Innovating Government-Wide Public Management Practices to Implement Development Policy: The Case of “Brazil in Action”

This article examines analytical and historical relationships between the topics of state capacity building and public management policy change. It does so by presenting an instrumental case study of Brazil in Action, a program that became the hallmark of the first presidential term of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The development of the program is explained on the basis of institutional processual meta-theories of policy and organizational change. The operation of the program is considered in terms of the clinical analysis of organizational practices. Implications for research on innovative administrative practice, public management policy change, and state capacity building are considered.     

“We Need to Have a Meeting”: Public Housing Demolition and Collective Agency in Atlanta,Georgia

The last two decades have witnessed widespread demolition of public housing and a large-scale relocation of public housing residents. Much of the current literature has examined the impact of demolition on relocated residents, focusing primarily on individual outcomes such as employment, housing quality, and health. This article examines the potential collective consequences of relocation by using data from 40 in-depth interviews conducted with relocated public housing residents in Atlanta, Georgia, to examine experiences of civic engagement and tenant activism before and after relocation. Participants describe frequent experiences of civic engagement and tenant activism in their public housing communities prior to demolition and also discuss how these collective actions often translated into meaningful gains for their communities. Participants also describe challenges associated with reestablishing these sources of collective agency in their new, post demolition, private-market rental communities where opportunities for civic engagement and tenant activism were perceived to be limited, where stigma was a barrier to social interaction, and where they experienced significant residential instability.     

Does the amount of participation matter? Public comments,agency responses and the time to finalize a regulation

The notice and comment rulemaking process is a fundamental part of how agencies write regulations. While this process is starting to receive more empirical attention, the question of how the number of comments that an agency receives affects its decision-making process has received little examination. This paper uses Boolean analysis to examine nine rules from two agencies at the Department of Health and Human Services and evaluates the impact of a high volume of comments on agency changes to proposed rules and the time an agency takes to finalize a proposed rule. These nine cases suggest that agencies are most likely to change their proposals when they receive a high volume of comments on highly complex rules that are not very politically salient. Highly complex rules are also likely to take a long time to finalize when there are many public comments however it is often other factors that cause a long delay between proposed and final rules.

Designing to Debias: Measuring and Reducing Public Managers’ Anchoring Bias

Public managers’ decisions are affected by cognitive biases. For instance, employees’ previous year's performance ratings influence new ratings irrespective of actual performance. Nevertheless, experimental knowledge of public managers’ cognitive biases is limited, and debiasing techniques have rarely been studied. Using a survey experiment on 1,221 public managers and employees in the United Kingdom, this research (1) replicates two experiments on anchoring to establish empirical generalization across institutional contexts and (2) tests a consider-the-opposite debiasing technique. The results indicate that anchoring bias replicates in a different institutional context, although effect sizes differ. Furthermore, a low-cost, low-intensity consider-the-opposite technique mitigates anchoring bias in this survey experiment. An exploratory subgroup analysis indicates that the effect of the intervention depends on context. The next step is to test this strategy in real-world settings.     

Public Service Motivation and Attraction to Public Versus Private Sector Employment: Academic Field of Study as Moderator?

ABSTRACT

Despite extensive public service motivation (PSM) research, our knowledge of PSM's influence on individuals’ sector employment preferences is limited. Few studies examine this relationship by suitable research designs, and the empirical findings are mixed. Using a sample of 718 Danish students of economics, political science, and law, this article tests (1) the relationship between PSM and attraction to public versus private sector employment and (2) the moderating effect on this relationship of students’ academic field of study. Overall, results underscore the multidimensionality of the PSM construct, as the PSM dimension of “public interest” is positively associated with attraction to public sector employment and negatively associated with attraction to private sector employment, while the PSM dimension of “compassion” is unrelated to both. Importantly, however, moderation analyses reveal notable correlation differences across students’ academic fields. Implications of these findings are discussed in the context of prior and future research.     

Blogging and Environmental Advocacy: A New Way to Engage the Public?

While there is a growing literature on weblogs (or “blogs”), most studies focus on a few high profile blogs, or on blogs written by individuals. This study assesses the little‐researched area of organizational blogging through a content analysis of blogs by 40 national‐level environmental organizations. I examine the general purposes that these blogs serve and the extent to which organizational blogs differ from traditional websites. Additionally, I explore two blog features—interactivity and personalized content—that offer the potential to strengthen the connections between group leaders and their supporters. I find that groups use their blogs primarily to inform readers about policy developments and news headlines, but that the level of interactivity between blog authors and readers is low. Thus, while the potential exists for blogs to enhance grassroots support for environmental groups, that potential is far from being realized.     

Defining “images” of presidential candidates from televised political spot advertisements

The proliferation in the use of televised political spot advertisements by presidential candidates justifies the increasing attention given to assess their value for the political system. Some controversy surrounding the value of their content concerns their reliance on image material. Yet the concept of candidate images has been ambiguous since images can refer to either graphic display of candidates or to candidates' character attributes. This study assesses candidates' character attributes in televised political commercials for 1980's American presidential primaries and finds that political spots offer useful and accurate profiles of candidates in campaigns and are helpful sources for the electorate to use in weighing the various strengths and weaknesses of presidential hopefuls.     

