Media Framing and Public Attitudes Toward Biofuels

This study investigates the relationship between media framing and public opinion on the issue of biofuels—transportation fuels made from plants, animal products, or organic waste. First, the paper investigates how media framing of biofuels has changed since the issue regained national prominence in the early 2000s. Through a detailed content analysis of newspaper coverage, the paper documents an increase in negative frames between 1999 and 2008, especially frames focusing on the negative economic effects of biofuels on consumers. Second, using data from a 2010 Internet survey of a random sample of the U.S. public, the paper analyzes the relative influence of these new media frames on public attitudes toward biofuels compared with other common predictors of public opinion, such as party ID, regional economic interests, and personal identity as an environmentalist. In general, the results confirm that public attitudes toward biofuels appear to be shaped by these new media frames, especially among those who indicate a high degree of attention to the media, suggesting the relative importance of framing effects on policy attitudes for environmental and energy policies in general.     

Hungry for Information: Public Attitudes Toward Food Nanotechnology and Labeling

What people think about food nanotechnology (nanofood) is under‐explored in the United States, especially outside of quantitative surveys. As such, we set out to examine public attitudes toward food nanotechnology in conversational, focus group settings in order to identify policy options for nanofood governance, and in particular, options for labeling. Through analysis of focus groups in six U.S. locations, we found that the vast majority of the participants wanted nanotechnology labels for all types of food products, and most were willing to pay a premium for labeling. Participants cited abilities to choose and avoid potential risk as the main purposes of nanofood labels. However, they recognized that labels alone do not provide much meaning and that information concerning food nanotechnology products needs to be sought and supplied beyond the label to enable informed choices. Additionally, willingness‐to‐use and risk–benefit perceptions varied according to the position and intended functions of the nanomaterials in food products.     

Changing Public Attitudes on Power and Taxation in the American Federal System

The research reported here updates for 2001 some public opiniondata previously provided by the U. S. Advisory Commission onIntergovernmental Relations. The 2001 survey results indicatea general continuation of earlier opinion trends. The federalgovernment is viewed as providing citizens the least for theirmoney; the federal income lax, followed by the local properlytax, is seen as the worst lax; a majority of the public indicatesthat local governments need more power; the public is most likelyto identify the federal government as having too much power;and the public is least likely to say that the federal governmentneeds more power. For the most part, these attitudes are heldwithout much variation by all categories of respondents; however,region, education, and, to a lesser extent, a few other demographicvariables do distinguish among respondents in a statisticallysignificant manner.     

Leadership and Public Service Motivation in U.S. Federal Agencies

ABSTRACT

This analysis of over 6,900 federal employees’ responses to the Merit Principles Survey 2000 examines the influences of leadership and motivational variables, and especially public service motivation, on the “outcome” variables job satisfaction, perceived performance, quality of work, and turnover intentions. CFA confirms a factor structure for transformation-oriented leadership (TOL), public service-oriented motivation (PSOM), transaction-oriented leadership (TSOL), and extrinsically oriented motivation (EOM). Multivariate regression analysis shows that TOL and PSOM, as well as interaction effects of TOL-TSOL and TOL-PSOM, have strong relations to the outcome variables. SEM analysis examines direct and indirect effects of the main variables. Overall, the results indicate that TOL and PSOM have more positive relations to the outcome variables than do TSOL and EOM. The combination of high TOL and high PSOM has the strongest positive, and hence desirable, relation with organizational outcomes. Among this very large sample of federal employees, those who perceived their leader as displaying TOL (i.e., leadership that is encouraging, supportive, informative, and that emphasizes high standards) also expressed higher levels of PSOM and higher levels of job satisfaction, perceived performance and work quality, and lower turnover intentions. The SEM analysis further indicates that TOL has these effects by way of empowerment, goal clarification, and PSOM, and is distinct from TSOL (transaction-oriented) leadership, which shows no such relationships.     

Self-Interest,Symbolic Politics,and Public Attitudes Toward Gun Control

Numerous studies have found that immediate and tangible self-interest has a minimal influence on public attitudes toward many policy issues. We examine public attitudes toward gun control in order to determine whether gun owners exhibit distinctive policy preferences. Our results indicate that self-interest strongly influences public preferences on gun control and that banning handguns evokes stronger self-interest effects than banning assault weapons or imposing a waiting period on purchases of firearms. We conclude by discussing why gun control evokes self-interested calculations among gun owners, the implications of our findings for self-interest theory, and suggestions for further lines of research.     

