ABSTRACT. The article contributes to the question about the role of history in explaining contemporary outcomes of the quality of government. In particular, we analyze the persistence of “good” institutions across time, showing that a tradition of local democracy – i.e. the tradition of having the local leader chosen through election or consensus, rather than other methods such as hereditary appointment – is associated with better quality of government today.

We provide empirical evidence of the impact of past local-level democracy on the quality of government today. The logic of transmission of democracy from the local-level to the national level has a positive impact on the quality of government in the long-run. To do so, we use the Ancestral Characteristics database built by Giuliano and Nunn (2013) at the country-level. The database provides measures of a variety of characteristics of the ancestors of the world’s current populations based on the ethnographic atlas. The data, reported at the country, district, and grid-cell levels, combines preindustrial ethnographic information on over 100 ancestral characteristics for 1,265 ethnic groups with information on the current distribution of approximately 7,000 language groups reported at the grid-cell level. We measure the quality of government using different indicators from the QoG database.

Our preliminary results show that premodern democratic practices in ancestral societies such as leadership succession and jurisdictional hierarchy, robustly correlates with different measures of the quality of government today. We control for variables showing the relative strength of ancestral societies depends on different variables such as complex settlements, stratification or the size of the cities. The paper contributes to the literature showing the building of the Nation State in explaining the quality of government today and the long-term impact of good institutions. The results of the paper is consistent with the results from Giuliano and Nunn (2013) who show that traditional democracy is highly correlated with observed polity scores at different periods between 1850 and 1999. The paper is linked to a rich literature in economic history (Persson and Tabellini, 2009), political science(Greif and Laitin, 2004) and public administration looking at the long-term impact of culture and institutions on the quality of government (Jurkiewicz, 2007).

ABSTRACT. This paper proposes a novel means of assessing health care delivery to local communities and examines why some health centers perform better than others. We collect data from all 1,375 Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) in the U.S., which are primary care safety net organizations operating in indigent and medically underserved areas. FQHCs’ activities have grown significantly over the last decade owing to an influx of funding under the 2002 Health Center Expansion Initiative and the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA). Although FQHCs heavily rely on federal money, they also receive funding from state and local governments and private sources.

We introduce a new measure of health care delivery consisting of three dimensions—effectiveness, efficiency, and equity. The health outcomes are measured as a composite index of adequacy of management of five chronic diseases: asthma, coronary artery disease, ischemic vascular disease, hypertension, and diabetes. The efficiency dimension is operationalized by cost per patient. The access to care is operationalized by the percent of low-income population and minorities served by the center.

The analysis conceptualizes performance as a function of two critical factors—funding source and organizational structure. We hypothesize that FQHCs with predominantly federal funding will have better health outcomes and improved care access at relatively lower cost compared to FQHCs with moderate, low or no federal funding. We employ a one-year lag to estimate the impact of funding type on performance. In terms of organizational structure, we expect that FQHCs which are run as nonprofits perform better than those operating under governmental auspices. The data for the analysis come from the Bureau of Primary Health Care and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and cover the period from 2012 to 2015.

The uncertain status of the ACA amidst federal changes in executive power and the talk about repealing the policy make this study especially timely. The results reveal some unexpected insights about the link between federal funding and performance of health centers and have important implications about the allocation of resources to FQHCs. The broader contribution of this study is related to the larger aspects of enhancing social welfare by improving access to quality care for low-income and minority populations in medically underserved communities.

ABSTRACT. The older prison population is rapidly increasing, which has major consequences for state correctional agencies. Older inmates suffer age-related illnesses at an earlier age and cost significantly more to house than younger inmates, yet the majority of prison facilities are not equipped to handle the special needs of this demographic. A 2006 study showed that 61% of inmates over 45 years old reported at least one current medical problem, while 44% said they were impaired (Reimer, 2008). While some states have dedicated medical or elderly facilities, these programs are not the norm. Instead, most facilities rely on ad hoc modifications or prisoner-led initiatives to help this population. In this paper, I investigate why some state departments of correction are better than others at providing care for elderly prisoners, with potential explanatory factors including the bureaucratic nature of the organization, political ideology, and hierarchical structure. Departments of correction with a stricter bureaucratic or hierarchical structure are less likely to make needed reforms, as are those who place less of a value on institutional innovativeness and responsiveness. Using an original data set encompassing prison type, state political ideology, innovativeness, demographics, and other relevant variables, this paper analyzes the factors that affect a state department of corrections’ policies and behavior towards elderly prisoners. Public management scholars note organizational performance and outcomes are affected by various elements; understanding how exogenous components interact with organizational behavior will allow states to better serve this population.

ABSTRACT. The role of networks and collaborative governance structures are widely recognized as an important perspective to consider in public management. These structures exist at multiple levels of government, but they are particularly complex at for local governments as metropolitan areas become increasingly fragmented and institutional collective action problems become more decentralized. This article builds on the argument that the importance of debt management has increased and local government dependence on financial intermediaries like municipal advisors, underwriters, and bond counsel has grown to the point where public managers who lead debt management networks question the decisions of intermediaries with reluctance.

To understand the complex management network that ultimately affects local government budget constraints as well as their capacity to invest in community infrastructure, the role of social capital in debt management networks is considered. To explore social capital in debt management networks, theoretical approaches from the policy network literature are partnered with those from financial economics. Both sets of theories deal with information asymmetry and the process by which credible information is transferred from one party to another. Using the concepts of bridging and bonding capital, financial certification, and reputational risk, a series of hypotheses related to structures for local government debt management networks are tested using a dataset of local government bond issues in Texas between 2010 - 2016. Preliminary results indicate that riskier debt is associated with more stable debt management network partnerships.

ABSTRACT. Special districts are a numerous and unique form of local government in the United States. They provide many public services ranging in scale from the hyper-local level to multi-county, metropolitan wide services. Even with this spatial heterogeneity, special districts are providing services similar to cities or counties. Concurrently, special districts have aspects unlike other local governments. Unlike cities, they overlap each other and other governments. They also tend to be less durable than cities; both entering and exiting the local governance landscape far more often than their multi-service counterparts. In this way, special districts act more like private firms, responding to citizen and “market” demands for public services. There is a small literature on the factors associated with special district formation and virtually no research on dissolution. Even with this small literature, we know relatively little about how the special district environment has changed over time. This research proposed here partially fills this gap. Using district-level data from the Census of Governments and methods borrowed from the industrial organizations literature, an examination of the patterns of special district formation and dissolution at the state and metropolitan area is conducted. Special district entry and exit rates are examined in terms of districts, “market” share, and the size of entrants and exiters relative to remaining districts. Treating special districts more as firms rather than governments, we can gain insight into how the local governance landscape changes across space and time. An ancillary benefit is the introduction of new-to-the-literature means of measuring special district entry and exit to facilitate future research on the topic.

ABSTRACT. The increasing mobility of labor among Chinese cities has effectively promoted the competition between the production factors of the region and has had an important impact on the expenditure structure of local government public goods. The theoretical analysis shows that the competition of livelihood public goods expenditure plays an increasingly important role in the factor flow competition. The demand of heterogeneous labor force for different public goods and the demand of local government for specific labor force affect the structural preference of local government’s public goods expenditure. Based on China's 2010-2016 prefecture-level city panel data, after controlling the specific variables and using the instrumental variables method to deal with endogeneity problems, this paper empirically tests the impact of heterogeneous mobile labor on the government's fiscal expenditure structure. The study finds that the current mobile labor force has shown strong sensitivity to the supply of livelihood public goods, and the strengthening of labor mobility has indeed reversed the expenditure bias caused by the simple capital competition in the past. There is also a difference in the demand for public goods by heterogeneous labor, and local governments have shown a strategic spending bias to attract specific labor. At the same time, these competitive strategies to attract labor inflows have contributed to the increase in related people's livelihood expenditures. Specifically, the three livelihood expenditures of education, medical care and environmental protection have different responsiveness to the two types of heterogeneous labor mobility.

ABSTRACT. There are numerous works, either academic or practitioner, on the impact of financial intervention on fiscal performance of monitored local governments. However, very few of them examine these effects in a causal sense. This paper contributes to this literature by studying a fiscal monitoring and intervention system in Illinois. This program was implemented by Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) and named “School District Financial Profile” (SDFP). Every fiscal year since 2003, SDFP calculates a total financial score for each school district based on fiscal data from their prior fiscal year annual financial reports. The calculation is determined using a weighted average score for five financial indicators: Fund Balance to Revenue Ratio (FBRR), Expenditure to Revenue Ratio (EXRV), Days Cash on Hand (DCOH), Percent of Short-Term Borrowing Ability Remaining (STB), and Percent of Long-Term Debt Margin Remaining (LTD). The total score is employed to provide an overview of school district finances, and to measure the fiscal health by placing each district into one of four categories. ISBE will monitor districts with the two worst designations (indicating more serious financial difficulties) tightly and provide technical assistance.

In this paper, I use data from ISBE to examine the causal effect of state intervention on financial performance of school districts. Instead of using difference-in-differences approach which has been mostly employed in studying this topic (e.g., Thompson, 2016, 2017; Spreen & Cheek, 2016), I design a regression discontinuity (RD) framework by using the exogenous variation in state intervention generated by the cutoffs for each of the five financial indicators. Taking advantage of the design of SDFP and the high-quality data, this study is the first to use the natural thresholds of financial indicators to investigate how state intervention influences future fiscal performance of monitored school districts.

I find that the magnitudes of RD estimates are small and precisely close to zero effects. These results are robust with different bandwidths on either side of the cutoff. However, in heterogeneity analysis, I document statistically significant positive impacts on financial indicators reflecting long-run fiscal health in a relatively long term for districts with certain characteristics. For elementary school districts, I show that state intervention improves the long-term debt capacity remaining by 15-20 percentage points more on average for districts just receiving the intervention in three to four years since the intervention, compared to those barely not. This indicates that they are less reliant on issuing long-term debt in order to meet obligations. Similarly, among accrual basis school districts, I find that the intervention decreases the value of Expenditure to Revenue Ratio by 0.035-0.050 unit more for districts barely receiving the intervention, suggesting that their budget is becoming more structurally balanced.

ABSTRACT. The practice of citizen engagement by public organizations is widespread and generally accepted as a key component of good public management and governance (Nabatchi & Leighninger, 2015; Svara & Denhardt, 2010). While research has not always found participation to be “worth it” all the time (Irvin & Stansbury, 2004), there is nevertheless a great deal of evidence that engaging citizens, at least in certain circumstances, can improve government performance and increase public trust (Yang & Pandey, 2011; Wang & Van Wart, 2007). But beyond any instrumental value of engagement, many would agree that a focus on more and better engagement is a must for public sector organizations seeking more openness and transparency.

While most studies examine practices and behaviors, few have explored perceptions, beliefs and attitudes of practitioners that ultimately shape citizen engagement practices (Yang, 2005). Studies that have examined some of the psychological terrain of practitioners as it relates to engagement find, as expected, that it is a significant factor in understanding behavior and outcomes. For example, Huang and Feeney (2016) find that “PSM is positively related to citizen participation both directly and indirectly through person–organization value congruence.” Yang and Callahan (2007) found “responsiveness to participatory values, measured by public managers’ attitudes toward citizen involvement” was a statistically significant predictor of local government citizen engagement efforts. A qualitative study of U.S. Forest Service officials also underscores the importance of the “beliefs of those conducting public involvement” in understanding participatory processes and outcomes (Predmore et al., 2011).

This study examines local government practitioners’ perceptions, attitudes and beliefs about citizen engagement through an open-ended survey that captures experiences engaging citizens, reflections on why the organization engaged citizens and why citizens chose to be involved; what went well and what did not, and why; and finally, describing overall attitude toward citizen engagement and why they feel that way. The survey was administered to local government administrators from all functions of local government (managers, planners, public safety, etc.) that participated in a popular continuing education course covering a wide range of topics relevant to local administration. 209 completed surveys yielded over 40,000 words. These personal reflections were thematically coded and analyzed, and offer a window into the thought processes behind specific government-citizen engagements. Strong themes emerge that correspond with broad themes in the literature (e.g. efficiency versus responsiveness), but also reflect a great deal of nuance and context-dependence as well.

ABSTRACT. American law enforcement agencies continue to experience disruptions in the level of trust and legitimacy ascribed to them by their communities. Citizen participation in policing, in the form of citizen oversight, may be an effective means for improving the police-community relationship. Utilizing a framework grounded in both procedural justice and citizen participation, this study examines whether a link exists between citizen oversight and community satisfaction in the police by empirically examining community and police satisfaction survey data from 45 U.S. cities. Additionally, this research explores whether citizen participation is associated with the community’s trust in the police and perception that the police are held accountable and treat people equally. Ordinal logit results indicate a negative correlation between citizen review boards and four outcomes: 1) community satisfaction in the police, 2) trust in the police, 3) belief the police treat people equally, and 4) belief the police are held accountable. These findings suggest that citizen review boards may not be an effective method for enhancing the police-community relationship.

ABSTRACT. First coined in a 2006 issue of Wired magazine (Howe 2006), the term crowdsourcing refers to the act of “sourcing” in ideas, opinions, labor, etc. from a potentially large group of people through an online open call. While most commonly applied in business contexts, crowdsourcing approaches have been increasingly applied in government and policy contexts as well, thanks in part to the introduction of open government initiatives by the Obama administration (Brabham 2013).

While a few studies have examined best practices and practical challenges of implementing crowdsourcing for government and public policy (Brabham 2015; Liu 2017), little attention has been paid to the implications of crowdsourcing for the public sector (Voorberg, Bekkers, & Tummers 2015). This study aims to fill this gap in the literature and contribute to our understanding of the value of crowdsourcing in the public sector, particularly in terms of its implications for citizens and their relationship to the state. We designed an online survey experiment in an effort to test whether citizens support government solutions (actual outcomes) more and whether they trust government agencies more when they are reminded or made aware that the agencies’ solutions were crowdsourced. To probe crowdsourcing effects on public support and trust, this study will manipulate the “awareness” of crowdsourcing using cues and not the effect of actual “participation” in the crowdsourcing of government solutions (which is obviously more difficult to manipulate experimentally). The survey experiment vignettes will be based on the real-world crowdsourcing initiatives sponsored by US federal agencies.

Data will be collected from on a (voluntary, nonprobability) sample of US adults from across the US that is quite diverse in terms of region, age, income, socioeconomic status, and political ideology. The experiment is scheduled for the field in this fall, with results expected well in advance the PMRC conference in June 2019.

References Brabham, D. C. (2015). Crowdsourcing in the public sector. Georgetown University Press. Howe, J. (2006). The rise of crowdsourcing. Wired magazine, 14(6), 1-4. Liu, H. K. (2017). Crowdsourcing government: Lessons from multiple disciplines. Public Administration Review, 77(5), 656-667. Voorberg, W.H., Bekkers V.J.J.M., & Tummers L.G. (2015). A systematic review of co-creation and co-production. Public Management Review, 17(9), 1333-1357.

ABSTRACT. The issue of pay equity has been a topic of great interest in this nation, and despite legislation and lawsuits, pay inequity based on gender persists. Previous studies have examined pay equity from various perspectives, including employees’ perceptions and satisfaction with pay, reasons for pay inequity, behavioral norms in salary negotiation, and potential solutions to solving the pay gap between women and men (see Rabovsky and Lee 2018; Lewis, Boyd and Pathak 2018). One area, however, that has been understudied is the perceptions more broadly of the citizenry toward pay disparities between women and men and efforts to correct this. An important question posed by this study is whether the citizenry supports efforts to close the pay gap between women and men, even when women’s performance ratings are lower than their male counterparts.

To address this research question, we conducted a survey experiment with an online panel of national participants recruited by Qualtrics (n=1029). Specifically, we ask participants to evaluate the efforts by a local government to promote pay equity between women and men employees (in terms of perceived trustworthiness of the government and perceived fairness of its action), conditional on whether or not there is a difference in women’s and men’s performing ratings. The results show that, regardless of how female and male employees are actually performing, citizens have favorable responses towards efforts to promote pay equity. A government’s decision to close the pay gap helps to improve its perceived trustworthiness and fairness, and the size of this positive effect is considerable (i.e., Cohen's d > 0.5).

This study is significant in that it taps into the public’s perceptions around pay inequality and how the problem could be tackled. Perceptions of the citizenry reflect social and cultural beliefs and attitudes about fairness and justice in the workforce, namely, whether women are valued as much as men, and hence deserve the same pay. If citizens are supportive of narrowing the pay gap between women and men, society as a whole may be more willing to adopt reforms and solutions to this vexing, perennial problem.

References Lewis, Gregory B., Jonathan Boyd and Rahul Pathak. 2018. Progress toward Pay Equity in State Governments? Public Administration Review, 78(3): 386-397. Rabovsky, Thomas and Hongseok Lee. 2018. Exploring the Antecedents of the Gender Pay Gap in U.S. Higher Education. Public Administration Review, 78(3): 375-385.

ABSTRACT. A diverse workplace is often touted as the ideal for public organizations. The reality is that demographic diversity within an organization, particularly within smaller workgroups, may lead to a difficult work environments. In public administration research, we do not yet have the language or theoretical understanding of the possible consequences of a diverse workforce. By looking to other disciplines, we can expand this understanding in public organizations and improve diversity management practices. Using the analogy of geological faultlines, Lau and Murnighan (1998) hypothesized that diverse workgroups could lead to conflict as subgroups form around social identities. However, faultlines should not be seen as divides that cannot be bridged. Organizational psychology researchers demonstrate that cooperative behavior can help managers bridge these divides (Bezrukova et al. 2010). The concept of faultlines has the potential to complicate and then improve our understanding of diversity in public organizations. A better understanding of the role of diversity also has the potential to help public managers improve diversity management programs (see the recent publication by Ashikali and Groeneveld 2015 for a summary of diversity management and policies). We first need to understand the concept of faultlines within public organizations. Using a purposive case, a local government department, I will use a similar method used by Chrobot et al. (2009). Semi-structured interviewing techniques will be used to gather information about intergroup conflict due to diversity for the purposes of identifying the phenomenon of faultlines in a public organization. I will also use the interviews to explore and identify management practices that either bridged or deepened the divides between subgroups in the department. The findings will be used to develop conceptual model to add to our current understanding of diversity management and improve diversity management practices.

Ashikali, Tanachia, and Sandra Groeneveld. 2015. Diversity management in public organizations and its effect on employees affective commitment: The role of transformational leadership and the inclusiveness of the organizational culture. Review of Public Personnel Administration, 35(2), 146-168.

Chrobot-Mason, Donna, Marian N. Ruderman, Todd J. Weber, and Chris Ernst. 2009. The challenge of leading on unstable ground: Triggers that activate social identity faultlines. Human Relations, 62(11), 1763-1794.

Lau, Dora, C., and J. Keith Murnighan. 1998. Demographic diversity and faultlines: The compositional dynamics of organizations groups. Academy of Management Review, 23(2), 325-240.

ABSTRACT. Organizational environments constrain managerial behavior and play an important role in shaping organizational decisions. Researchers have more recently begun to link diversity management practices in public organizations to their external environmental contexts. Yet, little systematic research exists in further examining if diversity management differs cross the public, nonprofit, and private for-profit sector; and if any cross-sector differences in diversity management can be attributed to the external environment. Combing the contingency approach with insights from the cross-sector comparison literature, we theorize how organizations in different sectors are susceptible to different environmental constraints, and thus manage diversity differently. Instead of viewing diversity management as a management response to internal organizational characteristics, we consider diversity management as an important management response to organizations’ changing environment, including inter-organizational dynamics such as competition and collaboration, as well as clientele characteristics. We also contend that nonprofit and private organizations are more likely to adopt diversity management programs than public organizations, facing high level of external market competition. Public and nonprofit organizations, however, respond more to the diversity of clients by adopting diversity management programs. Inter-organizational collaboration, moreover, increases diversity management, mostly among nonprofit organizations. Using a panel data set of American hospitals from 2008 to 2016, we explore how environmental conditions shape hospital diversity management differently across the three sectors. We empirically track hospitals’ diversity management based on formal adoption of a diversity management plan, diversity training, and strategic plan to improve cultural competence. Controlling for organizational size, resources, hospital location and specialization, we use difference-in-difference models and dynamic panel data models to disentangle how changes in environmental constraints affect diversity management differently across the three sectors. Our study bridges the literatures on the external contingency of organizations and cross-sector comparison of management practice. It also offers practical implications regarding how managers from different sectors can manage external environmental constraints by adapting their diversity management strategies.

ABSTRACT. In this manuscript we examine one of the most recent evolutions of diversity management practices at the municipal level in the United States: the diversity officer. Within municipal organizational structures, the diversity officer is typically a senior management level position. At the end of 2016, fifty-eight out of the 250 most populous cities in the nation had hired diversity officers, and 45 percent of those positions had been created just in the last decade. In spite of this growing trend, little is known about the roles, responsibilities, and decision-making actions of these local government managers. Therefore, our work is exploratory, focusing on delineation of unique managerial tasks and decision challenges of the position, values these managers uphold, and role development processes. We ask three research questions:

1) How do diversity officers prioritize managerial values to guide their actions? 2) What are the key areas of decision making for municipal diversity officers? 3) How can we describe these managers’ perceptions of role identity?

To investigate, we utilize a mix of quantitative website data (municipal organizational charts; job descriptions; mission/value statements; and counts of commissions, boards, and known collaborators) and qualitative interview data from the diversity officers themselves. Preliminary findings suggest some diversity officer roles are closely tied to traditional reactive diversity management practices such as responding to discriminatory actions and other inequities. Alternatively, other municipalities envision the role to be more proactive and policy-centric as a leader who cultivates initiatives to promote and encourage diversity and quality of life. These diversity officers tend to maintain strong diversity ties to local business.

Our research adds to the literature in the field by providing a systematic exploration and description of a unique set of public sector managers. We aspire to lay a foundation for future explanatory studies by categorizing the managerial roles and values that diversity officers develop in their jobs. We discuss how these have broader implications for all public managers in developing effective human resource management strategies. As growing diversity continues to characterize both the U.S. citizenry and public sector workforce, our research informs both scholars and practitioners seeking to better address and respond to these issues.

ABSTRACT. Women, racial/ethnic minorities, and LGBTs may all perceive discrimination and unfair treatment in the federal service, which may decrease job satisfaction, increase turnover, and lower organizational effectiveness. Research on this topic has typically examined the effects of gender, race, and/or sexual orientation in isolation, but the intersection of these demographics may lead to “double discrimination,” in which members of two groups experience more discrimination than those who only belong to one (e.g., Levin et al. 2002, St Jean and Feagin 2015). On the other hand, stereotypes may play against each other, so that, for instance, employers may view black gay men more positively than either white gay men or black straight men (Douglas and Steinberger 2015). In particular, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation might either matter only to white men, who experience few other sources of discrimination, or have a cumulative impact for women and racial/ethnic minorities.

Using the 2012-15 Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys (FEVS), we explore how the interaction of race, gender, and sexual orientation affects perceptions of fair treatment. Using regression analysis on 1.3 million federal employee responses, we test whether these three characteristics have cumulative or off-setting effects on several proxies for perceptions of fair treatment. We look at both more systemic measures of fair treatment (e.g., agency commitment to diversity, adherence to guidelines on prohibited personnel practices, allocation of rewards and resources based on merit) and more informal interpersonal discrimination (e.g., relationships with supervisors and co-workers). We also test whether these perceptions affect job satisfaction and turnover intention.

Preliminary findings suggest that (1) sexual orientation has a stronger impact than sex and at least as strong an impact as race; (2) that the impact of sexual orientation tends to be as strong or stronger for racial/ethnic minorities as for whites; and (3) that lower perceptions of fair treatment are associated with lower job satisfaction and higher turnover intention.

Douglas, Jamie H, and Michael D Steinberger. 2015. "The Sexual Orientation Wage Gap for Racial Minorities." Industrial Relations 54 (1):59-108. Levin, Shana, Stacey Sinclair, Rosemary C Veniegas, and Pamela L Taylor. 2002. "Perceived Discrimination in the Context of Multiple Group Memberships." Psychological Science 13 (6):557-560. St Jean, Yanick, and Joe R Feagin. 2015. Double Burden: Black Women and Everyday Racism Routledge.

ABSTRACT. Previous collaborative governance frameworks and models primarily depicted macro-level interorganizational collaboration dynamics. A complete understanding of such interorganizational collaboration, however, normally requires knowledge of micro-level intraorganizational collaborative behaviors forming foundations of these macro-level phenomena. Moreover, the prevalent collaboration practices call for the use of technology, in particular, collaborative technology, to facilitate communication and improve performance. This study thus focuses on the dynamics of intraorganizational collaboration and how the use of a new collaborative technology affects collaboration process and performance. Build on the findings, it further examines the contextual factors important to technology effectiveness in collaboration. This research contains two studies. In the first study, four departments in a public organization are randomly assigned to two treatment groups and two control groups. All four groups are required to do an internal department strategic planning task, while treatment groups are asked to use a new collaborative software and control groups are told to use whatever tools they used before in doing the task. All four groups are surveyed before and after the intervention. Follow-up qualitative interviews are conducted to help explain the quantitative results. Drawn from findings of Study 1, the initial theoretical framework is modified and tested in Study 2, an experiment on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Over 1000 full-time workers at U.S. organizations will be recruited and randomly assigned to the control group or treatment group. All participants will read a short vignette-the content of which varies across the two groups-that describes how people in a fictional organization collaborate in a project. They then report the resulting perceptions on the collaboration interaction, performance, the effects of collaborative technology (if they are in the treatment group), and factors influence the effects. The implications of this study are fourfold. First, it contributes to e-government studies by addressing the gap between ICT adoption and effectiveness. Second, it extends existing collaboration governance research to internal organizational collaboration context and explores collaboration dynamics brought by the use of a new collaborative technology. Third, this study is one of the first few studies to empirically examine technology effectiveness and influencing conditions by using a statistically rigorous experiment method. Fourth, findings of it help public organizations strategically adjust efforts to produce more interactive collaboration process and better collaboration performance, with the help of a new collaborative technology.

Slides: Leveraging Collaborative Technology for Performance: Insight from an Experimental Study

ABSTRACT. Although collaborative governance has been widely recognized as a source of enhanced public service performance (Ansell and Gash, 2008; Agranoff, 2012), outcomes resulting from collaborative efforts are likely to be challenged in the presence of agencies from different government levels and subject to political rivalry (Cabral and Krane, 2018). Nevertheless, recent studies indicate that technology can facilitate collaborative behavior and positively influence innovation, government performance, and public value creation (Bryson, Crosby, and Stone, 2015; Gil-Garcia and Sayogo, 2016; Hu and Capucu, 2016). In this paper, we assess the effects of innovative technologies in fostering collaboration between different agencies and in improving public service performance. For that, we analyze the impact of the collaborative process between the city of São Paulo (local government) and the São Paulo state government between 2015 and 2017 in sharing information from optical character recognition (OCR) traffic cameras. The city of São Paulo has 12.1 million inhabitants and approximately 8.6 million registered vehicles, thus being the background of intergovernmental interactions in multiple areas, which could provide lessons for collaborative governance in similar complex contexts. In our study, the local government implemented OCR radars initially aiming for traffic control, such as identifying vehicles over the speed limit. The city of São Paulo, however, shared this data with the state police department, which crossed license plates identified by the OCR with registers of stolen and robbed vehicles. We use logistic regressions to predict the likelihood of recovering a robbed or stolen vehicle resulting from the collaborative process between the different bodies involved. We find a positive relationship between technology adoption and car recoveries. After controlling for region, temporal effects, resources employed, other traffic operations, and vehicle characteristics, we obtain that sharing OCR data increases in about 11p.p. the likelihood of recovering a robbed or stolen vehicle. We also found that this effect is not even in different regions, indicating different levels of success in collaborating and performance. Heterogeneity in our results suggests that additional factors in collaborative settings are relevant to increase performance. For instance, local government decisions about locations for installing new OCR radars must take into account not only traffic data but also accumulated expertise of police forces. Incentive schemes to stimulate police officers to use data from the collaborative arrangement may also increase new interactions between parties and amplify the effects of technological innovations on public service performance.

