{"title":"Deservingness, humanness, and representation through lived experience: analyzing first responders’ attitudes","authors":"Ryan J Lofaro, Alka Sapat","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muae015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muae015","url":null,"abstract":"Representative bureaucracy theory has mainly been used to understand how identities related to race, ethnicity, and gender influence how bureaucrats administer public services. Although representation through lived experience has expanded the scope of the theory, this theoretical thread has mostly focused on the perspectives of management. The purpose of this article is to employ lived experience representative bureaucracy theory to understand the influence of first responders’ experiences with substance use disorder (drug addiction) on their viewpoints regarding the humanness and deservingness of clients with opioid use disorder. We analyze data from a survey of emergency medical services (EMS)-providers and police officers in the United States (N = 3,500) with ordinary least squares regression and Hayes’ PROCESS macro to test for mediation. Results show that indirect and direct lived experiences—respectively, having a family member or friend who has experienced addiction and believing addiction has had a direct impact on respondents’ lives—predict increases in client deservingness, mediated by ascribed humanness and driven largely by EMS-providers. However, responding to opioid overdoses—an on-the-job lived experience—is associated with reduced deservingness and ascribed humanness. The study adds to the literature by expanding representative bureaucracy theory beyond race, ethnicity, and gender; broadening representation through lived experience beyond a focus on managers to include street-level bureaucrats; and incorporating concepts from social and political psychology that have yet to be integrated into representative bureaucracy studies.","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142042353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Emotional capital in citizen agency: Contesting administrative burden through anger","authors":"Merete Monrad","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muae017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muae017","url":null,"abstract":"The literature on administrative burden has focused on cognitive, material, and social resources, leaving emotional strategies and processes largely unexplored. This study begins to address this research gap by elaborating Illouz’ (2007) concept of emotional capital in the context of citizen agency. The article uses the concept emotional capital to analyze claimant anger in response to administrative burdens examining the question: how do citizens understand and maneuver the potential benefits and risks of expressing their anger when experiencing administrative burdens? The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Danish job centers involving interviews with 71 claimants and observations of 10 conversations between caseworkers and claimants. The article contributes to theorize the role of emotions in citizen-state encounters by showing that emotional capital works as a resource moderating the experience of and coping with administrative burden","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141994506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Francesca P Vantaggiato, Zuzana Murdoch, Hussein Kassim, Benny Geys, Sara Connolly
{"title":"Intra-organizational Mobility and Employees’ Work-related Contact Patterns: Evidence from Panel Data in the European Commission","authors":"Francesca P Vantaggiato, Zuzana Murdoch, Hussein Kassim, Benny Geys, Sara Connolly","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muae014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muae014","url":null,"abstract":"Programmes to encourage staff to move within public sector organizations have become increasingly widespread in recent decades. Yet, although there are some anecdotal accounts, the effects of such intra-organizational mobility remain largely unexplored. Building on insights from organization theory and social psychology, we argue that intra-organizational mobility entails an important trade-off: it undermines movers’ depth of work-related contacts within the (new) department, while it increases the breadth of their work-related contacts outside it. Our empirical analysis evaluates this trade-off using a two-way fixed effects model for a longitudinal dataset of movers (N=149) and stayers (N=473) across two survey waves among European Commission officials in 2014 and 2018. Our main findings confirm that intra-organizational mobility is connected in opposing ways to employees’ intra- and extra-departmental work-related contact patterns. In line with theoretical expectations, we find these relationships to be stronger for employees who have previously experienced intra-organizational moves (‘repeat-movers’).","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141495728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Public Service Users’ Responses to Performance Information: Bayesian Learning or Motivated Reasoning?","authors":"Peter Rasmussen Damgaard, Oliver James","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muae013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muae013","url":null,"abstract":"Although performance information is widely promoted to improve the accountability of public service provision, behavioral research has revealed that motivated reasoning leads recipients to update their beliefs inaccurately. However, the reasoning processes of service users has been largely neglected. We develop a theory of public service users’ motivated reasoning about performance information stemming from their identification with the organization providing their services. We address a significant