and difference-in-differences (DID) model to assess the effect of the positive list policy on the environmental and economic performance of enterprises. The results indicate that the positive list policy significantly reduces the emission of pollutants from industrial enterprises. Environmental information disclosure, green patents, and environmental investments enhance the positive impact of the positive list policy on the environmental performance of enterprises. Simultaneously, the positive list policy has a significant positive effect on the total operating income and net profit of enterprises, contributing to improved economic performance. Therefore, compared to "one-size-fits-all" policies such as production restrictions, the positive list policy not only achieves environmental governance goals but also ensures sustainable economic development. This paper enriches the research on the micro-level impacts of Chinese environmental governance policies on enterprises, providing compelling empirical evidence to support the coordinated development of environmental governance and economic growth.

ABSTRACT. Traditional non-profit theory suggests that NPO requires an efficient board of directors. However, most boards of the science & technology (S&T) societies in China have fallen into failure or dysfunctional, but they have still achieved remarkable results. This is hard to be explained by traditional non-profit theories. Thus, this study poses the research question: How can Chinese S&T societies achieve their performance when the board fails? Entering from board functions, why do the S&T societies perform their basic functions well? How can this be explained from theoretical perspectives? Based on the comprehensive operational performance data (230000 items) of 214 national S&T societies under the China Association for Science and Technology from 2010 to 2021, as well as building a leadership background information database - total of 43620 items of the 214 national S&T societies(974 former and current directors and secretaries) over the past 11 years, the mystery of organizational performance is attempted to be revealed in the context of an overall so-called failure of their Board. Empirical analysis shows that, firstly, special institutional arrangements with Chinese characteristics can be found within the governance structure of S&T societies in China, in addition to their formal system. This arrangement may highly affect the organizational performance. Secondly, the embedding of party organizations and administrative affiliations has significant effects on these societies’ internal governance and organizational performance. Thirdly, the cross embeddedness plays a political incentive role, which is to enhance social capital, organizational resources, thus facilitate the organizational capability and to achieve performance goals.

ABSTRACT. What makes human service nonprofits effective? There are many potential answers to this question, but increasingly, funders of nonprofits, especially governments, seek quantitative measurements of program effectiveness as proof that human services “work.” Indeed, nonprofits are increasingly asked to align with the evidence-based policy movement which is pushing governments to restrict social policy funding to those programs with an established evidence base, for which the randomized controlled trial (RCT) is seen as the “gold standard.”

Our recently completed book explores how RCTs came to be seen as the most legitimate form of evidence, how RCTs are really carried out inside nonprofits, and where we find a mismatch between the RCT method and the goals of the sector. We go beyond existing critiques about RCTs to address unintended consequences for equity, sustainability, and organizational responsiveness and innovation. We base these findings on a field analysis as well as interviews with professional evaluators, foundation program officers, and nonprofit managers. We identify five specific problems with using RCTs as high-stakes assessments of human service programming: 1. The “False Certainty” Problem: RCTs aren’t a foolproof method of evaluation. 2. The “Programs Need Organizations” Problem: RCTs assess programs, but programs are embedded in organizations 3. The “Communities Need Organizations” Problem: RCTs threaten the community-level benefits provided by nonprofit organizations 4. The “Rich Get Richer” Problem: RCTs primarily advantage already well-resourced organizations whose way of working is easily adapted to RCT demands. 5. The “Agility” Problem: As high-stakes assessments, RCTs may hinder responsiveness and innovation

ABSTRACT. Public organizations consistently search for ways to enhance the amount and flexibility of their funding. Police organizations participate in this trend, as well, and recent research suggests growth in the prevalence of police foundations filling this role for police organizations (see Fernandez & Tremblay-Boire 2021; Lippert 2022). This paper examines whether growth in police foundation funds are responsive to incidents of officer use of force, which have been under greater scrutiny in recent years. In other words, does the public respond to such incidents and backlash against police officers by donating to police foundations? Do police organizations capitalize on public criticism of police by creating or growing police foundations? To address these questions, we rely on a unique dataset that combines data on incidents of police killings in communities (the Washington Post’s Fatal Force Database and the Mapping Police Violence database) with National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) Core Files data on non-profit organizations, as well as contextual information about cities across the country from the American Community Survey. Using this unique data set, we turn to matching methods and a generalized difference-in-difference approach (Imai, Kim, and Wang 2021) to estimate the short- and long-term impact of police killings on foundation funding and fundraising. We discuss the implications of our findings for our understanding of growth and behavior of private support for public institutions. Additionally, we discuss how police organizations use these funds against a backdrop of salient incidents of officer misconduct and deteriorating perceptions of police legitimacy.

