Editorial Report on Public Administration Review, 2006–2011: A Global Graduate Seminar,a Privilege,and a Challenge

In this final wrap‐up, PAR’s editor in chief, Richard Stillman, and managing editor, Jos C. N. Raadschelders, summarize the last six years of the journal’s objectives, contents, and accomplishments. The authors broadly discuss their editorial activities, past and present, and candidly and succinctly outline the ongoing challenges facing PAR in the future as the leading global journal for interdisciplinary public administration.     

PAR’s Social Equity Footprint

During the 75th anniversary of Public Administration Review (PAR), this article examines the social equity scholarship published in PAR from 1940 to 2013. Less than 5 percent of all articles published in PAR since its inception focus on social equity. The articles published in PAR are primarily concentrated within the areas of personnel and public policy. Very few articles were published in the areas of budgeting or ethics. While social equity scholarship published in PAR has made a valuable contribution to understanding the career inequities of women and minorities in the public sector, scholars and professionals need to more thoroughly examine the black box of agency practice and structural inequities to examine why they persist. The challenge for future social equity research in public administration is to examine broader dimensions of equity and to understand how social inequities in administration can be mitigated.     

Examining the Evolution of the Field of Public Administration through a Bibliometric Analysis of Public Administration Review

In 2015, Public Administration Review celebrated its 75th year of publication. For this milestone, the PAR Editorial Board selected the 75 most influential articles in the history of the journal and invited scholars to “revisit a selection of these articles” in order “to take stock of what these articles meant for the field.” Bibliometrics offers a complementary view of the history of a discipline and the evolution of its research and practice agendas through an analysis of its published literature. This article examines the changes over time in PAR from 1940 through 2013 in authorship: contributions, impact, gender composition, institutional and national affiliation, profession as scholar or practitioner, collaboration networks, and the status of the 75 influential articles. Through an extensive quantitative analysis of scholarly production, this article demonstrates PAR’s centrality to the discipline of public administration and its bridging role between public administration and political science.     

Toward “Strong Democracy” in Global Cities? Social Capital Building,Theory‐Driven Reform,and the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Experience

With faith in government waning, cultural diversity spiraling, and fiscal stress straining the ability of policy makers to address the policy challenges accompanying these developments, the salience of (re)connecting citizens with government takes on renewed urgency today. Nowhere is this more the case than in urban America, where so‐called global cities teeming with ethnic diversity and controlling a disproportionate amount of global business in the world economy confront profound citizen participation challenges, choices, and opportunities. In this installment of Theory to Practice, the authors cull lessons from their 10‐year action theory–based assessment and participation in the city of Los Angeles’ neighborhood council experience. Comparing and contrasting their findings in this global city with those from related studies on participatory mechanisms and deliberative processes more generally, they offer six lessons for those seeking to build stronger democracy in urban areas, argue that further advances require a greater research focus on the longitudinal implementation of these efforts rather than just on their design, and contend that university researchers have a role to play in these efforts as long as they appreciate the paradoxical nature of their participation. Expert e‐commentary by Brian Cook of Virginia Tech, Tina Nabatchi of Syracuse University, and John Thomas of Georgia State University on the perspectives and arguments culled from Los Angeles’ theory‐based participatory efforts can be found on the PAR website (go to aspanet.org, click on the link to PAR, and then on the Theory to Practice link). These e‐commentaries are accompanied by the authors’ response and instructions on how PAR readers can join the exchange.     

Left High and Dry? Climate Change,Common‐Pool Resource Theory,and the Adaptability of Western Water Compacts

Efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are falling far short of what a consensus of scientists argues is necessary to avoid potentially catastrophic increases in the mean global temperature. Increasingly, attention is devoted to understanding the vulnerability and adaptability of social and ecological systems to climate change in particular areas of the world. In the Western United States and other semi‐arid regions of the world, possibly the most immediate, direct impacts of climate change involve the availability of water resources. Scientific evidence suggests that the West is likely to become hotter and drier and will experience greater variability in precipitation. These changes will affect tens of millions of residents in Western states, and nearly every sector of the economy, especially agriculture. The logic of common‐pool resource theory is applied in this Theory to Practice essay to assess the vulnerability and adaptability to climate change of interstate river compacts and to offer recommendations for coping with climate change. Future areas of research on this critical topic are also outlined. Expert e‐commentaries by Richard Kashmanian and Roger Gorke of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and by Elisabeth Graffy of the U.S. Geological Survey, can be found on the PAR website (go to aspanet.org , click on the link to PAR, and then on the Theory to Practice link).     

Why PAR?

Is the Public Administration Review still necessary? Some think that PAR, which debuted in 1940 as America's first and only generalist scholarly public administration journal, belongs to a bygone era of two‐cent postage stamps—a time of coal furnaces, steam radiators, and wood‐burning stoves, when language was crafted longhand or by manual typewriter; when a slide rule calculated most math problems; when a long‐distance telephone call was rare and expensive; when the entire Army, Navy, and State departments were housed within a single building in Washington, DC, the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House; when President Franklin D. Roosevelt communicated to Americans through fireside chats; and when many in the United States still worried about keeping their jobs in the aftermath of the Great Depression, fiercely favoring isolationism over foreign entanglements and strict racial segregation throughout the South.     