Rethinking Leadership for the Public Sector

Leadership and management are best thought of as a matter of competencies. Or are they? The paper challenges the current orthodoxy in Australia on this question, and suggests that leadership and management need to be regarded as reflecting opposing values. The paper also distinguishes between charismatic and collective forms of leadership, and proposes the latter as likely to be of greater value in a public sector context. A challenge for public sector organisations is how to strike and maintain a suitable balance between management for ongoing operations and leadership for deep–reaching change. Strategies for developing collective leadership capability are suggested.     

Implications of Occupational Locus and Focus for Public Service Motivation: Attitudes Toward Work Motives across Nations

Is occupational locus or focus important for public service motivation? Does national context influence public service motivation? To answer both questions, the author examines attitudes toward work motives from national samples in 11 North American and Western European nations using multilevel binary logistic regression analysis. The findings demonstrate that the locus of an occupation in government and its focus on a public service activity both are important in shaping preferences for work motives related to public service motivation. Also, the preference for work motives held by citizens is correlated with the type of welfare regime in a nation. Although it is less pronounced, some evidence suggests that the type of welfare regime influences preferences toward work motives among government employees.     

Stability of the Federal System in Nigeria: Elite Attitudes at the Constituent Assembly Toward the Creation of New States

The Constituent Assembly which approved the constitution forNigeria's Second Republic (1979–1983) decided that nonew states should be created at that time and adopted proceduresmaking state creation in the future virtually impossible. TheAssembly's action implied that elite consensus had been achievedon the existing territorial configuration of the federation.Yet events during the Second Republic seemed to belie such aninterpretation. To resolve the contradiction a content analysisof the Constituent Assembly debates was undertaken. It showedwidespread dissatisfaction with the existing nineteen-statestructure. The study concludes that the Constituent Assembly'sdecisions on state creation did not reflect an elite consensus.Instead, the period of relative stability in federal territorialconfiguration, which elsewhere seems to follow early years ofinstability, had not yet been reached in Nigeria.     

Public Attitudes toward Climate Science and Climate Policy in Federal Systems: Canada and the United States Compared1

Multilevel governance poses several challenges for the politics of climate change. On the one hand, the unequal distribution of power and interests can serve as a barrier to implementing coherent policy at a federal level. On the other, these features also enable policy leadership among sub‐federal units. In the context of wide variation in climate policy at both national and sub‐federal levels in Canada and in the United States, this paper utilizes an original data set to examine public attitudes and perceptions toward climate science and climate change policy in two federal systems. Drawing on national and provincial/state level data from telephone surveys administered in the United States and in Canada, the paper provides insight into where the public stands on the climate change issue in two of the most carbon‐intensive federal systems in the world. The paper includes the first directly comparable public opinion data on how Canadians and Americans form their opinions regarding climate matters and provides insight into the preferences of these two populations regarding climate policies at both the national and sub‐federal levels. Key findings are examined in the context of growing policy experiments at the sub‐federal level in both countries and limited national level progress in the adoption of climate change legislation.     

Public Attitudes Toward Social Spending in the United States: The Differences Between Direct Spending and Tax Expenditures

This paper uses a survey experiment to examine differences in public attitudes toward ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ government spending. Federal social welfare spending in the USA has two components: the federal government spends money to directly provide social benefits to citizens, and also indirectly subsidizes the private provision of social benefits through tax expenditures. Though benefits provided through tax expenditures are considered spending for budgetary purposes, they differ from direct spending in several ways: in the mechanisms through which benefits are delivered to citizens, in how they distribute wealth across the income spectrum, and in the visibility of their policy consequences to the mass public. We develop and test a model explaining how these differences will affect public attitudes toward spending conducted through direct and indirect means. We find that support for otherwise identical social programs is generally higher when such programs are portrayed as being delivered through tax expenditures than when they are portrayed as being delivered by direct spending. In addition, support for tax expenditure programs which redistribute wealth upward drops when citizens are provided information about the redistributive effects. Both of these results are conditioned by partisanship, with the opinions of Republicans more sensitive to the mechanism through which benefits are delivered, and the opinions of Democrats more sensitive to information about their redistributive effects.     

Goal Conflict and Fund Diversion in Federal Grants to the States

Researchers using fiscal choice models have had limited success predicting fund diversion in federal grant programs. The application of a principal-agent framework to questions of fiscal federalism offered a potentially valuable alternative approach, but the traditional model employed by Chubb (1985) neglected potential variability in the degree of goal conflict between principals and agents. This article proposes an expanded framework, which incorporates the possibility of variation in goal conflict between participants in intergovernmental aid programs. The theory suggests that the level of policy congruence between recipient jurisdictions and the national government will determine the amount of grant funding diverted away from targeted policy areas. Findings from analyses of grant programs in two distinct policy areas support the hypothesis that grant effectiveness is partially a function of goal congruence. The relationship between intergovernmental partners is interactive, with the degree of policy agreement determining fund diversion in subnational jurisdictions, as well as the effectiveness of federal oversight activities. The findings have important theoretical implications for understanding both fiscal federalism and principal-agent relationships more generally.     