ABSTRACT. The construction of digital government represents a critical initiative in innovating government governance concepts and is an inevitable choice for advancing the modernization of national governance capabilities. This paper, based on panel data from 276 prefectural-level cities in China from 2011 to 2020, employs a double difference model to examine the impact of digital government construction on the equalization of basic public services and its underlying mechanisms. The results reveal that the construction of digital government significantly enhances the level of equalization in basic public services, a finding that remains valid even after a series of robustness tests. Mechanism analysis indicates that digital government construction can promote the equalization of basic public services by improving government transparency and optimizing the allocation of public resources. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the policy effects of digital government construction are more pronounced in cities with larger populations or higher levels of digitalization. The conclusions of this study provide a theoretical basis and policy reference for optimizing the top-level design of digital government, strengthening regional and urban-rural collaborative cooperation, and developing a more equalized public service system.

ABSTRACT. Digital Government (DG) has made positive impacts on society, but it has caused Digital Divide (DD) and Digitally Marginalized People (DMP). To address it, governments have implemented a Digital Inclusion (DI) strategy of providing digital education and equipment to the DMP. In this research, I name them Type-1 DMP, whose governmental digital provision strategy can be effective. Previous literature focused on digital provision strategy for the Type-1 DMP. However, there exists another type of DMP (Type-2), whose digital provision strategy might not be effective, like very elderly with their limited cognitive ability, and voluntary digital seclusive people because of their religious beliefs like the Amish in the US, who have suffered from community disintegration, economic hardship, and safety issues due to their limited accessibility to digitized governmental services. For Type-2 DMP, the government’s maintaining traditional and physical services (e.g., staff visits and paper notices) might be effective and desirable to secure their basic needs, considering their inability and religious beliefs. To deeply understand the hardships of Type-2 DMP, a qualitative case study about the Old Order Amish in the US with the semi-structured interview method will be employed. The critical theory (Nonprofit Advocacy) and three failures theory (Social Enterprises) will be used to elicit an alternative governmental DI strategy for the Type-2 DMP and the positive roles of Nonprofit Organizations in representing and helping them. This study can contribute to providing an alternative DI approach essential for the survival of Type-2 DMP living in the shadow of digital government.

ABSTRACT. Distinguishing shared motivation between different administrative regions and different ecosystems is the basis to drive collaborative dynamic in collaborative governance of river basin. Taking the Yellow River Basin in China as an example, we integrated remotely sensed ecological data with county socioeconomic statistic records to establish an ecology–economy–society model from 2001 to 2020, and used the metacoupling approach to investigate shared motivation between upper, middle and lower reaches. The results showed that statuses of ecology and environment in the upper and middle reaches influenced that in the lower reaches positively by influencing runoff, but influenced negatively by influencing sediment content. Ecology and environment protection in the upper and middle reaches promoted water and soil conserving capacity to ensure water supply of people boom and industrialization in the lower reaches. Central transfer payment and compensation for ecological conservation advanced ecological and environmental projects in the upper and middle reaches. The mutual understanding and support generated shared motivation in collaborative governance of the Yellow River Basin. Identifying the shared motivation is helpful for decision–maker to optimize collaborative governance of the Yellow River Basin more accurately in future.

ABSTRACT. This percolator session assembles a diverse and international group of scholars interested in illuminating the confluence of law/legal issue and public administration practice and theory. The session is designed to introduce a multidimensional approach to Law and PA’s interplay in contemporary governance. Dimensions include equity, transparency, human rights, procurement, the environment, judicial administration and practice, administrative law and comparative legal systems. The session is designed to elevate the relevance of law and PA research and practice. While this is often neglected and/or atomized in the pages of our journals.

