Assessing Governance: The Importance of Evaluating Policy Outcomes in National Mission Areas

This commentary responds to Fukuyama's (2013) rejection of “final outputs” as measures of government quality. It argues that public administration research should address policy outcomes in “national mission areas.” But public administration scholars should not simply become policy analysts. Rather, they should become policy analysts for policy areas that can benefit from expertise in organizations and management.     

Dire and Sequestered Meetings: The Work of Game Wardens

Game wardens are law enforcement agents responsible for enforcing fish and wildlife laws. Based on data from extensive interviews with game wardens the authors describe dangerous situations faced by wardens in their work. Comparisons with the dangers experienced by other types of police officers are made. Temporal, spatial, and situational factors shape the uniqueness of the law enforcement experiences of the game warden. Specific factors found which increase dangerousness were: isolation of area, being outnumbered, being alone, mistakes like not wearing hunter’s orange, and not being aware an offender is under the influence. In addition, most if not all individuals encountered are armed and skilled in the use of deadly weapons.     

Gambling on compliance with the new 2005 Act: Do organisations fulfil new regulations?

Gambling is not a new phenomenon. Indeed gambling has been seen to be omnipresent throughout history and culture. However gambling has taken a new path. Online gambling is fast becoming a major pastime for many of society. The ease of access and convenience of play has led to an increase in the numbers of people gambling, and not just online. Within the increase of online gambling there has also been an increase in the regulation surrounding this industry. This paper explores the regulatory approach to online gambling within the UK. The researchers explore the Gambling Act 2005 (UK) and provide an empirical analysis of the UK major gambling organisation to determine what regulatory aspects they adopt and what safety measures they have in place to protect minors and to protect against financial crime. The researchers finally looks at policy implications for UK governments when regulating future online gambling.     

Classification and individualization of black ballpoint pen inks using principal component analysis of UV-vis absorption spectra

The technique of principal component analysis has been applied to the UV-vis spectra of inks obtained from a wide range of black ballpoint pens available in the UK market. Both the pen ink and material extracted from the ink line on paper have been examined. Here, principal component analysis characterised each spectrum within a group through the numerical loadings attached to the first few principal components. Analysis of the spectra from multiple measurements on the same brand of pen showed excellent reproducibility and clear discrimination between inks that was supported by statistical analysis. Indeed it was possible to discriminate between the pen ink and the ink line from all brands examined in this way, suggesting that the solvent extraction process may have an influence on these results. For the complete set of 25 pens, interpretation of the loadings for the first few principal components showed that both the pen inks and the extracted ink lines may be classified in an objective manner and in agreement with the results of parallel thin layer chromatography studies. Within each class almost all inks could be individualised. Further work has shown that principal component analysis may be used to identify a particular ink from a database of reference UV-vis spectra and a strategy for developing this approach is suggested.     

Innovative work behaviour in the public sector: The roles of task characteristics,social support,and proactivity

This study examines the roles of task characteristics, organisational social support, and individual proactivity on innovative work behaviour (IWB) in the public sector. Analysing empirical data from 154 employees from a government agency in Australia, we found that task characteristics, organisational social support, and proactive personality have a positive impact on IWB. Proactive personality is also found to be a moderator in the relationship between task characteristics and IWB. The findings suggest the need to design human resource practices that better identify proactive and innovative job applicants in the recruitment and selection process. Further, we highlight the requirement to organise and design work that recognises the need to develop social support to improve IWB. The implications of the study for further research on IWB are discussed.     

The Future of Leadership in Public Universities: Is Shared Leadership the Answer?

Leadership of public universities has come under fire—from scandals, from funding, from students, from every direction. Top‐down leadership of institutions of higher education has been described as a “disease.” Shared governance—a mechanism of faculty representation in the leadership and decision‐making processes—a seeming alternative, has been described as “a recipe for paralysis.” In this article, the authors proffer shared leadership as a potential elixir for leading public institutions of higher learning, unleashing creative potential, focusing on pressing strategic imperatives, and enabling sustainable systems that leverage true talent to maximum effect. It is time to move beyond the moribund myth of top‐down heroic leadership and beyond the bureaucratic, political quagmire of the current state of affairs in shared governance. Is shared leadership the answer?      

Ideology,Learning, and Policy Diffusion: Experimental Evidence

We introduce experimental research design to the study of policy diffusion in order to better understand how political ideology affects policymakers’ willingness to learn from one another's experiences. Our two experiments–embedded in national surveys of U.S. municipal officials–expose local policymakers to vignettes describing the zoning and home foreclosure policies of other cities, offering opportunities to learn more. We find that: (1) policymakers who are ideologically predisposed against the described policy are relatively unwilling to learn from others, but (2) such ideological biases can be overcome with an emphasis on the policy's success or on its adoption by co‐partisans in other communities. We also find a similar partisan‐based bias among traditional ideological supporters, who are less willing to learn from those in the opposing party. The experimental approach offered here provides numerous new opportunities for scholars of policy diffusion.     

Electronic Funds and Benefits Transfers,E‐Government,and the Winter Commission

This article examines how electronic funds transfers and electronic benefit transfers have become integral components of digital government. These technologies have forwarded many of the principles of the Winter Commission, including the development of lean, responsive government. The greater efficiency and cost savings for the federal and most state governments have not been achieved without encountering and dealing with serious matters related to customer service, contracting, collaboration, management, and implementation. These issues arise in the normal daily use of electronic payment technologies, but they are magnified in crisis situations, as demonstrated by disaster relief operations during Hurricane Katrina.     

Military Power and Food Security: A Cross-National Analysis of Less-Developed Countries, 1970–1990

Addressing the long-standing debate over the social impact of military power and recent discussions of military-induced famine, we conduct a panel analysis of aggregate food supply and child hunger rates in 75–79 less-developed countries (LDCs). Distinguishing between militarization , as the growth of military resources, and militarism , as the use of military force to handle political conflicts, we show that militarization is both beneficial and detrimental to food security, whereas militarism is consistently detrimental. Arms imports and associated increased military spending plus praetorianism and military repression reduce food security, whereas increased military participation and arms production boost food security. Increased food supply reduces child hunger and is largely confined to the more developed of the LDCs. These military power effects show net economic growth, which "trickles down" to improve food supply and reduce child hunger among the more developed LDCs, reflecting the growth of global economic inequality. Contrary to views that see militarization as a single unified process, use of armed force is not strongly rooted in either praetorianism or militarization.     

Political Consequences of the New Inequality

This article proposes agendas for teaching and research about shifting global patterns of equality and inequality, a very different agenda than was appropriate when the last undergraduate professor was president of ISA, almost forty years ago. Today, unlike in that Cold War world, formal democracy is flourishing, state power is diminishing, gender inequality has diminished, and income inequality has risen. Consequences of these new patterns that demand our attention as teachers and scholars include: (1) more frequent protracted social conflicts, (2) a newly politicized sphere of international public health, (3) the new global gender politics, (4) the new global politics of the super-rich, and (5) the new politics and ethics of the world's privileged, a group that includes most ISA members and most of our students. Our responsibilities as teachers have grown, in part, because popular media present a decreasingly coherent picture of each of these patterns; and that incoherence, itself, may help sustain global inequalities.