In the United States, housing policies focused on assisting low-income families toward homeownership have resulted in the creation of publicly subsidized affordable mortgage programs. Private lenders and their employees (loan originators) are often the key point of contact to connect low-income borrowers to public programs. But why would loan originators offer borrowers public loan programs, pa…
This article presents a theoretical assessment of how the impact of management might differ in public versus private organizations. It essentially seeks to reframe the debate from “are public organizations are different from private organizations?” to “is the impact of management action the same in both sectors?” We start with a series of assumptions based on a set of relevant variables and the…
Debates about the merits of publicness have dominated the public administration landscape since the foundation of the modern state. The extent of organizational publicness (ownership, funding, and control) has waxed and waned in developed countries: it rose following the postwar settlement and fell under the policies of New Right government and the popularity of the notions of New Public Manage…
Research comparing public and private organizations and otherwise analyzing “publicness” involves complex challenges. These include the challenge of designing and attaining adequate samples to represent the two complex categories of “public” and “private,” as well as dimensions of publicness, and subcategories and control variables needed for valid comparisons. This review of sampling alternati…
This article echoes recent calls for public management research to focus on core questions and utilize multiple methods to advance the state of knowledge in the field. In this article, we call for more experimental research on the public/private distinction, which is a core public management research topic. We then conduct a pilot experimental study that provides new insights—and what seem to b…
“Empirical publicness” explains organizations on the basis of their mix of political and economic authority, whereas “normative publicness” seeks to identify, prescribe or infuse public values. The scholarly traditions developed by these two types of publicness have tended not to overlap and for very good reason—blending empirical and normative theory and purpose is a problem of longstanding, o…
This article reviews evidence from historical crisis episodes from four geographical regions to identify patterns in how economic crises shape dimensions of child wellbeing. The analysis is motivated by a concern to identify possible policy lessons of relevance to the 2007- financial crisis and its impacts on children and their caregivers. We conclude that while broad counter-cyclical economic …
Despite the potential advantages of a closer link between planning evaluation and programme evaluation , both fields have been developed independently. This is mainly due to significant differences between them, particularly in terms of historical background, evaluation scope and contexts, the articulation between theory and practice, and the timings of evaluation. This article advocates bridgi…
This article examines current empirical approaches to group learning. It focuses on two central questions: Are these approaches really measuring group learning, and what critical issues should be resolved in future group-learning research? The rationale for this examination is threefold. First, the last 10 years have seen a substantial increase in research on group learning. As this literature …
This article provides a review of previously published studies on virtual environments (VEs), focusing especially on empirical articles on social and group phenomena in VEs and their methodological and theoretical trends. VEs can be defined as communication systems in which interactants share the same three-dimensional digital space and can navigate, manipulate objects, and interact with one an…
Although the relationship between collective efficacy beliefs and team performance has been well-documented, few studies have explored the causal mechanisms that might explain these effects. In the current study, the authors explore the role of backing up behavior, a specific form of teamwork behavior, in explaining why high efficacy beliefs lead to high levels of team performance. Participants…
Anonymity in computer-mediated communication (CMC) is valued in organizations because it can facilitate participation in discussions, especially of sensitive issues. Concerns over maintaining the motivation to participate in such discussions, because of the inability to reward people for their contributions, have led to the development of techniques that allow rewards to be allocated without id…
Most governance arrangements involve spatial units with highly unequal powers, for example, a feudal monarchy and its principalities, an empire and its colonies, a formal empire and an informal empire (or sphere of influence), a national government and its subnational entities, or a regional government and its local entities. In this situation, the dominant unit (A) usually enjoys some discreti…
How do elite parties win over poor voters while maintaining their core constituencies? How can religious parties expand their electoral base? This article argues that social service provision constitutes an important electoral strategy for elite-backed religious parties to succeed in developing democracies. The study demonstrates how the upper caste, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJ…
A growing trend in the comparative politics literature on patterns of minority incorporation emphasizes the emerging policy convergence in this area, conventional oppositions between national models notwithstanding. This convergence is further illustrated by drawing upon the cases of two countries often analyzed within an “exceptionalist” framework and generally viewed as polar opposites as far…
The authors argue that the effects of economic globalization on social democratic parties in Western Europe are conditional on the position of the median voter. If the median is far enough to the right, such parties will adopt business-friendly policies because they are required to win office. Only when the median is relatively far to the left will globalization constrain social democratic part…
The historical rise of European foreign, security, and defense policy marks an important development in European politics and world politics more broadly. Long thought unlikely to amount to much, European integration in the domains of traditional “high politics” has consolidated bit by bit since the mid-1990s, under the auspices of a common foreign and security policy (CFSP) and a pan-European …
This symposium presents an overview of the state and administrative reforms in Southern Europe. The papers are written by scholars who are not only celebrated in their field, but also native to the country they write about. The report on Greece is by Dimitri A. Sotiropoulos and Calliope Spanou of Athens University. Edoardo Ongaro of Bocconi University Milan reports on Italy. In the case of Port…
In Greece, two distinct reform paths led to institutional building and economic managerial types of reform. These two reforms, with the exception of the period 1996–2004, when both institutional and economic reforms were attempted, did not attract the same degree of attention. Institutional reforms were more successful than attempts at managerial reforms; reform implementation on the other hand…
This article applies broad conceptual categories of comparative politics to the explanation of administrative reforms in Italy. It takes as its argument some lines of influence on public sector reform of the features of the party system in Italy, the executive-legislative balance, the politician-bureaucrat relationship, and the role of administrative law. In the search for explanations for the …