ABSTRACT. The quality of long-term care has been a longstanding policy challenge in the U.S. In an effort to enhance nursing home quality and resident well-being, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) introduced Nursing Home Compare (NHC), a public reporting system for all Medicare- and/or Medicaid-certified nursing homes nationwide. The system aims to provide information about facility quality and assist citizens in making informed choices. However, little is known about how facilities respond to this quality reporting system. This study investigates whether nursing homes improve their quality after receiving lower ratings than other homes in the community (social aspiration) or lower ratings compared to previous years (historical aspiration) (Cyert & March, 1963; Meier et al., 2015). Additionally, we explore whether facilities in underserved communities are more or less likely to take actions to enhance quality in response to the quality rating information. To assess the impact of quality ratings, we merge two archival datasets—NHC by CMS and the American Community Survey (ACS) by the U.S. Census Bureau. The NHC includes various facility characteristics, such as five-star quality ratings, facility ownership, number of beds and residents, and staffing hours. The ACS encompasses county-level characteristics, including the population in poverty and the racial composition of each county. This study offers empirical assessments of nursing home quality and thus has important policy implications for long-term care. Its findings can also inform policy strategies aimed at ensuring quality long-term care and offer insights into recent nursing home reforms.

ABSTRACT. Public libraries have evolved into vital community resources, serving as indispensable hubs for delivering public value (Seppänen et al., 2017; Field & Tran, 2018) in the community. Despite their growing role in the community, there is a lack of evidence that assesses how local libraries effectively utilize their core resources and capabilities to respond to specific community needs. Using public value management literature (e.g., Moore, 1995), I examine whether local libraries provide the services and programs that address community characteristics, balancing their internal and external environment. Specifically, this study answers two research questions: Does the service composition of local public libraries reflect community characteristics? What are institutional and organizational factors that moderate the relationship? I substantiate arguments by employing multi-level regression analysis using Public Library Survey (PLS) and the American Community Survey (ACS) covering FY 2010 to 2019 This study contributes to the performance management and public value management literature. First, it assesses the performance of local public libraries to better understand how local public librarians or library directors make management choices about how to program their public service offerings, therefore fulfilling community responsibility (Nowell et al., 2016). Second, it revisits the responsiveness of public servants, raising questions about how public servants navigate the process of identifying and creating public values, along with political legitimation (Finer, 1941; Friedrich, 1940). Third, it contributes to the theoretical advancement of Moore’s framework by empirically bridging the gap in the existing empirical studies defining, measuring, and assessing public value (Hartley et al., 2017).

ABSTRACT. Public organizations have long embraced performance appraisal systems as means to improve performance and accountability. The prevalence of performance appraisal systems stems from the Taylorite control perspective to manage performance and echoes the New Public Management. Rich literature in the management field has examined the implications of performance appraisal for individual outcomes. Fewer studies have shed light on how performance appraisal promotes achievements against organizational goals. A parallel line of literature in Public Administration has extensively examined the effects of performance management on organizational outcomes. This research, however, does not fully consider the multiple conflicting goals and performance measures constantly faced by public managers. Contributing to the existing literature, this study will explore how the appraisal of leaders' performance of one goal influences the performance of the competing organizational goal(s). Specifically, this study examines the effects of a performance appraisal program on two competing goals of city governments in China: environmental protection and economic development. This program was launched in 2014 in selected trial cities. Different from the cadre evaluation system in China, this appraisal program has an exclusive focus on rating local leaders’ environmental performance and offering feedback during their 5-year tenure. Data were collected from all 337 cities in China from multiple sources and interviews during 2012-2017. Using a quasi-experimental design, we find that the appraisal program has a positive impact on environmental performance. Interestingly enough, we also find a positive spillover effect of performance appraisal of leaders’ environmental performance on the organizational performance of economic development.

ABSTRACT. Performance management is a widespread principle in public administration, aiming for enhanced accountability, control, and learning. Despite the active debates over the topic, insufficient attention has been paid to the inherent selection bias in performance information, raising questions about performance spillover. Performance information generated within each department captures only a partial view of the phenomenon deemed relevant to their subject field, omitting seemingly tangential phenomenon. This could make an organization unwittingly produce negative effects on others. Simultaneously, the impacted organizations may struggle to trace external influences. This scenario casts doubt on the appropriateness of using performance information uncritically to assess an organization. The concern further escalates if resource allocation fails to acknowledge interorganizational dynamics.

To explore this spillover effect, we examine the management of local housing markets by public agencies in relation to public school teacher retention. Local housing organizations, through their performance in subsidy distribution and building permit approval, can influence local housing prices. These prices, in turn, can impact teachers struggling to cover living costs. By aggregating housing organizations’ performance at the school level, we aim to estimate the spillover effect on teacher retention through rent price changes induced by public housing organizations.

