Cognitive Biases in Governing: Technology Preferences in Election Administration

Cognitive biases are heuristics that shape individual preferences and decisions in a way that is at odds with means‐end rationality. The effects of cognitive biases on governing are underexplored. The authors study how election administrators’ cognitive biases shape their preferences for e‐voting technology using data from a national survey of local election officials. The technology acceptance model, which employs a rational, means‐end perspective, suggests that the perceived benefits of e‐voting machines explain their popularity. But findings indicate that cognitive biases also play a role, even after controlling for the perceived benefits and costs of the technology. The findings point to a novel cognitive bias that is of particular interest to research on e‐government: officials who have a general faith in technology are attracted to more innovative alternatives. The authors also find that local election officials who prefer e‐voting machines do so in part because they overvalue the technology they already possess and because they are overly confident in their own judgment.     

Emergency Management Research and Practice in Public Administration: Emergence,Evolution, Expansion,and Future Directions

In 1984, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) collaborated to foster a community of scholars focused on research and professional practice in emergency management. The intent was to build a community of researchers and professional practitioners who would support improved performance for an increasingly challenging set of problems confronting emergency managers at all levels of jurisdiction. The financial investment was small, but the NASPAA/FEMA initiative led to the evolution of a community of scholars engaged in emergency management research and professional practice. The authors review changes in FEMA since the 1984 workshop and the impact of the NASPAA/FEMA fellows on research and practice in emergency management, placing this initiative in the wider context of public administration.     

Government Communication Effectiveness and Satisfaction with Police Performance: A Large‐Scale Survey Study

For the last two decades, performance management theories and practices have focused on outcome‐oriented management but have paid little attention to the role of public communication. Using multiple large data sets from Kansas City, Missouri, for 2009–14, this research suggests that the perceived effectiveness of public communication has a more substantial impact on public satisfaction with police protection and crime prevention than neighborhood crime rates and broken windows factors and that perceived effectiveness moderates the negative impact of crime rates. After controlling for residents’ demographic characteristics, the authors find that the perceived effectiveness of communication is associated with public satisfaction with the content and quality of the city website and the government television channel. The implications for public safety management and police–citizen relations as well as directions for future research on public communication strategies and public performance management are presented.     

Three Traditions of Network Research: What the Public Management Research Agenda Can Learn from Other Research Communities

This article identifies and describes the development of three parallel streams of literature about network theory and research: social network analysis, policy change and political science networks, and public management networks. Noting that these traditions have sometimes been inattentive to each other's work, the authors illustrate the similarities and differences in the underlying theoretical assumptions, types of research questions addressed, and research methods typically employed by the three traditions. The authors draw especially on the social network analysis (sociological) tradition to provide theoretical and research insights for those who focus primarily on public management networks. The article concludes with recommendations for advancing current scholarship on public management networks.     

The Dynamics of an Interorganizational Emergency Management Network: Interdependent and Independent Risk Hypotheses

The purpose of this research is to uncover the dynamic structure of an interorganizational emergency management network after a disaster. This research tests two hypothesized network structures: interdependent risk and independent risk. While the former illustrates the importance of trust and information redundancy in coordinating and aligning emergency preparedness and response, the latter captures the tendency for local actors to seek dominant partners to bridge crucial information across the region. A stochastic actor‐based model with a forward selection strategy is used to analyze the structural effects of endogenous networks and the effects of exogenous community attributes on interorganizational ties. Based on the data sets collected before and after the 2012 typhoons in South Korea, the results support the interdependent risk hypothesis, suggesting that an interorganizational network structure tends to evolve into the notion of shared collaboration risk.     