Public Attitudes Toward Immigration Policy Across the Legal/Illegal Divide: The Role of Categorical and Attribute-Based Decision-Making

Scholars debate the relative strength of economic and ‘socio-psychological’ sources of anti-immigrant sentiment. However, the literature often fails to distinguish legal from illegal immigration and therefore overlooks a major instance in which this debate is moot. To address this issue, we develop a theory that recognizes two different modes of evaluating immigrants: “attribute-based” judgment, in which respondents weigh immigrants’ desirability based on individual characteristics—human capital, race, language ability, and so on—and “categorical” judgment, which disregards these altogether. Categorical judgments arise when a policy issue triggers blanket considerations of justice or principle that obviate considerations about putative beneficiaries’ individual merits, instead evoking overriding beliefs about the desirability of the policy as a whole or casting the entire category as uniformly deserving or undeserving. We use experimental evidence from two national surveys to show that the principal distinction between attitudes toward legal and illegal immigration is not in the relative weight of immigrants’ attributes but the much greater prevalence of categorical assessments of illegal immigration policy, much of it rooted in rigid moralistic convictions about the importance of strict adherence to rules and laws.     

Leadership and Meaningful Work in the Public Sector

There have been many important studies on leadership in the public administration discipline; however, scholarly inquiry still lags behind related disciplines such as psychology and business administration. This article helps fill that gap by analyzing the role that public leaders play in making work more meaningful for their employees, which, in turn, has a positive influence on employee job outcomes. Specifically, the authors analyze the mediating role of work meaningfulness in the relationships between leader‐member exchange and organizational commitment, work effort, and work‐to‐family enrichment. Samples from education, health care, and local government are used. Results show that leadership strongly influences work meaningfulness, which, in turn, influences job outcomes. In addition, the impact and extent of leadership and work meaningfulness are higher in health care and education than in local government. The results emphasize the importance of leadership and meaningful work in the public sector.     

公私冲突:中国行业体制改革困境

改革开放以来,随着市场经济的发展,行业协会作为一种同类企业间的联合互益组织在社会经济生活中起着日益重要的作用。但其本身所蕴含的公益性与私益性的冲突却成为制约我国行业体制发展的首要因素,从奶粉事件中我们可以看到:行业协会的私益趋向越来越明显,公益的属性已逐渐被取代。在许多学者声嘶力竭的改革呼声中,我们只有公正的看待行业协会的市场性,摒弃政治意义上的公益至上的观点,进一步厘清行业协会公私冲突的根源,在非营利话与市场化、民营化的互动基础之上,重新拷问中国的行业体制改革的路径选择,才能实现行业管理的善治。     

Public Attitudes to Gaelic and the Debate about Scottish Autonomy

Scotland seems to be a counter-example to general theories of the relationship between language and national identity or nationalism. These theories point to three components in the ideology of language and nation—that being able to speak the national language is necessary for full national membership, that the national language is a core part of the nation's culture, and that the future of national political autonomy and the future of the national language are connected with each other. In Scotland, it has appeared that language is not central to national membership or culture, and language campaigning has not been central to the political campaigns for autonomy. The article presents new evidence, from the 2012 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, which questions these beliefs about the relationship between language and national identity or nationalism in Scotland.     

Exploring Charismatic Leadership in the Public Sector: Measurement and Consequences

A survey of more than 203 middle and upper–middle managers that assessed their superiors ( N =51) in the Canadian public sector showed that charismatic leadership in such a setting comprises four dimensions: (1) energy and determination; (2) vision; (3) challenge and encouragement; and (4) risk taking. However, such leadership is only modestly related to motivational consequences and is not significantly related to unit performance. We discuss our findings in terms of their theoretical implications for leadership research in general and for the public sector in particular.     

We’re Not all Happy Yet: Attitudes to Work,Leadership, and High Performance Work Practices among Managers in the Public Sector

This article explores the attitudes of male and female managers in the public sector toward high performance Human Resource Management (HRM) policies and practices, work, and organisational leadership, and compares these attitudes to those of managers in the private sector. It finds that female public sector managers are most positive about high performance HRM policies and practices. Male public sector managers are less positive than female managers in the public sector and male and female managers in the private sector across all the measures. Psychological contract theory suggests either the changes associated with high performance HRM policies and practices, or attempts to decrease the disadvantage felt by women in the public sector may have resulted in a sense of disadvantage among some men in the sector, and created a changed, more transactional psychological contract between these men and their organisation. Strategies are needed to reengage public sector men.