ABSTRACT. This study analyzes the impacts of public service motivation (PSM) on street-level bureaucrats’ coping strategy, considering the moderating roles of two contextual factors: organizational performance pressure and clients’ help deservingness. Two vignette-based survey experiments were conducted separately in regulation and service settings (financial regulators and healthcare workers) in China. The findings indicate agreement across different settings on the positive effects of PSM on street-level bureaucrats’ intention to move against clients. However, the evidence regarding the moderating roles of organizational performance pressure and clients’ help deservingness points to more complexity, with the results varying in the regulation and service settings. In the regulation setting, organizational performance pressure crowds out financial regulators’ PSM, leading to declining intentions of moving against clients. However, in the service setting, clients’ help deservingness serves as a significant contextual factor, moderating the relationship between healthcare workers’ PSM and decisions on moving against clients.

ABSTRACT. This study investigates how social ties impact public service motivation (PSM) through social integration and social influence and how PSM affects social ties through social selection. While PSM can develop as a dynamic trait, few studies have explored the co-evolving nature of social networks and PSM. We hypothesize that highly integrated individuals, those with more extensive and dense friendship networks, demonstrate higher PSM than others. Additionally, PSM is influenced by the PSM of close friends. Moreover, PSM influences friendship selection because individuals prefer those with higher levels of PSM or whose PSM is similar to theirs. The hypotheses were tested using longitudinal social networks and PSM data from 67 students in a master's program in public administration at a university in the Eastern United States during the 2012-13 academic year. The use of Stochastic Actor-Oriented Models for ordered networks allowed us to detail and test our hypotheses for weak and strong-tied friendship networks simultaneously. The findings explore the relationship between social ties and PSM, disentangling social integration, social influence, and social selection mechanisms, and provide implications for management practices regarding socialization-based intervention that emphasizes building strong social connections to nurture PSM, as well as recruitment and selection of public employees with higher PSM and their social networks.

ABSTRACT. For decades, scholarship on public personnel management has explored the origins of employees’ motivation to go the extra mile, without conclusive evidence. Based on the systematic analysis of more than 800 articles, this study disentangles the relationship between organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and the two most important constructs argued to explain intrinsic employee behaviors in public administration: public service motivation (PSM) and prosocial motivation (PROSM). Combining meta-analytical and meta-synthetic means of analyses, this study synthesizes the empirical evidence of more than 30 years of OCB, PSM, and PROSM research to assess the empirical evidence on the relationships between these interlinked yet distinct theoretical concepts in the context of civil service employment to obtain conceptual and empirical clarity. We find that OCB can be reliably predicted by both PSM and PROSM. However, distinct psychological and motivational mechanisms drive these relationships within important boundary conditions. Relevant direct and indirect predictors are identified, highlighting clusters and gaps in the current empirical and conceptual understanding in the OCB-PSM-PROSM triad. These findings further elevate the OCB discourse by proposing a novel evidence-based research agenda and by deriving important implications for public personnel management in theory and practice.

ABSTRACT. Public libraries have long aimed to advance democracy by preserving records, providing access to information for all, and promoting intellectual freedom. Today they provide myriad services with a mission of radical inclusivity. For example, librarians note “libraries are the final bastion of place that people can sit at and just be without the expectation that you're there to buy something or provide something”, “Libraries are the best part of the community. We are the heart and soul of every community,” and “library services are more expansive, and more critical than they have ever been before”. This research investigates how contemporary public libraries serve as inclusive spaces for public gathering, information access, and public service delivery. We use qualitative case studies including 21 in-depth qualitative interviews, website data, and observation data to develop a framework for inclusive public service delivery. The cases include more than 17 libraries in two US states that represent diverse socio-economic communities with populations ranging from 2,058 to 1.6 million. We draw from these in-depth cases to analyze missions of inclusivity, professional training advancing that mission, and the diversity of communities that libraries serve. We also note how libraries fill gaps in local government service delivery. We draw from the data to develop a framework for inclusive public service delivery and offer propositions for assessing inclusive public service delivery in other government organizations. The framework, drawn from the case of US libraries, seeks to understand and enable analysis of inclusive public service delivery in other contexts.