ABSTRACT. The relationship between collaborative governance and performance is complex. There is contradictory evidence regarding the effectiveness of collaboration as a managerial strategy to improve organizational performance. The level of diversity in the context in which the collaboration unfolds could be an explanation for contradictory findings. This study uses economic diversification as a measure of the change in diversity of the collaborative context and tests whether municipalities with economies that depend more on different industries benefit more from inter-municipal partnerships to bring international aid to their communities. The study uses data from 215 Ecuadorian municipalities between 2007 and 2013. Results confirm that inter-municipal partnerships, a type of collaborative governance, it is an effective managerial strategy and that economic diversification positively moderates the effect of collaboration on organizational performance. 

ABSTRACT. We will examine the impact of state government, civil society, and market on the legislation of social enterprise law in the United States. To capture the different kinds of interests that drive the adoption and diffusion of social enterprise law, we will measure the ideology of state government, the number of and competition among non-profit organizations (NPOs), and the level of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The unit of analysis will be an individual state in the United States. Data will be gathered from websites of state legislatures, state ideology data initially reported in Berry, Ringquist, Fording, and Hanson (1998), the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS), and the RiskMetrics Group’s KLD Stats. Event history analysis (EHA) will be applied to analyze the data. This study will contribute to enhancing our understanding of the role of three sectors in emerging social enterprise. It will also help social enterprise supporters to find effective ways to promote the legislation of social enterprise law which is a crucial institutional strategy for supporting social enterprise. Questions this study will seek to ask; (1) What state political, economic, sector and cultural factors account for state adoption of the four types of SE laws? (2) For the combined number of SE laws? (3) Are early and late adopters different? (4) Are there time patterns that reflect different dominant independent variables? (5) Are SE laws substitutes or complements for each other? Are there other types of laws that are substitutes or complements?

ABSTRACT. The paper adds to the literature on social enterprises (e.g., Guo and Bielefeld, 2014) principally by drawing on the strategy-as-practice tradition of strategy research (Golsorkhi, et al., 2015), along with the literatures on individual and collective leadership (e.g., Quick, 2015), collaboration (e.g., Bryson, Crosby and Stone, 2015), and strategic action field change (e.g., Fligstein and McAdam, 2012). The empirical focus is on the growth and development of the Metropolitan Economic Development Association (MEDA), a non-profit organization headquartered in Minneapolis, and Catalyst, a collaboration of complementary minority business-support organizations in the Twin Cities MEDA helped organize. MEDA and Catalyst are nonprofit social enterprises in that they draw on the authority and resources of federal, state, and local governments; use foundation, bank, and corporate financing; rely on market-oriented strategies in support of business development; and engage in political advocacy to address important public concerns that governments alone cannot address effectively (Guo and Bieliefeld, 2014). In this paper, we trace the strategic thinking of Gary Cunningham, the President and CEO of MEDA, from the time he joined the organization in August 2014 through December 2018, when Catalyst formally adopted a detailed MOU outlining its purposes, guiding principles, formal governance processes, and project management approach. We analyse the context of Cunningham’s thinking and its consequences for the development of MEDA and Catalyst in order to develop propositions potentially generalizable to other similar kinds of change efforts. Our theoretical framework draws on the existing literature on social enterprise, strategy-as-practice, leadership, collaboration, and institutional entrepreneurship. We adopt a longitudinal case study method to capture the dynamics within MEDA and in the process of collaboration while understanding its holistic characteristics (Eisenhardt, 1989; Langley, 1999; Yin, 2009). Our case focuses in particular on the collaborative efforts of Catalyst, which started in 2015 as an idea championed by Cunningham and has developed through many overlapping stages. As noted, Catalyst seeks to alter the strategic action field (Fligstein and McAdam, 2015), or ecosystem of support for minority entrepreneurs and minority-owned businesses (Feld, 2012).

ABSTRACT. Social enterprises often have mixed resource structure of both intangible resources as well as tangible resources. Tangible resources (i.e., human and financial resources) plays important role in early developmental stage of social enterprises, while intangible resources such as network and mission clarity become increasingly critical to their performance because they are the source of legitimacy and competitive advantages. Considering many social enterprises often depend on external financial support often from governments or non-governmental organizations, the resource dependency perspective suggests that acquirement of tangible and intangible resources become more critical particularly when governmental subsidies get reduced or terminated. Based on resource-dependency theory, this study aims to analyze how both tangible and intangible resources affect social performance (i.e. social service deliveries, employment of socially disadvantaged population) and economic performances (i.e., profits) of social enterprises using the data collected from the data coded from annual management reports of 755 social enterprises disclosed by the Korea Social Enterprise Promotion Agency from 2012 to 2017. The statistical analyses suggest several important findings. First of all, clear social missions appear to have positive effect on achieving social performance such as employment of vulnerable workers as well economic performances while network capacities, one of major intangible resources of social enterprises have positive effect on economic performance. This result confirms previous research findings that resource characteristics of social mission of social enterprise might improve the multi-dimensional performance of social enterprise by providing legitimacy to gain resources (Cheah et al., 2019). Second, the result also shows a positive effect of intangible resources on economic performance such as net profit during the term as well as mixed performance such social reinvestment. Finally, the size of private funding appears to have a positive effect on the size of social reinvestment. This study suggests that both tangible as well as intangible resources are critical to both economic and social performances of social enterprises. This also implies that tangible and intangible resources might have different effects on social and economic performances of social enterprises at different stages of their life cycles.

ABSTRACT. Social enterprises (SE) – organizations with a dual mission to generate economic and social value – have become important players in the delivery of public services in the UK and elsewhere. While public sector value-for-money imperatives encourages these hybrid organizations to provide estimates of their social and economic impact, relatively little is known about who does so. Using institutional perspectives and large-sample data produced by Social Enterprises UK, we empirically document the uptake of social impact measurement in this sector and the extent to which context, the nature of the impact, and stakeholders involvement (non-funders and funders) explain differences in participation rates.

ABSTRACT. Developing Public Value Theory for Coproduction and Social Enterprise: New Frontiers or Old Wine in New Bottles from Nonprofit Management?

ABSTRACT. There has been a debate between human capital theories and cost-benefit theories regarding the turnover-performance relationship in an organization. The former posits the negative relationship between the two, whereas the latter proposes an inverted-U shaped relationship, first positive and then negative. For instance, at low rates of turnover, the effects of turnover on organizational performance can be positive, as newly hired people offer new ideas and insights. When turnover rates are excessive, the costs of hiring new employees, however, start to outweigh the benefit of bringing them. What is missing in the debate is the condition of the labor market and quality of employees, and public management scholars have made little attempt to incorporate these factors in investigating the relationship between turnover and performance.

To illustrate, an exit of bureaucrats poses transactional costs to the government organization such as searching, hiring, and bargaining. While conducting such activities to hire a new employee, a government agency should participate in a labor market where bureaucrats are the suppliers of labor (supply curve) and the organization is a buyer (demand curve). Therefore, the conditions of the governmental labor market, such as labor supply, can affect the agency’s efforts to find a replacement. Furthermore, although contemporary literature in public management assumes that organizations can find replacements as soon as turnover occurs, and new employees will bring new ideas which can revitalize the workforce. We find these problematic, as many organizations often have difficulty finding a suitable job candidate once a current employee announces her/his last day of works; a job market can be highly unpredictable in searching for a suitable job candidate due to limited quality labor supply and the asymmetry of information between future employers and employees.

In this regard, this paper presents a theoretical framework to better understand the dynamics of the turnover-performance relationship in public management. In doing so, we first illustrate how public labor market conditions would affect optimal turnover rates of public organizations. After that, we develop a decision-theoretic model of public managers to show when turnover incurs costs or benefits to organizations. We also propose a set of testable propositions for future scholars, which posit the turnover-performance relationships being conditioned on various organizational and environmental contextual factors. Therefore, the paper will offer critical insights on better managing human resources and performance of public organizations, which makes significant contributions to both theory and practice of public management.

ABSTRACT. Using a panel of high schools from 2013 to 2017, this research investigates the impacts of leader tenure and turnover on a rich set of performance measures: attendance rates, dropout rates, graduation rates, and college enrollment in 6 and 18 months after graduation. Using fixed effects models that control for year fixed effect, school fixed effect and a set of time-variant school and students attributes, the results show a curvilinear relationship between leader tenure and organizational performance: longer tenure is beneficial to organizational performance, but after around 10 years, leader tenure is shown to be negatively related to performance measures such as graduation rates. In addition, the fixed effect models show that leader turnover is negatively related to the performance of high schools. A contingency model was tested to see if the effect of leader turnover is contingent on prior performance. Results suggests that leader turnover exerts negative effect on low- and medium-performing schools, but the negative effect is mitigated in high-performing schools. The findings of this research carry important theoretical and practical implications. First, the curvilinear relationship between leader tenure and organizational performance reveals more nuanced effects of tenure. A longer tenure fosters organization-specific human capital, which is beneficial for organizational performance. However, leaders of long tenure can ossify, become rigid and resistant to change, thus negatively affecting organizational performance. The findings show the danger of leadership ossification, which has not attracted much attention in public leadership research. From a practical perspective, we should encourage leaders to stay for a certain period time to gain the benefits of organization-specific capital, but we should also be aware of the negative effects associated with a long leadership tenure. Second, the findings support a contingency view of leadership turnover, which deepens our understanding of the effect of leadership turnover on organizational performance. However, the findings are not consistent with the traditional view that the positive effects of turnover outweigh the disruptive effects when prior performance is low, and disruptive effects outweigh positive effect when prior performance is high. This research shows that the loss of organization-specific human capital is more problematic for low to medium-performing organizations, and high-performing organizations are better positioned to absorb the negative shocks of leadership change.

ABSTRACT. Following the departure of a chief executive, some organizations experience a vacancy in leadership while others name an interim leader who may be in charge for a substantial period of time. The occurrence and length of vacancy instances among organizations can vary widely. Moreover, interim leaders often face complex environments and restricted decision-making power, which can have implications for organizational performance. Such phenomena are salient in contemporary organizations—one only has to look at vacancies in federal agencies in the United States—but have yet to be formally addressed by substantial research in the field of public management. Although the literature on executive turnover aims to explain some aspects of change in leadership, little attention has been paid to the causes of vacancy. This paper explores the variability of executive vacancy, focusing on organizational characteristics of size, performance, and sector as well as the anticipation of departure as key explanatory variables.

We hypothesize that organization characterized by lower performance, smaller size, and public sector ownership will have higher likelihoods of experiencing vacancy as well as longer periods of vacancy compared to their counterparts. On the other hand, longer anticipation time for departure should lower the likelihood of vacancies. To test our hypotheses, we use data from public and private U.S. doctoral universities to identify 230 leadership transitions between 1993 and 2013. To measure vacancy, we assess both the occurrence and the length of a gap between two permanent university presidents. The empirical analysis uses logistic and zero-inflated negative binomial regression and finds that anticipation to departure is an extremely strong predictor of vacancy. Longer anticipation times reduce both the likelihood of vacancy occurrence and the length of vacancy instances. Further, private universities are significantly less likely to experience vacancy. However, little support is detected for the expected linkages between organizational performance or size and executive vacancy.

ABSTRACT. As public managers continue to rely on artificial intelligence technologies and machine learning algorithms to make decisions, a glut of research has recently emerged which has discovered that the algorithms themselves may be making “biased” decisions. A recent study on the use of the COMPAS recidivism risk prediction algorithm, for example, has discovered that the algorithm has a tendency to falsely predict (ie a false positive result) that African-Americans will recidivate at a rate that significantly higher than than the false positive rates of other racial groups, thus calling into question the implications of relying on these algorithms by police departments and other public sector workers for making important decisions in their day to day activities.

While much of the research on the use of algorithms in the public sector has focused on questions regarding whether the algorithms themselves produce outcomes that are fair or unbiased, little is know about how these algorithms actually shape the decisions made by street level bureaucrats and public managers. The purpose of this study is to address this question by proposing a formal theory of bureaucratic decision-making with algorithms and then testing this formal theory with an experimental study of police officers across the data of Georgia. This study will not only shed light on how decision-making processes by public managers and street level bureaucrats are affected by algorithms, but also more generally how algorithms are incorporated into the decision-making processes of individuals more broadly.

ABSTRACT. Organizations may respond to institutional pressures by decoupling formal policies from daily practices that constitute the organization’s core tasks. Combining organizational decoupling theory and psychological theory of coping, this study examines decoupling strategies among street-level bureaucracies in China. We conceptualize team-level decoupling as enforcement teams’ deviations from strict and consistent enforcement as a response to various external and internal constraints. Individual-level decoupling refers to individual agents’ deviations from formal rules and regulations. Our study advances theory on two fronts. First, it advances theory of organizational strategy by identifying different forms of decoupling strategies at the team level, and their institutional determinants. Second, we enrich the current literature on organizational decoupling, which focuses on top-management decision-making, by investigating the determinants of front-line agents’ decoupling practices.

We conducted in-depth interviews with local environmental enforcement teams in the city of Guangzhou, China, in the years of 2006 and 2017. Our findings reveal over-time shifts in decoupling strategies (at the team level), which were related to different combinations of institutional and organizational factors. In 2006, local enforcement teams mainly adopted a decoupling strategy in routine enforcement, due to resource scarcity and power inadequacy. In 2017, decoupling strategies were focused more towards regulatory targeting and sanctioning. Specifically, a decoupling strategy targeting certain groups of polluting enterprises was correlated with simultaneous pressures from local governments and the community, which shifted enforcement teams’ goal from environmental protection to blame avoidance. Decoupling in relation to sanctioning decisions was more prevalent when legal rules were weak, impractical, and ambiguous.

We further draw on a survey of all front-line enforcement officials in Guangzhou, 2014 to explore what explains individual agents’ enforcement deviations from formal rules and regulations. Our findings suggest that individual officials’ decoupling behaviors are positively related to a perception of administrative ambiguity, intervention from local governments and enterprises, and pay satisfaction. Resource scarcity, which is a key factor determining the enforcement teams’ decoupling strategy, has only limited influence on individual officials’ decoupling behavior.

ABSTRACT. While we often think of environmental regulations as imposing rigid technical standards, in reality implementation and enforcement leave considerable room for bureaucratic discretion by state and federal agencies. One major example of this is the US National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires that all actions taken or authorized by Federal agencies be assessed for social-ecological impacts. However, the level of scrutiny applied to different actions can vary greatly, with some projects being eligible for a Categorical Exclusion with no additional study, some given a limited Environmental Assessment, and others undergoing a full Environmental Impact Statement drafting and public comment process--which for a major infrastructure project can take multiple years. There are no fixed requirements for NEPA other than that a proposed action be fully assessed for its likely impacts. Thus, NEPA presents a unique opportunity to understand how regulators navigate complex tradeoffs in infrastructure decision-making and how social, economic, and institutional factors influence regulatory implementation.

While NEPA has been in force for more almost 50 years, poor documentation and the challenge of aggregating and analyzing the content of large impact assessment documents has hindered our ability to understand when and how the Federal bureaucracy assess the impacts of proposed infrastructure projects and management plans. This project takes advantage of text mining and automated language processing tools to collect and analyze 20 years of NEPA records for two Federal agencies: the Department of Energy (DoE) and the Federal Highway Administration (FHA), both of which are heavily involved in infrastructure construction, planning, and operations nationwide. We extract data concerning the location of proposed projects, the nature of the proposed project or action, and socio-ecological impacts. We then pair these data with external records including longitudinal demographic and institutional data from the US Census, energy and transportation systems data from DoE and FHA, and environmental data from the US Environmental Protection Agency. We address three primary questions: (1) What are the primary determinants of whether an infrastructure project is required to undergo a full EIS review process?; (2) How does NEPA implementation differ according to the demographic attributes of local communities in which projects are sighted?; and (3) How do these same factors affect the timeline of NEPA processes and whether a project is subject to length and/or multiple reviews?

ABSTRACT. Leadership and governance of complex disasters is a growing area of interest to the field of public management. The governance challenges on large disasters are immense. Governance structures for coordinating a complex, multi-jurisdictional disaster response must evolve in response to both current conditions as well as anticipated events (Comfort,2007) . Projections of response needs are often further complicated by considerable uncertainty about what will happen, where, and in what timeframe. Last, disasters generally require network forms of governance as authority and responsibility for various response functions across different geographic areas are distributed among levels of government.

Governance forums are the spaces in which information is exchanged, common operating norms are established, and decisions are made among those with formal and informal responsibilities to respond to a disaster. This begs the question, how do public leaders come to understand the nature of the “incident” they are engaged in? How does this understanding influence the governance forums that are created to manage a complex incident? Who is given access to these decision making and information exchange forums? Who is excluded? What are the factors that influence this process?

Network cognition in complex problem domains has been described as the understandings that network managers develop about the nature and structure of the pertinent network they are seeking to influence (Nowell and Steelman, 2016). In this paper, we argue that the creation of governance forums is the negotiated enactment of the network cognition among a group of managers (Schein, 1993). We empirically explore this phenomenon in the context of complex, multi-jurisdictional wildfire events. Based on analysis of field observations during the active response phase of three complex fire events in the American West during 2018, we specifically examine the role and use of boundary objects among leaders in shaping and influencing the network cognition of public leaders. Implications of research findings for advancing a theory of network cognition are discussed.

ABSTRACT. The increasingly long ice-free season in the Arctic, a consequence of climate change, coupled with the increased maritime activity that is enabled by ice-free seasons, is posing significant challenges for emergency preparedness in Arctic Alaska. This paper outlines the challenges of planning for a maritime accident, such as an oil spill or a stranded cruise ship, in Arctic Alaska. These challenges are compounded by the complex institutional and governmental arrangements that characterize the management of resources and emergency response in Alaska. Governance in Alaska is far more challenging than one would expect in a state of about 750,000 people. Stakeholders in this field include the federal and state governments, local governments that differ in some respects from the form of local government in other states, Alaska native corporations at the regional and village level, as well other private interests. Planning for a maritime response is particularly challenging since the region has no deepwater ports, and the largest community in the Alaskan Arctic, Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow) is not much larger than 4,000 people. The combination of remoteness, the lack of substantial emergency preparedness and support infrastructure, and the sparse population of the Arctic makes planning for emergencies challenging. In this paper, we outline our research project, Emergency Response in the Arctic, in which we plan to develop means for planning emergency response in a way that also affords tangible community benefits in Alaska. This is a departure from past practices that have not accounted for local community needs in Alaska.

ABSTRACT. In the United States, the national framework that governs disaster response is referred to as the Incident Command System. This system is built on classic bureaucratic principals of design, aimed at creating a coherent and coordinated response to a complex disaster through the use of tools such as centralized leadership, scalar chain of command, and limited span of control. As the complexity of disasters increase, disaster response organizations must also expand in complexity to accommodate the myriad of actors with authority and responsibility to take action. This complexity has pushed the tools of the incident command system to their limits as incidents adopt a complex array of governance tools such as joint delegations of authority, unified command structures, area command, and geographic zoning. However, while more networked forms of governance have been advocated for in the literature, we lack a clear picture of the structural forms of network disaster governance and the characteristics that are associated with more favorable outcomes. The essential tension in complex disaster governance is that the formal organizational system for management has a hierarchical command structure, while disasters are networked events requiring significant lateral coordination. This mismatch creates an opportunity to explore more appropriate governance for more effective disaster management. In this paper, we empirically address this gap by investigating the structural forms network governance that are linked to better outcomes.

The specific outcome of interest in this project is the perception of voice in the disaster governance efforts by leaders with formal responsibility to represents a jurisdiction threatened by the disaster. Sorenson and Torfing (2009) argue that voice in meta-governance structures is an essential component to establishing more effective network governance. However, while we know that incidents are managing to govern in networked contexts in which there is no superordinate authority, we know little about the tools of meta governance that are more or less effective in supporting network governance processes. In this paper, we address this gap based on data from interviews with public and private leaders engaged in disaster response on complex disasters. Specifically, we investigate the structural features that were associated with leaders’ perception of having voice in the collective management of the incident for 13 complex, multi-stakeholder disasters. Implications for advancing both theory and practice of network governance of disasters will be discussed.

ABSTRACT. As wildfires complexity increases, there are more government and private actors involved in and impacted by fire response, representing local, state, private and federal levels of government. The wildland fire response community has broadly adopted risk management principals and practices to guide decision making on complex wildfire events. As a result, risk perception is a key factor in shaping decision making and subsequent disaster response. Further, to the extent the risk perception guides decision making, it stands to reason that actors who share a common risk narrative will be more likely to also find greater common ground in decision making. Therefore, the understanding how risk perception may vary across stakeholder groups may offer valuable insight into points of tension and conflict on multi—jurisdictional disasters. That said, while there is a well-developed literature on risk perception of disasters within the general public, less is known to date about the risk perception of elite decision making makers. In particular, we know little about whether, and if so, how risk perceptions on the same incident may different based on positionality within different levels of government. This paper aims to address this gap by conducting a within and cross case analysis of risk narratives from responders on the same incidents representing different levels of government. To better understand how responders view risk in complex multijurisdictional wildfires, we identified ten of the most complex U.S. events in 2017 and conducted interviews with 87 representatives of tribal, federal, state, local, and private stakeholders. Analysis of risk narratives revealed variation among levels of government in both the salient substantive dimensions of risk as well as the temporal bounding of risk perception within substantive areas. Substantive dimensions of risk perception included categories around human safety; built infrastructure; ecosystems and the environment; and social, political, and economic risks. Temporal dimensions varied based on their attention to the immediate and tactical elements of risk, the incident-level potential, and long term consequences that would endure after the fire was extinguished. We found actors from different levels of government view risk differently, with private landowners focused more on long-term economic impacts, federal landowners concerned about immediate tactical risk to firefighters, state landowners considering immediate public safety, and local landowners expressing a variety of risk concerns. Findings provide perspective on differing risk perceptions, which may ease communication and strategic decision-making processes around risk prioritization and fire management among jurisdictions.

ABSTRACT. Scholars have documented the economic decline of rural America over the past thirty years, citing the dwindling of agricultural, extractive, and manufacturing industries in rural communities, the rise of low-wage service employment, and limited human capital (Slack 2010; Lichter and Schafft 2016.). Popular discourse frames rural economic decline as detrimental to rural whites, but in fact data make clear that racial and ethnic minorities overwhelmingly bear the burden of stalled rural economic growth. Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans in rural areas experience higher rates of poverty than rural whites. In 2016, nearly 33 percent of rural Blacks, 32 percent of rural Native Americans, and 26 percent of rural Latinos were in poverty, compared to only 14 percent of rural whites. 
Rural sociologists attribute these disparities to the historical legacy of racial discrimination and insular social networks reinforce racial inequality (Duncan 1996; Duncan and Coles 1999). Rural ethnographies suggest that these characteristics of rural communities have deep significance for the marginalized (Sherman 2006; 2009; 2017; Duncan 1999; 2015) but we know surprisingly little about how public welfare agencies reinforce racial inequality in the rural South. Most studies of welfare offices examine agencies in suburban or urban communities (Hays, 2003; Watkins-Hayes 2009; Soss et al., 2011). Research has not yet examined how “small-town” norms, values, hierarchies, and politics make their way into the day-to-day life of welfare offices to affect poverty and obstruct or promote social mobility among the racially marginalized in the very places where poverty among these groups most predominates. 

ABSTRACT. A wide body of social science research shows frontline bureaucrats—such as teachers, employment counselors, and social workers—use discretion to prioritize clients they deem worthy (Lipsky 1980; Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003). These choices, however, are not arbitrary, but are, instead, shaped by frontline experience and organizational context (Soss and Moynihan 2014; Tummers et al. 2015). By understanding the factors that influence the use of discretion, organizations can better anticipate how frontline staff will implement policies in the real world (Sandfort 2000).

This article follows and extends an experimental conjoint design survey used by Jilke and Tummers (2018) to better understand the conditions in which frontline workers prioritize clients. Specifically, we examine three hypotheses: 1) frontline workers are more likely to prioritize clients perceived as having high levels of need, engagement, and progress 2) a higher perceived level of organizational red tape will reduce frontline worker use of discretion to prioritize certain types of clients; 3) frontline workers with higher level of professionalization will be more likely to use their discretion to help clients deemed worthy.

The survey, administered to human services workers in two Midwestern counties, asks participants to select between clients with randomly assigned demographic, household, and deservingness characteristics. It also collects information about frontline workers and their perceptions of organizational red tape (Van Loon et al. 2016). We complement the survey with interviews and focus groups. Data collection is complete in one county (n= 475, 51 percent response rate) and will begin soon in a second county. Respondents are frontline workers and supervisors in human services, including respondents from children and family services, community corrections, and economic assistance divisions.

ABSTRACT. Epps, Maynard-Moody, & Haider-Markel’s (2014) book Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship explored how rudimentary and recurrent tasks associated with a police officer’s stop of a driver often results in racially inequitable bureaucratic decision-making. They found that predatory and discriminatory policing practices can isolate and endanger residents while exacerbating tensions between front-line public servants and the citizenry they serve. Epps, Maynard-Moody & Haider-Markel (2014) examined these tensions through a statistical examination of police stops in Kansas.

Following in the trajectory of that study, this analysis goes a step further by examining the geographic patterns of police stops, citations, vehicle searches and individual person searches in relation to the highest and lowest racially segregated neighborhoods in Minneapolis. The authors examine Minneapolis’ racial discrepancies in police stops by looking at the role that the location of the stop within a city plays in the equity of stops as a whole. Using geocoded police stop data and calculated block-group level dissimilarity indexes within Minneapolis, this paper seeks to identify how homogeneous and heterogeneous racial characteristics of neighborhoods contribute to inequitable traffic stops within the city. Finally, the authors identify several policy adoptions that can potentially alleviate the discrepancies in policing practices in Minneapolis and across the United States.

ABSTRACT. A young person who earns a two-year associate degree will earn over $200,000 more over the course of his or her lifetime than someone with just a high school diploma, and the returns for bachelor’s degrees are even higher (de Alva & Schneider, 2013; Ma, Pender, & Welch, 2016; Oreopolis & Petronijevic, 2013). In spite of this evidence, fewer than two-thirds of California’s high school seniors immediately enroll in college upon completing high school (National Center for Higher Education Management Systems [NCHEMS], 2014). This share is much lower for students from low-income families, for those whose parents did not go to college, and for those from underrepresented minority groups (Wilber & Rosigno, 2016). Policymakers – at both the federal and state level - have made large investments in recent decades in trying to increase access through financial aid programs. (College Board, 2017; Seltzer 2017). But there is evidence that existing aid programs fail to reach all students who would benefit from them. We argue in this study that the administrative burden associated with receiving aid is partly to blame. Following a Moynihan et al. (2014) framework, we argue that eligible students may not be taking up aid they are entitled to because of learnings costs, compliance costs, and psychological costs that students face.

This paper reports on a simple field experiment implemented in collaboration with the California Student Aid Commission (CSAC), which administers the Cal Grant college scholarship program. We tested whether changing the preliminary notification letter that CSAC sends to low-income high school seniors could increase take-up of aid. A randomly selected subset of seniors received a simplified letter (less visually cluttered, shorter, clearer language). A second randomly selected subset received the same simplified letter with additional language aimed to reduce stereotype threat and belonging uncertainty.

Preliminary evidence indicates that the new letters were highly successful. 62% of students receiving the control group letter had registered accounts by June 11. The treatment letters increased take up by as much as 6.8 percentage points, with significant difference between the two treatment arms. Although we are still following students to see whether the higher rate of account registration translates into higher rates of college-going and/or Cal Grant receipt, at a minimum this early evidence indicates that an extremely simple zero-cost intervention can help students navigate the college aid process more smoothly.

