Journal of Democracy, Volume 28, Number 1, January 2017

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ISBN/ISSN

10455736

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Does Civil Service Reform Affect Behavior? Linking Alternative Personnel Syst…

Current literature on civil service reform lacks any studies that examine how these reforms impact employee behavior. The research presented here links the presence of alternative personnel systems and perceptions of procedural justice in 2005 to the rates at which complaints were filed in 2006 in the federal government, after controlling for the use of alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Amo…

Autonomous Agencies and Perceptions of Stakeholder Influence in Parliamentary…

This article examines the following question: How do independent agencies within parliamentary democracies perceive the influence of various political principals and societal stakeholders in their environment on their strategic and policy decisions? This question is examined through an extension of the theory and methodology of Waterman, Rouse, and Wright for 213 Dutch agencies. We find that ag…

Competing Explanations for Minority Enrollments in Higher Education

Abstract Although diversity has been considered a vital component in higher education over the past several decades, little research—theoretical or empirical—has rigorously examined the determinants of minority enrollments in higher education. By drawing on literature across several fields, this article helps close this gap by testing competing theoretical explanations for minority enrollmen…

Scientific Expertise and the Balance of Political Interests: MEDCAC and Medic…

Edition

Volume 22, Number 1, January 2012 p. 55-82

ISBN/ISSN

10531858

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Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory

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An Integrative Framework for Collaborative Governance

Collaborative governance draws from diverse realms of practice and research in public administration. This article synthesizes and extends a suite of conceptual frameworks, research findings, and practice-based knowledge into an integrative framework for collaborative governance. The framework specifies a set of nested dimensions that encompass a larger system context, a collaborative governanc…

Agency Performance and Executive Pay in Government: An Empirical Test

Public management reform has drawn inspiration from principal agent theory and private management, and a favored reform strategy has been civil service reform that strongly recommends pay-for-performance. The hypothesis tested in this paper is that the incentive effect will improve public sector management. The basis is the performance management system introduced in Danish central government w…

Benchmarking and Interorganizational Learning in Local Government

Scholars have questioned the value of benchmarking as a means of advancing public sector performance and innovation, pointing instead to evidence of isomorphism among benchmarking organizations. The authors of this article assert that different types of benchmarking should be distinguished from one another in such assessments and suggest that the verdict for best practice benchmarking will diff…

How (Not) to Solve the Problem: An Evaluation of Scholarly Responses to Commo…

Public administration scholars are beginning to pay more attention to the problem of common source bias, but little is known about the approaches that applied researchers are adopting as they attempt to confront the issue in their own research. In this essay, we consider the various responses taken by the authors of six articles in this journal. We draw attention to important nuances of the com…

Public Management, Context, and Performance: In Quest of a More General Theory

Recent years have seen a substantial growth in the large-N quantitative study of public management and performance. Much of the progress can be attributed to a small number of data sets on local governments in a few countries. The range of data sets suggests the validity of the overall hypothesis of management affecting performance, but the precise findings also vary across these and other cont…

The Politics of Detection in Business Regulation

Detecting noncompliant behaviors is an important step in the enforcement of regulations. The literature on the subject is vast yet also narrow in its approach, in the sense that it has built on the assumption that regulators would always want to maximize information quantity and quality, while acting under two fundamental constraints: the regulator’s resources and the information asymmetry betw…

New Leaders’ Managerial Background and the Performance of Public Organizati…

We develop a theory of the effect of top management succession on the performance of public organizations. The theory is rooted in the fundamental characteristics of an organization’s publicness: ownership, funding, and regulation. We construct the concept of publicness fit—the match between the organization and the leader’s previous managerial experience. We argue that the effect of publicness…

Transactional Authority and Bureaucratic Politics

Bureaucratic politics research couched within the new institutionalism paradigm has largely focused on principal authority rooted in formal (institutional) mechanisms that are ultimately both devised and chosen by politicians. A nascent literature has emerged over the past two decades whose underpinnings reflect increasing gravitation towards a transactional authority perspective, one that is c…

Bureaucratic Politics Arising From, Not Defined by, a Principal–Agency Dyad

We contrast two archetypal modes of research in principal-agency theory and in public administration: an aggregated mode which regards the agency as a unified whole, and a disaggregated mode attending to individuals. We argue for the virtues of the latter approach in that mechanisms are clear, verifiable, and specific. The aggregated approach may also be clear, at the cost of submerging interna…

Institutional Effects of Changes in Political Attention: Explaining Organizat…

All democratic countries have ministries for issues like foreign affairs, defense, transportation, education, and social affairs. Yet, we know little about what determines the number and issue content of ministries. Why do some policy issues have their own ministry while others do not and when are new ministries created? The article offers a theoretical argument for how creation and termination…

A Conceptual Framework for Analysis of Goal Ambiguity in Public Organizations

Prominent authors have claimed that government organizations have high levels of goal ambiguity, but these claims have needed clarification and verification. We discuss the complexities of organizational goals and their analysis, and review many authors’ observations about public agencies’ goal ambiguity and its good and bad effects. Then, we propose a conceptual framework to organize and make …

This Could Be the Start of Something Big: Linking Early Managerial Choices wi…

The influence of early events in the history of a country, a social phenomenon, or an organization on later developments has received significant attention in many social science disciplines. Often dubbed “path dependence,” this influence occurs when early events influence later outcomes even when the original events do not reoccur. “Path dependence,” however, has received little theoretical or…

Local Government Management and Performance: A Review of Evidence

Local governments play a critical role in delivering services to the public. Over recent decades scholars have begun to empirically examine the relationship between the management and performance of local governments, locating this in economic, contingency, and resource-based theoretical frameworks. In this study, we undertake a comprehensive assessment of what is currently known about the mana…

Administrative Burden: Learning, Psychological, and Compliance Costs in Citiz…

This article offers two theoretical contributions. First, we develop the concept of administrative burden as an important variable in understanding how citizens experience the state. Administrative burden is conceptualized as a function of learning, psychological, and compliance costs that citizens experience in their interactions with government. Second, we argue that administrative burden is …

Predicting Public Sector Accountability: From Agency Drift to Forum Drift

Principal-agent theory has been the dominant theory at the heart of public sector accountability research. The notion of the potentially drifting agent—such as independent public agencies, opaque transnational institutions, or recalcitrant street-level bureaucrats—has been the guiding paradigm in empirical accountability research. The aim of this article is first of all to signal the limits of …