The Future of the Study of Public Administration: Embedding Research Object and Methodology in Epistemology and Ontology

What should be done to advance the study of public administration? A strong argument is advanced by outgoing PAR managing editor Jos C. N. Raadschelders that the field benefits significantly from greater attention to ontology and epistemology. To be sure, empirical, evidence‐based research has its place, but its basis and the meaning of findings seldom are questioned. Why? Many public administration scholars seek “scientificness” through a disciplinary type of methodology. However, working within an inherently interdisciplinary field, public administration scholars cannot reduce the complex, wicked problems of society and government to mere empirical measurement. The author lays out five critical challenges confronting today’s public administration—both its study and research—requiring the field’s urgent attention in order to meet the comprehensive and rapidly expanding needs of specialists and generalists, practitioners and academicians, as well as the general public.     

Reflections on Leadership: An Interview with Sean O'Keefe

This interview with Sean O'Keefe by PAR Associate Editor W. Henry Lambright is a departure from traditional Administrative Profiles. It represents an opportunity to elicit from a man who has held executive positions in government, industry, and the university lessons he has learned about leadership from those experiences. It is his perspective, in his own words, about a host of questions of interest to scholars and practitioners of public administration. These include commonalities and differences in leading organizations in various sectors. O'Keefe discusses how executives can deal with people and get the most from them, how executives use administrative power in achieving organizational goals, and why executives sometimes make the wrong calls in key decisions. He comments on what he learned about leadership from mentors during his formative years. He explains the limits he faced in making controversial decisions, such as his termination of a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission.     

Migrants’ inhabiting through commoning and state enclosures. A postface

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I deploy the framework of commons as social systems which I have developed in my last book Omnia Sunt Communia to interpret the debate developed in this issue, enquire on the relationship between commons and citizenship, and ground the question of migrants’ inhabiting on the theory of commoning.     

Trends in the Study of Public Administration: Empirical and Qualitative Observations from Public Administration Review, 2000–2009

What are the apparent research and methodological trends in PAR’s content over the past decade? From the perspective of the journal’s 70‐year history, with its aim to “mesh” practitioner and academic knowledge creation, topical coverage since 2000 reflects striking continuity, emphasizing many of the “bread and butter” administrative issues such as planning, human resources, budgeting, and public management. A marked increase in coverage is apparent in the application of more sophisticated quantitative statistical methodology, as well as in the number of female authors, while the number of practitioner authors declined sharply. Throughout the first turbulent decade of the twenty‐first century, three intellectual themes stood out: evaluations of New Public Management, connections between practitioners and academicians, and responsiveness to immediate social, economic, and political challenges. Given the constant demand for usable knowledge, scholars seem to have marginalized attention to the historical context and epistemological foundations of the study. The central challenge in the years ahead will be to effectively use research methods in response to the big questions of government and society that defy measurement. Since many [empiricists], especially the younger, do not know very much about epistemology, they tend to be quite dogmatic about the one set of canons that dominate them. —C. Wright Mills, 1959     

BOOK REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this issue. Democratic Flaws
RICHARD BOURKE The Life and Death of Democracy, by John Keane. Flawed democracy
Gianfranco Pasquino Democracy Inc. Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, by Sheldon Wolin. Democracy in the Land of Good Things (Britain)
Richard Mullender Democracy: 1,000 Years in Pursuit of British Liberty, by Peter Kellner. The soldier's right to kill
Christopher Finlay Killing in War, by Jeff McMahan. Facts from Eastern Europe and elsewhere
Richard Briand Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name, by Timothy Garton Ash. The soul of Tony Blair
Ilaria Favretto Losing Labour's Soul? New Labour and the Blair Government, 1997–2007, by Eric Shaw. Greeks and Turks in Europe and Cyprus
Mehmet Ugur Turkey's Accession to the European Union: An Unusual Candidacy, by Constantine Arvanitopoulos. Cyprus: The Post‐Imperial Constitution, by Vassilis K. Fouskas and Alex O. Tackie. Obama's last chance
Tony Klug The Last Chance: The Middle East in the Balance, by David Gardner. Thatcher's grandchildren
Mark Garnett Thatcher's Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s, by Richard Vinen.     

Declining options/increasing needs

Before that, he served at the National Institute of Education. He has held teaching appointments at the Universities of Illinois and Oregon and at Cornell University, and is now adjunct professor at George Washington University. He has authored fifteen books, including Finding Work: Cross National Perspectives; Program Evaluation and the Management of Government;and he has edited the last four volumes of Policy Studies Review Annual.     