ABSTRACT. One challenge to nonprofit organizations seeking to help their clients navigate administrative burden is addressing the features of their clients' lives that indirectly exacerbate administrative burdens. Government efforts to minimize administrative burden address policy requirements, but leave the redemption costs of benefit receipt an outstanding issue. This study seeks to describe how nonprofits can help with redemption costs, drawing on how nonprofits facilitate gender affirming care access for transgender youth through parental support programs. Previous research on administrative burdens speaks to how third party agents can limit access to services, such as cashiers’ behavior in WIC transactions. In addition to advising on navigating policy requirements, nonprofit organizations are uniquely positioned to address the social barriers between a person and service access. In the case of LGBTQ+ serving nonprofit organizations, one major element of that sector is supporting the parents of transgender youth in managing grief, developing acceptance, and navigating transition-related administrative processes. Descriptions of this process come from interviews with nonprofits leaders and member parents (n=30), and transgender identifying youth between ages 14-19 (n=12) in one midwestern state. Some initial themes arising in the data include descriptions of the kinds of information parents are looking for from peer-to-peer support communities, knowledge sharing on experiences with providers, and how parents either open up to or further restrict their childrens access to gender affirming care. The goal of this paper is to contribute understanding of how nonprofit interventions are positioned to both indirectly and directly shape administrative burdens.

ABSTRACT. Administrative burdens are pervasive and impact citizens everywhere. This paper contributes to better understanding the citizen side within state state-citizen interactions around information requirements that create burdens. We adopt a participation angle and examine the extent to which citizens’ political participation shapes their experiences of administrative burdens. We argue that participation allows citizens to voice concerns, likely resulting in a more responsive government. It may also increase citizens’ tolerance for burden, as the mere opportunity to provide feedback may make citizens feel more positive about their government interactions; a mechanism drawing on cognition rather than action. The paper utilizes Afrobarometer (2023) data composed of 27 African countries (N=10,000+) in which citizens report difficulties when accessing identity documents, medical and school services, and information on the payment of taxes. Findings are mixed but suggest that institutional opportunities to participate improve experiences of burden more than non-institutional activism-types of political participation.

ABSTRACT. This research explores the positive framing of electric vehicles (EVs) subsidy has a positive impact on burden tolerance. Recent studies were on administrative burdens within the safety net programs such as Medicaid, Food stamps, and disaster management for underserved populations (Moynihan et al., 2015). While literature found evidence of psychological burden that affects the take-up of programs negatively, suggesting the effect of stigma (Halling & Baekgaard, 2023), subsidy for EV adoption does not have a stigma and few studies have investigated subsidies with a positive perception, which does not have a stigma or negative impression that hinders applying. Thus, with the positive framing, is the cost of administrative burden on encouraging the purpose of EV adoption and solar panel installation different? We examine how the level of burden tolerance among the recipients varies by the different emphasis on different benefits of having an EV. To do so, this research utilizes survey-based experimental designing to the Americans in the Florida Panhandle (n=2,000) with the treatments into three benefits: individual benefit with cost, community benefit with building relative infrastructure, and universal benefit with reducing Co2 emission. The finding suggests the highest burden tolerance when the EV subsidy is framed with individual cost saving and the least generous tolerance on the EV subsidy framed with environmental saving with pollution reduction. This suggests that by framing the EV subsidy by shifting emphasis on personalized benefits, governments can encourage greater participation in subsidy programs, promoting the adoption of electric vehicles regardless of the burden.

ABSTRACT. Administrative burden studies often focus on the take-up of public services by underrepresented and marginalized citizens, who represent the demand side of the public program. Current studies on burden tolerance highlight the importance of the burden tolerance of citizens (Nicholson-Crotty et al., 2021) and policymakers (Bækgaard et al., 2021). Yet, there is a lack of understanding of the relationship between the burden tolerance of bureaucrats, the supply side of the public program, and the social construction of policy.

This paper investigates bureaucrats’ burden tolerance when confronting different policy contexts, which have different social constructions of citizens. We posit two core hypotheses: 1) Bureaucrats will be less likely to impose heavy documentation requirements on citizens when the policy is to support everyone in accidental cases, compared to the means-tested policy which is socially constructed as for marginalized communities. 2) Bureaucrats will be more likely to impose heavy documentation requirements on citizens when the policy is to grant incentives to selective and voluntary clientele, compared to the means-tested policy which is socially constructed as for marginalized communities.