突发公共事件应急管理研究中的重要科学问题

当今,各类突发公共事件已成为构建和谐社会的重要隐患,引起了社会各界的广泛关注.认为,加强突发公共事件应急管理中的科学问题研究是我国社会经济发展过程中产生的重大现实需求,对于建立和发展富有中国特色的应急管理理论以及相应的学科体系具有重要的科学意义;在此基础上,将突发公共事件应急管理中的科学问题归纳为突发公共事件应急管理体系建设战略研究、典型突发公共事件危机/灾害的机理机制研究、突发公共事件的监测预警研究、应急资源管理理论与技术研究、突发公共事件的认知与决策行为研究、突发公共事件的模拟仿真研究、突发公共事件的应急管理系统研究以及突发公共事件的后评估与重建研究,并对其研究现状和发展趋势进行了扼要的回顾和展望;最后建议国家有关部门设立重大研究计划以便加强研究力度,并就如何提炼和组织其中的科学问题提出了一些建议,可为我国开展突发公共事件应急管理中的科学问题研究提供参考.     

Realized Publicness at Public and Private Research Universities

Although research‐extensive universities in the United States produce similar outcomes—research, teaching, and service—they vary substantially in terms of the publicness of their environments. In this article, the authors adopt a public values framework to examine how regulative, normative/associative, and cultural cognitive components affect realized public outcomes by faculty. Using survey data from a random sample of faculty scientists in six fields of science and engineering at Carnegie Research I universities, findings show that organizational and individual public values components are associated predictably with different realized individual public outcomes. For example, individual support from federal resources and affiliation with a federal lab (associative) are related to increased research outcomes, while tuition and fee levels (regulative) explain teaching outcomes, and perceived level of influence in the workplace (cultural cognitive) explains teaching and service outcomes.     

Making Connections: Performance Regimes and Extreme Events

Local officials in the emergency management field have reached out and increased their connections with other agencies and organizations during the past several years. Collaborative networks have been created in an effort to address the complexities and uncertainties surrounding extreme events. But has this collaboration really taken root? In this article, the authors find that although a collaborative ethos has penetrated local emergency management, it is neither deep nor uniform. Data from a survey of emergency managers in North Carolina counties show that maintaining a functional network—a performance regime in which participants develop consistent management practices and rely on each other for the generation of new ideas—is a difficult task. The explanation for the variation found across the counties largely involves capacity and vulnerability.     

Robotic Bureaucracy: Administrative Burden and Red Tape in University Research

This Viewpoint essay examines university research administration and the use of software systems that automate university research grants and contract administration, including the automatic sending of emails for reporting and compliance purposes. These systems are described as “robotic bureaucracy.” The rise of regulations and their contribution to administrative burden on university research have led university administrators to increasingly rely on robotic bureaucracy to handle compliance. This article draws on the administrative burden, behavioral public administration, and electronic communications and management literatures, which are increasingly focused on the psychological and cognitive bases of behavior. These literatures suggest that the assumptions behind robotic bureaucracy ignore the extent to which these systems shift the burden of compliance from administrators to researchers.     

Behavioral Public Administration ad fontes: A Synthesis of Research on Bounded Rationality,Cognitive Biases,and Nudging in Public Organizations

This article provides a comprehensive overview of how policy makers, practitioners, and scholars can fruitfully use behavioral science to tackle public administration, management, and policy issues. The article systematically reviews 109 articles in the public administration discipline that are inspired by the behavioral sciences to identify emerging research trajectories, significant gaps, and promising applied research directions. In an attempt to systematize and take stock of the nascent behavioral public administration scholarship, the authors trace it back to the seminal works of three Nobel Laureates—Herbert Simon, Daniel Kahneman, and Richard Thaler—and their work on bounded rationality, cognitive biases, and nudging, respectively. The cognitive biases investigated by the studies reviewed fall into the categories of accessibility, loss aversion, and overconfidence/optimism. Nudging and choice architecture are discussed as viable strategies for leveraging these cognitive traps in an attempt to alter behavior for the better, among both citizens and public servants.     