ABSTRACT. Smart cities are increasingly investing in smart city technologies. A recent estimate suggests 66% of U.S. cities are implementing smart technologies, such as smart meters for utilities or e-government applications (National League of Cities, 2017). Despite the growing number of governments embracing initiatives such as open data, living labs, or mobile applications, there is a relative dearth of public management research on the topic.

What makes a city “smart”? We take the view that a smart city integrates information and technology in a way that utilizes data to improve citizens’ lives (Thompson, 2016). Local governments are not just making “smart decisions” but rather the city itself (inclusive of citizens, government, and industry) becomes smarter through the use of data. Foundational to these efforts is an integrated data exchange (IDE), which integrates data from multiple sources, both public and private. (For example, the IDE for Smart Columbus is an open data platform with over 1,000 datasets on mobility and transportation in the central Ohio region (https://www.smartcolumbusos.com, 2018)). The central purpose of the IDE is to make public and private data available for shared use by citizens, and the public and private sectors.

Given the bias in e-government towards improving efficiency and economy, a public values approach is needed that utilizes both managerial and democratic values in the evaluation of how different governance models provide this data.

We evaluate three governance models: Public-private partnerships (PPPs), cooperative agreements among regional governments, and public-ownership. We utilize e-government literature in public management and data sciences (Van Dijck et al 2018; O’Reilly, 2011) to capture the technical functions of IDEs and risks associated with implementation and sustainability. We draw from public values research to identify core values to these functions (managerial values such as innovation, sustainability, efficiency as well as democratic values such as accountability, transparency, and citizen engagement (Nabatchi, 2012; Jorgensen & Bozeman, 2007)).

An analysis of both the values and risks reveals that different smart city functions (e.g., daily operations versus “sensemaking”) are better served by different governance mechanisms.  This is in line with the governance literature that suggests different sectors can complement their efforts and share in the realization of public outcomes in smart cities (Goldsmith and Crawford, 2014). 

ABSTRACT. Background Studying public values is essential in a democracy. In particular, citizens’ view on government performance including efficiency, effectiveness, and equity matters in the creation of citizens’ perspective on government service. This paper examines whether these public values serve as moderators of how citizens cognitively process performance information. The only existing studies of factors affecting how citizens process performance information focus on cognitive biases. In this sense, this study attempts to identify effective moderators for citizen satisfaction with different aspects of government performance in line with the three dimensions of public value.

Research Question What measurement of public value moderates cognitive information process the best?

Design I conduct an experiment on citizen satisfaction. This study considers that individuals having different preferences will perceive various aspects of government performance differently. Specifically, I examine how different types of public values on government services moderate citizen satisfaction with the varying types of government services by manipulating the performance information. The measures of the public value are mainly on the different aspect of government performance interacting with multiple dimensions of performance information.

Data This study uses an experiment via Amazon MTurk surveying parents in the United States in 2018. The experiment is conducted in a randomized setting by manipulating multiple dimensions of performance information corresponding to the three values and randomly distributing to respondents.

Methods The first stage of the experiment asks the respondents their preferences, then providing them manipulated the three aspects of performance information separately, and finally, measuring their satisfaction with the public school that their children attend. By providing the manipulated information in a random setting, I aim to find a causal relationship between performance information and citizen satisfaction moderated by different aspects of citizens’ public values. In this process, I would like to see what measure of public value is the most effective moderator in the cognitive information process.

Implications This study demonstrates the importance of public value as a moderator of the citizens’ cognitive information process. Moreover, it is highly significant to identify what public value affects citizens’ perception of different dimensions of government performance. This study contributes to the literature in public value by testing citizens’ values on government performance and linking them with their satisfaction given that there have been few empirical studies (Bozemen et al. Forthcoming). Public managers should consider different values that citizens hold as a benchmark to improve the quality of performance.

ABSTRACT. The era of big data and data science is characterized by growth, not only in the amount of data, but by the detailed nature of that data. Furthermore, data is forecasted to grow at an unprecedented rate over the next decade, as the use of sensor-based technologies allow for persistent data collection, while more robust analytical platforms enable the continual analysis of streamed data to facilitate timelier and tailored actions to address social issues. Accordingly, the IoT will not only bring more capable ICT to public institutions, but impact their management practices by allowing them to successfully use big data to achieve higher levels of effectiveness than ever before. This paper seeks to identify and discuss how a focus on data science impacts the broader process of social inquiry in public management. Furthermore, we attempt to highlight the implications for work carried out by academic researchers and practitioners. Moreover, we seek to address how the focus on data may affect public management by examining the differentiated impacts on the key stakeholders. Public management, as a field involving both research and practice, faces significant challenges regarding how norms pertaining to the use of data assets and analytical practices impact knowledge development. Current initiatives and trends - such as smart cities - exemplify a data-deterministic approach to public management and governance. Such perspectives often focus on the availability of big data and sophisticated analysis systems as THE factors to creating public value. However, these perspectives often fail to identify and assess the fundamental values embedded within the collection, management, and analysis of data assets, nor do they address the broader array of activities to create public value. What is missing is an appreciation for the epistemological positions taken by public actors that in turn impact the norms informing the broader system of inquiry, knowledge, and action. For example, what is the role of empiricism in relation to other theoretical beliefs, such as constructivism, in the era of big data? Similarly, what is the role, if any, of theory development? If theory development is undervalued, how do policy actors correctly identify and address key issues in their efforts to create public value? Ultimately, what is the impact of big data on government accountability and citizen participation? As real-time data regarding citizen behaviors are captured and employed by public institutions, does this reduce the functional need for overt citizen participation in creating public value?

ABSTRACT. Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a democratic process through which the individual citizens get to vote and make decisions on how to spend a part of the public budget. Since its initiation in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989, PB has been widely recognized to be a successful democratic reform process that has increased civic participation in the policymaking process, promoted accountability, and brought tangible impacts such as increased tax revenues in many localities that adopted PB (Cabannes, 2004; Sintomer et al., 2008). One of the important research gaps she finds through literature review is that while some studies discuss the positive association between PB and increased tax revenues, there are rarely any previous studies conducted on identifying the underlying linkage factor between PB and tax revenues at the individual level. That is, more research is needed on how PB participation experience impacts an individual’s voluntary and intrinsic motivation of willingness to pay taxes. Some literature suggests that the institutional quality and mechanisms which encourage citizens to voice their opinions and reflect their policy preferences, positively influence people’s tax morale (Torgler and Schneider, 2009). Many scholars and practitioners of PB also argue that PB is a democratic platform which elicits and reflects the participating citizens’ policy and budget preferences (Khagram et al., 2013). Based on such theoretical foundations, she aims to explore answers to the following research questions: 1) How does PB elicit individuals’ budget and policy preferences? What are the mechanisms and factors that best elicit taxpayers’ policy needs and budget preferences; 2) What are the implications for management practices in the public sector? To answer the research questions, she uses qualitative methods that consist of in-depth interviews, case studies, and document analysis. She focuses on the cases of New York City and Chicago PB models. She interviews city council members, PB subject experts, and PB participants. Her intended contribution to new knowledge in the field is to shed more light on the individual citizens’ motivation and behavior in their role as taxpayers and the roles of public managers thereupon with a focus on US PB models, which relatively have been given scant attention in the current PB research.

ABSTRACT. Transparency is an enduring concern in government functioning at all levels. Previous research on the impact of budgetary transparency study fiscal balance, democratic participation, financial markets, human development, economic and social equity, debt accumulation, and accountability (Jarmuzek, M. 2006; Sedmihradská, L., & Haas, J. (2012); Fukuda-Parr, S., Guyer, P., & Lawson-Remer, T. (2011); De Renzio, P., & Masud, H. (2011); Fox, J. (2007); Benito, B., & Bastida, F. (2009)). It is surprising to note, however, that all existing research on the topic has been conducted in the international context. In the proposed paper we study if budget transparency can improve fiscal performance on the example of large US cities. They measure fiscal performance with credit ratings. Their work is the first attempt in the literature to study the relationship between budget transparency and credit ratings. They argue that cities with more transparent budget processes and procedures are likely to have better credit ratings. They test this hypothesis on a sample of 150 large cities in the U.S. by collecting primary data on budgetary best practices employed by these cities over a 20-year period (1995-2015). Data on credit ratings (the dependent variable) is derived from the Standard & Poor and Moody’s websites. Data from Lincoln Land Institute, Fiscally Standardized Cities database (FiSC), and the U.S. Census is used to operationalize the control variables such as per capita personal income, cities’ own source revenues, the amount of debt outstanding, and others. They apply lagged two-way fixed-effects ordered dependent variable model to find a positive and significant correlation between budget transparency and city credit worthiness.

ABSTRACT. A public budget has long been considered a statement of priorities as the budgetary allocation is the ultimate financial commitment by a governing body to a public activity. Thus, the idea of aligning budgets with institutional priorities is nothing new; in fact it is relatively old (Gerwin 1969; Schick 1983; Behn 1985). However, the twin forces of institutionalism and incrementalism continually work to entrench the status quo in government as “fiefdoms” and “silos” are built and politicians are reluctant to make massive changes (Wildavsky 1964). Nevertheless, the needs of the public force governments to re-evaluate its priorities from time to time. It is in this context that a budgetary reform effort known as priority based budgeting (PBB) has emerged over the past decade. Even a cursory review of a Google search for the term yields a bounty of state and local governments who have adopted the process, and PBB has been named a “best practice” by the Government Finance Officers Association as well as a “leading practice” by the International City/County Management Association). This begs the question: What have practitioners found useful in PBB? This paper explores that question at the municipal level in the United States and tests the prevailing theory among PBB supporters that PBB implementation leads to greater shifts of funding between functional budgetary areas than standard budgetary practices. To do this, the authors works with data from the Center for Priority-Based Budgeting (the primary consulting organization for these efforts) that divides budget allocation by program and has assigned each program to a priority quartile, determined by a community ranking process. Allocations toward high-priority and low-priority programs prior to implementation are then compared to allocations to these same programs in subsequent years to determine if the system has resulted in more dollars flowing to the identified high-priority programs. Comparison-of-means tests will be utilized to determine if significant reallocation has taken place in these municipalities. This paper provides an introduction to the topic for the audience while presenting tests of PBB effectiveness for the first time.

ABSTRACT. A bureaucratic agency's capacity to implement policy has been a long-running area of research. Countless articles provide theory and empirics regarding capacity to implement policy whether it is management, organizational, or technical capacity. The way in which capacity is operationalized varies across policy areas and scholars (Christensen and Gazley, 2008; Hou, Moynihan and Ingraham, 2003; Peters, 2015). Yet, the amount bureaucratic agencies spend—on both managerial salary and total spending for the agency—are relatively untapped among public management scholars. Building upon the literature on managerial quality (Meier and O'Toole, 2002; Melton and Meier, 2017), they develop slightly different measures that capture a broader measure of capacity. This measure is then validated against other objective measures of capacity in election administration. To link their capacity measures to performance measurements, they examine election administration in North Carolina, one of the few states with spending data over the years 1994-2012. In particular, they focus the effects of managerial and organizational capacity on election administration measures of performance—specifically, uncounted votes, otherwise known as residual votes—and on voter turnout. They find that election jurisdictions with higher organizational capacity have higher voter turnout and lower residual votes. Those jurisdictions with higher levels of managerial capacity have higher levels of voter turnout, but not lower residual votes. In the conclusion, they discuss how our alternative financial measures of capacity may be used in other public management settings.

ABSTRACT. For years, workforce scholars and practitioners forecasted the coming era of diversity. For example, Fullerton (1999) predicted that by 2015, the civilian workforce would be comprised of 48% women and 32% minorities. That prediction is today’s reality. According to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, in 2016, the federal workforce included 43% women and 36% people of color. While these statistics may suggest progress toward a more diverse workforce, the pursuit of a more representative workforce is complicated by: 1) evolving elements of differentness, 2) evidence of occupational segregation, and 3) systemic cultural barriers to equity and inclusion. Race and gender are only two elements of diversity; and often, they are treated separately, without respect for intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989; Acker, 2006). Aggregate federal workforce statistics may paint a picture of a representative workforce, but studies reveal marked differences in the employment of women and people of color especially in leadership roles (Riccucci, 2009). Occupational segregation is expected to persist and impact leadership pipelines in the years ahead. In addition to nondiscriminatory recruitment and hiring, organizations must also prioritize equitable and inclusive practices that support the retention of underrepresented groups (Society for Human Resource Management, 2017). President Obama’s 2011 Executive Order 13583 was a catalyst for a coordinated government-wide initiative to promote diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce. This order noted the importance of reflecting the government’s commitment to equal employment opportunity by “using the talents of all segments of society,” achieved by recruiting, hiring, promoting, and retaining a more diverse workforce. The order mandated the creation of a government-wide diversity and inclusion strategic plan and indicated the importance of providing guidance on agency-specific diversity and inclusion plans. This paper explores what impact these plans had on cultivating a more diverse and inclusive federal workforce.Utilizing a mixed methods approach, this paper examines federal diversity and inclusion strategic plans using qualitative content analysis to explore variation of plans across agencies and quantitative agency demographic data to determine the impact of diversity plan adoption. The study compares “early adopter” agencies that implemented their plans in 2012 and “late adopter” agencies that implemented their plans three or more years later. The aim of the study is to determine how diversity and inclusion plans define workforce diversity and inclusion indicators and its impact on agency level diversity and inclusion outcomes.

ABSTRACT. This paper expands upon the representative bureaucracy literature by investigating determinants of the passive representation of women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) occupations in the federal workforce. Women are notably underrepresented in STEM-based occupations in both the public and private sectors. Women’s turnover rates in STEM fields tend to be higher than both their male counterparts in STEM occupations and higher than women who work in professional occupations. Previous research suggests that, among other reasons, women leave engineering at high rates because they do not believe they are provided adequate opportunities to use their science and math abilities, suitable opportunities for advancement, or appropriate recognition for their work. The authors argue that including women at the supervisory level in STEM-based work units may reduce these and other problems that drive high turnover rates for women in STEM fields. The authors test this proposition using panel data on women’s STEM employment and turnover in Cabinet agencies from the years 2005 to 2017.

ABSTRACT. Social equity research provides evidence of inequities at all levels of government and within diverse policy domains ranging from education to healthcare to public transportation and the environment (Guy and McCandless 2012; Gooden 2017). Similarly, the human resource management literature finds workplace disparities, such as those related to unequal pay or assessment of performance resulting from biases and stereotypes of age (Posthuma and Campion 2009; Ng and Feldman 2012; Abrams, Swift, and Drury 2016); gender (Hale 1999; Alkadry and Tower 2011; Meier and Wilkins 2002); and race (Wilson 2006; Ortega, Plagens, Stephens, and Berry-James 2012; Riccucci and Saldivar 2014). Citing the theoretical and practical limitations of viewing these factors in isolation, Bearfield (2009), Stivers (2002), and others advocate for social equity research that accommodates intersectionality (Crenshaw 1994) and the reality of simultaneous membership in multiple identity categories. This perspective is consistent with recent public administration studies of the interaction effects of race and gender on disparities in work assignments (Christensen, Szmer, and Stritch 2012), government contracting with minority- and women-owned firms (Fernandez, Malatesta, and Smith 2013), and use of legal authority (Portillo 2008). This study extends the intersectionality conversation into representative bureaucracy, ethics, and public opinion, exploring the effects of particular demographic profiles of government officials on citizen attitudes toward such actors and their behaviors. Specifically, the paper’s research questions ask: Are citizen assessments of city managers’ formal rule violations driven by gender, age, and race or a confluence of these factors? Are patterns of citizen judgment of rule breaking city managers of specific gender-race-age profiles similar for violations driven by pro-social versus self-interested motives? And, do similar patterns emerge with citizen response to city managers accused of criminal behavior? Using survey experiments, the authors test for main and interaction effects of gender, race, age, and violation intentions on the severity of citizens’ recommendations for penalties taken against city managers reported to have broken formal rules or allegedly engaged in unlawful acts. Study participants are randomly presented with fictional news reports, which include photographs of the alleged offender along with descriptions of the events, and then asked to levy hypothetical punishment. The study contributes empirical evidence for social equity discussions related to disparities existing at the intersection of multiple identity categories while incorporating the effects of behavioral intentions of government leaders. Findings have implications for management of diversity and inclusion as well as leadership and ethics in public service.

ABSTRACT. Gender equity continues to be a global discussion, including the lack of women in leadership positions. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2017 Global Gender Gap Report, not until a century from now will men and women achieve equality in health, education, economics and politics, and it will take 217 years to achieve workplace equality. In the U.S. public sector, for example, only 14% of congressional representatives are women, and females represent only 1 in 5 of the 100 state senators in the U.S. Congress. Instead of leadership positions, women in the workforce continue to be minimized to lower levels of the organizational hierarchy, which has broad social equity and diversity implications such as the gender pay gap. Most recently, the #Metoo movement has garnered attention to the concept of “implicit bias,” the unconscious bias that is associated with exposure to cultural stereotypes, and its broader social equity implications (Bannaji & Greenwald, 2013; FitzGerald & Hurst, 2017). Most recently, Williamson and Foley (2018) found that most public sector managers acknowledge the existence of implicit bias in the workplace and its potential to create unequal employment outcomes. However, as a corrective response, when compared to merit-based actions, affirmative action practices were received with skepticism and resistance. Although prominent in many disciplines, including psychology, sociology, and economics, implicit bias has been nearly absent from public administration scholarship. Using an electronic survey of middle and lower state government managers the purpose of this research is to understand how implicit gender bias precludes women’s advancement to leadership positions in the U.S. public sector workplace. This research is organized around the following questions: 1) Do public administrators perceive implicit bias in the workplace setting across gender? and 2)What is the impact of implicit bias on turnover, performance, and promotion to leadership positions in the public sector workforce? The survey will be sent to managers in state governments that provide email addresses on their official state website. The sample frame will be narrowed using the following criteria: 1. An equal distribution of agencies will be chosen using Lowi’s (1985) classification of agencies: Distributive, Regulatory, Redistributive and Constituent; and 2. the required titles will be provided online so we can clearly target a diversity of positions in upper and lower management. Data will be analyzed using regression models that will examine the impact of implicit bias on outcome variables like upward mobility to leadership positions, performance, and turnover.Findings of this research will advance the field by examining biases that affect public sector decision-makers in an unconscious manner. Understanding implicit gender biases and identifying the structural and/or institutional changes needed to break down gender advancement barriers will contribute to building a just and equitable workplace.

ABSTRACT. Network administrative organizations (NAOs), which are separate administrative entities to govern the network and its activities specifically, are now attracted the scholars’ attention. There are two approaches to explore NAOs. The first one is the network approach, which is to take NAO as a form of governance as an explanatory variable to predict the effectiveness of the network. The second one is organization approach, which is to explore the structure or development of NAOs. We combine the two approaches. We explore what factors influence the NAO’s collaboration with other members in the network with a focal organization perspective. Our potential contributions are as follows. Firstly, we pay attention to NAOs which is specially designed to promote collaboration among members rather than organizations that provide direct operational services for the clients or for law enforcement(Daley, 2009; Raab et al., 2015; Smith, 2009). We collected our data from 86 emergency management offices(EMO) in X province, China, which can be regarded as NAOs in emergency management network(EMN). Our response rate is 97.8% from 88 counties in total. The directors are required to answer questions about basic information of the organization and collaborative activities with other public agencies in EMN. Secondly, we emphasized the political power of NAO’s director is a critical factor to predict the collaboration with other members. The position of the leader in party system offers the legitimacy and authority to promote the collaboration among the equal level agencies in bureaucracy. We find that if the director of EMOs is a member of the local standing committee of the Communist Party of China, EMOs can have broader and deeper collaboration with other members of emergency management network. Thirdly, different collaborative activities are not equal in EMN (Bowman & Parsons, 2013; Koliba et al., 2017). We followed Bowman and Parsons (2013) and Koliba et al. (2017) to discover the variance in specific functional collaborative activities. In our preliminary results, we find that the political power of the directors has a different influence on “collaborative meeting” and “joint inspection”, which are both collaborative activities.

ABSTRACT. In recent decades, many forms of transnational collaboration have emerged as to avoid the negative externalities and regulatory loopholes associated with the internationalization of markets. For domestic agencies this means that they have become enmeshed in a wide variety of formal and informal transnational policy settings, in which an increasingly large number of national regulatory officials at different levels of the organizational hierarchy are simultaneously involved in transnational networking on their behalf. However, the internal problems of management and coordination these developments potentially create for domestic agencies are rarely studied by public administration scholars. Empirical studies typically lack an intra-organizational dimension, either focussing on the effects of internationalization on domestic bureaucratic structures in general, or analyzing the actions and decisions of agencies in transnational networks as if it were unitary actors.

In response, this paper shifts the analytical focus to the sub-unit level of analysis to provide a better understanding of the way in which the transnational network behaviour of domestic agencies is internally managed and coordinated. In particular, we theorize on the different ways in which the boundary-spanning activities of agencies can be organized at the level of organizational structure, and what potential trade-offs this brings about for its associated functions of information-processing and external representation. Through qualitative empirical analysis we illustrate these trade-offs and analyze how they are internally managed and coordinated. From this, a conceptual model is developed on the configurations between structural design parameters, management practices, and boundary-spanning activities, which is potentially applicable to other research contexts as well.

The empirical setting on which we base our analysis is found in international finance regulation, looking at the way in which Dutch national financial sector regulators (banking and securities) internally coordinate their actions in transnational regulatory networks at both the European and global level. Based on annual reports and policy documents, we map out the structural changes within these organizations over time, particularly related to the centralization, specialization, and formalization of boundary-spanning activities. For developing our conceptual model, we rely on 20 face-to-face interviews conducted with Dutch senior officials involved in international financial regulation. To establish a more complete account on how transnational network behaviour is managed within the organization, these respondents vary in terms of hierarchical position and specialized units.

ABSTRACT. Cooperation within bureaucratic organizations has drawn increasing attention in the past decade (Olsen, 2006). This study focuses on the cooperation among Chinese central government departments with the context of China. Previous studies have examined the formal institutional factors influencing inter-ministry cooperation in western countries. However, As previous studies suggest, China government is not a law-based government, informal factors, such as factions, political leaders, play key roles in Chinese politics (Shih, 2004; 2016). Therefore, this study tries to explain how informal personal networks affect formal organizational behaviors.

This study proposes the following theoretical proposition: under the context of non-politics-administration dichotomy, China's central government departments are rational organizations which are embedded in structures of social relations, which means that the cooperation behavior of China's central government departments is governed by three logics simultaneously: the logic of rational organization, the logic of politics and the logic of factions.

By coding joint-issued documents (Lianhe Fawen), CVs of ministers and Statutory Duty of Ministry (Sanding Guiding), this study constructs 8 adjacency matrixes. Using Social Network Analysis, this study: (1) describe how 72 ministry-level central government apparatuses cooperate with each other during 2003-2012 by conducting whole network analysis (including Density, Centrality, distribution of Degree and Cluster analysis); (2) empirically investigate how overlapping of statutory duty, political coordination from top leaders, factions and personal ties among ministers affect the inter-ministry cooperation by conducting multiple regression quadratic assignment procedures (MRQAP).

The empirical results show that (1) the factional attributes and some kinds of personal ties (e.g. old-boy and coworker relations) affect inter-ministry cooperation significantly, which suggests that informal factor matters. This finding implies the like market activities, administrative activities are also embedded in the structure of social relations, which may be a supplement to the theory of embed. (2) Not all forms of political intervention work. Specifically, only a certain form, Small Leading Group, has positive effects on cooperation, which implies that translating horizontal cooperation into hierarchical control is a potential mechanism. This finding is consisting of previous researches on formal institution factors.

ABSTRACT. Government agencies have continuously faced various institutional pressures such as performance improvement while engaging citizens in governmental decision making processes. In response to these pressures, government agencies have attempted to build collaborative networks with other agencies. We have, however, little knowledge of how interagency collaborative networks effectively respond to institutional pressures, especially when agencies face competing institutional pressures (e.g. improving agency performance and engaging citizens in administrative processes). This research asserts that agencies cope with competing institutional pressures differently and thus, their responses, in terms of the forms of collaboration structures that emerge, vary depending on the nature and degree of pressures facing agencies. The primary purpose of this study is to address a question of how agency managers perceive competing institutional pressures and how their different perceptions shape interagency collaboration networks within an organization. For the analytical purpose, this research focuses on structural holes, which refer to network positions that connect otherwise disconnected agencies, as the main network characteristic of interagency collaboration. Drawing the literature on performance management, citizen participation, and social networks, this research develops a theoretical model of interagency collaboration network and hypotheses. The hypotheses are tested using the combined network and survey data collected from 134 agency managers in the City of Seoul. Agencies in the City of Seoul has dealt ongoing performance improvement pressure since performance management practices such as merit-based monetary bonus and promotion as a means of reforming city management were adopted in the early 2000s. At the same time, these agencies have faced growing demands for citizen participation in administrative decision making processes via conventional (e.g. citizen members of committees) and online channels (e.g. online policy forums). Preliminary results show that city agencies under greater performance improvement pressure tend to locate themselves in collaboration networks rich in structural holes while agencies facing greater citizen participation demands tend to embed themselves to dense interagency collaborative networks. The findings imply that performance improvement pressures drive city agencies to seek competitive structural positions within collaborative networks. Meanwhile, citizen participation leads agencies to build more closed collaborative networks. Based on the preliminary findings, this research will discuss how performance-oriented management and public participation practices serve as facilitators or barriers for agencies to build such collaborative network strategies as a network location. This research concludes by offering the managerial and policy implications for government agencies’ network strategies in response to competing institutional pressures.

ABSTRACT. Leadership does not take place in a vacuum, but is embedded within a context. To address the various demands in their environment, leaders have to adapt their behaviour to fit with the situation. Working with competing values, multiple goals, different tasks, and a range of stakeholders generates contextual ambiguity, which is particularly prevalent in many public organisations. Nonetheless, whether and how leaders adapt their leadership behaviour to context remains elusive. This paper examines to what extent and how leaders adapt their leadership behaviour to ambiguity in their task context. Drawing on the concept of requisite variety it is hypothesised that more ambiguous situations require more complex leadership behaviour. Furthermore, it is hypothesized that such adaptation may be constrained by the distribution of formal authority which may limit –or stimulate–behaviours at the expense of others. Data were collected in a 2x2x2 vignette interview design with leaders holding formal leadership positions in Dutch universities, organisations particularly prone to ambiguity. The within-person design enables analysing how variations in context elicit different choices by the same participant, controlled for between-person differences. Preliminary results show that leaders' task context has an effect on leadership behaviour, emphasising the relevance of further pursuing this line of research. Qualitative analyses of the interview data can add further explanation about the mechanism of participants’ interpretations of and responses to the scenarios underlying the hypotheses.

Key words: leadership behaviour, contextual ambiguity, behavioural adaptation, public management, vignette methodology

ABSTRACT. Despite the celebration of charismatic leaders in third sector organizations in developing countries, we argue that such leaders often hinder long-term capacity building, because they inhibit adaptation and discretion within the organizational middle ranks where much of the knowledge exists about on-the-ground realities. A competing perspective assumes a development context riddled by complexity and uncertainty, in which monitoring and evaluation must rely primarily on continual learning and making adjustments as circumstances change. In this latter perspective professionalism underlines a varied set of competencies for anticipating and responding to change and engaging stakeholders in a collaborative rather than logically managed fashion. We advocate for this latter view and propose that professionalism be geared to developing managers with the skills to “learn-how” in interaction with their beneficiaries and community members, rather than the professional and organization always being expected to exert their “know-how” onto the needs of development contexts. We have gathered data from civil society organizations in six countries and based on field observation, interviews, focus groups, and archival data we have induced a typology of leadership activities that hinges on two dimensions: a) the distinction between context-specific leadership actions and those that originate from leaders’ formal positions; and b) the form of leadership action as either emergent or heroic. The typology we have created encompasses a comprehensive model for understanding the varied forms of leadership that characterize the work of development CSOs. By identifying features of these distinctive leadership forms we can teach them within these organizations and strengthen leadership capacity throughout multiple levels of each organization. In particular, the everyday and context-specific forms of leadership in our model can strengthen “learn-how” leadership capacity throughout an organization and develop a broader set of individuals prepared to step into the void in times of leadership succession or whenever formal leaders are absent or unavailable. While inducing the characteristics of context-specific leadership, we have identified five key elements that are present in this type of leadership: (1) translation, (2) brokerage, (3) closure, (4) joint action, and (5) “personal” sources of power. We contend that teaching these elements through a targeted, culturally competent model can empower employees within CSOs to foster and cultivate learn-how leadership within their organizations. Empowering individuals this way prepares them as intermediaries in organizations who can bridge gaps of power and action when they arise, enabling people in the middle to act while also preparing them to be leaders.