challenge to studying motivated reasoning—that widely used existing research designs cannot rule out alternative cognitive explanations, especially Bayesian learning, such that existing findings could be driven by strong prior beliefs rather than biased processing of new information. We use a research design incorporating Bayesian learning as a benchmark to identify departures from accuracy motivated reasoning process. We assess the empirical implications of the theory using a preregistered information provision experiment among parents with children using public schools. To assess their identity based motivated reasoning we provide them with noisy, but true, performance information about their school. Overall, we find no evidence of directionally motivated reasoning. Instead, parents change their beliefs in response to performance feedback in a way that largely reflects conservative Bayesian learning. Performance reporting to service users is less vulnerable to motivational biases in this context than suggested by the general literature on motivated reasoning. Furthermore, exploratory findings show that performance information can correct erroneous beliefs among misinformed service users, suggesting that investment in reporting performance to service users is worthwhile to inform their beliefs and improve accountability.","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141182521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Robin H Lemaire, Lauren K McKeague, Donna Sedgwick
{"title":"Ebb and Flow of Network Participation: Flexibility, stability and forms of flux in a purpose-oriented network","authors":"Robin H Lemaire, Lauren K McKeague, Donna Sedgwick","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muae012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muae012","url":null,"abstract":"The flexibility/stability tension is a key challenge for purpose-oriented networks, especially salient with network participation. Because of the voluntary nature of networks, it is common for network participation to fluctuate, with participants entering, leaving, and returning over time for a variety of reasons. This fluctuation may challenge the stability that is key to network effectiveness. Yet, despite the salience of this tension, we know little about managing the ebb and flow of network participation. Driven by phenomenon-based theorizing, we draw on longitudinal participatory action research to examine participant attendance and contribution in monthly workgroup meetings over a four-year period of an early child education network. Combining interviews (n=5), meeting attendance tracking (n=37), and meeting observations (n=30), we identify six types of flux stemming from individual, organizational, and system forces. We find these forces of flux support both flexibility and stability. Highlighting the duality of flexibility and stability, we explain how flexibility at one level may result in stability at another and vice versa. Our findings contribute to a greater understanding of how stability and flexibility are both valuable for networks and thus, the need to embrace the ebb and flow of participation.","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140910648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Performance information and issue prioritization by political and managerial decision-makers: A discrete choice experiment","authors":"Joris van der Voet, Amandine Lerusse","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muae011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muae011","url":null,"abstract":"Issue prioritization is the first stage of attention-based theories of decision-making, but remains theoretically and empirically uncharted territory in public administration research. We propose and test how issue prioritization is informed by the characteristics of the performance information on which decision-makers rely, in particular its source (internal or external information), nature (objective or subjective information), aspiration level (historical, social, or coercive aspirations), and required cognitive effort (attention costs). Furthermore, we theorize how these characteristics of performance information determine issue prioritization decisions of political and managerial decision-makers in different ways. We empirically examine issue prioritization decisions in road maintenance and primary school education using a discrete choice experiment among 2,313 local government officials. The experiment reveals that decision-makers are more likely to prioritize issues that are signaled through objective performance measures and that are articulated relative to coercive aspirations, but that the effects of the information’s source and attention costs differ between policy domains. Comparison of observational variation regarding decision-makers’ roles indicates that public managers more strongly prioritize road maintenance issues that are articulated in objective performance information, but not in primary school education. The study advances public administration research and theory with a ‘horizontal’ behavioral perspective on decision-makers’ information processing to prioritize between simultaneous performance issues.","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140820048","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Fernando Nieto-Morales, Rik Peeters, Gabriela Lotta