电力企业建立应急物资管理体系的建议

电网企业的应急物资管理是电网企业应急体系的重要组成部分。当今电力系统已经实现了比较完备的常态物资管理体制,但缺少了应急条件下的管理机制和管理系统,近年来,因突发性灾难事件导致的救灾电力物资调度不畅更加暴露出建立应急物资管理的重要性。提出了基于现代物流条件下,从制度建设、物资保障、人员配备和信息化建设等方面建立应急物资管理体系的设想。     

Interstate Partnerships in Emergency Management: Emergency Management Assistance Compact in Response to Catastrophic Disasters

The Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) is a mutual aid agreement and partnership that allows states to assist one another in responding to natural and man-made disasters, often in advance of federal disaster assistance. This article examines EMAC's response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in order to address the significant need for analysis of emergency management at the state level. A content analysis of news reports, government documents, and reports from a number of institutions was performed to determine the volume and direction of EMAC's performance and its transactions during the response operations. The authors find a lack of EMAC training among responders, potentially reducing communication and coordination and the efficiency and effectiveness of response operations. A network analysis assessed the relationships among the responding organizations to coordinate their emergency response operations.     

逻辑与功能：应急管理信息文本的一种分析

应急管理信息文本作为应急管理部门内部交流的一种信息文本,承担了信息通报和工作交流的功能.受应急管理特殊行政文化影响,应急管理信息文本具有准确、简短和快速的特点,在传递中包含了行政和知识双重属性.由于在我国公共安全管理模式从综合减灾模式走向全面危机管理的模式中,并没有改变原有行政机构的内部设置和功能调整,于是,应急系统运行过程中,应急管理信息文本的政治功能越来越凸现,而行政功能日趋下降.同时,作为应急管理委员会的办事机构--应急委员会办公室在日常工作中协调能力非常有限;从而导致在防灾、减灾和备灾日常工作中,应急办难以发挥其协调和规划的功能.因此,开发应急管理信息文本的知识功能有利于改善其行政功能,也有助于应急管理工作的科学化、模块化和常规化的建设.     

Status and Power: The Principal Inputs to Influence for Public Managers

The authors identify status and power as the principal bases of influence for public managers and describe how managers can use this conceptual distinction to increase their influence. Status is defined as the degree to which one is respected by one's colleagues, and power is defined as asymmetric control over valued resources. Different social and relational processes govern (1) how people determine who is, and who ought to be, high status versus powerful and (2) how status and power affect individual psychology and behavior. To illustrate key points, the authors provide examples of individuals from the public sector and public service organizations. The framework of interpersonal influence gives practitioners behavioral strategies for increasing their status and power as well as a way to assess and diagnose interpersonal dimensions of their own performance in their jobs and careers.     

基于网络计划的应急预案的可操作性研究

制定应急预案是突发事件应急管理的重要内容,而可操作性则是应急预案的基本要求.我国已经制定了很多应急预案,但这些应急预案是否具有可操作性并不确定,也难以全部通过演练来判断,目前,国内外在应急预案可操作性方面的研究有限,因此,在应急预案综述研究的基础上,提出可操作性预案的制定步骤和可操作性预案应该包含的内容.把项目管理中的网络计划与应急预案相结合,将应急预案的应对过程看作项目,应对步骤看作工序,使用网络计划的形式来表达可操作性预案的应对过程,给出示例进行说明,并使用网络计划来分析应急预案的时间计划.在时间紧迫且资源不足的情况下,引进资源保障率的概念,使用网络计划分析应急预案对突发事件的处置效果,并可为未来的资源配置提供参考;最后,从应急预案的内容等方面提出一个综合评估的指标体系,对应急预案的可操作性进行评估.主要为可操作性应急预案的制定和评估提供参考.     