ABSTRACT. Globalization, advances in information technology, demographic shifts, political polarization, and changing economic conditions have increased turbulence for contemporary public sector leaders. Despite the rapid rate of change that shapes modern administration, a great part of leadership theory, in both the public and private sectors, has been built upon cross-sectional research (Getha-Taylor et al., 2011; Orazi, Turrini, and Valotti, 2013; Van Slyke and Alexander, 2006; Yukl and Mashud, 2010). As a result, most empirical observations offer only a snapshot of leadership, preventing a full understanding of how leaders adapt to changing conditions for their organizations.

Adaptation presents a critical gap for the leadership literature. Leadership theory suggests that a leader’s optimal choice of style is driven to some extent by the context in which it is enacted (Van Wart, 2011). Thus, changing conditions suggest changes in the optimal choice of style. However, leadership theory does not offer clear predictions of leader responses to change. Some early theorists doubted that leaders can change leadership styles, suggesting that appropriate responses to change may include selecting and recruiting for fit or modifying the situation itself (e.g., Fiedler and Chemers, 1974). Other theorists suggest that leaders can change styles, given certain traits, training, or skills (e.g., Hersey and Blanchard, 1969). The theoretical conflict over leader responses to situational or contextual moderators endures in the contemporary literature (Zaccaro et al. 2018). The debate is especially salient to public sector leadership theory given the limitations imposed by the current rate of change and the institutional constraints unique to the sector.

This research will fill this gap in the literature with a panel analysis of leader style adaptation and changes in the organizational. Using panel data from more than 1,000 public schools, this study follows school leaders over a period of three years. Preliminary analyses of the data suggest that leaders change their style over time and when the context changes. Principals appear especially sensitive to changes in staff composition.

The findings of this study will inform theory by resolving tensions regarding how leaders handle change, especially in an underexplored sector—the public sector. The findings will also inform recruitment, selection, and personnel development strategies for public organizations.

ABSTRACT. International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) serve as social agents of change and provide essential services in the developing countries (Buss & Gardner, 2006). As more and more INGOs take on global priorities and work across national boundaries, the success of their programs depend on the individual characteristics of their leaders. Understanding leadership in this context requires an understanding of the diversity of leaders who serve in these roles. INGO leaders remain in the workforce long into their careers, creating workplaces comprised of employees from multiple generations. The study of generational leadership reveals the influence of generational cohorts on leadership styles. The existing business management literature suggests that the Veteran leaders prefer delegation more than leaders from other generations whereas Baby Boomers often lack communication, listening and motivating skills (Sessa et al, 2007; Salahuddin, 2010). Millenial leaders are characterized by being less culturally sensitive compared to leaders from other generations (Sessa et al, 2007). Despite understanding of these apparent differences, little research has been done to understand generational differences in leadership styles in the INGO sector. For example, research on public and nonprofit leadership has been limited to the styles and behaviors of leadership within or across organizations (McGuire and Silvia, 2009; Silvia and McGuire, 2010) without taking into consideration generational differences. Given the growing generational diversity in INGOs, it is critical to understand the ways that leaders belonging to the different generations identify and leverage approaches to leadership. Specifically, what are the leadership traits, skills and behaviors of Veterans, Baby Boomers, Xers and Millennials in the international nonprofit sector? This study examines data from semi-structured interviews data collected from the leaders of 121 INGOs conducted between 2005 and 2008, as a part of a National Science Foundation-sponsored study. Most of the interviewees held top level positions in their organizations including CEOs, presidents, or executive directors (83% of the sample), vice presidents (11% of the sample) and directors of lower organizational level (4% of the sample). Through systematic and thematic content analysis of interviews of leaders and members of 121 INGOs, we investigate the generational differences in the perception of effective leadership traits, skills and behaviors among INGO leaders. Results from this study offer a window into the ways that nonprofit professionals representing different generations approach leadership within and across organizations, which can offer insights into ways to prepare emerging leaders in this sector.

ABSTRACT. Public employees in developing countries often face difficult working environments and demanding workloads. While Public Service Motivation theory suggests that many public employees will be inspired by the opportunities to benefit society and help others, the demands of the job can overwhelm rather than inspire employees. This study investigates some of the conditions under which public employees may associate their workloads with debilitating stress or more positively as the opportunity for meaningful accomplishment.

In particular, we expect that workloads are more likely to increase employee engagement to the extent that their work efforts are successful, recognized and rewarded. We test this assertion by focusing on two reward related mechanisms. First, drawing on the lessons of goal setting and expectancy theories, we expect that employee engagement will be higher when the employees perceive that their work has a prosocial impact. Under such conditions, employees are not only likely to have higher self-efficacy about their ability to perform well under higher workload conditions but also feel rewarded when they see their efforts are producing outcomes they value.

Second, we expect that employees will be more engaged in their work to the extent they perceive high performance is valued and recognized in their organization. Although financial rewards are often limited in public organizations, equity theory suggests that the effectiveness of performance rewards is driven by employees’ perceptions of how the rewards are distributed across employees. Thus, we investigate whether employee perceptions about the extent to which the organization recognizes and properly addresses differences between high and low performers may increase employee engagement. Such attention to employee performance differences not only incentivizes high performance with more rewards and recognition but also signals to the high performing employees that the organization values the work by taking steps to identify and address poor performers.

To test the two hypotheses, we conducted a longitudinal study of 65 principals of vocational training centers in Pakistan. After a baseline survey to collect data about the principals’ PSM, role clarity, and perceptions of performance equity, we then conducted six bi-weekly surveys to gather data about changes in their workloads, leadership support, prosocial impact of their work, and work engagement. The results of an HLM analysis supported our expectations that although PSM is related to employee engagement, higher workloads only had a positive impact on employee engagement when employee perceptions of performance equity and prosocial impact were sufficiently high.

ABSTRACT. While most work activities today occur in workgroups, relatively few studies in public management have focused on the dynamics of work groups in public organizations. In the proposed research, we address this gap by focusing on the relationship between group conflict and group helping/citizenship behavior in law enforcement workgroups.

The extensive research on group relations indicates that, while conflict in generally is undesirable, a moderate level of conflict improves group performance (Coser, 1956; Deutsch, 1969; Sandberg & Rechner, 1989). However, excessive conflict reduces cooperation in the group (Foldy & Buckey, 2010), increases member dissatisfaction, and potentially influences members to leave the group (Gladstein, 1984; Wall & Nolan, 1986). Therefore, the benefits or harms of conflict may depend on circumstances (e.g., leadership) within a workgroup (Hassan & Hatmaker, 2015; Andersen & Moynihan, 2016). In the proposed research, we plan to examine the relationships among inclusive leadership, group conflict and group helping/citizenship behavior in select law enforcement workgroups. Our goal is to assess whether and how inclusive leadership shapes the relationship between group conflict and cooperation (i.e., helping) in law enforcement workgroups.

Inclusive leadership refers to “words and deeds by a leader…that indicates an invitation and appreciation for others’ contributions” (Nembhard & Edmonson, 2006: 947). Inclusive leaders downplay status differences between the leader and subordinates and acknowledge the unique value of each group member regardless of their social status or position in the group. We propose that inclusive leadership may influence the connection between group conflict and citizenship behavior in two ways. First, inclusive leadership may enhance group helping behavior by reducing the likelihood of group conflict. Second, inclusive leadership may moderate the negative effects of group conflict on group helping behavior.

We examine the two mechanisms with data collected through separate surveys from 68 law enforcement workgroups (68 managers; 390 subordinates). The preliminary analysis provides support for both hypothesized relationships. We find that inclusive leadership improves cooperation by reducing group conflict. We also observe a moderation effect. Cooperation declines sharply in workgroups that face high levels of conflict when the group manager is not inclusive. More importantly, we find that cooperation remains high in workgroups facing considerable conflict when the group manager demonstrates inclusive leadership. This suggests that inclusive leadership behavior plays an important role in ensuring that conflict does not diminish group cooperation. We discuss implications of these findings for research on leadership and workgroup dynamics in public agencies.

ABSTRACT. The use of performance information in decision-making is central to the practice of public management and is a common feature of modern governance (Kroll, 2015; Moynihan, 2008). Prior research has shown a link between purposeful and political uses of performance information and prosocial impact or the experience that employees have from realizing they have made a positive difference in the lives of others (Moynihan et al., 2012). Scholars studied performance information itself as a driver of attitudes of elected officials toward spending (Nielsen & Baekgaard, 2015). There have also been studies on how citizens have made use of statistical performance data compared to episodic forms of data (Olsen, 2017). However, there has been little research on how gaming behavior is affected by specific types of performance information, such as information with a prosocial impact. We argue that data gaming becomes less likely if performance data show prosocial impact because in such instances, public managers recognize the meaningfulness of the data and are encouraged to find ways to use data for real improvements. In particular, we propose that different ways to visualize prosocial impact will have a differential impact on the odds that managers engage in data gaming. To test our theory, we employ two experimental studies, one with school leaders and one with a general population sample. Each experiment uses three treatment groups to probe different ways to visualize prosocial impact and one control group. Participants will play the role of a school citizen advisor (for the study with the general population) or a school administrator (for the study with the school principals). Participants will be given the task of deciding whether to keep students or transfer them to another school. The incentive to transfer these students to another school is that the school’s overall average will increase, allowing the school to meet the district target. The disincentive to transferring these academically-challenged students is that sending them to another school will prevent them from accessing a successful reading program, which is only available at the current school. The extent to which participants transfer students with low performance scores to other schools is used as a measure of gaming. We examine how different visualization of schools’ previous social impact affect subjects’ gaming behavior.

ABSTRACT. In China, state-owned enterprises are an important part of public management and have the resemblance to governments and public institutions. As a tradition, state-owned enterprises in China always give tenure to their employees directly, which we call the “iron rice bowl” . Seeing this, employees who choose to work in SOEs usually share a high level of job security protected by the local and national government. Consequently, employees working in state-owned enterprises in China often have high organizational commitment (OC). The positive relationship between OC and employee citizenship behavior towards organization (OCB-O) is consistently supported in the literature. However, we should note that the high level of OC of employees working in Chinese state-owned enterprises may be attributed to the tenure system rather than the organization per se. Their OC in this case might not be positively related to OCB-O. The goal of the current study is to explore whether/how OC of employees working in Chinese state-owned enterprises would positively predict their OCB-O. We collected data from 402 employees working in two state-owned enterprises located in China. A time-lagged design with multisource data was employed. We found that OC was positively related to employee OCB-O rated by their direct supervisor, however, the relationship was moderated by employee organizational identification. The OC-OCB-O relationship was positive only for employees with higher levels of organizational identification; and for employees low in organizational identification, the relationship went negative. Since organizational identification had such an important role, secondly, we focused on how to improve employee’s organizational identification and we found the positive effect of organizational justice and coworker’s help and support on organizational identification. In the end, we combined the two research models of the first and second part into an overall model. We confirmed the mechanism where organizational justice, coworkers’ help and support could enhance employee’s organizational identification, which could potentially fix the negative effect of organizational commitment on OCB-O found among employees low in organizational identification. The study suggests that the high levels of OC in China’s state-owned enterprises could not always lead up to OCB-O. When employees’ OI is low, OC can even decrease it. Thus, for the sake of promoting employee OCB-O, those state-owned enterprises should attach importance to cultivating employee OI.

ABSTRACT. Recent decades have witnessed the increasingly visible roles of international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in various missions of global governance, such as international relief and development, conflict resolution, and human rights advocacy (Schmitz & Mitchell, 2016). To pursue such missions in the global South, Northern international NGOs have progressively moved from their traditional strategy of directly implementing projects towards a collaborative strategy of working with or through Southern local NGOs (Elbers & Schulpen, 2011). The existing literature, however, is lacking theoretical insights and large-N empirical evidence that help explain the local basis for the presence of local-international NGO relations. This is an important gap because effective relations between Northern international NGOs and their Southern local counterparts are considered both a means and an end of itself in international development (Elbers et al., 2014).

Drawing on resource dependency, institutional, and gender theories, as well as original data from recent surveys of local NGOs in Lebanon, this study begins to fill the gap by examining several characteristics of local NGOs that explain their relations with international NGOs. Our surveys were launched in March 2017, targeting the executives of 650 local Lebanese NGOs listed in the United Nation Development Program’s database and Daleel Madani’s (the Lebanese civil society network’s) directory. The efforts led to 223 completed surveys, achieving a response rate of 34%. These 223 NGOs are representative of the targeted NGOs in terms of geographic location and industry.

Our preliminary findings indicate that local Lebanese NGOs interacting with international counterparts are significantly more likely to enjoy stronger financial and human resource capacities, receive international donations rather than local government funding, belong to international networks, and be based in non-rural areas. Implications for theory, practice, and future research will be discussed.

ABSTRACT. For twenty years, the city, county, and local United Way chapter jointly funded human service nonprofits. All three jointly allocated funding, accepted formal applications, and empowered volunteer citizen juries in a participatory decision-making process. Then two years ago the United Way chapter elected to separate from this partnership. In the wake of this change, recipient nonprofits were concerned about potential losses of funding, yet relatively little changed in the first round of post-split funding. This paper examines the history of funding in this specific community to explore the extent and causes of inertia in grant-making decisions.

As both a longitudinal and revelatory case study, this community’s history of funding decisions has the potential to contribute substantially to knowledge of funding decisions and participatory practices. In particular, it allows testing whether process or decision-makers have greater influence on who receives funding. The partnership used previously agreed categories of activity and a formula for allocating funds between categories, along with a structured approach to the grant applications, review process, and presentations before the citizen juries, all of which would be expected to encourage stable funding allocations. The public participation element, with volunteer citizen juries whose membership would vary widely between years, would have the opposite effect, with each cohort potentially holding very different preferences on how to apportion the funds.

This paper tests the competing expectations through analysis of funding decisions over time, including whether periods of increased turmoil (such as through funding declines, minor scandals, or other noteworthy events) altered prior grant-making patterns. A custom dataset that includes funding decisions, recipient nonprofit characteristics and finances, process details, and participants will be analyzed over time and put in context of historical events in the partnership. Initial analysis of some data suggest strong patterns of inertia, with funding for ongoing participant nonprofits at relatively flat levels and most substantial changes occurring amongst nonprofits newly receiving and then often failing to renew funding. The full analysis is expected to contribute to knowledge of government grant-making practices, nonprofit grant-seeking, cross-sector collaborations, and public participation in government. 

ABSTRACT. Concerns around organizational efficiency, sustainability, and accountability cut across the public and nonprofit sectors. Collaboration, within and across sectors, has been an emergent strategy to address these concerns, particularly as substantive policy issues and public service needs cut across sectoral boundaries.  In the nonprofit sector, such concern has manifested in a focus on overhead or administrative spending, a normative concern around administrative spending displacing mission-oriented spending, with personnel costs often conflated with overhead costs.  It is argued that the focus on overhead and administrative salary is misplaced and instead  results in a negative “nonprofit starvation cycle”.  A growing empirical literature suggests that the starvation cycle is real and deleterious, resulting in increased fundraising expenditures, executive incentive problems, reporting inconsistencies, inadequate organizational slack, and insufficient investments in long term infrastructure (Lecy & Searing, 2015).  There is also evidence, however, that nonprofits turn toward their external environment and engage in range of collaborative behaviors to lower administrative burdens, seek other efficiencies, share influence, and pursue economies of scale (MacIndoe & Sullivatn, 2014; Marwell & Calabrese, 2014).  The mechanisms associated with overhead spending constraints have largely been self-regulatory in nature, with alternative explanations of the phenomena:  institutional levers, resulting in espoused and enacted values in board governance, industry codes of conduct, standards, and the like; resource dependent and market levers, where nonprofits overhead efficiency signals performance to investors and partners; and principal agency dynamics where contracts are used to moderate efficiency and other spending concerns.  Scholars have also suggested that as nonprofits have multiple stakeholders and motivations, competing institutional logics are also at play.  Though largely moderated by self-regulation, there have been periodic efforts to codify overhead spending limits into law.  Notably embedded in China’s 2016 comprehensive charity legislation and in India’s recent Corporate Social Responsibility Act are constraints on overhead and staff salary expenditures.  Using data from China, India, and the U.S., this comparative study investigates how nonprofits respond to these normative and legal constraints on overhead and salary.  The investigation suggests that external relationships and collaboration play a critical role in organizations’ adaptive and maladaptive strategies, including the development of pass-through funding structures, shadow employees, loaned employees, varied growth and performance trajectories, and accounting and reporting implications.  The study presents a typology for future research and theory testing.  

ABSTRACT. Extant literature uses prominent theoretical frameworks in public management to examine the antecedents that drive intergovernmental and intersectoral collaboration. Resource dependence theory, transaction cost theory, and institutional theory are some frameworks referenced to explain why organizations embrace collaboration. However, the decision to collaborate is more intricate than consideration of whether an organization can benefit from collaboration.  Collaboration is not monolithic, and it takes on different forms. The degree of formality is an important feature of collaboration that merits more scholarly attention.  This study moves beyond looking at how an organization’s characteristics and institutional context affect its collaboration decisions by extending the inquiry to examine how organizational and individual characteristics relate to the shape of collaboration – that is, to formal (managing by agreement/contract) and/or informal (facilitative behaviors) collaborative behaviors. 

Few studies examine this question, and fewer explore local government and nonprofit organization (NPO) collaborators in a developing country context. We aim to fill that research gap in two ways. First, we will verify whether certain organizational characteristics (capacity, access to external funding, and availability of potential collaborators) and individual characteristics (gender, past collaboration experience, and institutional associations) are associated with the formality of local government-NPO collaboration. We then move to the primary question motivating our research – are organizational or individual characteristics better at explaining the collaboration formality?

The analysis relies on original survey data from two nationally representative samples of local government and NPO officials in Lebanon. The data provide a unique opportunity to focus on local-level cross-sector collaboration—an understudied subject overall, and especially in the developing country context—and to compare collaborative arrangements and behaviors across sectors.

Preliminary results suggest the gender of the local government and NPO officials is influential in determining collaboration formality; women are more likely to collaborate formally. Further, among local government-NPO collaborations in this research setting, organizations that collaborate more formally likely have access to funding sources external to the collaborative dyad and have greater organizational capacity. We expect the findings of our study to 1) clarify whether collaboration formality is driven by organization or individual characteristics, or both, and 2) to encourage innovation and improvement in the way public servants harness formal and informal arrangements to collaborate within and across sectors.

ABSTRACT. Many of the problems that public managers must manage are complex in nature. They involve multiple moving parts, different actors who understand and approach problems differently, and solutions tend to create unanticipated challenges in the future. Information about the problem can be vast, contradictory, and complicated. Yet, owing both to tangible manifestations of problems and stakeholder perceptions of risk, there may be a demand for governmental action. Even if policymakers recognize that wicked problems cannot be solved, they may feel pressure to do something—even if it is unclear what actions will be beneficial. The question we pose is in this research is decidedly simple, even though the situation is complex: how do public managers find a governance path forward for dealing with a problem for which there is no feasible solution? We study this question in the context of one of the most important wicked problems facing the world: climate change. We explore how different governance partners in local communities understand the issue of climate change and the mental models they use to make sense of the issue and its attendant problems and effects. The breadth and diffuse nature of these effects presents a governance challenge, in part, because the preliminary effects are emerging at micro levels, and may be different from town to town, and even neighborhood to neighborhood. In short, different stakeholders likely perceive risk differently and thus perceive the problem differently. If something is to be done, how does a governance network figure out what to do? We probe these questions by considering a set of cases of climate change planning in the southeastern United States. Drawing from risk management and risk perception literature, we argue that communities find spaces for governance action where the diverse and distinct mental models of community stakeholders overlap. We do so through in-depth case analyses of different contexts that all face climate change challenges, following a mental model mapping methodology. We map the mental models of government officials, political leaders, interest groups, and citizen representatives. We suggest that although these different stakeholders are likely to frame and understand the problems of climate change differently, areas of overlap in these mental models provide a space for action on climate change.

ABSTRACT. The allure of collaborative governance platforms (Ansell and Gash 2018) is wrapped up in the promise of innovation—that by working across organizational and sectoral boundaries, stakeholders can produce new and better public goods and services and reorganize governance systems and bureaucratic processes in more efficacious ways. The ongoing question of when (and whether) collaborative governance results in substantive changes or is mainly cheap talk (Lubell 2004, Scott 2015, others) is ultimately a question of innovation success. Torfing (2016) defines public sector innovation as “an intended… process that involves the development and realization… of new and creative ideas that… disrupt the established practices” (p. 29). This does not imply that resultant outcomes are desirable (or even intended) (Torfing 2016), but rather simply means that a new idea or mode of action must be put into practice to count as innovation. While we often think of collaborative governance platforms as innovations in and of themselves, the innovation associated with a collaborative platform is actually contingent on whether the agreements reached by participants are successfully implemented. For instance, do those invited by a public manager to a regional transportation planning group actually participate in the planning process and subsequently implement components in the plan for which they are responsible? Currently, we know surprisingly little about what shapes collaborative governance implementation, and thus have a limited understanding of how and when innovative ideas are implemented through collaborative governance. This paper seeks to couple and extend upon existing perspectives of collaborative governance performance (e.g., Emerson and Nabatchi 2015) and public sector innovation (e.g., Torfing 2016, De Vries et al. 2015) to advance theory concerning successful innovation through collaborative governance. We use agent-based modeling (ABM) to explore the relationships between collaborative platform characteristics (e.g., decision rules, deliberation, membership), participant characteristics (e.g., preferences, incentives, organizational resources, patterns of communication), and the characteristics of the innovation itself (using Torfing’s (2016) theoretical typology of innovation forms). ABM allows us to simulate collaborative platforms under any combination of circumstances and quantify how innovation success varies. ABM is useful for this purpose because it is non-deterministic—just like real-world outputs emerge out of the individual actions, ABM simulates the decision processes and interactions of individual actors, showing how these individual decisions aggregate into system-level results. The results of this study thus inform how public managers should design collaborative governance platforms by identifying the conditions enabling successful implementation of collaborative innovations.

ABSTRACT. Ensuring that governance responses to wicked environmental problems are offered at appropriate scales and with sufficient resources and administrative capacities is difficult and can lead to policy failures. This study employs an agent-based model to test a series of governance scenarios relative to policy responses designed to address nonpoint pollution that leads to the proliferation of harmful cyanobacteria blooms. The primary driver of blooms in fresh water bodies like Lake Champlain is nutrient runoff from anthropogenic factors (e.g., agriculture and stormwater infrastructure). Legislation at national and state levels has been passed to achieve pollution reduction targets, but there are questions of how best to design policies, allocate funds, and build administrative capacity to meet the challenges posed by nonpoint water pollution. To test the degree to which these challenges stem from the scale of prioritization, the amount of funding and capacity, and cooperation across complex governance networks, we present an agent-based model (ABM) of water governance in the Lake Champlain Basin. To simulate the impacts of alternative governance on the development of suites of water quality projects, the ABM is coupled with simplified land use and load accumulation models. Subsequently, the model connects collective action, prioritization, and resourcing scenarios to simulated load reductions, thereby providing an experimental capacity to explore the optimal design for collective action. We find that while policies that generate cooperation at broader scales can lead to better environmental outcomes, both monetary and ecological benefits are unequally distributed in geographic space. Further, we find that although increased spending can fund more projects and reduce greater runoff, without adequate administrative capacity to manage the funds, money can go unspent and possibly erode public trust in institutions. The implications of these findings suggest that while regionalization of policies may lead to better environmental outcomes, policymakers must also consider political and jurisdictional dynamics in policy and governance design to ensure equity and continued collaboration among actors.

ABSTRACT. Recently, Nowell and colleagues (2018) suggested that an effective response network structure is neither integrated nor rigidly centralized but instead is a moderate, core-periphery structure. This structure is considered to be effective in reconciling the need for centralized coordination among various responders while retaining the flexibility to mutually adjust operations to rapidly changing conditions. However, the real challenge is that we have not seen many response network structures in practice except the ones from Hurricane Katrina. To fill the gap, we extracted relational data on the organizational response from archival documents in a recent epidemic outbreak in South Korea, constructed the epidemic response network of organizations, and uncovered the community structure in the network using the Leiden community detection algorithm (Traag, Waltman, & van Eck, 2018). The visualization of the network suggests that the inner structure of the network is not completely centralized or egalitarian. It looks more like a forest of mushroom-trees and spider-webs. Using the relaxed notion of “community” and the Leiden algorithm, we detected the community structure in the sparse epidemic response network. The results showed that 1) communities in the network are discernable (Modularity: 0.583), 2) the community structure corresponds to activeness in response, geographical location, and organizational functions, and 3) communities of heterogeneous organizations deserve substantively more attention than homogeneous communities in this network. The effort to understand the structural property of the network and reduce its complexity to extract useful information provided several fruitful insights about a response structure for the epidemic.

Slides: Epidemic Response Network of Organizations: Detecting Communities in a Forest with Mushrooms and Spider Webs

ABSTRACT. What does human-centered design signify, when it is presented as an approach to public management? How would public management benefit from theorizing and researching human-centered design? These two questions provide a useful point of entry into a critical examination of human-centered design in public management.

An energetic critical examination of human-centered design would consider some challenging questions about public management as a field of study. Should public management be identified as a design-science? If so, what significance should be accorded to Herbert Simon’s idea that solving problems requires both designing and decision-making, within an organizational context? How should public management researchers and scholars make up for Simon’s having formulated his ideas about designing and design-science after he left the fields of management and public administration? How should we compensate for weaknesses in how Simon theorized function-performing mechanisms within enterprises? How should we compensate for the relative lack of depth of Simon’s conception of designing, as a professional activity? How do we make up for Simon’s not having worked out a theory or method for learning from experience?

The paper will examine these issues about design and public management, on the basis of a book to be published in 2019, under the title, Public Management as Design-Oriented Professional Discipline. On this basis, human-centered design will be interpreted as a conceptual design for projects to achieve organizational change and public value creation and as a framework for research projects that aim to provide insight into the challenges of embodying that design in actual projects, under varying field conditions.

ABSTRACT. The second paper argues that the outcome of human-centered design in public management is not limited to citizen-centric services that are usable, useful, and desirable (Sanders 1992) for users. Instead, the insights gained through the development process can also inform the innovation efforts of public organizations, guide their internal transformation and provide pointers to policy-makers for developing citizen-centric policies and laws. Human-centered design in Public Management assigns public services developed around human experience and human interaction a central role in public sector innovation (Junginger 2017). New Public Management has been mostly concerned with implementing, monitoring and administrating policies (Dunleavy & Hood 1994). What we may call New Public Design Management demands from public managers that they engage in anticipatory and proactive scenario development, participatory design, user research and prototyping to arrive at future-oriented sustainable outcomes.

