A Transformed Political Landscape

The 23 June 2016 referendum on Britain’s EU membership exposed deep fractures within the British party system. Products of global political, cultural, and financial trends, these fractures have diminished the power of the U.K. government and of other Western democracies alike. Though the EU’s role in these changes was ambiguous, it became a scapegoat for them, and on the initiative of Conservat…

The Risk to Northern Ireland

The United Kingdom’s 23 June 2016 vote to leave the European Union represents an immense challenge for the Irish peace process. The implicit assumption of continuing British and Irish participation in Europe was woven into the terms of the Belfast Agreement of 1998, which brought an end to three decades of intercommunal violence known as the Troubles. This assumption underpinned guarantees to c…

Resistance from Scotland

Since the 23 June 2016 EU referendum, in which 62 percent of the Scottish electorate voted to remain in the EU, the ruling Scottish National Party (SNP) has made it a priority to carve out a prominent role for Scotland in the U.K.’s negotiations to withdraw from the EU. Led by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP aims to either derail Brexit’s course or otherwise guarantee Scotland’s members…

A Nation Divided

On 23 June 2016, the United Kingdom voted by a 52 to 48 margin to leave the European Union. The result of the EU referendum was the latest and most dramatic expression of long-term social changes that have been silently reshaping public opinion, political behavior, and party competition in Britain and Western democracies. In this essay, we consider the underlying social and attitudinal shifts t…

The Signs of Deconsolidation

In recent years, parties and candidates challenging key democratic norms have won unprecedented popular support in liberal democracies across the globe. Drawing on public opinion data from the World Values Survey and various national polls, we show that the success of anti-establishment parties and candidates is not a temporal or geographic aberration, but rather a reflection of growing popular…

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

Edition

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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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Series Title

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…