Empire,Rifondazione Comunista,and the politics of spontaneity

Hardt and Negri's Empire has emerged as an ambitious and influential attempt to theorize some of the most pressing political concerns of our time. I examine Empire's reach into contemporary politics—a hitherto neglected aspect of its influence—by explaining how it came to be at the center of fierce debates at the last national congress of Rifondazione Comunista, a political party of the Italian left. I then develop a critique of Empire as a failed attempt to transcend the theoretical and political horizons of Marxism. While Empire presents itself as a radically new theory, it is better understood as the latest of incarnation of spontaneity, a conspicuously old orientation. Finally, I recover Lenin's critique of spontaneity, using it to make sense of some of the most peculiar ambiguities in Empire and to critique it as neither original nor adequate to face the political challenges of our time.     

From Uniformity to Diversity? Reinventing Public Sector Industrial Relations in New Zealand

Since 1988 industrial relations in New Zealand's public sector have changed significantly. This paper discusses the changing roles of the State Services Commission and chief executives in bargaining with public sector employees, and how these changing roles have affected union representation and wage rates. While the Employment Contracts Act, 1991 resulted in changes to bargaining, generally its effect was minimal in the public sector with respect to bargaining outcomes. However, one of the more significant changes as a result of the Employment Contracts Act has been a move to direct employer — employee negotiations. Bargaining in New Zealand's public sector has moved, in the last nine years, from uniformity to diversity, but to what extent?     

Regional arrangements for providing liquidity in a financial crisis: developments in East Asia

Abstract

During the last decade three books have had a disproportionate impact on China Studies because of their controversial interpretations: Jenner's The Tyranny of History, which predicts the disintegration of the Chinese state; Menzies' 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, which describes how Chinese sailors circumnavigated the globe well before any Europeans; and Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's biography Mao: The Unknown Story. All are revisionist histories that amongst other (usually controversial) conclusions suggest there has been a conspiracy to keep the information they convey hidden. Considering their arguments and the manner of their enquiry and expression is interesting in more general ways about the construction of narrative and the nature of conspiracy, as well as about the lessons for academic research.     

Paul Hirst’s encounters with Economy and Society

Abstract

This article examines the construction of the homo economicus in Argentina in the context of the last military dictatorship (1976–83). While the worldviews of the military and neo-liberal economists of the time were very different, their common concern for distortions in economic and political life made them translatable. These economists provided a new economic identity that would be in tune with monetarist theory, replace ‘distorting’ collective identities and allow individuals to be governed from a distance. I argue that the homo economicus was performed through two sets of tools: consumer campaigns and the financial press. However, individuals did not always behave as expected. The contradictions of neo-liberalism, between its liberalism and its quest to create self-regulating spheres through active government intervention, led to the financial crisis of 1980. Economists later blamed the crash on the irresponsibility of market actors and expressed doubt regarding the self-regulating model they had promoted. In the conclusion, the legacy of the attempt to perform the homo economicus is assessed.     

Spin: from tactic to tabloid

• Over the last fifteen years, the word Spin has come to define both the process of political communication, and the practice of public relations itself. The history of the term requires some examination. Arguably, until around 1992, Spin did not have such a widespread meaning—it was simply one tactic in an election campaigner's armoury.
• Now it seems to embrace the whole process of communication, not only between election campaigners and the media, but also between a Government and its people, or between a public relations professional in any field, and his or her target publics.
• The development of Spin as a word has gone through a number of stages which will be addressed in the course of this paper. It now has widespread popular usage, which has arisen through two principal processes: The increasing celebrity status of the spin‐doctor role: and the usefulness of the word to tabloid sub‐editors.
• By 1997, when New Labour came into Government, the discourse of spin was firmly established.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Linear Poisson Autoregressive Model: The Poisson AR(p) Model

Time series of event counts are common in political scienceand other social science applications. Presently, there arefew satisfactory methods for identifying the dynamics in suchdata and accounting for the dynamic processes in event countsregression. We address this issue by building on earlier workfor persistent event counts in the Poisson exponentially weightedmoving-average model (PEWMA) of Brandt et al. (American Journalof Political Science 44(4):823–843, 2000). We developan alternative model for stationary mean reverting data, thePoisson autoregressive model of order p, or PAR(p) model. Issuesof identification and model selection are also considered. Wethen evaluate the properties of this model and present bothMonte Carlo evidence and applications to illustrate.     

State and Local Governance Fifteen Years Later: Enduring and New Challenges

This article draws on the contributions to this issue and related evidence to assay the extent to which the states and larger local governments have moved in directions endorsed by the Winter Commission in 1993 . The commission’s recommendations targeted (1) the political context of state and local governance, with a particular focus on executive leadership, campaign finance reform, and citizen engagement; (2) the specifics of public administration, with primary emphasis on empowering managers through internal deregulation and bolstering human resource capacity; and (3) the nature of the relationship between the national government and the states in a key policy arena. Significant changes in the fabric of state and local governance have occurred in each of these three areas over the last 15 years. Many of these modifications are consonant with the thrust of the Winter Commission report, but the evidence also points to the limits of state and local reform. Further reform initiatives should be built on systematic efforts to advance knowledge concerning the origins, nature, and outcomes of the array of institutions and processes present at the state and local levels.