ABSTRACT. The third paper describes initiative in two local public service bureaucracies responsible for implementing policy and programs for vulnerable citizens. Through a design-based approach, we looked in detail at the experiences of service users, trying to understand their experiences, their backgrounds, the range of perspectives they might bring to the service interactions. Over one year, we also investigated, with the same attention to detail, the frontline staff, trying to understand their points of view, knowledge and tools brought to the interaction. When applying human-centered design in public institutions, this laser focus on frontline interactions also needs to be simultaneously combined with systematic attention to the supervisory practices and management routines that support it. This approach, called backwards mapping in policy implementation analysis (Elmore 1980), takes into account how frontline interactions are shaped by supervisory and management practices, and how these are shaped by policy and institutional structures. The contribution of this paper is articulation of the methodological approach used to develop new services and products, operational procedures, and management routines. It includes both conventional social science data collection – semi-structured interviews, focus groups, contextual observation – and other methods that engage the social system in design labs, prototyping, and other probes to explore and test alterations of existing practices and routines. These latter methods provide a means to potentially alter dynamics within the strategic action fields in the service organizations (Moulton and Sandfort, 2017). Backwards mapping helps to bound the design process and enable systematic attention to key institutional factors potentially significant in organizational change.

ABSTRACT. Numerous public organizations report performance information to citizens using performance reports or performance dashboards. It is unclear what effect this information has on public opinion of elected officials or on the public, but a significant amount of time and resources is spent on performance reporting and performance reporting is encouraged by scholars for purposes of transparency. In this split-ballot survey experiment using 1,280 participants recruited from MTurk, I test whether that performance information may be filtered through (American) political (and ideological) lenses, testing the purported “objectivity” performance measures. Treatment groups were exposed to one of three treatments which test the effect of the messenger on whether participants “correctly” interpret performance information. The experiment found that the partisanship of the messenger did not influence whether individual correctly interpreted performance information, nor does a negative framing by a neutral/moderate elected local government official. This suggests that a simple partisan messenger is not sufficient to alter interpretations of performance.

ABSTRACT. Public management as a field of theory and practice has long embraced a focus on outcomes or results over mere outputs of government activity and programs (Kettl 2006; Moynihan 2008; Osborne & Gaebler 1992). However, a study by Grosso, Charbonneau, & Van Ryzin (2017) suggests that citizens tend to exhibit a bias toward more frequent yet ambiguous outputs (people served) over less frequent but more meaningful outcomes (causal effects)—with important implications for evidence-based policymaking and democratic accountability. In this new study, we report on a set of survey experiments with a nationwide sample of US adults (n=840) that probe the public’s judgments about two real social programs, both of which have rigorous evidence of their causal impacts along with highly favorable benefit-cost ratios. In the first experiment, we replicate a paradigm in which respondents are asked to judge the effectiveness and efficiency of an HIV/AIDS program in California with randomly assigned real information about outputs, outcomes, and costs. Results replicate previous findings, suggesting that respondents exhibit a bias favoring high frequency but ambiguous outputs (at-risk clients served) in comparison with more meaningful outcomes (HIV infections prevented). In the second experiment, we extend the paradigm to a program for high school students with special needs called Check and Connect, again randomly assigning real information about outputs, outcomes, and costs. We find even stronger evidence of a bias toward high frequency but ambiguous outputs (students served) over more significant outcomes (students graduating who would not have graduated otherwise). In both experiments, providing information on the costs to society of the social problem at issue (treating AIDS, dropping out of high school) leads people to judge the programs as more effective and efficient. Thus, while people view a program more favorably when given complete information about social benefits as well as program costs, they remain unable to distinguish between outcomes (causal effects) and mere outputs (people served) when doing their mental benefit-cost accounting. We suspect this ‘output bias’ is fundamental and likely widespread in human decision making, influencing not only laypeople but policymakers and even policy analysts as well (although future research is needed to confirm this speculation). Implications for research along these lines as well as the practice of program evaluation and evidence-based policymaking are discussed.

ABSTRACT. To reduce wasteful spending, expand effective programs, and strengthen accountability, governments at all levels are encouraged to adopt evidence-based practices, policies, and management approaches. While there has been substantial growth in the number of studies on evidence-based practice, policy, and management in the public administration field over the past two decades, no study has systematically reviewed this diverse body of research to establish the current state of knowledge and identify directions for future inquiries. The present study fills this void by conducting the first comprehensive and systematic review of the evidence-based practice, policy, and management literature to date. To identify studies for inclusion, the authors searched the top 12 public administration journals, one specialty journal, as well as five academic search databases using the following keywords: “evidence-based practice” and “public administration,” “evidence-based policy” and “public administration,” and “evidence-based management” and “public administration.” The authors discovered nearly 200 studies that meet the selection criteria (e.g., study must be written in English, be a peer-reviewed journal article or dissertation, and focus on evidence-based policy, practice, and management in the context of public administration) and are included in the review. Preliminary findings show the majority of studies are conceptual in focus, there are disagreements in terms of what constitutes evidence, and a primary area of inquiry is determining the extent to which public managers and policymakers use academic research to guide decision-making.

The results from this systematic review also indicate that significant knowledge gaps exist. For example, our understanding of the extent to which public organizations maintain an organizational culture that values research, evaluation, and evidence remains limited. Furthermore, there is a dearth of research on the relationship between an organizational culture that values research, evaluation, and evidence, and organizational outcomes. The present study addresses these gaps in research using data gathered from a national survey of emergency managers at the local, state, and federal levels. Specifically, the authors uncover the extent to which local, state, and federal emergency management agencies maintain a culture that values research, evaluation, and evidence and determine whether emergency management agencies that value research, evaluation, and evidence experience better mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery outcomes.

ABSTRACT. The question of how public managers use public sector performance information received significant scholarly attention in recent years. The promise of performance management systems was to rationalize the decision making process by creating objective performance metrics that citizens, political officials, and public managers could use to assess the performance of public organizations. Some theoretical work suggests, however, that there is a certain subjectivity to these data, which arises from an individual’s role in their organization or broader political environment. Furthermore, a recent spate of experimental work in this area suggests subjectivity might also arise, at the individual level, through cognitive bias. I bridge these two bodies of scholarship with a framework of performance information processing, which incorporates four models of political information use into the story of how public managers use performance information. I suggest that cognitive bias can contribute to the subjectivity of performance information when public managers process performance information. In other words, a model of meaning avoidance suggests that managers accurately receive performance information from management systems, but that cognitive biases influence the ways in which they interpret or act upon that information. In this essay, I provide empirical evidence for this model. I show that despite different presentations, public managers can accurately recount the objective information they saw when asked to recall it. I also provide evidence that despite being equally aware of objective raw performance metrics, public managers exhibit evidence of cognitive bias when asked to interpret the meaning of that information. This study contributes to the broader discussion of how individuals use performance information.

ABSTRACT. This analysis explores each state's current laws that impact their ability to capitalize on the Supreme Court's Wayfair ruling. The manuscript goes state by state to analyze the structure of the laws that may add to the complexity of the state and local sales taxes and limit their ability to require e-commerce vendors to collect sales taxes. Issues that may lead to complexity, and create an undue burden on remote vendors, include issues like different tax bases, whether taxes are collected by the state or the local governments, and different tax rates within jurisdictions.

ABSTRACT. A body of literature across several fields of academic inquiry has developed over time exploring the nature of relationships among the government sector, nonprofit sector, and individual contributors to charity. Largely grounded in economic theory, much of this research flows from the mid-1970s work of Martin Feldstein and his coauthors. Recognizing the importance of charitable contributions for organizations providing services with a public purpose, this early research began an ultimately inconclusive quest into the structure of the U.S. income tax in terms of its treatment of charitable contributions and its influence on the amount and distribution of giving and philanthropic activities. By providing evidence from various data samples of the price elasticity of charitable giving due to the federal deductibility of charitable contributions from taxable income, which lowers the price of charitable contributions relative to other goods, Feldstein (1975), Feldstein and Clotfelter (1976), and Feldstein and Taylor (1976), were among the first to associate government tax policy with outcomes related to the nonprofit sector. Clotfelter (1980) followed these studies with further evidence that the price of giving influences charitable contributions beyond simply the effect of itemization, although short-run income and price elasticities are smaller than the long-run impact on giving. More recent evidence suggests that taxes have both a transitory and persistent price and income effect on levels of contributions, and the persistent component of price and income changes is more influential on charitable donations than are the transitory ones (Auten 2002).

Much less attention has been paid to the implications of charitable giving and its deductibility from federal income taxes on state and local tax structures. However, most state income taxes begin with federal adjusted gross income as the starting point for determining state income tax liability. As such, it seems likely that the federal deductibility of charitable contributions has the implication of narrowing state income tax bases. And, depending on the distribution of income among individuals most likely to deduct itemized charitable contributions, this federal tax policy in application might also have an effect on state and local tax structures in terms of the distribution of tax burden. If wealthier individuals are more likely to deduct charitable contributions from federal income tax liabilities and consequently lower their adjusted gross incomes to be used as the basis for determining state income tax liabilities, all else equal, it seems plausible that the associated implication is for state and local tax structures to become more regressive. 

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ABSTRACT. Citizen-centered approaches have emerged as an alternative administrative method to overcome the limitations of traditional public service provision. Governments have designed and implemented various citizen participation channels to improve the government’s responsiveness to citizens. Citizen-centered public administration, therefore, is often equated with participatory administration.

Potentially positive effects of participatory methods can be limited by citizen factors as well as government factors. First, participatory administration can result in promised effects only when citizens are eagerly willing to join the public participation.  Decisions made through participatory mechanisms can only represent the views of those actual participants. Another limitation is on the government side. Government officials perceive very narrow needs for citizen participation:  more efficiently figuring out the demands of service recipients. Hence, citizens are considered as either passive consumers or merely the sources of information to understand the problem setting. 

One possibly important question to be drawn from the argument is whether satisfied citizens would be willing to participate further into the governing process. There can be competing explanations for this question. Satisfied citizens could be complacent with the status quo and be less willing to make additional contribution to the public service provision. On the other hand, satisfaction with extant public services facilitates greater trust in the governing system and, consequently, citizens may feel more self-efficacy in public participation.

We also pay attention to how citizen satisfaction is formed. While some citizens determine their satisfaction with public services by assessing the quality and quantity of presently available services, others may also consider the unmet demands for the services that ought to be ‘public’. Especially for the latter, satisfaction indicates a broader assessment of the quality of life in the public sphere. Hence, citizens’ subjective assessment of public service satisfaction can be affected by how narrowly or broadly citizens set the scope of services to be provided through the public service provision mechanisms.

These questions will be empirically addressed by analyzing multi-year survey data implemented to 2000 citizens in Korea by Korea University’s Citizen-centered Governance Research Team in December 2011 and April 2013. Results from the preliminary regression analysis of the data indicate that those citizens satisfied with presently available public services are willing to participate more. Yet, the citizens whose expectation of quality of life in the public sphere is not fulfilled show reduced intuition to participate in the public service provision process.

ABSTRACT. A primary purpose of reporting performance information is to empower citizens and users to make more informed choices regarding public service providers. In turn, performance disclosure is argued to place pressure on service providers to improve. Critical assumptions underlying this argument are that actors use performance information to form assessments about service quality, and that they act on these assessments, for instance, in terms of exit or voice.

However, whereas citizens as recipients of performance information have been studied extensively – largely finding that citizens do respond to performance information, albeit in biased ways – actual users of specific public services have received less attention, even as only the users of public services are able to hold public service providers directly accountable. Moreover, the few existing studies typically use hypothetical cases. This can be problematic, because hypothetical data and scenarios exclude all prior information that service users have through their knowledge of and interaction with specific service providers. New pieces of performance information might therefore have little influence compared to the detailed information already available to users. Service users might also engage in motivated reasoning about performance data, for instance, by questioning the validity or relevance of inconvenient information about service providers they are otherwise happy with, and whom they themselves are responsible for choosing.

In this study, we therefore conducted a survey experiment in the field, offering true and realistic performance information to actual service users, namely parents with children enrolled in public schools (n=1185), who were contacted through the school principals. We focused on public education in Denmark, where standardized performance information is comparable and of relatively high quality compared to other types of public services. Parents show a high degree of interest and can choose between different public schools, or choose a private non-profit schooling alternative. Parents are also represented through school boards, where they can voice their concerns. Accordingly, this is a setting where we would expect users to be responsive to performance information.

Nevertheless, across model specifications we consistently find no effects of performance information on user satisfaction, intended voice or exit behaviors. We additionally find no effects of including a social comparison or reference point. These findings have important implications for the feasibility of using performance information to empower and affect the choices of service users. This can have important down-stream effects by limiting the competition faced in practice by public service providers.

ABSTRACT. Citizen-state relationships are an enduring theme in public management research. Central to this are studies that seek to understand the determinants of citizen satisfaction. An important development in this line of research has been the application of Expectancy Disconfirmation Theory (EDT) to understand citizen satisfaction. EDT advances “traditional” approaches to the explanation of satisfaction by examining citizen’s behavior, rather than understanding satisfaction in relation to external characteristics (e.g. demographic variables). The EDT framework proposes that citizen satisfaction arises from a process where citizens compare their perceived performance with their prior expectations. The model, derived from the marketing literature, was first applied to public organizations by Van Ryzin (2004) and has subsequently received widespread attention. The growth in the public services EDT literature suggest that a meta-analysis would be timely to assess the state of knowledge, identify areas where further research is needed, and help advance the theory of citizen satisfaction. This study, therefore, asks: Is EDT a valid framework for explaining citizen satisfaction with public services? Searches of the Public Administration section of the Web of Science and Google Scholar using the phrases “citizen*”, “public” and “expectancy disconfirmation” led to the identification of 18 articles, containing 22 samples, and around 600 correlations. We apply the meta-analysis procedure of Field and Gillet (2010) to integrate the empirical findings. We will derive a population and sub-population effects size across correlations, test whether specific moderating variables are significant sources of variation among effect sizes and identify potential issues with publication bias. Moderators will cover differences between studies in three areas: concepts (e.g. is disconfirmation operationalized directly or indirectly), methods (e.g. observational or experimental tests), and context (e.g. which public services are covered, country). Preliminary descriptive analysis of the studies employing an experimental research design is suggestive of strong support for the model when expectations and performance are manipulated. This is suggestive of the generalizability of the EDT across time and space. At the same time, there is initial indication that EDT can be developed further theoretically, by making the role of time explicit and empirically, by directly operationalizing disconfirmation.

Field, Andy P., and Raphael Gillett. 2010. How to do a meta‐analysis. British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology 63:665-694.

Van Ryzin, Gregg, G. 2004. Expectations, performance, and citizen satisfaction with urban services. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. 23:433-448.

ABSTRACT. It is widely considered that the diffusion of Internet has the potential to provide opportunities for citizens to facilitate their access to and participation in political institutions in information society. In regard to this, why citizens in developed countries still express critical concerns about their representation in digital era? Based on the literature of digital divide, the unequally distributed Internet access among different citizen groups implies that these opportunities are exclusively open to those who have sufficient access to Internet, thus, creating the problem of the exclusion of these disconnected citizens from full digital citizenship. Furthermore, digital divide still persists in the changing face, even as the Internet penetration rate has reached saturation and physical access is nearly universal in developed countries nowadays. Variety of usage and content preference have become the new facets of digital divide in which the former refers to skill distance to Internet connection and the latter captures the psychological distance. In this regard, what is the effect of digital divide along several facets on citizen’s satisfaction with democracy? How these differentiated effects would change over time? Following the participatory approach to explain citizen’s perception on political institutions, this article develops a simple framework to examine why these digital disconnected citizens would show concerns about their representation in political institutions. As a reflection of preexisting inequality in digital era, digital divide creates fault lines among citizens in regard with the degree of their access to Internet. We focus on the role of digital exclusion and hypothesize that these disconnected citizens which are isolated either in variety of usage or content preference probably express their concerns on representation. Moreover, given the increasing widespread of digital infrastructure and education, psychological aspect of digital divide may increase in importance over time. This article conducts empirical test in the context of Europe by using Eurobarometer survey from 2012 to 2016 with the application of cross-classified multilevel analysis. The result reveals that the extent to which citizens are disconnected from Internet is negatively related to their satisfaction with democracy. Accordingly, the improvement of governments’ policymaking transparency negatively moderate this effect. In addition, we find that the magnitudes of the negative effect of content preference on citizen’s satisfaction with democracy would increase significantly over time. Several potential contributions or implications of this study are further discussed.

ABSTRACT. Mirroring developments in other public policy areas, over the last thirty years U.S. public education has entered a period of hyper-accountability (Heinrich 2010; Manna 2010). Using student test scores as a performance metric, public schools in most locations are now regularly evaluated and graded (Favero and Meier 2013). It is not uncommon for the results of these evaluations to be used by policymakers to determine the fates of schools, principals, and teachers. Also, parents use school grades to select schools for their children (Buckley and Schneider 2007).

The imagined effects of this enhanced accountability vary. Proponents highlight the potential for increased competition, the weeding out of bad teachers and principals, and the shuttering of routinely underperforming schools (Osborne 2017). Critics raise concerns that this environment incentivizes teaching to the test, cheating, and rebuffing or pushing out low-performing or otherwise undesirable students (Fierros and Blomberg 2005; Ravitch 2013).

The concerns of critics have been heightened by the spread and growth of charter schools. These schools are publicly-funded but primarily function outside the authority and rules of a school district; also, they are typically authorized for a limited period of time. Because of these characteristics, charter schools are thought to operate with increased accountability and autonomy (Miron and Nelson 2002). Under such conditions, critics have speculated, charter schools have an increased incentive to “skim” better students from neighboring district schools. There have been various efforts to investigate this issue (West, Ingram, and Hind 2006; Zimmer et al. 2009), but it remains unclear if skimming occurs more often in charter schools.

This paper contributes by examining skimming in the admissions processes of charter and district schools. Specifically, we conducted an audit experiment on a nationally-representative sample of public and charter high school principals. In the experiment, we studied how principals responded to the ability level (high, medium, and low) and race (white and black) of a fictitious interested student. With an interest in getting better school test scores – and drawing from common stereotypes of black students as less able and having more behavioral problems – we hypothesize that principals will be more likely to discriminate against low-ability students and black students. Because charter schools are under greater accountability pressure, we expect higher levels of discrimination in these schools relative to district schools.

To conduct our experiment, in October 2018 we sent emails to 3,600 charter and public school principals across the nation. In the email we pretended to be a mother who was moving to the school’s area and wanted information on gaining entry into the principal’s school. We indicated the race of the student with the name of the mother and child; we indicated the ability level of the student by telling the principal about the student’s past level of school performance. After a month, we will calculate the principals’ email response rate, content, and tone. By comparing responses across treatment conditions, we will estimate the causal effect that race and ability have on principal discrimination in the public school admissions process.

ABSTRACT. Charter schools are privately managed schools that compete for students with traditional public schools. There exist a large literature on performance disparities between charter and traditional public schools, and whether they are driven by differences in student populations (e.g., Marlow 2010; West, Ingram and Hild 2006). Differences in the socio-demographic composition of charter versus traditional public schools can have a variety of reasons, including geographical location or specific curricular models. However, after controlling for these criteria, it is often assumed that population differences would be automatically due to adverse student selection procedures. But whether charter schools actually select well-performing students at the door remains untested empirically.

If charter schools would select certain types of students in the initial enrollment process, the question is why? Indeed, charter-schools are subject to competitive pressures to sustain in the educational marketplace. Hence they will focus on enrolling students who are not costly, and able to meet bureaucratic success criteria like high test scores. However, direct information about the future performance and/or costliness of prospective students is often not available during the initial application process of charter schools. Drawing upon the theory of statistical discrimination (Arrow 1973; Phelps 1972), we argue that charter schools instead use imperfect signals of students’ future performance and costliness. This means that in the absence of direct information, charter school principals will draw on population-based inferences about the average performance/ costliness of members of certain racial/ethnic groups, and use this population-specific statistical knowledge as a stereotype against individual applicants. As a consequence, racial/ethnic groups who are perceived to perform less well on average academically (like African-Americans and Latinx; see NCES 2017) will be discriminated against in accessing charter schools.

To test these theoretical predictions, we will send out a conjoint experiment to all charter school principals in the US in late 2018. The conjoint design will involve a choice between multiple sets of two hypothetical profiles of prospective students. Student profiles will involve randomly presented attributes, including gender, race/ethnicity, math and reading scores, English language learner status, special education needs, and parents’ occupation. By randomly presenting different levels of these attributes (including no information), we can estimate the so-called average marginal component effect of each student attribute separately and in combination with all others. This allows us to effectively tease-out whether charter school principals engage in statistical discrimination as a means of cream-skimming.

ABSTRACT. Over the last fifteen years, a growing body of evidence has used the audit study to examine how group biases result in discriminatory behavior. In their role as gatekeepers of public services, street level bureaucrats can discriminate in ways that undermine equal access to public services. To advance the theoretical understanding of discrimination in public services, we distinguish between two mechanisms by which bureaucratic actors may use their power. First, they may engage in direct discrimination by making decisions that differentially allocate public resources across different groups. For example, they might tell members of some groups that spaces in a job-training programs are unavailable. Second, they apply more indirect forms of discrimination, by imposing administrative burdens differentially across groups. Administrators might decline to share information, be less welcoming, or demand more documentation toward groups they disfavor. This paper uses an audit study approach to offer evidence of both mechanisms. Prior public sector audit studies typically involve relatively low-cost commitments on the part of the public actor – a request for information, or a meeting – and are often measured only in terms of whether the individual receives a response or not. In our study bureaucrats are asked to make a costly and real commitment – a place for a student in their school. We therefore examine actual decisions to allocate public resources, not just requests for information. We sent a request to Danish school bureaucrats from an in-group (a typical Danish name) and out-group (Arab name) asking if it was possible to move their child to the school. We find large differences in the access provided between the two groups. Danish senders are substantively more likely to get a clear acceptance for their request than Arab senders. We find some evidence of discrimination in the application of administrative burdens. Arab senders were more likely to face compliance costs in the form of additional questions, while native Danes were more likely to be invited to talk via phone to provide more information.

ABSTRACT. While some consider Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) policies a valid tool
to increase the representativeness of the public workforce, critics claim that EEO
policies undermine the merit principle. This study puts this debate to an empirical
test. First, we test the role of political orientation and public sector employment in
determining the support for active EEO policies in public hiring. Second, we manipulate
the potential tension between EEO policies and merit-based hiring using a
randomized survey experiment. We use data collected on about 400 students of public
administration, 220 public administration employees, and 630 private employees
in Germany. Empirical findings can be summarized in two points: First, a rightist
political orientation increases opposition towards EEO policies, while public employment
increases support. Second, highlighting a potential tension between merit
recruitment and migrant representation in the public workforce in the treatment
condition increases support for the merit principle among all groups of respondents.
However, in particlar respondents with a rightist political orientation overemphasize
the importance of the merit principle when a potential migrant underrepresentation
is mentioned. These findings suggest that preferences for labor market equality in
public hiring are highly politicized and vulnerable towards political manipulation.

ABSTRACT. Sharing of the wireless spectrum is a real techno-economic challenge to be addressed and is increasing in importance as the cellular spectrum has become a scarce natural resource at a worrisome rate. It is critical to address spectrum sharing for more reliable public safety communications and is essential to achieve the goal of more effective communication. Researchers as well as policy makers are concerned for ways to improve the utilization and efficiency of the spectrum due to the static allocation, the lack of appropriate regulatory policies, and emerging public management challenges. In such pervasive spectrum sharing markets, the operators will have to satisfy users’ expectation from wireless data services while also balancing towards a market where operators may share their resources with primary users of other operators and sometimes have to block their own primary users in order to attain higher sharing goals that may be set by the government(s) or inter-operator agreements. The drawback, however, is that small operators with lower quality service may freeride on large operators’ infrastructure in such pervasively shared markets. If larger operators are incentivized to share, the small operators’ users may perceive higher-than-expected service quality for a lower fee, which then can cause customer loss to the large operators and motivate small operators to continue freeriding with additional earnings from the stolen customers. Such freeriding may take the shared spectrum market to an unhealthy and unstable equilibrium. Although it has clear advantages of achieving better performance and larger good, sharing policies and techniques open the for free-riders unless it is not regulated in some fashion. Polycentric governance is seen as a theoretical framework possesses a multitude of institutional attributes that have the capacity to provide essential explanation power for this complex policy and public management problem. Yet the theoretical ideal can be argued in that these systems are not deemed perfect, which is consistent with real-world attempts at implementing the polycentric governance approach to scarce resources. This focus can assist the spectrum sharing issue by promoting a multi-level analysis including diverse stakeholders, their interactions, and understanding the current spectrum ecosystem. Within this analysis, decision-makers can investigate complementary partnerships that go against previous assumptions and push for cooperative sharing and coordination. In addition, the analysis should incorporate a scientific basis that is translated for each stakeholder to assist in decision-making and generating regulations and incentives that can operate on the many complex levels.

ABSTRACT. Over the past few decades, we find much to applaud in previous works on the impact of managerial networking on performance in various settings in both public and private domains. However, prior research has primarily taken a static view that examined the effect of current managerial networking on concurrent outcomes. Given that a prominent feature of network relationships is their dynamics and their effects may also diminish or grow over time, one aspect of managerial networking that is worthy of closer examination is how the managers’ relative involvement in past and current networking relationships influences current network outcomes. In this context, this study is motivated by the need to look at how a dynamic view of managerial networking contributes to the cumulative knowledge of the study of managerial networking in the public sector.

This study improves our understanding of the relative influences of past and current networking relationships on current program performance by, first, exploring the nonlinear effects of relative levels of networking on performance and, second, investigating how relative networking influences may interact with organizational conditions that are characterized by different aspects of institutional and task environments. From the perspectives on organizational task and institutional environment, we propose a set of contextual factors that may influence the relationship between relative managerial networking and performance. We examine these issues in the longitudinal context of the performance of top managers’ networking involvement in local school districts in the United States, using a comprehensive panel dataset of U.S. local school districts in 1999–2011.

Our findings show that organizational performance increases at an increasing rate as the relative level of managerial networking increases, and the advantages of the relative level of networking relationships are more effectively leveraged when the organization meets their institutional requirements and when the environment is less complex and highly turbulent. The results of the current study have a number of significant implications for future research. First, by considering the relative level of managerial networking compared to past experiences, this study has been able to provide a richer understanding of the managerial networking–performance relationships. Second, it clearly suggests that the relative managerial networking–performance relationship is context specific. Therefore, development of both theoretical understanding and managerial implications depend very much on identifying contextual factors which enhance a positive relationship between relative managerial networking and organizational performance.

ABSTRACT. Inter-organizational networks have been an important subject in public policy and management research. Organizations across public, private, and civic spheres (i.e., public agencies, legislative offices, non-governmental organizations, and private sector organizations) generate self-organizing multilateral networks during decision-making and implementation processes for coordination, knowledge exchange, and advocacy mobilization. Previous studies on inter-organizational networks have much emphasized the importance of trust in operating in the networks and focused on exploring sources of inter-organizational trust in the context of social service delivery. However, many policy networks can be adversarial, particularly those that operate in a regulatory context. Distrust is much more likely to characterize regulatory inter-organizational network with high legal conflict, polarized policy beliefs, and technical controversy over public decisions in the design and implementation of policies. Thus, previous research has restricted opportunities to understand the unique features of regulatory network contexts and the sources of distrust in the network. Current conceptual and empirical research on public network management has provided an insufficient understanding of what makes distrust between network actors and how network actors build distrust. This study conceptualizes distrust as a distinct concept from the absence of trust, and then identify sources of inter-organizational distrust and examines the ways that organizations are building distrust in the network. Specifically, this study will address the following questions: 1) Is distrust empirically district from the absence of trust in an inter-organizational regulatory network? 2) If so, what are the sources of distrust in an inter-organizational regulatory network? 3) Are there any patterns of building distrust in an inter-organizational regulatory network?

To answer these questions, we collected a quantitative network survey data and qualitative interview data from 25 key organizations involved in a local hydraulic fracturing policy network in New York in 2014. Using a mixed-method analysis (descriptive social network analysis and qualitative coding), specifically, we investigate (1) reasons why network actors distrust other members in a network, (2) variation between diverse types of organization in using sources of distrust, and (3) interactive patterns between reasons of distrust. This study improves our understanding of inter-organizational network management by showing why network organizations are generating distrust toward other organizations in the network and how different sources are moving and interacting through network organizations and contexts that organizations are creating.