We conducted a vignette survey experiment to test these hypotheses and received responses from 400 bureaucrats across the United States. This study suggests two significant contributions. First, it focuses on the supply side of the policy program, which are the main actors in the public resource distribution process. Second, it compares the burden tolerance of bureaucrats by policy context with different client communities.

ABSTRACT. The movement to implement a results-based approach to management and budgeting over the past 60 years has faced a consistent disconnect between strategic planning, on the one hand, and resource constraints, on the other. Often plans are developed with little attention to the resources that would be necessary in order to implement them, and budget processes do not focus adequately on the priorities reflected in these plans. This research will focus on five OECD countries--Australian, Great Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United States--that have been viewed as leaders in the results-based budgeting and management movement. By describing how these countries do (and do not) make the connections between planning and budgeting, lessons will emerge that can inform future progress. Past research has shown that much of the impact of these performance budgeting reforms has been in the use of performance information in the budget execution process, rather than to inform wholesale changes in resource allocation between agencies or ministries. Particular attention will thus be paid to the impact of performance information for management and whether agencies/ministries are using their discretion to focus on the priorities articulated in strategic plans or other priority-setting documents.

ABSTRACT. The escalating frequency and severity of natural and man-made emergencies pose a formidable challenge for public budgeting. In his book Searching for Safety, Aaron Wildavsky used the analogy of the “jogger’s dilemma” to demonstrate the basic paradox that organizations face between maintaining security and pursuing growth with risks. As the national policy orientation increasingly pays attention to security in China, local governments nowadays are expected to devote fatter budgets to address public security concerns, including areas such as fire rescue, law enforcement, and resource reserves. However, given the prevailing climate of fiscal austerity, the key question for local governments is how to balance protective measures without sacrificing investment on economic growth and public services. Drawing upon the frameworks of public choice theory and fiscal federalism, our research seeks to formulate hypotheses regarding the factors influencing government expenditure decisions concerning security and growth. Specifically, we investigate how the demand for public security, macroeconomic dynamics, and local fiscal conditions collectively shape the allocation of budgets by local governments. To achieve this, we conduct an analysis of county-level budget data from a Chinese province, categorizing expenditures into security-oriented and growth-oriented domains. Employing dynamic panel regression analysis, we aim to identify the determinants that influence the budget expenditure ratio between security and growth. Our research deepens the understanding of the security-growth paradox and calls for a new budgeting orientation towards resilience to guide future budget reforms.

ABSTRACT. Disasters provide a stress-test to states where the consequences for failure are dire in terms of loss of life and property. The budget mechanisms and characteristics used can affect how states respond to disasters. This paper uses Qualitative Comparative Analysis to analyze sets of budget mechanisms and characteristics to identify which are the most helpful in terms of financial outcomes in dealing with disasters. The main research questions focus on how states budget for disasters (in terms of similarities and differences) and how those strategies for budgeting affect outcomes including financial metrics for disaster response, timely completion of projects, and fiscal health. Common state budget mechanisms include appropriations, budget stabilization funds, reserves, and taxing options. Though states generally have access to the same types of mechanisms, there are essentially 50 different budget strategies because of the unique differences between states. Identifying similarities and understanding which strategies are most useful in promoting a state’s fiscal health can provide a map for states to identify weaknesses in their current budget strategies as well as identify specific sets of mechanisms that states can utilize.

ABSTRACT. The implementation of participatory budgeting (PB) as a method to involve citizens in democratic governance has reinvigorated an inquiry into which citizen voices are being engaged. PB can be defined as “a budgeting practice built on the active participation of citizens in budgetary decisions with the aim of influencing resource allocation” (Bartocci et al., 2023). Research has focused on efficiency outcomes with aims to increase transparency (Welch, 2012), accountability (Justice & Duler, 2009; Wu & Wang, 2012), and responsiveness of government (Sintomer et al., 2012) with less attention on social and racial equity in the public budgeting process (Gooden, 2015; Grossi et al., 2023; Martínez Guzmán et al., 2023; Pape & Lerner, 2016; No & Hsueh, 2022). This article examines how institutionalized structural design features and decision-making around incorporated PB features can improve social equity and inclusion of underrepresented minorities. Empirically, this article examines the structural design features for PB enacted by American and Canadian local governments. Survey and interview findings suggest targeting recruitment to enhance representation, facilitating understanding of the budgeting process, and reducing barriers to in-person engagement may enhance participation. Specifically, 90% of respondents incorporate at least one strategy to recruit underrepresented participants. Yet, barriers exist such as lack of structural features to reduce the cost of participation and the provision of video information introducing participants to the meeting process. More broadly, these findings offer insight into the conditions by which governments can improve their PB process to enhance social equity aims while widening budgetary engagement for all.

