Are Some Citizens More Equal than Others? Evidence from a Field Experiment

The equal treatment of all citizens is one of the fundamental principles of good administrative practice. Nevertheless, there are growing numbers of media and scientific reports on unequal treatment by public administrations. This article examines the unequal treatment of citizens by gender and ethnic origin by means of a survey‐based field experiment in German local government. With the help of two vignettes and randomized assignment of names, responses to fake citizen requests by local governments are analyzed for speed, quality, and service orientation. The results show very limited discrimination effects. While there is no evidence for general ethnic discrimination, a more differentiated analysis indicates patterns of ethnic discrimination conditioned by gender.     

Virtual Civil Society: The New Frontier of Social Capital?

Although many scholars agree that social interactions within traditional social groups build social capital, there is less consensus on the benefits of virtual interactions for political engagement. Our research examines how interpersonal social group activity and virtual activity contribute to two dimensions of social capital: citizen norms and political involvement. We rely on data collected in the 2005 Citizenship Involvement in Democracy survey conducted by the Center for Democracy and Civil Society at Georgetown University. This survey provides unique detail on participation in both social groups and virtual interactions. Our findings suggest that social group activity and virtual interactions both foster many of the same positive aspects of social capital.     

Cornwall's Devolution Deal: Towards a More Sustainable Governance?

This article considers the devolution deal signed by Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly in the summer of 2015. It asks if the deal constitutes a more sustainable approach to governance, concluding that while there are some factors that help to enhance sustainability, other areas urgently require more attention. These claims are made through an analysis of a model of sustainability which emphasises the importance of networks and feedback loops envisaging civil society as an adaptive organism. This helps to show that although power is significantly dispersed in some aspects of the ‘Cornwall Deal’, this latter does little to alter the highly centralised nature of governance across England, or provide spaces where local actors can feed back into central policy.     

Water privatization,hegemony and civil society: What Motivates Individuals to Protest About Water Privatization?

The article takes the case of protest against water privatization in Ireland to show that protestors with high levels of instrumental motivation as opposed to ideological motivation are more likely to protest. In order to explain this we uniquely combine Klandermans’ social psychology of protest with Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. By bridging these two bodies of theory, we provide an interdisciplinary account of the reason why protestors serve to uphold the exact power structures they intend to challenge. We argue that for water movements to be successful they must focus equally on both their instrumental and ideological motivations to ensure that power structures are confronted. This would enable movements to devise a coherent counter-hegemonic discourse, which is essential to contest the dominant global hegemony of water marketization.     

Is There More Violence in the Middle?

Is there more violence in the middle? Over 100 studies have analyzed whether violent outcomes such as civil war, terrorism, and repression are more common in regimes that are neither full autocracies nor full democracies, yet findings are inconclusive. While this hypothesis is ultimately about functional form, existing work uses models in which a particular functional form is assumed. Existing work also uses arbitrary operationalizations of “the middle.” This article aims to resolve the empirical uncertainty about this relationship by using a research design that overcomes the limitations of existing work. We use a random forest‐like ensemble of multivariate regression and classification trees to predict multiple forms of conflict. Our results indicate the specific conditions under which there is or is not more violence in the middle. We find the most consistent support for the hypothesis with respect to minor civil conflict and no support with respect to repression.     

More Similarities or More Differences? Comparing Public and Nonprofit Managers’ Job Motivations

Existing research on career motivations tends to focus either on the difference between private and public organizations or on the difference between nonprofit and for‐profit firms. Although commonalities exist, the literature suggests that there also are many differences in what motivates public and nonprofit employees. Employing data from the National Administrative Studies Project III, this research examines how seven motivational aspects correlate with the choice between public and nonprofit employment. The authors find that managers who value advancement opportunities, a pension and retirement plan, and the ability to serve the public in their jobs are more likely to accept a job in the public sector, whereas managers who value family‐friendly policies and increased responsibility are more likely to accept a position in the nonprofit sector. Participation in volunteering is positively associated with nonprofit employment. The authors suggest a possible link between volunteering and the unique nonprofit motivation that is differentiated from public service motivation.     

When Are Women More Effective Lawmakers Than Men?

Previous scholarship has demonstrated that female lawmakers differ from their male counterparts by engaging more fully in consensus‐building activities. We argue that this behavioral difference does not serve women equally well in all institutional settings. Contentious and partisan activities of male lawmakers may help them outperform women when in a polarized majority party. However, in the minority party, while men may choose to obstruct and delay, women continue to strive to build coalitions and bring about new policies. We find strong evidence that minority party women in the U.S. House of Representatives are better able to keep their sponsored bills alive through later stages of the legislative process than are minority party men, across the 93^rd–110^th Congresses (1973–2008). The opposite is true for majority party women, however, who counterbalance this lack of later success by introducing more legislation. Moreover, while the legislative style of minority party women has served them well consistently across the past four decades, majority party women have become less effective as Congress has become more polarized.     

In-Group Love Versus Out-Group Hate: Which Is More Important to Partisans and When?

Political Behavior - Recent evidence indicates that partisans discriminate against those from the opposing party. However, it is still unclear whether partisan out-group prejudice reveals a desire...     

Can Transparency Foster More Understanding and Compliant Citizens?

Voluntary policy compliance is an important yet rarely studied topic in public administration. To address the paucity of research, this article proposes and empirically tests a conceptual framework that ties policy transparency and policy understanding to voluntary policy compliance intentions. The reasoning is that the extent to which citizens understand a policy contributes to their intentions to comply with that policy. Further, the authors argue that policy transparency indirectly influences voluntary policy compliance intentions through a positive effect on citizens’ levels of policy understanding. To enhance the validity of the findings, the authors assess these relationships across two policy domains. The findings reflect an indirect positive effect of transparency on voluntary compliance occurring through policy understanding. However, this emerged only for one policy domain. These results suggest that the effects of policy transparency on policy understanding and voluntary policy compliance intentions may depend on the policy domain.     

Does Spending More Get More? Health Care Delivery and Fiscal Implications From a Medicare Fee Bump

While salient features of the Affordable Care Act include insurance expansions and private coverage reforms, various other provisions are embedded within the law. We focus on a temporary 10 percent fee increase for primary care visits supplied to publicly insured (Medicare) beneficiaries. Using administrative and survey data, we assess the price shock's impact on service volume, physician labor supply, and quality of care. Primary care physicians (PCPs) in independent practices demonstrate, at most, a marginal 2 percent increase in new patient visits while horizontally and vertically integrated PCPs show no change. Both PCP organizational types witness declines in established patient visits, on average, but there is marked heterogeneity: established patient visits increase by 1 to 2 percent among PCPs with fewer Medicare claims in the pre‐period. The Medicare fee bump did not observably impact other labor supply outcomes and quality of care margins. We estimate that the policy introduced a $1.5 billion transfer from taxpayers to providers during the initiative's first three years.