ABSTRACT. This paper analyzes the constitutive effects on policy stakeholders of interacting with federal agencies during collaborative farm preservation. Scholars recognize that public administration influences policy and politics (e.g Mettler 2002; Soss and Moynihan 2014; Selznick 1949). However, we lack a unifying concept for referring to these diverse effects. Thus, the term constitutive refers to the collection of effects resulting from policy implementation that are capable of influencing the web of relationships, politics, attitudes, and values that make up governance (Cook 2014).

This paper asks the question, what are the constitutive effects on policy stakeholders of interacting with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) during policy implementation? It does so by examining changes in behavior and attitudes expressed by citizen landowners and nonprofit land trusts engaged in collaborative conservation policy implementation.

The data consist of a cross-sectional, national phone survey of 504 private landowner participants in the Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program (FRPP). Multinomial logistic regression is used to assess the likelihood of changes in attitudes and behaviors as a result of agency assertion of priorities. These data are augmented by in-person interviews of nine land trust partners engaged in FRPP implementation. The analysis is designed to assess the effect of NRCS priorities on the actions and attitudes of landowners (individuals) and land trusts (organizations).

Preliminary findings indicate statements and other forms of encouragement made by NRCS have a positive effect on landowner adoption of these same attitudes and behaviors. To illustrate, one landowner in the survey dataset reported “the people that we worked with, their priorities helped us to implement the conservation”.

This research is a contribution because it bridges normative theories of constitutive governance with systematic, empirical evidence of its effects. Work from scholars taking a normative stance recognizes the constitutive effects of bureaucracy but does not provide empirical evidence to support its claims. Literature from collaborative governance and policy process theories provide empirical evidence of bureaucracy’s influence but does not explicitly recognize the concept of constitutive governance. Furthermore, understanding the constitutive effects of bureaucracy has implications for policy makers and public managers on a range of topics including policy design, implementations practices, as well as employee awareness of the impacts of their work.

ABSTRACT. Since the early 1970s, government outsourcing has been gradually but extensively used as an alternative improving efficiency and performance in delivering public service. Under the reinventing government movement in the U.S., in particular, the proponents of market-oriented reforms insist that government outsourcing will deliver positive outcomes in numerous organizational contexts. That is, government outsourcing not only delivers its promises on better economic performance, but also contributes to employee work attitudes. The literature evaluating government outsourcing outcomes has predominantly focused on the former question of economic outcomes of outsourcing, but we have a little understanding on the latter one of how government outsourcing affects employees in their work attitudes.

This research explores potential consequences of government outsourcing in employee work attitudes. More specifically, this research brings together disparate literature on organizational slack, public service motivation (PSM), and psychological contract theory to propose theoretical foundations in understanding why and how government outsourcing may affect employee work attitudes in public sector organizations. Both scholars and practitioners alike hold the traditional belief that government outsourcing may be detrimental on employee work attitudes, but we take a more comprehensive approach considering both positive and negative theoretical perspectives in evaluating outsourcing outcomes.

This research empirically examines how employee work attitudes—job satisfaction and commitment—change over time in the federal agencies while looking for the impacts of government outsourcing. We consider whether government outsourcing has different impacts on managers and employees. A difference-in-difference-in-difference model is used in examining the impacts of outsourcing a debt collection program to private agencies in the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in 2017. According to the law enacted in 2016, the IRS has outsourced its debt collection program for outstanding inactive tax receivables to four private collection agencies. Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys covering a 5-year period between 2013 and 2017 are analyzed. Results indicate that government outsourcing lowers job satisfaction and commitment of employees, but not managers. With an emphasis on the perspective of public managers and employees, this research advances more comprehensive understanding of government outsourcing outcomes: the potential benefit of increasing economic performance may generate potential costs for agencies in affecting their employees’ work attitudes negatively.

ABSTRACT. Public service delivery is increasingly complex, involving actors from multiple sectors. As a result, public managers frequently work with other organizations in government, as well as with partners in the private and not-for-profit sectors. There has been much research on how to manage in networks. Studies of collaboration have attempted to identify the processes through which collaboration occurs (Agranoff and McGuire, 2003), as well as the factors that contribute to collaborative success (Thomson and Perry, 2006). Some of this work has raised questions about how government employees react to the contracting out of public services. For example, using the 2006 Federal Human Capital Survey, Yang and Kassekert (2010) found that contracting out negatively influences employees’ job satisfaction. Vrangbæk, Petersen, and Hjelmar (2015) confirmed similar findings in their meta-analytic review of not only job satisfaction but also of workforce composition, working conditions, salaries, and motivation. However, they noted that most of the 25+ studies in their review rely on cross-sectional data or small samples. They also asserted that “it would be useful [to] take a longer time perspective to avoid the possible short-term bias apparent in the majority of the existing studies in the field” (2015, 19).

That is the purpose of this study. Using longitudinal data, I examine contracting out and its potential effects cooperative workplace behaviors. Does contracting out affect federal employee work attitudes? I use generalized estimating equations (GEE) to analyze eight panels of Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) data beginning in 2006 to measure perceptions of cooperative workplace behaviors. For my primary explanatory variable, I calculate the percentage of discretionary budget spent on contracting at the sub-agency level, using contracting data from the Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation and discretionary spending data from OMB. Results indicate that when contract spending is very high (more than 50% of total discretionary spending), federal employees perceive a much less cooperative workforce. However, supervisory employees associate contract spending with more cooperative behaviors. This may indicate that, though managers see benefits in the use of contractors, rank and file employees are feeling less able to effectively collaborate with those in their workplace. Indeed, my findings may show that the presence of contractors in the workforce can reduce collegiality and create adversarial environments between public administrators and their contractors.

ABSTRACT. The lines of accountability have become increasingly blurry with the rise of third party government and government contracts for service. If a for-profit organization is providing a public service, should citizens still hold the government accountable when something goes wrong? Examining the politics, James et al. (2016) find only delegation to a public unit inside the government reduces blame to local politicians and Marvel and Girth (2016) find sector influences perceptions of mayoral control. More directly, Piatak, Mohr, and Leland (2018) find citizens attribute blame appropriately to whichever sector is providing the service.

While this research has begun to causally test blame attribution, there has been little research on differences in blame attribution across the levels of government in federal systems. Regarding blame distribution, Marvel (2014) found citizens placed the most blame on the Federal Bureau Investigation for the Boston bombings compared to the Boston police department. Therefore, we also ask: Does citizen blame attribution for public service delivery failure in contracting vary across levels of government?

We investigate our research questions with a vignette experiment conducted in January 2018 on MTurk. The vignette uses the timely example of a prisoner passing away in the course of interstate transport and ask about the blame attributed to the company/government actor handling the transportation. This experimental method can give us a more nuanced view of how people respond in complex, federal systems. Findings have implications for public managers across levels of government—federal, state, and local—in clarifying the lines of accountability and understanding citizen blame attribution in times of service failure.

References

James, O., Jilke, S., Petersen, C., & Van de Walle, S. (2016). Citizens' blame of politicians for public service failure: Experimental evidence about blame reduction through delegation and contracting. Public Administration Review, 76(1), 83-93.

Marvel, J. D. (2014). The Boston Marathon bombings: Who's to blame and why it matters for public administration. Public Administration Review, 74(6), 713-725.

Marvel, J. D., & Girth, A. M. (2016). Citizen attributions of blame in third‐party governance. Public Administration Review, 76(1), 96-108.

Piatak, J., Mohr, Z., & Leland, S. (2017). Bureaucratic accountability in third‐party governance: Experimental evidence of blame attribution during times of budgetary crisis. Public Administration, 95(4), 976-989.

ABSTRACT. When governments deliver a service to citizens, they have to make a choice between different potential service delivery modes (Stein, 1993; Brown and Potoski, 2003). It often takes the form of some type of contracting out to a private party. Following new public management, the doctrine of the neo-classical contracting theory has been pushed forward by the European Union over the last decades (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000; Keulemans and Van de Walle, 2017). As a consequence, contracting-out decisions in the European Union have mainly been driven by the price criterion and the less costly option has typically been favoured over the others. However, we have recently noticed a slow desire from public institutions to integrate non-price criteria such as environmental, social and innovative criteria into contracting-out decisions (Uyarra et al. 2014; Loosemore, 2016). As price has for many years been at the centre of contracting out decisions, one can enquire the extent to which local civil servants consider environmental, social and innovative criteria when awarding a contract to a company. Using random utility theory which assumes that latent preferences, composed of a systematic and a random component, are associated with all choices being scrutinized by individuals (Louviere et al., 2008), this study seeks to quantitatively investigate two related research questions: (1) to what extent do local civil servants consider economic, environmental, social and innovative criteria when awarding a contract to a company? and (2) how much are these criteria worth to local civil servants? To answer these two research questions, this paper focuses on the waste collection sector and employs data from a discrete choice experiment among local civil servants working in the environmental department of the municipality in five European countries (Belgium, Estonia, Germany, Norway and Spain). Discrete choice experiments have been developed based on random utility theory and aim at eliciting individuals’ stated preferences. Moreover, discrete choice experiments allow the researcher to identify the relative impact of each factor on the final choice by deriving local civil servants’ marginal willingness to pay from the data collected during the experiment. The preliminary results indicate that local civil servants look beyond the price of the service when contracting out by considering the other criteria. In addition, the marginal willingness to pay for every criteria indicates that civil servants appear to favour different criteria based on their country origin.

ABSTRACT. Job satisfaction is a strong indicator of employee well-being with important implications for employee turnover and performance. Therefore, job satisfaction is a widely studied topic in both the public and private management literature. It is increasingly important for societies to facilitate collaboration and employee mobility between the sectors. Understanding sector differences in job satisfaction and explanations hereof are important as public organizations increasingly need to recruit employees with skills and knowledge developed in the private sector, and vice-versa private firms benefit fromrecruiting employees with a public sector background to facilitate effective interactions with public organizations.

However, a recent literature review argued that current research lacks the comprehensiveness required to provide clear evidence on sector differences in job satisfaction (Baarspul & Wilderom 2011 in PMR). In our own review of the literature, we found 63 studies that have analyzed sector differences in job satisfaction with quantitative data. Most studies use simple methods such as bivariate correlations or regressions with a limited set of controls.

The objective of this paper is to a) gain more rigorous knowledge about sector differences in job satisfaction and b) investigate how different determinants of job satisfaction are important to different extents in the two sectors.

A major challenge in the literature on sector differences is the lack of representative data spanning the multiple occupations found in society – most former studies are limited by looking at one or a few occupations. We use a representative survey of 4,000 Danish public and private sector employees, which we have merged with register-based labor market data containing detailed information on occupation as well as a range of individual- and firm-level varaiables. We achieved a survey response rate of 54 percent, and use register data to investigate non-response bias. These data allow us to go beyond existing studies in the literature and conduct rigorous analyses to understand sector differences in job satisfaction.

To develop an increased understanding of sector differences in job satisfaction, we take point of departure in the direct relationship between sector and job satisfaction but continue to investigate how public service motivation, red tape, hierarchy, leadership, salary, and tenure affects job satisfaction in the two sectors. An example of this is that we investigate if salary has the same impact on job satisfaction in both sectors. Understanding sector differences and explanations hereof may have important implications for how to improve job satisfaction in the public sector.

ABSTRACT. We aim to understand how individual motivations of a public official might contribute to the level of bribes in a municipality. Using individual-level data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) and aggregate data from the Colombian Institutional Performance Survey, we estimate a hierarchical model seeking to find the effect of pro-social motivations among bureaucrats within a given municipality on the frequency of bribe requests reported by its inhabitants. Given that this relationship is likely to be endogenous, we attempt to isolate this causal effect using instrumental variables at the government department level. We expect that municipalities with a greater level of ‘good’ public officials may be less likely to generate corrupt behaviors, even in different government departments, but the effect is likely to be contingent on the type and level of social capital in the surrounding community. On one hand, bridging social capital (generalized trust) may create positive externalities and network effects, disincentivizing corrupt behavior by raising its social costs in the workplace and the community at large. On the other hand, bonding social capital (personal trust) may create narrow networks of cooperation, reducing the social cost of getting caught in corruption, even in communities where state workers are motivated by intentions to pursue public good.

ABSTRACT. Burnout, broadly defined as a work-related syndrome involving emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a sense of reduced personal accomplishment (Maslach, Schaufeli, and Leiter 2001), is a critical issue affecting many types of front line workers and the communities they serve. We know, for example, that health workers with severe burnout are more likely to make errors that can cost patients their lives (Salyers et al. 2017); that law enforcement officers who are fatigued display higher rates of use of force (James, James, and Vila 2018); and that burnout among human service workers is tied to significantly more sick-leave and absenteeism (Borritz et al. 2006). While the topic of burnout has received significant attention over the past few years, we have little evidence of what works in reducing burnout among front line staff and how this impacts key organizational outcomes.

This study reports on a multi-site field experiment conducted in nine mid-sized cities in the US. The focus of the study was a reduction in burnout among 911 dispatchers and call-takers, a population that reports particularly high rates of burnout, absenteeism and turnover, due to the emotionally challenging work they are called to complete.

The intervention involved a series of six behaviorally-informed emails that focused on the shared experiences of call takers and dispatchers. The intervention drew on evidence that workplace burnout is lower in environments where people’s identities are built around a community and a shared set of values (Schaufeli, Leiter, and Maslach 2009), as well as on research regarding the power of storytelling as an effective method for coping with emotional stress (Shuler 2001). Importantly, each message focused not on the impact that a dispatcher or call-taker has on residents, but on the impact she can have on her colleagues or future colleagues, thus building a different type of prosocial motivation than what we are accustomed to seeing in government programs.

Preliminary findings suggest that receiving the series of emails and accompanying stories led to a 39% (8 point) reduction in burnout score on a validated scale, when controlling for other factors. The intervention also seems to have reduced resignations by about 22% over a 6 month period. Follow-up data collection is currently underway and will be completed before PMRC 2019.

ABSTRACT. Whistleblowers can help root out bureaucratic waste, fraud, and abuse of federal government. Bureaucratic whistleblowers have played a critical role in keeping government transparent, efficient, responsible, and accountable, thus they enhance bureaucratic democracy. (Bowman, 1980; O'Leary, 2013; 2015). Public management scholars have paid considerable attention to the effectiveness of bureaucratic whistleblowing and have called for sufficient protections for federal whistleblowers (Brewer & Selden, 1998; Dubnick & Frederickson, 2010; Hassan, Wright, & Yukl, 2014; Perry & Hondeghem, 2008; Rubin, 2009). Despite the legal, practical, and academic concerns, protection for whistleblowers has been insufficient (Peffer et al., 2015). The goal of this study is to assess the changes in bureaucrats’ whistleblowing intention between before and the after the enactment of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2012.

Insights from behavioral approach is particularly useful when investigating the impact of macro-level institutional change on a particular agency and individual bureaucrats’ perception. Whistleblowing intention, as a micro-level perspective of individual attitudes, has not yet been much discussed in public administration but more in psychology and business management. Drawing a lens from psychology and utilizing an econometric evaluation method, this study complements traditional understanding of whistleblowing in public management.

This study conducts a quasi-experimental assessment of the impact of the WPEA on Homeland Security (DHS) bureaucrats’ whistleblowing intention in three distinct ways. First, this study descriptively analyzes federal bureaucrats’ whistleblowing intention using Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) from 2010 to 2017 to accumulate a general understanding of who is likely to blow the whistle, under what organizational context. Second, it assesses the impact of the protection act on DHS bureaucrats to test whether enhanced protection can change individual bureaucrats’ willingness to blow the whistle. The use of comparison groups in other federal agencies allows us to consider if changes in whistleblowing intention are due to the protection act or reflect governmentwide trends. Third, it tests whether the given wisdom in business whistleblowing studies can be generalizable to the public administration context.

As a result, the difference-in-differences estimates with agency and year fixed effects indicate that that strengthened whistleblowing protection has a moderate, but statistically significant effect in increasing the DHS bureaucrats’ whistleblowing intention. In addition, this result reveals a unique pattern of bureaucratic whistleblowing that is unlikely in private organizations. The findings, methods, limitations, and three theoretical contributions to the ongoing debate about whistleblower protection would be further discussed.

ABSTRACT. Reforms of welfare-to-work systems in OCED countries over the last two decades have seen wide deployment of New Public Management (NPM) as a set of governance ideals. Embracing private sector management techniques, quasi-market incentives, contestability of purchasing, performance-based contracts, and outcome budgeting, NPM strategies aim to motivate individual agents, and integrate groups of agents to work together, which has helped drive a normative and pragmatic shift in governance modes, the characteristic ways in which the delivery of employment services steer state-society interactions. In addition to the traditional Weberian form of governance, which is characterized as using laws and rules (‘Procedural’ governance mode), three newer variants emerge: (1) ‘Corporate’ which relies on strengthening central direction through plans and incentives; (2) ‘Market’ which uses competition or results-based-payments to motivate actors; and (3) ‘Network’ which emphasizes the benefits of joint working to obtain the desired results (Considine and Lewis 1999). This paper empirically examines how well these academic descriptions of governance modes fit the reality of life on the frontline of employment services systems. Specifically, the research considers different governance modes, with a view to understanding how welfare-to-work reforms are translated into different practices that are utilized by street-level bureaucrats – in this case, employment consultants on the frontline, working directly with unemployed people. It compares the salience of these governance modes for frontline staff in two different countries and at four different times. Frontline staff were surveyed in Australia and the UK in 1998, 2008, 2012 and 2016. Australia pioneered a number of NPM-driven innovations in relation to public employment services, ultimately turning most service delivery functions over to private for-profit and not-for-profit agencies; while the UK has also contracted parts of these services out to private providers over the past ten years. We found that three modes of governance, Procedural, Network and Enterprise (a hybrid of the corporate and market types identified by Considine and Lewis (1999)) were replicated in a reduced form across the two different countries and also in different time periods. This suggests that the governance scales are robust, as they have now been used over a substantial period of time in these two different national systems. However, there are differences across national contexts, with significant differences between Australia and the UK for enterprise and network governance modes in each of the four years of the comparison. Procedural governance only differs between Australia and the UK in 2008, indicating that this is still the most stable and readily understood mode of governance on the frontline of employment services.

ABSTRACT. Street level bureaucrats’ behaviours have been subjects of several studies, but with different conclusions about the kinds of logics that can explain them. In studies that proceed from the Principal-Agent perspective, street level bureaucrats (as agents) comply with principals’ commands – or do not. Hence, their behaviours can be explained as choices about whether to comply or to follow another path, typically one that is self-serving. In studies that proceed from a psychological perspective, street level bureaucrats (as decision-makers) either follow scripts (heuristics enabling fast decision-making) or take account of all pertinent details known about the situation (deliberations that lead decision-making to be slow); on the spectrum in between fast and slow decisions might sit improvisation, which is not quite automatic (fast) nor quite satisficing (slow). Finally, in studies that proceed from an institutional perspective, street level bureaucrats are directed by their context to operate according to one of several governance modes, such as corporate, market, or network. That is, street level bureaucrats can be managed through alternative modes, and the mode in place systematically steers them to behave in some ways rather than others. This paper will explicate these alternative perspectives on explaining street level behaviours and expectations that arise from them.

The paper will then ask which of these perspectives is best supported by cases of non-routine but expected public problems, such as those typically dealt with in crisis preparedness and response. Preparedness for and response to recurring events like bushfires (wildfires, forest fires) during hot and dry seasons and flooding following extreme weather have been routinized in the sense that public organisations have been created and maintained to respond to them (emergency management agencies, fire departments, etc). In turn, front line responders are street level bureaucrats in that they are literally face to face with and take actions to mitigate emergencies; or they are face to face with citizens who are trying to cope with these extraordinary events. During most periods, would-be responders are in training, learning specific patterns of behaviour as well as specific hierarchies (incident command structures), while also being made aware of the unpredictable nature of emergency events. Hence, crisis responders work in a space where surprises co-exist with anticipation, and with events that combine existential threats, uncertainty, and urgency, as well as high symbolic and political risk. Two cases will be analysed. These have been selected because they share general political institutional and event characteristics but occurred at different times and scales, and because the street level behaviours (i.e., crisis responses) have been thoroughly documented in evaluations and scholarly analyses. These are the January 2003 Australian Capital Territory bushfire and the February 2009 Victoria ‘Black Saturday’ bushfire.

ABSTRACT. responsibility and no-one’s responsibility. This enables all levels of government, private organizations, communities and individuals to “pass the buck” in terms of making the necessary but often difficult changes that would help move it forward. Like climate change, it poses a quintessential collective action problem. Even within jurisdictions that have adopted sustainability as an explicit goal, the dynamic created by it being “everyone’s responsibility and no-one’s responsibility” hinders its implementation. Cities, like most multi-purpose governments, are traditionally organized around their distinct functional responsibilities, i.e. planning, public works, community development, parks and recreation, and transportation, to name a few. In this context, we explore which entity is (or should be) “responsible” for sustainability? And, if multiple units share responsibility, how are the subsequent fuzzy boundaries managed to prevent free-riding and mission-shirking by the various partner agencies?

This paper advances a theory of Functional Collective Action (FCA) and applies it to local sustainability as part of our effort to explain how cities can – and in some cases do – organize to successfully administer complex and functionally transboundary sustainability objectives in a manner that is comprehensive and durable. It develops and elaborates upon four general types of administrative structures able to integrate sustainability across administrative units: consolidated agencies, lead agency coordination, relationships and bargaining, and decentralized networks.

ABSTRACT. Now almost two decades into its treatment as a local objective, most city government leaders have a general awareness of what sustainability is, as well as a basic knowledge about the types of actions and policies that contribute to its improvement. Moreover, although they are not always explicitly bundled into a single comprehensive concept and labeled “sustainability”, the vast majority of cities consider these actions as components of locally important economic, environmental and social programs. Although it simultaneously looms over and directly impacts the long-term viability of actions in each of these three areas, climate change, and the policies meant to mitigate it, receive a more mixed reception across US cities.

This paper offers a 10,000 foot view of local sustainability initiatives in the United States. Using data from a nation-wide survey of over 500 cities, we present an overview of the relevant efforts being pursued by US municipalities and the organizational arrangements that they are using to do so. We provide a snapshot of the priorities, actions and administrative arrangements that US cities had in place in late 2015 and early 2016 related to sustainability. This data is used to develop a quantitatively grounded description of the amount of attention that US cities give different dimensions of sustainability, the frequency with which they pursue different policy actions, and how they organize to administer sustainability. We utilize correlational and cluster analyses to gain an initial idea of how these factors relate to each other and to identify the characteristics of cities associated with different types of actions. The insights gained from this quantitative overview provide context and frame questions regarding effect that organizational form and institutional characteristics have on cities’ abilities to overcome collective action dilemmas.

ABSTRACT. Four general organizational arrangements have been identified as enabling cities to overcome functional collective action arrangements: lead agency consolidation, lead agency coordination, relationships and bargaining, and decentralized networks. Each of these arrangements are based on and differentiated from each other according to the relative levels of administrative authority and decentralization associated with local sustainability efforts. In this paper, we present in-depth case studies of eight city governments that have strong sustainability programs and together utilize a cross-section of the four previously described arrangements to overcome FCA challenges. Specifically - through a series of site visits, semi-structured interviews with city sustainability staff, and archival research - we examine Kansas City, Missouri, Orlando, Florida, Fort Collins, Colorado, El Paso, Texas, Providence, Rhode Island, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Oakland, California, and Gainesville, Florida. We identify the key features and priorities of each city’s sustainability initiatives, paying particular attention to the identity and structure of the lead agency. This intentionally varies across the case study cities, and ranges from being a two person division within a Public Works Department, to being a six person unit within the City Manager’s office, to being a 40 person stand-alone “services area.” Reflecting their different structure, the approaches these units use to advance sustainability in their respective cities also varies. Via our case study research, we identify and characterize the formal and informal mechanisms each city employs to minimize challenges of fuzzy boundaries and functional collective action, and assess their impact on sustainability implementation and outcome.

ABSTRACT. Social network analysis is frequently used to examine interactions and collaborations across organizations, but has not often been utilized to explore the relationships that exists between independent units within a single organization. This paper uses network analysis to visualize and summarize the intra-city dynamic that exists around sustainability for a subset of our cases study cities: Fort Collins, Colorado, Kansas City, Missouri, and Orlando Florida. Data was collected via surveys administered to the head of every “functional unit” in each of these three city governments. Functional units are defined as having staff and being associated with specific service functions. Survey respondents were asked to identify whether, and the frequency with which, their unit worked with every other unit in their city government to advance the city’s overall sustainability efforts. Using this data, the network analysis creates an empirically-grounded visualization of the departmental interactions around sustainability city-wide and shows how the lead agency “plugs into” the larger web of interactions. As part of this process, we highlight the informal network structures that have emerged in these cities in attempt to match administrative processes and boundaries to the sustainability issues.

As the final paper in this panel, it then takes a step back and considers themes and patterns that emerged across the quantitative analysis, the eight case studies, and the network analysis. Using a comparative analysis, it closes by identifying the relative strengths and weaknesses of the various organizational arrangements employed and each general mechanism to overcome Functional Collective Action in US cities around sustainability.

ABSTRACT. Public service motivation (PSM)—an individual’s heightened need to serve the public and/or public-serving institutions—has been the focus of a great deal of research in recent decades (see Ritz et al. 2016). Much of this work confirms that certain individuals are predisposed toward public serving activities (Perry 1996), but mixed findings, methodological shortcomings, a paucity of practice-based applications (Christensen, Paarlberg and Perry, 2017), and a lack of conceptual clarity have led some to question the utility of PSM as a specific concept (Bozeman and Su 2015). Previous scholars have not clearly distinguished whether high PSM employees’ increased desire to help others/society (Wright and Pandey 2008) applies monolithically or some “publics” more than others. The tacit treatment of PSM as generalized may not be supportable given evidence that other closely related behaviors and attitudes are often conditional. For example, a good deal of experimental research suggests that expressed altruism is not unconditional but depends on positive affect or perceptions of deservedness (Bowles and Gintis, 2004; Fong 2007). It is reasonable to expect, therefore that PSM, which scholars suggest is related to altruism (Rainey and Steinbauer 1999; Brænder and Andersen 2013), may also not equally benefit all members of society. We test for the existence of conditional PMS in an experimental study of 200 public employees. The experiment has two treatment arms, where respondents are asked to recall their most positive or most negative experience with a client, as well as a control group. Subjects are then asked to answer questions from a recently developed multidimensional PSM scale. We expect that subjects primed with negative experiences will score lower on the PSM scale than both those in the control group and those given the positive recall prime. Support for this expectation will provide preliminary evidence for a conditional PSM. We also expect that the impact of the negative prime on expressed PSM will be moderated by subject’s Social Dominance Orientation, or support for the idea that some groups are inherently superior to, and therefore deserving of authority over, others (see for example Sidanius and Pratto 1999). We measure SDO using a widely used questionnaire (Gatto and Dambrun 2012) and expect that the impact of the negative prime on expressed PSM will be greater in those with higher SDO. The existence of conditional PSM, moderated by Social Dominance Orientation, would have important implications for the relationship between PSM and things like organizational commitment and performance. It might also help to explain the sometimes inconsistent results regarding those relationships in previous research.

ABSTRACT. Clarifying the ways in which transformational leadership affects performance remains an important topic for scholars and practitioners alike. Value fit and public service motivation (PSM) has been considered key mediating processes, but no comprehensive theoretical account for their distinct effects has been offered so far, and existing studies predominantly rely on cross-sectional research designs. This article outlines theoretical arguments for value fit and PSM as distinct ways for transformational leadership to increase performance in public service organizations. A multilevel panel dataset of 844 public service employees distributed on 153 organizations is used to assess whether transformational leadership indeed aligns employees’ individual values with those of the organization and stimulates PSM over time, and whether changes in value fit and PSM correlate with changes in employee performance. The study finds evidence of a mediating effect of value fit but no clear evidence for PSM as a mediator of the transformational leadership-performance relationship. Future research is encouraged to test the robustness of these findings using panel data from other empirical settings and preferably combined with experimentally induced variation in leadership to draw up firm conclusions on the ways transformational leadership can affect performance.