Network Structure and Perceived Legitimacy in Collaborative Wildlife Management

The widespread supposition that collaborative management designs enhance legitimacy must be examined empirically, and the rich diversity of different collaborative arrangements should be better acknowledged in this endeavor. This study adopts a social network perspective and examines three state‐initiated and interest‐based collaborative management arenas in Swedish wildlife management: wildlife conservation committees (WCCs). Is there a link between social network structures in collaborative management arenas and the perceived legitimacy of output by policy stakeholders? This puzzle is addressed through social network analysis combined with survey data and interviews. The empirical results confirm the notion that collaborative arenas consisting of high network closure with many bridging ties across organizational boundaries enjoy a higher level of support among stakeholders directly involved in management, as members of the committees, than networks with a more sparse structure do. This type of well‐integrated network structure seemingly increases stakeholders’ understanding of other actors’ perspectives through deliberation. Contrary to what was expected, though, the empirical analysis did not verify the effect of linking, or outreaching ties between the committee members and the organizations that they represent, on the organizations’ support of WCC decisions. Given the rapid rise of collaborative designs in public administrations, the topic elaborated in this paper is urgent and further research is encouraged.     

Project Versus Process Management in Public-Private Partnership: Relation Between Management Style and Outcomes

ABSTRACT

This article elaborates the relation between two management styles, project and process management, and perceived outcomes in public-private partnerships (PPPs). The research is based on an extensive face-to-face survey conducted with 32 managers of 18 large complex infrastructure projects. The managers were asked questions about management strategies and outcomes. Based on theoretical literature on process and project management we conceptualized and measured these two types of management and looked at which type of strategies contributed more to perceived outcomes. The results show that a process management style correlates to outcomes and that project management does not correlate to outcomes.     

Financing Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness: Use of Interlocal Cost‐Sharing

Before this study, much of the research on interlocal collaboration has focused broadly on interlocal service agreements, of which interlocal cost‐sharing is but one dimension. This study is one of the first to examine the nature of interlocal cost‐sharing agreements for a specific (and critically important) functional area. A mail survey of Florida city and county finance officers finds that the most common interlocal cost‐sharing partnership is between local general purpose governments rather than with local special purpose governments. The strongest incentives for interlocal cost‐sharing are (1) inadequate funding for emergency management in a jurisdiction's capital budget, (2) the perceived inadequacy of federal and/or state homeland security funding, and (3) greater faith in horizontal (local‐to‐local) than vertical (federal‐state‐local) intergovernmental agreements. The research also highlights the importance of asking fiscal condition survey questions in a more functionally specific manner rather than as an “overall fiscal condition” question.     

A Cognitive Perspective on Policy Implementation: Reform Beliefs,Sensemaking, and Social Networks

Utilizing a cognitive perspective, this article examines the social processes through which teachers come to understand the Common Core State Standards. The authors begin by identifying three beliefs that have important implications for policy implementation: self‐efficacy, resource adequacy, and value for clients. They measure those beliefs and the Common Core discussion networks that emerge among teachers at three points in time. Through the use of SIENA models, the authors explore how networks and beliefs coevolve within schools. Unlike prior research on social networks, which consistently finds strong homophilous tendencies, this research finds no evidence that teachers seek out coworkers who hold similar beliefs. Rather, teachers relied on preexisting formal and informal relationships to guide interactions. Those interactions were characterized by social influence, whereby a teacher's own beliefs adapted toward the beliefs held by the members of their social network. The findings offer a novel perspective on the complex dynamic that occurs within organizations as new policies are unveiled and employees interact with one another to understand the changes those policies entail.     

MANAGING IN NETWORK SETTINGS

The focus of this article is on managing networks. A network knowledge base is developed from the authors' studies of city government involvement in economic development, management within rural enterprises and the evaluation of a rural strategic planning project. Other public management network analyses are also incorporated. Management in network settings is not based on central authority and cannot be guided by a single organizational goal as is the case in the classical management approach. Management involves managing flexible structures toward collective efficiency. The ability to manage is related to the internal condition of the manager's primary organization. It involves technical, legal, political and cost dimensions. It requires different capacities, skills and knowledge from that of single organization management. The next steps in the research would include the development of the skills needed, an analysis of the role of organizational power and the operational variables of networks, the issue of network cohesion, and the question of loss of control or difficulty in assessing network accountability.