ABSTRACT. Coproduction refers to the collaborative efforts between service providers and service users to jointly design, develop, and deliver public services, policies, or initiatives. Current research indicates a contentious discourse on the role of monetary and symbolic rewards in fostering citizen participation in coproduction, with recent empirical studies highlighting the negligible impact of financial incentives in the motivation framework for public service coproduction. These studies largely rely on survey experiments, which may not accurately capture the divergence between self-reported intentions and actual user behavior. The extant literature does not distinctly measure the willingness of co-designing, co-developing, and co-delivering public services. Furthermore, Citizens’ coproduction behavior also varies across cultural contexts. This research revisits the institutional theory's perspectives on 'selective incentives' and 'incentive compatibility,' and constructs a theoretical framework for citizen participation in coproduction, informed by the social construction theory, social exchange theory and self-determination theory. The research is grounded on a case study of a digital platform utilized in Inner Mongolia, China, which has fostered an online virtual community. In this community, citizens accumulate points via an online 'task-grabbing' system, which is propelled by both financial and normative rewards, thereby stimulating the involvement in the co-design, development, and provision of public services. In collaboration with the enterprise that established the digital platform in Inner Mongolia, we have access to user desensitized data. Employing a natural experimental design, we assess the impact of financial and normative rewards on citizen coproduction engagement, with user interviews providing insight into the underlying mechanisms of this influence.

ABSTRACT. This study aims to enhance our understanding of the roles played by nudges in promoting citizens' coproduction and explores the combined influence of different nudges on citizens' coproduction intentions. Using a 2 × 2 framework, the research investigates combinations of two types of educative nudges—providing egoistic or altruistic information—and two types of noneducative nudges—gain frame or loss frame. Unlike previous studies that assessed nudges in isolation, our innovative approach examines the interplay and combined impact of these nudges.

Through a survey experimentation conducted within the context of a community smart energy device project in China, our findings reveal that individual nudges, whether educative or noneducative, do not significantly impact citizens' intentions in isolation. However, synergistic combinations of diverse nudges demonstrate a noteworthy influence on citizens' coproduction intentions. Specifically, the amalgamation of gain frame with altruistic information and the pairing of loss frame with egoistic information prove more effective in eliciting citizens' intentions.

These results underscore the importance of coherence in nudge combinations, emphasizing the alignment of the type of nudge with the target audience's inherent motivations and cognitive biases to maximize intervention effectiveness. The study emphasizes the need for a nuanced approach in designing nudges, considering the complex interplay of different motivational factors and cognitive biases. The implications extend beyond the specific context of smart energy devices, providing a framework for fostering citizens' coproduction intentions in various public service areas through well-coordinated behavioral interventions.

ABSTRACT. Coproduction can promote democratic values and service quality, but because of its complexity, the benefits and sustainability of the process are challenging to predict. This is why citizens’ motivation to engage with coproduction has been widely investigated to explain variations in outcomes. However, less is known about public employees’ motivation to co-produce, despite the fact that public employees' behavior plays a prominent role in this collaborative process and its outcomes are likely to be influenced by the interaction between public employees and citizens. We rely on a survey experiment in the context of state/local government urban planning to test the effect of three factors that can shape self-centered motivation, namely salience of the issue at stake, different degrees of effort required by public employees, and different prospects in probability success of the coproducing process. Based on the collaborative nature of the process, it is necessary to understand both parties' motivations. Also, even when the general decision to coproduce can be made at the organizational level for the government, the quality of coproduction outcome can vary by individual public employees because coproduction is the result of interactions at the micro and meso levels. Therefore, this paper can contribute to the field by expanding the understanding of individual-level motivation! s, especi ally those of public employees involved in coproduction.