ABSTRACT. Scholarly interest in Public Service Motivation has yielded a vast amount of research explicating its benefits for public sector organizations; including increased employee job satisfaction, boosted individual performance, higher intention to stay with the organization, enhanced organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior. However, a closer inspection of the literature reveals mixed empirical evidence for each of these PSM impacts PSM. This study attempts to shed light on these contextual factors and measurement related choices made by researchers in the empirical studies and see if some part of the variance in the results is attributable to them. In order to do so, we perform a meta-analysis on each of these five impacts of PSM. By analyzing a total of 162 estimations, we consider the salience of two types of factors in the existing studies and how they strengthen or weaken a given individual or organizational impact of PSM. Firstly, we assess the impact of measurement related choices made by the researchers and, secondly, we look at the contextual factors that may be accountable for bringing in some of the variations in the results of the studies. We find evidence of the existence of a true effect for PSM over negative outcomes, organizational commitment and organizational citizenship. In addition, we also find that contextual variables, legal origin and corruption of the country, along with the measurement related variables, affect each of the five relationships in a unique manner. While we can say that there exists a relationship between PSM and beneficial outcomes in the organizational context, these benefits are concentrated or diluted depending on the level of corruption and the legal origins of the country. We find that the role of PSM in enhancing the job satisfaction of individuals employed in the public sector is even greater in corrupt countries, as compared to countries that rank lower in corruption. We have also found that lower perceived corruption strengthens the impact of PSM on individual performance and organizational commitment. Furthermore, our findings also show that countries with civil law traditions reap more benefits of PSM in terms of increased individual performance and reducing burnout and turnover intentions as compared to countries with common law legal traditions. Overall, this research contributes to the existing literature by explicating whether the variation in results of existing research is artefactual and the consequence of measurement choices, or an effect of the environment in which the study was conducted.

ABSTRACT. The simultaneous demands for democratic accountability, fiscal conservatism, leadership, improved performance, and customer service in the public sector have prompted local governments to “try, if not to fully embrace, strategic management approaches” (Bryson, 2003). Strategic planning is utilized by a majority of local and state governments, most nonprofit organizations, and within the national government (Bryson 2003; Poister and Streib, 2005). Much of the scholarly work in public strategic management has centered on the strategic planning and the resulting outcomes, ignoring what may be the most critical portion of the strategic process: implementation. Recent analysis indicates that 40-50% of municipal strategic initiatives are never fully implemented (Mitchell, 2018). Walker (2013) underscores this reality by stating that the alignment of strategy with the appropriate implementation approach is key to strategic success—even more so than strategy formulation. One element of successful strategic implementation centers upon buy-in from those involved. Mitchell (2014, 2018) has demonstrated that stakeholder support is essential to not only strategic planning, but also implementation—across most project types and phases. While stakeholder support is vital, less attention has been paid to which types of stakeholders are most vital to implementation. Stakeholders can vary from line employees to middle managers to senior executives to elected officials to community members, to name a few. Various studies have highlighted the importance of support for implementation from elected officials and senior executives (Bergen, 1982; Kemp et al., 1993; Young and Jordan 2008); middle managers (Huy 2002; 2011); and affected employees (Trader-Leigh, 2002)—however, few have analyzed the impact of these groups in a single study. Based on the literature, it is hypothesized that policymaker and executive support matter at the beginning and ending stages of implementation, while support of affected employees is vital during the execution of implementation. This proposal tests the hypothesis by examining survey responses regarding 207 strategic initiatives from 43 US municipalities in an original dataset to determine whether support from elected officials, senior executives, and/or affected employees is linked to implementation success (both holistically and for differing project contexts and implementation phases). Fixed-effect regression analysis is employed to isolate the independent effect of support from these groups of organizational actors. The findings can inform theory by identifying further contingencies within strategic management practice and provide guidance to municipal managers on how and when to seek buy-in from differing organizational groups during the process of implementation.

ABSTRACT. Devolution is intended to promote local decision making, honor differences in regional context, and facilitate accountability. In pursuit of these goals, the devolved welfare state can be observed across human services and is tightly linked with administrative choices around contracting out. Yet, we identify a conundrum: while the federal government has devolved program oversight to states and localities, it is still active in policy making in many areas by setting federal mandates for performance measurement or requiring particular evidence-based programming. This leads to novel implementation challenges. How do local authorities and service providers respond to top-down directives which shape the policies and programs that they ultimately are held responsible for? What leads to such different responses?

In this paper we propose a theoretical framework for understanding how national level reforms are experienced by and responded to by regional authorities, using the policy fields of homeless services and K-12 education. We develop the framework using data from a national survey of the population of homeless Continuum of Care networks as well as in-depth qualitative data from 18 regional networks. Based on a deductive analysis of that data, we suggest three ways in which local implementers respond. We then use data on how local school districts responded to No Child Left Behind to test and refine our framework.

Ultimately, we argue that regional authorities respond in one of three ways when faced with challenging federal mandates—strategic, authoritative, and ceremonial.

Strategic: Leverages policy mandates in order to generate new initiatives, focus energy, and (re)invest stakeholders in working toward shared goals. Most often found in high capacity networks or districts with strong existing relationships.

Authoritative: Utilizes policy mandates to consolidate power, including efforts to intimidate providers/schools into compliance, punish those who do not align, and minimize stakeholder voices. Most often found in networks or districts with existing fissures or bimodal relationships, or where local elected officials are heavily involved.

Ceremonial: Actions are often reactive, experienced as ‘muddling through,’ and legitimacy-seeking versus goal-directive. Unaligned core actions persist, usually from lack of knowledge, capacity, or resources.

We find these three basic responses held across both policy areas and provide a useful framework for understanding why federal mandates look and feel different across localities. While this question has plagued public administration since Pressman & Wildavsky, our framework helps update implementation research in light of growing networked governance, contracting (including charter schools), and expanding devolutionary trends.

ABSTRACT. Scholars typically define organizations as goal-seeking entities (Scott and Davis, 2006). Goals are also foundational components of theories of organizational excellence and change (Fernandez and Rainey, 2006), strategic management (Bryson, 2018) and performance management (van Dooren, Bouckaert, and Halligan, 2015). In short, the existence of organizational goals is a longstanding and central premise in organization and management research.

Surprisingly, however, important aspects of organizational goals have received little attention. A comprehensive literature review has revealed that there is actually very little on where organizational goals come from. Instead, dominant theories on goal-setting (Latham, Borgogni, and Petitta, 2008), goal-networks (Kruglanski, Shaw, Fishbach, and Friedman, 2002), and management by objectives (Drucker, 1954; Gagné, 2018) are typically focused at a more micro-level and start by assuming that organizational goals have already been established. Organizational-level theories include the idea that goals often are imposed (Kettl, 2017), emerge from negotiations (Cyert and March, 1963), result from emergent strategies (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel, 2009), or are part of conscious attempts at organizational strategizing, design and change (Daft, 2015). But again, these literatures do little to fill in the details around how the goals are formed in the first place.

As noted in the first paragraph, there is significant attention to goals in some situations where goals can be presumed to exist. In the public and nonprofit management literature, attention has been paid to such basics as short-term and distal goals, strategic and operational goals, formal and informal goals, and goal ambiguity, among other topics.

What has been missing is a comprehensive framework that incorporates existing work in the form of testable propositions related to organizational goal formation and implementation in public and nonprofit organizations. In this paper, the authors offer one approach to such a framework. Based on an extensive literature review across multiple disciplines, the authors first present a framework that includes the following interconnected categories: institutional determinants and influences; policy domain; policy issue; contingencies; goal formation approach; goal content; goal implementation approach; organizational performance, accountability, and learning; and a series of feedback loops. The authors then offer a set of propositions regarding goal formation and implementation in public and nonprofit organizations tied to the elements of the framework. Finally, the authors conclude the paper by setting out a research agenda aimed at advancing understanding of organizational goals, where they come from, and what their effects are on public and nonprofit organizations.

Slides: Toward a Theory of Goal Formation and Implementation in Public and Nonprofit Organizations

ABSTRACT. A growing body of literature on behavioral public administration has been devoted to studying core questions in the public administration/public management discipline. Some examples include performance information use (Olsen, 2015; Baekgaard and Serritzlew, 2016), trust of civil servants (Van Ryzin, 2011), representative bureaucracy (Riccucci, Van Ryzin and Li, 2016), chief executive decision-making (Avellaneda 2013), and transparency (de Fine Licht, 2014). This research has provided important insights into the empirical legitimacy of traditional public administration theories, including the effect of transparency on trust in government and the perception of legitimacy (Porumbescu et al, 2017).

However, we know little about how performance disclosure can shape civil servants’ behaviors during implementation, thus affecting performance. This study aims to address this gap in the public administration literature. We argue that civil servants’ knowledge of the kind of performance information disclosed to citizens should shape their behaviors. We also argue this relationship is moderated by the framing and type of incentives employers use to boost their performance. 

To test the direct and indirect effects, we will rely on data generated through a survey-experiment applied to street-level bureaucrats implementing a program called Doctor at Your Home (DH) in Mexico City. DH’s goal is to reach underserved patients by providing care in their homes, rather than expecting them to come to health centers. Originally, the program targeted only pregnant women in order to address increasing maternal death rates in Mexico City. To explore the reasons behind this high maternity mortality rate, Mexico City’s Ministry of Health (SEDESA) started to visit each home in September 2014 to identify pregnant women. 

In each county of Mexico City, SEDESA’s health centers are in charge of program implementation. SEDESA operates 210 health centers. Each health center is responsible for a certain number of neighborhoods. The program starts in the most populated neighborhoods and moves to the least populated ones until all of them are covered. One DH social worker from each health center visits households and looks for pregnant women. During the home visits, social workers advise the mother-to-be to adopt a healthy diet, recommend prenatal care and explain how to identify signs of common pregnancy complications. If the mother-to-be is not receiving prenatal care, the social worker provides her a 48-hour pass to go to her nearest health center for treatment. If she is unable to go to the clinic within that period, a physician will visit her to evaluate the overall health of her pregnancy. Based on the evaluation, she is referred to a health center for follow-up prenatal care consults. 

Two hundred and ten DH social workers were invited to participate in a seminar about program implementation. During the seminar and using a survey, we assessed participants’ roles and experiences with the program, as well as their background characteristics. All subjects were presented with the same hypothetical scenario in which each health center was required to post the weekly number of households visited by each social worker on SEDESA’s web page. Then subjects were assigned to one of three possible treatment groups, where we manipulated (1) the framing of the punishment if the performance goals were not achieved, and (2) the types of incentives to boost performance. Using data generated from this survey-experiment, we tested the moderating effect of incentives and their framing on implementers’ job discretion preferences.  

ABSTRACT. In the United States, many governmental agencies have found their budgets constrained due to the double impact of the 2008-2011 global recession and calls for increased government efficiency. Particularly hard-hit have been public services deemed to be non-essential. Government-nonprofit collaboration to meet this service demand is one solution.

This form of service collaboration has a long- standing presence in the public affairs scholarship, but it has been discussed almost entirely from the perspective of nonprofits as recipients of public monies to extend public services while limiting the size of bureaucracy (e.g., Salamon’s “third-party government”, 1987). Much less understand is the impact of nonprofits as philanthropic providers or coproducers of public services, despite evidence this is a growing phenomenon (Gazley, Cheng, and Lafontant, in press).

In such cases, do government-supporting charities help or hinder public values of social equity in public service access? The concern is well founded since in the case of public school foundations, Paarlberg and Gen (2009), Suslova (2018), and Nelson and Gazley (2014) find the philanthropic capacity of these charities is associated with community wealth. This study uses the context of public recreation and natural resources to ask whether the phenomenon of “Friends of the Parks” and other state parks charities will unfold as it seems to be unfolding for public school charities, which appear to largely exacerbate rather than compensate for the distributional inequities of American economic life. Indeed, this context of parks may be especially useful to study since observers note the strong historical association between White, middle-class interests and the politics of outdoor recreation (Floyd and Johnson, 2002, 72). For public parks, the social equity concerns are validated by extensive research demonstrating connections between human health outcomes and access to green space and the natural environment (Strife and Downey 2009).

This study tests the equity question with a combination of institutional and community factors known to play a role in supply-side and demand-side theories of citizen service use. The study employs a unique dataset of the charities supporting 40% of all state parks across the United States. Data include substantial coded characteristics of the charity, joined with similarly rich community demographics via the U.S. Census Bureau, park visitorship and other outcome data, and comprehensive state park system finance and activity data. This research should be of interest to scholars studying governments under fiscal stress, as well as those interested in racial and distributional justice.

ABSTRACT. This study examines formation of board interlock, a phenomenon that occurs when board members serve on the boards of multiple organizations, thereby connecting the organizations through board affiliations. Network structure influences the development of larger network in which they are embedded and it has potential to shape important organizational outcomes through the network position (Uzzi, 1996). Studying board interlock formation process is especially important, as the structure of interlock relationships may disproportionately affect policy contexts in which the nonprofits develop (Salzman & Domhoff, 1983). While board interlock has been studied extensively in public and private contexts, the topic is relatively new to nonprofit scholarship, and the question of how board members’ affiliation networks emerge remains largely unanswered. I fill this gap by exploring the structure of nonprofit board interlock by studying network formation process.

Existing studies find that networks emerge through a process where organization-specific characteristics such as financial resources or size to be important predictors (Zaheer & Bell, 2005). Furthermore, extensive literature finds that trust and reputation gained through previous interactions influence future relationship (Gulati & Singh, 1998). Network formation depends upon not only the organizational-specific characteristics and previous interactions, but also upon the structure of the rest of the network (Contractor, Wasserman, & Faust, 2006). For example, similar attributes between the two parties (McPherson et al., 2001) or the existing social structure may influence the ways in which the networks grow. Despite theoretical significance of structural properties, however, less is known about the structural conditions that explain network tie formation. I focus on three mechanisms — (1) preferential attachment, (2) homophily and (3) transitivity — to test which network processes are most predominant in predicting board interlock.

To address interdependence nature of network formation and to model longitudinally observed networks, I use a temporal exponential random graph model (TERGM) to analyze a unique dataset (1998-2015) of over 1,000 public charities in three cities in New York. Studying how nonprofits are connected through their overlapping board members is important to policy makers, funders, and nonprofit managers in that such knowledge inform how networks might best be structured and managed. The findings from the study contributes to literature and practice by providing evidence on procedural dynamics of network formation, which helps to predict aggregate patterns of whole network development over time.

ABSTRACT. The size of the U.S. immigrant (foreign-born) population grew by 57 percent between 1990 and 2000 (Malone et al., 2003). Along with the growth of immigrant population, Asians and Hispanics, the two fastest growing racial/ethnic groups in the United States, will make up nearly 40% of the U.S. population in 50 years (Pew Research Center, 2015). Many believe that K-12 education is one of the effective mechanisms for social mobility and economic prosperity, but there is limited research with regard to the landscape of nonprofits working to improve K-12 education across communities, and especially their availability for racially and ethnically minority groups. Government failure theory suggests that more diversified communities would have larger number of nonprofits due to heterogeneous demands (Corbin, 1999; Matsunaga et al., 2010). Based on this argument, we can expect that school districts with a higher ratio of minority students would have more nonprofits committed to fostering K-12 education. However, a current study on K-12 education nonprofits suggests that this may not be true due to the varying levels of financial support for education nonprofits across the communities (Paarlberg & Gen, 2009). As such, our study explores the density of K-12 education nonprofits across US school districts with a focus on racial and ethnic diversity. We draw data from 2010 Census records, 2013-2017 American Community Survey, and the National Center for Charitable Statistics to capture information about the diversities in each community as well as the prevalence of K-12 education nonprofits per school district. To capture the density of K-12 education nonprofits, we use the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) classification system and identify organizations that serve K-12 system such as Single organization support (B11), Educational services (B90), Remedial reading & encouragement (B92), Parent & teacher groups (B94). Our empirical model also controls for community factors including the number of public schools versus private schools, household median income, poverty rate, crime rate, population, and the percent of residents younger than 18. The preliminary findings suggest that minority students might not receive enough support for education opportunities from the nonprofit sector even though they are the ones who need them most. After presenting the empirical results, we will discuss implications for both policymakers and nonprofit leaders as well as the issues related to the public-nonprofit joint-production of K-12 education systems.

ABSTRACT. Scholars have increasingly recognized the paucity of research in understanding how nonprofit organizations contribute to public governance and policy process, calling for research that sheds light on how the nonprofit sector and philanthropic organizations serve as a democratic mediator that promotes civic value (Berger & Neuhaus, 1977; Bushouse, 2017; Fyall, 2016; Guo, 2007). In order to perform their service, advocacy, and empowerment functions, it is crucial for public charities to establish representative structures through which the views and concerns of constituents are represented by those who speak on their behalf (Guo, 2007; Guo and Musso, 2007). Drawing on the case study of community foundations, a type of community-based charitable and grantmaking 501(c)(3) nonprofits, we analyzed the changing landscape of their organizational strategy and how community foundations might play a community leadership role to facilitate civic engagement and policy discussion. Coupled with manual coding and supervised machine learning methods to analyze social media data, this study provides novel theoretical insights and empirical data to shed light on “the civil society approach to civic engagement” by investigating the mechanisms of how community foundations engage the community in policy process for advancing community change and channeling community voice from the bottom up.

To address these research questions, we investigated online civic engagement behaviors of community foundations on a social media platform, namely Twitter. Through mining publicly available data on Twitter, we have finished a preliminary data analysis on a random sample of 953 text data (including tweets, posts, and tags) of community foundations in the U.S. from September 1, 2016 to September 1, 2017 using content analysis and manual coding.

Our inductive analysis of the sampled data resulted in theorizing a ladder of community leadership with five levels of mechanisms for engaging with communities, ranging from the bottom rung of (1) relationship building, (2) knowledge building, (3) dialogue, (4) resource mobilization to the highest rung of (5) leadership. Community leadership, thus, may be conceptualized as a continuum of the community leadership capacity of a community foundation.

This study takes up Guo’s (2007) and Bushouse’s (2017) important call for research to contribute knowledge on how the nonprofit sector and philanthropic organizations serve as mediating democratic institutions by analyzing their engagement behaviors on Twitter. This study also highlights the interdependence between the nonprofit sector and policymaking as put forth by Smith and Lipsky (2009) and Vaughan and Arsneault (2013).

ABSTRACT. When looking to improve citizen participation and face contentious public debates, it is important for public officials to understand the argumentation tactics that people use in public meetings. Public meetings are important to examine since these are the ubiquitous local government forums where policy deliberations happen. In this paper, we examine the extent to which the tactics are effective (or not) in shifting policy discourse in public meetings. We use Habermas’s communicative rationality and Aristotle’s classical approach to rhetoric as the conceptual lenses to identify ten argumentation tactics in public meetings. The tactics are grouped under four Aristotelian categories: kairos or situational context (first mover advantage, using time as ally, and mountains are too high); logos or rationality ((ab)use of facts, take it down the rabbit hole); ethos or speaker’s credibility (expert knows best, belittling dissenters, moral high ground); and pathos or emotional appeal (loaded language, trigger the bomb).

Our main research question in this paper is: which of the above tactics are effective in shifting public deliberations? We consider a shift toward Habermasian mutual understanding to be a positive outcome in public discourse. Conversely, a shift toward more differences would be considered as a negative outcome in public discourse. Towards this end, we examine public meetings of selected counties for how the tactics shifted the discourse on common policy measures. The policies include: (a) opioid crisis; (b) vacation rentals (through sharing platforms like Airbnb); (c) affordable housing. We find that the tactics can be used in both ways—for mutual understanding as well as for accentuating the differences. Kairos tactics can enhance mutual understanding if the initial framing is inclusive, sufficient time is permitted for dialog, and there are no imagined or real policy barriers.Logos tactics achieve mutual understanding through reasoning, Ethos can be effective when the participant is an expert, but does not belittle or inflexible. Pathos can either flare up emotions with divisive rhetoric and angry outbursts or calm the meeting by being inclusive and using humor to arrive at common values.

ABSTRACT. In the decades since the advent of the world wide web, it has become an invaluable source of information and exchange. This has had a profound impact on individuals’ private lives, but also on how cities conduct and manage public life in the 21st century. The benefits associated with access to the Internet are many and varied, but social media platforms in particular foster communication and a sense of place. Cities incorporate social media as exactly that – new media through which they can communicate to citizens. Citizens, in turn, take to platforms like Facebook or Twitter to learn about local issues, converse with their neighbors, and make their voices heard. These conversations represent new feedback loops for cities and opportunities to enhance city service delivery. With each tweet they publish, citizens are creating digital content about their neighborhoods and their satisfaction with services. Collection of open source data, published on social media platforms, could paint more comprehensive pictures of public policy issues than municipal data alone and inform more efficient use of city resources.

This analysis explores whether citizen engagement on social media platforms enhances city response patterns, as measured by the average time-to-close for 311 service requests. It evaluates a sample of cities that have taken different approaches to citizen-generated content and seeks to identify the effect of including such content in 311 programs on city responsiveness. The analysis will combine data from cities' open-data initiatives with data derived from social networking platforms and publicly available application programming interfaces (APIs).

Existing public management theories suggest that cities should strive to uphold ideals like accountability, efficiency, and equity. In an age where information is prevalent, and communication happens in real time, they must also be dynamic, adaptable, and responsive. Incorporation of citizen-generated content has very real potential for streamlining city services, informing public management decisions, and enhancing quality of life. This evaluation will identify which "mix" of that data - formal 311 requests alone or requests supplemented by citizen-generated content - results in the most responsive city services.

ABSTRACT. Even though public hearings have faced criticism when subjected to scrutiny in the public administration literature that they have no significant influence over policy decisions, they remain a frequently used method for direct citizen participation in practice. This irony, the persistent use of a seemingly useless method, have been explained in the literature as resulting from either mandatory provisions that require public involvement or from deceptive strategies of policy-makers aimed at legitimizing foregone policy decisions. However, this explanation may stand only with a strong assumption that all policy-makers are self-interested.

In this study, we suggest a new perspective on the effectiveness of public hearings by exploring the hearings on single-payer healthcare in New York State in 2014. We argue that although public opinion and information that flow into the policy process through public hearings have defects as policy evidence, it can affect decision-making by leading policy-makers to consider public interests before and after public hearings more than they would when there is no relevant hearing. This finding is consistent with the argument that public hearings are effective as a ritual, in itself. However, at the same time, it alerts government decision-makers to be vigilant on biases caused by specious and overstated arguments. From this point of view, academic debates about public hearings should deal with the biases that public hearings can cause.

This study involved the two following tasks. First, by using public hearing transcripts, we assess the invited speakers’ testimonies from the perspective of evidence-based policy assessing the types and quality of evidence presented at public hearings to consider their utility in informing the policy process. Second, from the policy-makers’ point of view, we look at how policy-makers recognize and use public hearings and those testimonies in the process of drafting legislation.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents findings of an ethnographic case study of the potential and limitations of efforts to redefine community-police relations and transform race relationships. The setting is the city of Falcon Heights, where Philando Castile, a young African American man, was killed by a police officer. His death brought to the foreground longstanding patterns of racism in the town. Community leaders described the community grief and upheaval as “a microcosm of what vexes America.” The city convened a Task Force Policing and Inclusion, which met for 9 months in conjunction with a series of five community conversations. The lessons learned from these efforts are immediately relevant to public managers grappling with police-community relations and racial inclusion/exclusion elsewhere and to scholars interested in the potential and limitations of deliberation to address inequality.

Scholarship on deliberation suggests it may facilitate problem/solution redefinition and inclusive governance (Bingham et al., 2005; Quick & Feldman, 2011). Ideally, deliberative processes ensure diverse stakeholders have voice (Nabatchi, 2010) and mobilize participants towards shared action (Ansell & Gash, 2017). However, race dynamics cloud judgments about what constitutes a public “problem” (Schneider & Ingram, 2005) and perceptions of leadership legitimacy (Ospina & Foldy, 2009). The risk of tokenism and damaged trust are particularly perilous where “conversation” is elevated as a method to transform racism and privilege. In this fraught context, the structures and processes of deliberations are critical to realizing their potential to produce change ( Morse, 2010; Bryson et al. 2013).

My data sources are 225 hours of participant observation, meeting transcripts, post-process focus groups and interviews with key stakeholders, and surveys of community conversation participants. I trace problem/solution redefinition over the nine months of dialogues and participants’ accounts of how they experienced deliberative process design features that were intended to alleviate domination, elevate the influence of marginalized groups, and minimizing the stifling effects of White fragility.

Preliminary findings indicate participants began with divergent points but increasingly converged in their views about safety, policing, and race relations. Their problem orientation shifted from a “bad apple” police officer needing discipline to their own complicity in systematic racism; their solutions shifted towards making personal commitments to create safety for everyone and address White privilege. Notably, participants attribute these shifts in part to particular features of the duration, sequencing, and pacing of the deliberative process which allowed them to build trust, discover new perspectives, and express and listen to non-White perspectives.

ABSTRACT. This paper asks “Do the predictors of client outcomes differ depending on what racial/ethnic group a client belongs to? Does representative bureaucracy function differently for different racial/ethnic groups?” Existing research on racial dynamics in public administration (PA) rarely considers racism in an explicit manner, despite considerable evidence from other disciplines that many organizations pay a role in perpetuating racial inequality. Another limitation of the PA literature is that it typically draws on biracial frameworks, focusing on white versus minority, or same-race versus different-race. Sociological studies, however, suggest that different racial groups occupy different places in the racialized social system of the U.S. This study contributes to the literature by introducing the framework of a racialized social system to PA, allowing for the development of a more nuanced understanding of how racial dynamics help shape the distributional outcomes of public organizations.

In this study, I conduct an observational study of client outcomes, focusing on five different racial groups (white, black, Latino, Asian, and Native American). For each racial/ethnic group, I examine how bureaucratic outcomes are associated with the racial composition of personnel in the organization. I use a 13-year panel dataset of California public schools (2000-2012), assembled from publicly available records. Bureaucratic outcomes are measured using standardized exam results, which are reported by racial group for each school. I run panel regression models (specifically, random effects with a lagged dependent variable). I estimate several alternative models as robustness checks, including two-way fixed effects models. I also use various measures of the racial composition of the organization, including measures of passive representation (% same race), diversity, and white dominance (% white). The results indicate different patterns is results for different racial groups. Same-race effects are strongest and most consistent for Asians and Latinos. Managers should take care to distinguish between distinct minority groups. A solution that works for one minority group may not work for others.

ABSTRACT. This paper traces societal, institutional and individual-level drivers of unequal representation of women in public institutions. It examines macro- and micro-level factors that reproduce unequal representation of women in male-dominated roles. The contributions of this paper are twofold, first it locates both formal and informal practices in organizational processes that seemingly appear gender neutral but are deeply informed by masculine advantages. Second, it reveals the ways in which organizational equity performance perpetuate (manifesting in the form of women’s representation in male dominated positions).

Previous research suggests that equal employment opportunity for women and marginalized groups is fostered by organizational- and individual-level choices. Hence, the performance equity assessment in this study explores organizational factors as well as both formal and informal institutional systems that appear to enable or impede women from engaging in roles that are often considered male domains. In addition to exploring organizational factors, the study also pays attention to individual-level factors that support women in their pursuit of their professional roles.

