Generating Usable Knowledge through an Experimental Approach to Public Administration

This introduction to the symposium on experimental methods in public administration shows how using experimental methods generates not only research that is empirically credible, but also relates to the real world of public administration. The ten articles in the symposium subject classic public administration theories or hypotheses that have been generated in nonexperimental research to rigorous testing using experimental methods. The first group of articles consists of studies with citizens who interact with government. The second group consists of three studies with public officials.     

Five Ways to Make a Difference: Perceptions of Practitioners Working in Urban Neighborhoods

This article responds to and develops the fragmented literature exploring intermediation in public administration and urban governance. It uses Q‐methodology to provide a systematic comparative empirical analysis of practitioners who are perceived as making a difference in urban neighborhoods. Through this analysis, an original set of five profiles of practitioners—enduring, struggling, facilitating, organizing, and trailblazing—is identified and compared. This research challenges and advances the existing literature by emphasizing the multiplicity, complexity, and hybridity, rather than the singularity, of individuals perceived as making a difference, arguing that different practitioners make a difference in different ways. The authors set out a research agenda, overlooked in current theorization, that focuses on the relationships and transitions between the five profiles and the conditions that inform them, opening up new avenues for understanding and supporting practice.     

Innovation for a steady state: a case for responsible stagnation

The proponents of responsible innovation (RI) have often opened their discussions with the reassurance that while they are against irresponsible innovation, they are not advocating irresponsible stagnation. In the two-by-two matrix generally used to illustrate this model of innovation, the quadrant for responsible stagnation has so far gone largely unmentioned, let alone explored. This paper draws on existing real-world cases to examine what arguments drawn from ecological economics might contribute to the discussion of RI. It questions the present growth-driven paradigm and asks whether opening the black box of ‘responsible stagnation' might also open the door for a reasoned discussion about resource consumption and pace of development in over-productive or too-risky sectors and technologies, as an intrinsic part of responsible innovation, rather than its opposite.     

BLM,the Administrative Presidency,and Policy Shifts: Policy Tools Affecting Oil and Gas Operations

This paper addresses change in oil and gas policies pushed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) during the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Administrative policy changes occurred not only because of election outcomes and the emergence of new governing coalitions but BLM's selective utilization of policy tools such as rulemaking, planning, environmental impact analyses, and the use of discretionary authority to increase or relax enforcement decisions. The data reveal that BLM put more emphasis on the use of discretionary authority to limit environmental inspections and to limit environmental reviews of proposed drilling projects under Bush while agency officials gave priority to adopting new planning procedures to allow greater stakeholder input under Obama as well as increasing the number of environmental inspections.     

Means to a Better World: Two Analytical Methods,Similar Policies

In different ways David Harvey’s Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism and Robert Reich’s Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few tell us what we already know about capitalism’s rigged system favoring the rich while exploiting working people. Reich bases his analysis on five building blocks of “free markets” which demonstrate government’s unbreakable connection to the shape given to those markets. Reich’s solutions move the conversation leftward from the establishment mainstream. Harvey, on the other hand, examines seventeen contradictions in today’s capitalism that need to be resolved and proposes seventeen mandates to resolve them. His “mandates” have similarities to Reich’s policy suggestions. Coming from different perspectives and relying on different methodologies, but both focusing on establishing a more just society, both Reich and Harvey wind up suggesting similar changes.     

The dynamics of doping: Lance Armstrong,the United States Anti‐Doping Agency and the regulatory governance of professional cycling

On 10 October 2012, the United States Anti‐Doping Agency published an investigative report on the use of performance‐enhancing drugs by professional cyclist Lance Armstrong. The report paints a disconcerting picture of the doping program that Armstrong and his US Postal Service professional cycling team managed to carry out for several years, despite being subject to many inspections. It contains a wealth of unique empirical data, including a large number of affidavits. In this article, we use this data to answer the question of how Armstrong was able to prolong prohibited behavior. In doing so, we focus in particular on the interactions between Armstrong and the many doping inspectors he encountered. Our analysis results in a variety of answers to this question. First, inspectors were confronted with an inspectee who behaved as an “amoral calculator” and acted strategically. The strategies of inspectors were not adequately attuned to such behavior. Second, the team's internal professional control was neutralized by various factors, including its strict hierarchy and the many friendships within the team. And, finally, the environment created strong incentives to start doping and subsequently deny doing so. We argue that the dynamics underlying doping necessitate a combination of measures to regulate the use of performance‐enhancing drugs in the field of professional cycling and beyond.     

“If You've Got Friends and Neighbours”: Constituency Voting Patterns for the UK Labour Party Leader in 2010

Most attention in British electoral studies has been paid to the pattern of voting for parties, with relatively little to that for individual candidates. In intra-party elections, however, candidates may perform better in some areas than others, illustrating V. O. Key's well-known “friends and neighbours” effect. This paper explores whether that was so at the election for the leader of the UK Labour party in 2010, expecting each of the five candidates to perform better in their own constituency and its environs and also with those constituency parties whose MPs supported their candidature. The results are in line with the expectations, especially for one of the candidates who ran an explicitly geographical campaign.