ABSTRACT. In today's turbulent environment, temporary or ad hoc networks in public sectors have become increasingly common as a form for interorganizational organizing in response to crises. Despite the growing discussions on the formation and development of public sector networks, one network formation path that has not received sufficient attention is the development of purpose-oriented networks (PONs) from temporary network initiatives. Connecting the literature on temporary organizing and PONs, this study aims to explore the research questions of why a temporary network develops into a PON and what the driving factors are behind that process. We examine the case of the Virginia COVID-19 Finance network which began as a temporary impromptu virtual network in April 2020 to help local governments address the fiscal challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. It became a formalized network over time, operating currently and thus enduring beyond the pandemic that was its impetus for emerging. All meetings are virtual and most of the exchanges occurred via the chat feature in the Zoom platform. Using the Zoom chat data beginning with the first meeting, we first analyze the change of meeting themes and network leadership to demonstrate the network’s transition from a temporary network to a PON. We then examine whether shifts in participants’ roles, especially in terms of type of ties and network management activities (Agranoff & McGuire, 2001), explain why and how the network transitioned into a PON. Our findings offer important implications for understanding the path from temporary crisis-oriented organizing to established PON.

ABSTRACT. As local governments increasingly turn to intergovernmental collaboration agreements to achieve shared objectives, they face challenges tied to coordination, division, and defection risks. While formal (or complete) contracts are commonly used to address these issues, they may fall short of covering every possible contingency. In contrast, relational contracts may deliberately remain incomplete, relying on trust and cooperation. Despite existing research acknowledging the synergy between formal and relational contracts, a gap exists in understanding the precise interplay of these strategies for managing collaboration risks. This study draws insights from network literature to investigate how social capital complements formal contracts in mitigating collaboration risks. Our research employs a web-scraping script to gather data on the population of 24,000 interlocal agreements in Iowa, established between 1993 and 2018. Iowa is unique in that it requires all interlocal agreements to be filed with the Secretary of State. We construct comprehensive longitudinal networks of intergovernmental collaborations from the metadata of these agreements. We then select a sample for systematically coding features related to contract design and agreement characteristics. These coded features are subsequently evaluated in relation to the structural attributes of the networks they form to understand whether relational contracts are more flexible in design.

ABSTRACT. The challenge for collaborative governance is to achieve some measure of coordination, control, and direction among the network members, in contrast to central coordination or hierarchical control mechanisms. Collaborative partnerships emerge from a dynamic and iterative process that can focus on provision (e.g., planning, policy development, problem definition) or production (e.g., implementation). More importantly, these structures can vary in their level of governance and change form when shifting from provision to production or when the underlying strategy or purposes for the collaboration are modified (internally or externally). Thus, it is important to understand the different structural forms used to enhance network governance.

This paper relies on a 4-stage life-cycle framework to examine the different forms of network governance first observed by Provan and Kennis (2008). The paper relies on the comparative analysis of 31 watershed partnerships that emerged in four watersheds in the United States – Delaware Inland Bays, Narragansett Bay, Tampa Bay, and Tillamook Bay. The analysis allows us to refine the Provan and Kennis (2008) framework in important ways. First, it reveals strategies and governance forms used for provision and production. Second, the watersheds relied on different structural network administrative organizations (NAOs), which improves our understanding of how they facilitate network governance – if at all – and their limitations. Finally, we conclude by building on the key predictors of effectiveness for different network forms proposed by Provan and Kennis (2008) incorporating a life-cycle perspective and a greater understanding of the role NAOs play in network governance.

ABSTRACT. Network evolution literature is growing in popularity as scholars seek to identify how each facet of network life contributes to effective service delivery of complex, social problems within today's society (Albrecht, 2019). Given the rise in the importance of networks through governmental contracts, grassroots initiatives, and unanticipated social disasters, there is also a definitive name for the goal-driven networks that are used to mitigate these issues, Purpose-Oriented Networks (Nowell & Milward, 2022; Carboni et al, 2019). As a current buzzword in network scholarship, little is known about PON's lifespan, especially regarding its dissolution. Network scholars also know little about the partners influenced by PONs, especially when PON's presence is no longer active. This is an important phenomenon to evaluate given that networks evolve into new entities at different points in time (Provan & Huang, 2012). Thus, partners of previous engagements are critical components of future networks. As we continue to study network literature regarding performance, sustainability, and even evolution, we cannot ignore the previous experiences of network partners as they make up the creation, activity, and dissolution of PONs. They possess insights into how PONs are influential during and beyond their lifespan. This research proposal seeks answers to the question: What kinds of influence do PONs have on their partners beyond dissolution? This research will be conducted using an inductive, case study method to account for the variety of network contexts and mitigate boundaries set by the Unit of Analysis to include partner perspectives like communities, organizations, and individual stakeholders.