Gebhard Kirchgässner, 60 years on

This introductory essay summarizes the contents of the papers presented at a conference in honor of Gebhard Kirchgässner entitled “(Macro-)Economic Policy and Public Choice” which are published in this special issue. In addition to this brief overview on the contributions, this essay relates them to the scientific works of Gebhard Kirchgässner after locating the latter within the realm of Public Choice analysis.     

A Systematic Review of Field Experiments in Public Administration

Field experiments have become popular in public administration. By allowing for the identification of causal effects in realistic settings, field experiments may become central in several research agendas of relevance to the field. Conducting field experiments is difficult and problems often occur along the way. However, researchers new to the method have few resources in public administration to consider the problems that arise when conducting field experiments. This systematic review identifies 42 field experiments in public administration and serves as an introduction to field experiments in public administration. The article discusses how field experiments developed over time and highlights trends in field experimentation in public administration. It then discusses issues to consider when designing field experiments. Among these are costs, practicality, ethics, and validity. Finally, the authors suggest a future research agenda for public administration field experiments.     

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.     

The leap of faith from disease treatment to lifestyle prevention: the genealogy of a policy idea

Since the 1970s public health policy has attempted to counter the rise of chronic diseases by getting individuals to make healthy choices about smoking, alcohol, diet, and physical exercise. Inspired by the so-called new perspective of the 1974 Lalonde report, this shift from disease treatment to prevention has been a key focus of public health policy to this day. Every generation of public health reports presents prevention as the answer to past failures, but the continuous experience of failure is strangely coexistent with a fundamental belief in the ability of lifestyle prevention to produce large health improvements. The article tracks the genealogy of lifestyle prevention as policy idea across three generations of U.S. and Danish public health reports and finds a systematic interpretation of lifestyle prevention as being more successful and promising than acute medical treatment.     

Policy Making in Foreign Aid: Gender Equality and Danish Development Policy

Since the mid-1980s, gender equality has constituted a major priority in the provision of Danish foreign aid. Seeking to understand policy-making processes in the field of foreign aid, this article analyses three gender policies in relation to Denmark’s official foreign aid published respectively in 1987, 1993 and 2004, examining the degree to which they reflect domestic politics, organisational concerns within Danida and global gender norms. Challenging earlier research, the conclusion is that, while global norms, organisational concerns and the normative environment in Denmark all play important roles, Danish stakeholders have had a limited and decreasing influence over these policies.     

Deduction and Justification in the Law. The Role of Legal Terms and Concepts

Abstract. Legal terms, such as “ownership,”“contract,”“validity,”“negligence,” are used as middle terms in legal deduction. The paper distinguishes two problems regarding this use. One is the logical function of terms for deduction within a normative system. Specific problems dealt with in this connection are meaning, definition, and economy of expression. The other problem connected with middle terms is the “moulding” and possible manipulation of the meaning of legal terms, for arriving at desired conclusions in a given scheme of inference. It is indicated how the moulding of contested legal concepts, if not restricted, will obscure the ratio of legal rules. This problem is relevant, inter alia, to arguments ex analogia in the law.     

“Ruby’s Music Festival”: developing problem-solving skills using online scenarios and creating opportunities to feed forward

One of the characteristics of good teaching is giving the highest quality feedback on student work, but the term “feedback” is most commonly associated with summative assessment given by a teacher after work is completed. The student can often be a passive participant in the process. This article looks at the implementation of web-based scenarios completed by students prior to summative assessment with the objective of improving legal problem-solving skills. It examines the design process and the implementation of the problem-solving activity and the approach to teaching and learning taken in the new law unit of which it is part. We argue that such activities are effective tools to feed forward and reflect on the implications for the effective teaching of law in higher education.