Cultivating Public Service Motivation through AmeriCorps Service: A Longitudinal Study

The public service motivation literature has helped scholars and practitioners better understand who is attracted to public service and why. However, little is understood about how public service motivation in individuals may be cultivated or how it changes over time. This article uses panel data collected by the Corporation for National and Community Service to track the longitudinal effects of participation in the AmeriCorps national service program on participants’ public service motivation. Findings reveal that participation in AmeriCorps programs had positive effects on participants’ levels of commitment to the public interest and civic awareness immediately after the program; many of these program effects were sustained seven years later. However, when observed in isolation, the comparison group showed significant declines in levels of commitment to public interest and civic awareness over an eight‐year period, suggesting that public service motivation may initially decline upon entry into a public service career.     

US presidential elections and real GDP growth, 1961–2004

In this paper I show that, since 1960, an electoral cycle in US output growth can both be seen by the naked eye in the raw data and confirmed by a statistical analysis that allows for rational partisan effects as well as a wide range of control variables. That is, controlling for multiple lags of interest rate changes, inflation, money growth, energy prices, lagged output growth, government spending (or its growth) and temporary partisan effects, the timing of elections exerts a significant influence on quarterly real GDP growth.     

Inside the Presidential Communications Machine: An Interview with Martha Joynt Kumar

Martha Joynt Kumar is a professor of political science at Towson University. Her book, Managing the President’s Message: The White House Communications Operation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), examines the media and communications operations of the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In March 2008, Professor Kumar was interviewed in the White House Press Briefing Room by Kevin R. Kosar on behalf of Public Administration Review. As this interview went to press, the American Political Science Association’s Presidency Research Group announced that it had awarded Managing the President’s Message the Richard E. Neustadt Award for best book on the U.S. presidency published in 2007.     

Who Is Mobilized to Vote? A Re‐Analysis of 11 Field Experiments

Many political observers view get-out-the-vote (GOTV) mobilization drives as a way to increase turnout among chronic nonvoters. However, such a strategy assumes that GOTV efforts are effective at increasing turnout in this population, and the extant research offers contradictory evidence regarding the empirical validity of this assumption. We propose a model where only those citizens whose propensity to vote is near the indifference threshold are mobilized to vote and the threshold is determined by the general interest in the election. Our three-parameter model reconciles prior inconsistent empirical results and argues that low-propensity voters can be effectively mobilized only in high-turnout elections. The model is tested on 11 randomized face-to-face voter mobilization field experiments in which we specifically analyze whether subjects' baseline propensity to vote conditions the effectiveness of door-to-door GOTV canvassing. The evidence is consistent with the model and suggests that face-to-face mobilization is better at stimulating turnout among low-propensity voters in prominent elections than it is in quiescent ones .