“We've Cared for the Dead since We Started Caring”: COVID-19 and Our Relationship to Public and Private Deathcare

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted public organizations’ challenges related to deathcare. Within the emergency management literature, and specifically within public administration, there is a gap when it comes to planning past death. Using data from interviews with 35 municipal cemetery managers throughout the United States, I show how our unwillingness to talk about or plan for death, coupled with cemetery managers who are underfunded and often left out of emergency management planning processes, needs increased attention. While many deathcare best practices were deployed to respond to the virus, cemetery managers often are not part of the planning process.     

Rediscovering the Taproot: Is Classical Pragmatism the Route to Renew Public Administration?

The origins of the influential American philosophy classical pragmatism and of American public administration overlap. On the surface, it appears that classical pragmatism had no influence on the emerging field of American public administration. Why were the two never properly wed? This essay first traces the historical connections that link public administration and classical pragmatism. Second, using a framework that is simple to remember, the tenets of classical pragmatism—practical, pluralistic, participatory, and provisional—are explored and applied to public administration. The marriage of classical pragmatism and public administration should prove endlessly fertile.     

Applying Self-Determination Theory to Understand Public Employee’s Motivation for a Public Service Career: An East Asian Case (Taiwan)

The research on employee motivation for choosing a public service career has largely been grounded in the intrinsic-extrinsic dichotomy along with limited motives such as job security, instrumental reward, and public service motivation (PSM). Such an approach narrows the view of researchers, especially those in cultures where major reasons for choosing a public service career exceed these factors and the intrinsic-extrinsic dichotomy. By employing self-determination theory (SDT) to examine data collected in Taiwan, an East Asian cultural setting, a measurement instrument is developed that captures five major motivations for a public service career. A discussion of applying this survey instrument for future research follows.     

False papers and family fictions: household responses to ‘gift children’ born to Indonesian women during transnational migration

When parents pursue transnational labour migration, challenges arise around ensuring the social belonging of children, especially ‘gift children’ who are conceived or born abroad as a result of out-of-wedlock relationships or sexual assault. Families we interviewed in Lombok, Indonesia, displayed complex social ingenuity to ensure the gift child’s social belonging. Caregivers described how they address discrimination by manipulating and falsifying family histories in identity documents, including census forms and birth registration. These family strategies drive home the local role of identity documents as a tool to enhance belonging rather than as proof of legal identity. We spotlight the time lag between birth and obtaining an official birth record as a crucial space in creating ‘citizenship from below’ in communities with high out-migration and low birth registration rates.     

Labour protest in China’s private sector: responses to Chinese communism with capitalist characteristics

Abstract

Building on existing studies of worker activism in formerly communist states, this paper examines the context, nature and consequences of labour protest in China’s private sector – highlighting the specific features that have emerged from China’s unique ‘communist’ political regime and partially privatized economy. As private enterprises have grown in China, private sector worker protests have been common. Three key factors have shaped this activism: (i) a disjuncture between benevolent and protective national laws and the lived experience of workers; (ii) fluctuations in the labour market; and (iii) generational shifts and learning among workers, employers and political authorities. The interplay of these factors has led protesting private sector workers to focus their ire on their employers and on occasion local political authorities, while viewing national political leaders as sources of worker support. These dynamics have had both positive and negative consequences for private sector workers and political authorities. Making comparisons with other authoritarian and communist states, this study adds to current understandings of how specific economic and political configurations engender particular characteristics of labour activism – and how these change over time.     

No room at the inn: American responses to Australian immigration policies, 1946–54

ABSTRACT

After the Second World War, Australia introduced a new immigration policy based on the concept of ‘populate or perish’. Through the International Refugee Organization (IRO), 170,000 DPs migrated to Australia between 1947 and 1950, funded by the United Nations and the Australian government. Jews were largely excluded from this programme and the Minister for Immigration even prohibited the IRO from continuing to support the migration to Australia, based on family reunion, of individual Jewish survivors. In addition, the Australian government introduced other discriminatory policies that ensured that Jews remained only 0.5 per cent of the overall population. Based on archival research in the files of the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society and the American Joint Distribution Committee, Rutland and Encel analyse the entrenched racism in Australian society that contributed to these policies, and the reactions of the American Jewish leadership to them.     

Adaptive Management for Oil and Gas Development on Public Lands: An Innovative Approach to Resource Protection,or Symbolic Placation of Public Interests?

Energy development on public lands in the intermountain west is often contentious due to concerns over detrimental impacts to wildlife. To mitigate harm to ungulates and other species, federal agencies often utilize adaptive management, a structured decision‐making framework predicated on “learning while doing.” But in the context of recent energy development, does adaptive management represent an innovative approach to conservation, or is it a largely symbolic policy used to contain the scope of conflict? This article, rooted in the agenda‐setting literature, applies Sarah Pralle's (2006) framework to strategies of conflict containment used by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and industry in three contentious energy development projects in Wyoming. The findings indicate that the BLM's use of adaptive management can be understood as a strategy for conflict containment, rather than as a substantive policy change in public lands oil and gas development.