This study uses organizational behavior, organizational equity and a critical gender theory lens to examine micro-and macro-level factors that make it challenging for women to overcome barriers as they climb up the organizational ladder. The study is applied within the context of two facets of local government operations: the office of the City Manager and the Police Department. Both operations are heavily male dominated and have extensive interaction with communities. In addition, in both roles, city managers and police leaders exercise bureaucratic decision-making that impact organizational operations and service delivery to citizens. To trace the representation of women in the aforementioned roles, the paper compares the career paths of female city managers and female police officers. Qualitative data that is used for the study comes from semi-structured interviews with female city managers and female police officers in the state of Florida and Connecticut respectively.

The initial findings suggest that informal organizational arrangements in the form of mentorship and individual-level support structure both play an important role for women to pursue these positions. The findings also point to the gendered nature of formal organizational processes and individual level social role expectations that make it difficult for women to overcome barriers in their career paths.

ABSTRACT. Although modern research on representative bureaucracy often seeks to understand how socialization based on sex, gender, race, and ethnicity shapes bureaucratic discretion, Kingsley was specifically concerned with class when he coined the term in 1944. This study revisits Kingsley’s original conception of representative bureaucracy, focusing on the ways in which socioeconomic status (SES) affects the behavior of a subset of street-level bureaucrats whose day-to day decisions can have life or death consequences: police officers. Specifically, we ask: How do officer biases based on the socioeconomic profile of different neighborhoods shape the patrol decision they make in poor and wealthy communities? What role does officer SES (in the present and as a youth) play in shaping officer perceptions and patrol decisions? We provide some initial answers to both of these questions using data from a survey experiment conducted with officers working in Georgia and Ohio.

Previous research suggests that the socioeconomic profile of a given neighborhood may shape officer patrol decisions and policing outcomes (Alpert & Dunham, 1988; Klinger, 1997; Meehan & Ponder, 2002; Peterson & Krivo, 2010). Most of the implicit bias research to date, however, fails to consider such context bias and focuses instead on bias directed towards individuals with certain demographic characteristics. This research uses implicit bias measurement techniques to detect bias based on the socioeconomic profile of a given neighborhood. Additionally, we examine the relationship between officer SES (in the present and as a youth), bias based on neighborhood socioeconomic context, and simulated patrol decisions. Initial findings indicate a significant relationship between officer SES, patrol context, and work-relevant attitudes and behaviors.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how cognitive frames about public problems affect the governance structures and decisions of cross-sector collaborations. Framing is a social process that makes some aspects of perceived reality more salient than others, privileging certain definitions of problems and solutions over others (Entman 1993). We investigate how frames emphasizing the importance of outcomes data affect the issues that collaborative partners address and, ultimately, collaborative approaches to social change.

We conducted a mixed methods study of local cross-sector partnerships using the Collective Impact (CI) model to improve public education. The CI model assumes that influential institutions from the nonprofit, public, and private sectors can collaborate to pursue a common agenda to improve population outcomes (Kania & Kramer 2011). The Strive Together framework uses the CI model to focus collaborative partners on improving specific indicators of children’s academic development from “cradle-to-career.” By 2017, over 70 communities in 31 states had adopted the framework (Strive Together 2017).

This study draws on original data from 27 semi-structured interviews with the staff and partners of collaborations in two communities that have used the Strive Together framework for most of the past decade. We triangulate these data with an analysis of web sites from 12 additional Strive collaboratives, which found that the framework substantially influenced how sites framed local public education problems, outcomes, and solutions. The paper proposed here uses those findings as a springboard from which to develop a more nuanced understanding of how the two communities where we conducted interviews chose indicators and used them to select specific issues, collaborative activities, and partners.

Our interview data reveal sharp contrasts in the ways the two communities used outcome indicators. For example, while one community targeted aggregate graduation rates for improvement, the second targeted racial disparities in school discipline. The first community’s backbone staff organization selected indicators to target; the second used a mix of top-down and bottom-up decision structures. While both communities maintained a tight focus on academic outcomes in designing and disseminating collaborative program activities, the second also attended to broader systems and policy changes in expanding its program activities.

These findings resonate with research on the influence of framing in social movements (Clemens 1996). Accordingly, we propose that ‘social reform’ frames can catalyze collaborators to pursue changes in institutional arrangements and power distributions, while ‘managerial’ frames may constrain them to working within existing institutions and power distributions.

ABSTRACT. Collaborative governance often involves multiple institutional actors that have different missions, responsibilities, and representational structures. These differences often create challenges for these actors when they try to work together to manage local common-pool resources. These challenges are evident during the implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management (SGMA) passed by the California state legislature in 2014, which requires local institutional actors to collaborate in developing new groundwater sustainability agencies and sustainability plans within time limits. These actors include both special districts (special-purpose governments) that specialize in water management as well as cities and counties (general-purpose governments) that have diverse portfolios of responsibilities and constituencies. The differences in responsibilities, representational structures, and incentives between special-purpose and general-purpose governments have created tensions among agencies working together in meeting the SGMA mandate. Drawing on information gathered by in-depth interviews with local officials and a survey of institutional actors, the paper examines how different contextual factors—problem severity, the extent of jurisdictional overlaps, differences in use patterns, and differences in representational structures—affect how the two types of governments approach the collaborative process and the extent to which they can resolve potential conflicts.

ABSTRACT. In Collaborative Governance Regimes, Emerson and Nabatchi (2015) make passing reference to the development of collaborative governance regimes (CGRs), asserting that once initiated, the development of CGRs will vary based on their formative type. This paper digs more deeply into questions of how CGRs change over time and how CGRs develop and sustain their collaboration dynamics as they foster actions, outcomes, and adaptation. These are important questions for researchers and practitioners as they design, manage, participate in, and evaluate collaborative governance systems. Understanding the likely developmental phases of CGRs assists us in appropriately evaluating performance at specific times, identifying expected challenges for participants over time, and preparing for anticipated resources and interventions to improve CGR performance. To inform this theoretical investigation, we draw on five literatures to identify relevant theories and research about developmental dynamics in social organizations: group dynamics, organizational development, interorganizational relations, interorganizational networks, and integrated resource management. From this review of key scholarship, we highlight different approaches taken by scholars and suggest how their work might be useful to the study of CGRs. We also discuss some of the limitations in transferring these approaches to CGRs, including the inadequate treatment of external influences (especially in the early scholarship), the nature and extent of the problem or policy arena that is prompting CGR formation, and the primary affiliation and allegiance of CGR participants to other organizations and constituents. The developmental dynamics observed in three case studies are introduced representing three types of CGRs- self-initiating, independently convened, and externally directed CGRs. We then turn to Van de Ven and Poole’s (1995) noted article and explore four different families of social change theory (life cycle, evolution, dialectic, and teleology) and note the existing gaps in the use of these theories to explain developmental trajectories of CGRs. We find that collaborative governance and network theorists have not looked beyond the life cycle approach to developmental change, which may in fact be the least appropriate approach for conceptualizing CGR developmental dynamics. We then present a multi-theoretical framework to guide future empirical investigations into these dynamics across different CGR types, revisit the three cases through this new framework, and conclude with a discussion of the implications for managing and participating in CGRs.

ABSTRACT. It is difficult for direct leaders to get their message across to employees (Jacobsen et al. 2015), but leadership at higher levels is even more challenging (Yang et al. 2010). Our aim is therefore to obtain better knowledge about transmissions of leadership between different hierarchical levels.

Pasha et al. (2014) find that transformational leadership flows from higher to lower leadership levels, such that top leadership influences the leadership behavior of the first level supervisors indirectly through their influence on middle managers. They don’t find a direct flow from top-tier to lower-tier leadership for this type of leadership behavior, but each level of leadership still has independent effects. In a call for future research, Pasha et al. (2017) argue that other leadership behaviors (in addition to transformational leadership) should be explored, and that future studies should rely on separate information sources for the different factors in question. They also recommend exploring the possible cascading effects of leadership from top leadership tiers to the lower tiers in the public sector. Our paper contributes to close all these gaps.

We examine how successful different leaders are in their attempts to transmit leadership behavior to lower levels for transformational, transactional and distributed leadership. We argue that this depends on the leadership identity of leaders, that is ”the extent to which an individual views himself or herself as a leader” (Grøn et al. 2018:6). Our key claim is that only leaders whose leadership identity is as strong or stronger than their occupational identity will be able to influence the leadership behavior of the leaders below them and ensure that employees perceive their active leadership.

Focusing on health and social services in Denmark (and thus holding function and macro-institutions constant), we investigate transformational, transactional and distributed leadership at three levels. We have data from 2498 employees, 134 direct leaders and 27 leaders of leaders. The research design is a multilevel, quantitative study of leadership at different levels. We have exact knowledge about the specific chains of control, and this enables us to use multi-level regressions combined with structural equation modelling (SEM). We can therefore connect data from the whole hierarchy.

The key contribution is improved knowledge about transfers of leadership to followers. If our key expectation is correct, the implication is that all leaders should develop their leadership identity to be at least as strong as their occupational identity.

ABSTRACT. Many public sector organizations currently implement profound organizational changes including mergers, cutbacks, and general restructuring to become more effective at delivering welfare services (Kuipers et al. 2014). Such change processes have substantive consequences for the employees, and their support for the change implementation is a key element in determining its outcome (Bordia et al. 2004; Fernandez and Rainey 2006; Kelman 2005). But are some employees better at engaging in leading the organization towards successful change than others?

The distributed leadership (DL) literature emphasizes the importance of involving employee resources in leadership tasks to facilitate organizational support and performance (Bennett et al. 2003; Bolden 2011; Gronn 2000). Theoretically, DL can be defined as the sharing of generic leadership tasks to influence resource availability, decision making, and goal setting within an organizational perspective (Gronn 2000). However, not all employees are expected to have high agency in DL. Employees with high public service motivation (PSM), i.e. motivation to do good for others and society through public service delivery (Perry and Hondeghem 2008), exert more pro-social citizenship behavior and possibly also more pro-social intra-organizational behavior during change processes (Wright, Christensen, and Isett 2013). High PSM employees are thus expected to express higher agency in DL compared with low PSM employees. Yet, this positive PSM-DL association is only likely to benefit the organization if the employees agree with the goals of the change process. This paper thus investigates how PSM relates to employee agency in DL during times of organizational change depending on employee agreement with organizational goals.

The study uses a sample with balanced panel data (n=650) from two consecutive surveys collected in one of Scandinavia’s largest public hospitals. The hospital went through a major organizational change process during 2012-2014 as four smaller hospitals merged into one large hospital unit. The first survey to the hospital staff was launched right after the mergers were decided, and the second survey was conducted in early 2015. Both surveys contain measures of employee PSM, employee agency in DL, and organizational goal agreement in the change process, which enables a measurement separation of independent and dependent variables to strengthen the causal claim. Preliminary analyses show that high PSM employees do indeed participate more actively in leading their hospital units during these times of organizational change. Employee PSM may thus be considered an organizational strongpoint by public managers striving to obtain a successful reform outcomes.

ABSTRACT. Ethics refers to normative principles about what are seen as “right” behavior according to a specific society (Trevino and Brown, 2006). Such principles are important components in good governance (Perry et al. 2014). Recently, research has highlighted ethical leadership as having an important role in ensuring ethical conduct among public employees (e.g. Hassan, Wright, and Yukl, 2015). Ethical leadership can be understood as the character, decision-making, and behavior that a leader demonstrates to motivate others to make decisions and behave in accordance with relevant ethical standards (Heres, 2014: 37). Yet, the majority of studies have investigated the effects of middle managers’ ethical leadership (e.g. Kolthoff et al., 2010; Hassan, Wright, and Yukl, 2015) without considering the role of top management. Consequently, less is known about the importance and understanding of ethical leadership at different management levels and how this is linked to employees’ behavioral considerations. The aim of this paper is therefore to explore the following research question: How can ethical leadership at different management levels be related to ethical behavioral considerations among subordinates?

Theoretically, some scholars argue that top management is most influential as they decide on the overall ethical standards of an organization and can inspire subordinates to behave accordingly (Weaver et al., 2005). Other scholars argue that the distance between the leader and subordinates matters the most. Therefore, middle managers serve as better ethical role models for subordinates (David and Rothstein, 2006). Lastly, some argue that both management levels are important and suggest a cascading effect of ethical leadership, meaning that top management will function as a role model for middle management, who will then function as a role model for subordinates (Mayer et al., 2009).

In order to investigate the research question, this paper applies a qualitative multilevel comparative case design. Based on a Most Similar Systems Design logic, two public hospitals with a systematic variation in the top management focus on ethical leadership are compared. 20 semi-structured interviews are conducted, consisting of focus group interviews with respectively top- and middle management and individual interviews with subordinates. The paper contributes with important insights about the dynamics through which ethical considerations are transferred from different management levels and down through an organization.

ABSTRACT. Within the public management research, scholars’ primary source of information has been managers’ self-reports of their management practices (Favero et al., 2018). However, empirical research suggests that there is a discrepancy between employees’ and managers’ perceptions (Fleenor et al., 2010) and that employees’ perceptions of public management are more strongly related to organizational performance than manager’s self-reports (Jacobsen & Andersen, 2015; Favero, Meier & O’Toole, 2016). Therefore, I argue that in order to better understand the relationship between public management and performance, more knowledge is needed about why employees’ perceptions of management differ from managers’ perceptions. Accordingly, the present study aims to get a better understanding of why this discrepancy occurs. More specifically, the following research question will be examined: To what extent does manager’s ability, motivation and opportunities explain the discrepancy between employee’s and manager’s perceptions of people management?

People management refers to the implementation of human resource (HR) practices together with supportive leadership by frontline managers (FLMs) (Knies, Leisink & Van der Schoot, 2017) and is based on the notion that FLMs are increasingly charged with the responsibility to implement HR practices in public organizations, and this inevitably goes together with FLM’s support towards employees. As the research question suggests, the AMO-framework (Appelbaum et al., 2000) will be used to explain the discrepancy between employee’s and FLM’s perceptions of people management. This framework suggests that FLM’s ability (A), motivation (M) and opportunity (O) enhances their individual performance and as such, their people management (Trullen et al., 2016). The theoretical rationale is that because FLM’s people management will be improved, it will become more likely that they will get through to their employees, and as such the discrepancy between employees’ and FLM’s perceptions of people management will decrease.

The hypotheses will be tested based on dyadic data analysis using multilevel modeling, with data from FLMs (n=285) and teachers (n=3,581) in schools. The dependent variable will be calculated using parallel survey items regarding people management from FLM- and teacher data and the independent variables will be measured using the FLM data. Based on the results, organizations could consider how to facilitate their frontline managers’ ability, motivation and opportunities to decrease perceptual discrepancy between employees and managers and as such, increase people management effectiveness.

ABSTRACT. Over the past decades, research on public service motivation (PSM) has made substantial progress in terms of explaining desired work-related outcomes of the concept (Ritz et al. 2016). More recently, an increasing body of research is focusing on the potential “dark sides” of PSM and has found that PSM is associated with negative attitudes, such as dissatisfaction and burnout (e.g. Van Loon et al. 2015). This research is relevant as it advances our understanding of the concept of PSM. However, we argue that an additional dark side of PSM requires attention as it is a prerequisite for flourishing good societies and organizations: unethical behavior (Koven 2015). Building on recent theoretical developments exploring the potential unethical outcomes of PSM (Schott and Ritz 2017, Ripoll 2018), we aim to empirically answer, for the first time, the question of whether highly public service-motivated individuals vary their justification of an unethical behavior when this type of behavior advances or puts at risk their interpretation of the public interest. In order to shed light on this question, we take an experimental approach, which is in line with the recent calls in public administration research (Grimmelikhuijsen et al. 2016). In the survey experiment, first the individual’s interpretation of the public interest is identified. To do this, respondents see a pair of conflicting interpretations of the public interest. For each pair, respondents are asked to report the degree to which they identify with these two interpretation of the public interest by distributing 10 points to each option. After that, they encounter a vignette that puts in play the two conflicting interpretations. Depending on their interpretation, individuals are confronted with a situation in which an unethical action either advances or puts at risk “their” public interest. Finally, respondents are asked to report the extent to which the unethical behavior can be justified in three different hypothetical dilemma situations to ensure sufficient variation in the cases in which individuals’ public interest is advanced or put at risk. This study is relevant for both theory and practice. On the one hand, it contributes to the debate about the desirability of selecting individuals with high levels of PSM to have an ethical and high performing workforce. On the other hand, this study makes evident the importance of considering the public interest, and its interpretations, when conducting PSM research in general and research on the behavioral “dark” sides of PSM in particular.

ABSTRACT. Public service motivation is based upon the concept of serving society. This definition automatically assumes that PSM leads to behavioural outcomes. However, understanding the decision-making processes that lead to behavioural outcomes remains understudied. This is important in order to advance our understanding of the applied utility of PSM. One critical component in linking motivation to decision making is how time horizons influences the decision to act in one or another way (Sonnentag 2012). To account for variations in individuals’ preferences across time, researchers use the hyperbolic discounting hypothesis, which refers to the fact that people overestimate the present and underestimate the future (Ainslie and Haslam 1992, Steel and Konig 2006). A direct implication of this model is that it explains individual actions focusing on the value of each action and also accounts for their place in a temporal continuum. Departing from this argument, we ask: are actions of individuals with high levels of PSM affected by the value associated to each action, by time, or both? In order answer this question, we use an experimental survey approach. In the survey, respondents complete two exercises that mimic real world choices that public servants make during a two-week period. Each exercise consists of 10 choices (one per working day). Presented two at a time, respondents must indicate which one of the two they prefer to invest one hour of work in. These activities vary on the extent they are directly related to PSM, on whether they lead to a final outcome, and on the delay of the associated benefit. In both exercises, the short-term oriented exercises are all PSM related and therefore provide an immediate satisfaction of the need to serve the society. By contrast, all of the none PSM-related activities are long-term oriented, but in exercise 1 they can lead to an outcome that satisfies the need to serve the society, and in exercise 2 they can lead to a non-PSM organisational outcome.

This research contributes to the theoretical debate on whether PSM is a future oriented motivation or not (Breaugh et al 2018, Scott et al 2017), by testing if highly public service motivated individuals are affected by the hyperbolic discounting hypothesis. From a practical perspective, our results inform managers about how time constraints and values interact in the decision-making processes of public service motivated employees, and especially on how tasks can be structured to enhance their completion.

ABSTRACT. Public service motivation (PSM), or the motivation to give back to society, is a heavily researched topic in public administration literature. Since Perry and Wise (1990) hypothesised that higher levels of PSM will be associated with higher levels of work performance, researchers have focused their attention on investigating this connection empirically. The link between PSM and performance lies in the fact that certain jobs (e.g. within the public sector) provide opportunities for employees to internalize their public service motives that influences the strength and duration of motivational outcomes such as performance (Gagné and Deci 2005).

Many studies that examine the PSM-performance hypothesis focus solely on individual performance and individual PSM without taking into consideration the implications of PSM and performance at the team level. This is an important omission as public sector organizations increasingly structure their work around teams. This bears the question whether employees within teams share the same attitudes and motivations, and what these potential differences mean for team level performance. This is important because team level outcomes often differ from individual level outcomes (Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001). We therefore examine the role PSM climate (Petrovsky & Ritz 2015), defined as employees shared levels of PSM, on team level performance.

HRM literature has long focused on interpersonal team characteristics in understanding performance (Bell, 2007; LePine, Jackson, & Saul, 2008). In fact, the effect of the influence of coworkers establishes an important contextual understanding of a person’s work environment that ultimately drives the overall performance of the team. In addition, as personal values play an important role for team level performance (Bell, 2007; Glew, 2009), it could be possible that high levels of PSM in teams creates synergies that can lead to better work outcomes. The impact of these synergies is through the improvement to interpersonal processes, a necessary component of team performance (Marks et al., 2001; Mathieu, Maynard, Rapp, & Gilson, 2008).

The data used for this study comes from a two wave survey of public sector workers from two public sector organisations in the Swiss canton of Bern. The use of multiple waves, from two different public organisations, allows us to test our claims from a broader perspective. We use multilevel level modelling to test our hypotheses. Our main contribution is to assess the concept of PSM climate, and how this impacts team level performance therein testing the limits of PSM in predicting organisational outcomes.

ABSTRACT. Both public service motivation (PSM) and prosocial motivation (PM) can be considered as the motivation to do good. Despite their conceptual differences, research has generally agreed that both PSM and PM are positive motivation that can bring about a series of desirable individual and organizational outcomes. Due to the focus on the positive outcomes, little attention, with a few exceptions (i.e., Giauque et al. 2012; Van Loon, Vandenabeele, and Leisink, 2015), has been paid to the potential dark forces that may be brought out by PSM and PM.

This study thus sets out to examine the respective role that PSM and PM play in ethical conditions where dishonesty can either financially benefit oneself or others. Since both PSM and PM aim to promote the benefits of others, even they have different beneficiaries and temporal focus (Schott et al. 2017), we propose, people with varying levels of PSM and PM will respond differently when they can cheat to advance self-interest and promote the benefits of others.

To test the hypotheses, the study used a randomized online survey experiment that was conducted with an online panel of 805 employees working in the public (405) and private for-profit (400) sector recruited by Qualtrics. To detect dishonesty, the study adopted an online repeated dice game designed in Bartford et al. (2017). Participants were assigned to one of two groups in which they played 10 times of a virtual dice game for 4 rounds and filled out survey questions between each round of the dice game. The participants in group A were told they can keep the winnings they won in the dice game while those in group B were told their winnings would be donated to one of three designated reputable nonprofits of their choice.

The findings show that people are more likely to cheat if cheating benefits others than themselves. Furthermore, participants with high PM are more likely to be noble cheaters. That is, the stronger desire a person has toward helping others, the more likely the person will cheat to benefit others. This finding suggests PM can potentially catalyze unethical behavior if the behavior can benefit others. Interestingly, we did not find PSM having the same impact. PSM does not significantly enable dishonesty that benefits others. The paper concludes with a broader implication about the role of PSM and PM in influencing unethical behaviors.

ABSTRACT. Performance management systems have endured over three decades of adoption, implementation, and criticism. Conforming to the goals of goal-based paradigms such as the New Public Management and Management By Objectives, these systems promise to strengthen public performance in terms of efficiency, accountability, and effectiveness. As a result, most empirical research has tested the claims of their effectiveness in different contexts and produced varying results finding positive as well as null and negative impact of the system on organizational performance. This study aims to study an important, but hitherto ignored, outcome of performance management: equity. Relying on primary survey data of 300 city and town police departments in the United States, this study finds performance management systems to be detrimental to social justice. We found that police departments that report to make a more intense use of performance management were more likely to arrest a disproportionately higher number of African-American and Hispanic youth. These results highlight the need to study the impact of performance-based systems in their entirety, including the unintended consequences resulting in discrimination. These findings support critical voices that have pointed toward police highhandedness and abuse, mostly because of an increasing pressure on police officer to reduce crime to unreasonable levels.

ABSTRACT. Factual information takes center stage in the democratic machineries of most developed societies today, where it is often argued that facts can be used to improve decision-making. In the domain of policymaking, this is reflected in broad calls for evidence-based policymaking assuming that politicians will make better decisions, leading to improved societal outcomes, if provided with factual information in the form of policy-relevant scientific evidence and systematic policy evaluations. However, politicians’ ability to make factually informed decisions has been questioned by large bodies of literature on motivated reasoning showing that decision-makers are often motivated to reach conclusions in line with political identities and attitudes when processing policy-relevant information.

In this article I ask whether politicians alter their reasoning about policy-relevant information when they know that they must be able to justify their evaluation of the information. Politicians are continuously required to justify their claims, for example through committee proceedings, parliamentary debates and through interviews with critical journalists, and some literature suggests that this may reduce biases in politicians’ reasoning. Thus, asking people to justify evaluations has been found to reduce a range of cognitive biases. I hypothesize that politicians are biased by information-related political attitudes when they process policy-relevant information, but that asking them to justify their evaluations will lead to more effortful and less biased evaluations. I test the hypotheses using a survey experiment and a decision board experiment on large samples of elected politicians. Furthermore, literature has shown systematic differences in politicians’ and citizens’ behavior in a range of psychological experiments and therefore, I compare the politicians’ responses to responses from nationally representative samples of citizens who were recruited to participate in identical experiments.

As expected, I find strong evidence of motivated reasoning but my results surprise regarding the effects of justification requirements. Both politicians and citizens do seem to spend more effort on processing information when asked to justify their evaluations but while this seems to reduce the influence of attitudes among citizens (especially among those who are most interested in politics), the reverse is the case among politicians. Politicians rely more on attitudes and less on evidence when they know that they must be able to justify their evaluations. I conclude by addressing possible reasons for this and by discussing the broader implications of the results.

ABSTRACT. Policy advocates and public managers have turned towards performance management in an effort to improve the quality of public services. Increasingly these reforms task agency executives, mid-level managers and street-level bureaucrats with collecting and analyzing organizational data and responding to an array of performance indicators and incentives.

Originally a strategy rooted in principal-agent theories of organizational alignment and compliance (Osborne and Plastrik 1997; Radin 2006), performance management has increasingly been celebrated as a context for organizational learning (Moynihan 2008). Thus it has become, to some degree, a “valence” reform that appeals to multiple parties for a diverse range of reasons.

Yet despite its appeal, the use of performance management to achieve multiple ends—accountability, organizational learning and public transparency—risks systems that collapse under their own contradictions. For to serve multiple purposes, performance management requires not only different measures (Behn 2003) but also different processes (Posner and Mahler 2014). Moreover, as Posner and Mahler argue, these processes often conflict with one another. In other words, successfully navigating one set of processes (e.g. accountability) may in fact impede progress towards an alternate performance management goal (e.g. organizational learning or public transparency). Organizational learning often requires risks and short-term failure; transparency demands clear communication of outcomes in a format the public can readily digest. Yet sanctions can create perverse organizational incentives, such as a resistance to risk, and “fair” accountability systems often rely on complex statistical approaches that prove incomprehensible both to the agents whose behavior they are intended to direct and to the public at large (Destler 2016).

We thus need to better understand how performance management’s complex imperatives interact with one another, and the implications for performance and political sustainability. Towards that end, this paper examines the dynamics of learning, accountability and transparency in the New York City Schools, which, under the leadership of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, underwent a city-wide performance reform from 2007-2013. Integrating longitudinal data on organization outcomes and practice with data from four elementary schools, it examines how contrasting political messages about accountability, transparency and learning shaped implementation, in particular by complicating schools’ willingness and ability to respond in ways that visibly contributed to a long-term improvement in organizational performance. These contradictions, in turn, undermined support for the reform among broader stakeholders, paving the groundwork for a dramatic reversal under a new mayoral regime.

ABSTRACT. While most research on performance systems is concerned with their impact and implementation (Gerrish, 2016; Kroll, 2015; Olsen, 2015), studies on potential dysfunctions are accumulating as well (Heinrich & Marschke, 2010; Eterno et al., 2017). In fact, scholarship across different context, policy areas, and government functions has collected enough evidence on the manipulation of performance systems that it becomes difficult to shrug off data gaming as the exception to the rule. At the same time, large-scale studies of performance gaming are difficult to conduct due to social desirability issues and the constraints that come with observational research, leading to the predominance of case studies. Our paper will contribute to closing this gap: we measure gaming behavior using a large-N design, and we propose and test hypotheses regarding the behavioral antecedents.

We examine the role of ethical leadership, prosocial impact, and red tape in explaining differences in gaming behavior. In particular, we argue that data gaming will decrease if supervisors exemplify ethical leadership behavior and if employees find meaning in, and see the impact of, their work. At the same time, data gaming increases in the presence of red tape, as manipulation may be considered a legitimate way to work around inefficient formal systems.

We test out hypotheses with a sample of 900+ public employees from different agencies. To capture gaming behavior, we employ a list experiment, which is a useful tool to estimate true responses to sensitive or socially desirable questions (Glynn 2013). In essence, we use an experimental method to uncover the true response to the question whether participants have altered performance data in their work life. Based on Blair and Imai’s (2012) statistical modeling techniques, we test our hypotheses, while controlling for a good number of confounding variables. Initial analyses suggest support for our theory.