{"title":"Burdens, Bribes, and Bureaucrats: The Political Economy of Petty Corruption and Administrative Burdens","authors":"Fernando Nieto-Morales, Rik Peeters, Gabriela Lotta","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muae010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muae010","url":null,"abstract":"Bribery and other forms of petty corruption typically arise in bureaucratic encounters and are a common element of the everyday experience of the state in many countries, particularly in places with weak institutions. This type of corruption is especially troublesome because it creates direct costs for citizens when accessing services and benefits to which they are formally entitled. However, only a few studies deal with how situational attributes of bureaucratic interactions create incentives for citizens to pay bribes and opportunities for street-level bureaucrats to demand them. We contribute to filling this gap by providing evidence that administrative burdens increase the chance of bribery. We do so by analyzing the prevalence of (attempted) bribery in more than 63,000 interactions across 20 different types of bureaucratic encounters, ranging from paying taxes to accessing essential services, using multilevel logistic regression analysis. Our study contributes to understanding the possible consequences of administrative burdens and the factors conducive to petty corruption in specific citizen-state interactions.","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140640262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A New Measure of U.S. Public Agency Policy Discretion","authors":"Natalie L Smith, Susan Webb Yackee","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muae007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muae007","url":null,"abstract":"The U.S. bureaucracy routinely issues major public policy decisions that affect Americans’ lives. Government agency leaders make those decisions based on a subjective understanding of their agency’s available policy discretion. Over time, discretion has become a prominent theoretical construct in the bureaucratic politics and public administration literatures, but it is rarely measured directly. In this article, we create a new measure of agency policy discretion. We draw on research suggesting that discretion is derived from the bureaucracy’s key political principals: the elected executive, legislators, and interest groups. We use data from the American State Administrators Project and trigonometry to calculate the discretion area scores for 8,955 state agencies between 1978 and 2018. We then evaluate the measure through a series of construct validation assessments. The article offers an innovative and generalizable way to operationalize discretion that will advance future scholarship in organizational behavior, public administration, and bureaucratic decision-making.","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140533266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Adapting to Organizational Change in a Public Sector High-Reliability Context: The Role of Negative Affect and Normative Commitment to Change","authors":"Armin Pircher Verdorfer, Gerco van Ginkel","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muae009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muae009","url":null,"abstract":"This study aims to investigate the impact of organizational change in a public sector high- reliability context. Drawing on conservation of resources theory, our theoretical model posits that change can be stressful and cause negative affective reactions toward the change, which undermine adjustment and post-change functioning. A quantitative case study was carried out on a Dutch air force squadron undergoing a significant organizational change, including the collection of three waves of survey data from squadron members. The data underwent analysis through a process of moderated mediation. Consistently with the theoretically derived hypotheses, results show that negative affect towards the change predicted important adjustment indicators, i.e., higher levels of work role overload and work errors. Furthermore, we found that the detrimental effects of negative affect were mitigated by the level of normative commitment to change, i.e., the felt obligation to provide support for the change. Overall, the study's intended contribution lies in its detailed examination of change dynamics in the specific context of public high-reliability organizations and its potential to inform theory and practice in that area.","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140533251","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Agency consultation networks in environmental impact assessment","authors":"Jie Wang, N. Ulibarri, Tyler A Scott","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muae008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muae008","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Government agencies practice inter-agency consultation to ensure that broader governmental activities align with their missions and objectives. Consultation allows agencies to express their preferences and interests, but also may create administrative burden and procedural delay. To explore the conditions under which agencies choose to review activities proposed by fellow government actors, this research focuses on the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), California’s environmental impact assessment law. We conceptualize the CEQA review network as a two-mode network, in which each review agency is linked to particular projects, and use two-mode exponential random graph models to test a series of hypotheses about agency, project, and agency-project dyadic characteristics that shape the choice to review. We find that projects located in sites with socioeconomically vulnerable residents or higher levels of background pollution garner more consultation. Agencies are more likely to provide consultation when their expertise aligns with the project’s impact, and are less likely to review a project with agencies that possess the same expertise. This research highlights variations underlying interagency consultation and helps understand how agencies try to influence other agencies’ decisions.","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140368506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}