Determinants of Public Administrators' Use of Performance Information: Evidence from Local Governments in Florida

Performance management has been a focus of scholars and practitioners for more than 25 years, yet the use of performance information has not greatly expanded as a result of this attention. Acknowledging that performance measurement is not an end in itself but rather a means to enhance focus on results and value, this article evaluates the determinants of the use of performance information by local government administrators. An online survey was administered to local government employees involved in the 2015–16 Florida Benchmarking Consortium. Analysis of the data demonstrates that institutionalization of performance measurement has the strongest statistically significant positive association with the use of performance information, followed by the design adequacy of the performance measurement system.     

The INSPIRE Framework: How Public Administrators Can Increase Compliance with Written Requests Using Behavioral Techniques

Public administrators rely on written communications to send information to citizens and stakeholders, and they are among the heaviest users of the postal service. Behavioral science research has identified several techniques that public administrators can use to increase compliance with written requests and, in turn, increase effectiveness. Currently, however, many written communications from government bodies are not written in a manner that utilizes these techniques. It remains an ongoing challenge for public administrators to identify, understand, and use these techniques in the written communications sent by their organizations. This article presents a framework capturing seven prominent techniques in a simple mnemonic—INSPIRE—that is already being used by several government bodies in Australia. It also provides practical examples of how to use each technique and demonstrates that using these techniques could result in large aggregate improvements in effectiveness and socially desirable outcomes of public administrators' written communications.     

Engage Them through Emotions: Exploring the Role of Emotional Intelligence in Public Sector Engagement

The public administration literature has demonstrated the valuable impact of employees' engagement on public service. However, studies conventionally deal with engagement as a unidimensional construct, with few explanations for its evolution. To promote knowledge in this arena, the authors propose public sector engagement (PSE) as a multidimensional construct, comprising social responsibility, work engagement, and organizational citizenship behaviors at the individual level. The authors develop and examine a set of hypotheses proposing that PSE may be augmented by enhancing civil servants' emotional intelligence (EI) as well as their supervisors' EI. Using a two‐study multimethod approach (i.e., an experiment and a survey), the authors identify employees' and managers' high EI as a critical resource in enhancing PSE. The article concludes by theoretically framing the findings using the job demands‐resources model and illuminating the practical value to public service of better selection and training of high‐EI employees and managers.     

Urbanization Patterns,Information Diffusion,and Female Voting in Rural Paraguay

We use a field experiment to evaluate the impact of two informational get‐out‐the‐vote campaigns to boost female electoral participation in rural areas of Paraguay. We find that public rallies had a small and insignificant effect either on registration or voter turnout in the 2013 presidential elections. Households that received door‐to‐door canvassing treatment were 4.6 percentage points more likely to vote. Experimental variation on the intensity of the treatment at the locality level allows us to estimate spillover effects, which are present in localities that are geographically more concentrated, which may favor social interactions and diffusion of information. Reinforcement effects on the already treated population are twice as large as diffusion effects on the untreated. Our results underscore the importance of taking into account urbanization patterns when designing informational campaigns.     

Regulating Autonomy: An Assessment of Policy Language for Highly Automated Vehicles

Self‐driving cars (also known as driverless cars, autonomous vehicles, and highly automated vehicles [HAVs]) will change the regulatory, political, and ethical frameworks surrounding motor vehicles. At the highest levels of automation, HAVs are operated by independent machine agents, making decisions without the direct intervention of humans. The current transportation system assumes human intervention though, including legal and moral responsibilities of human operators. Has the development of these artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous system (AS) technologies outpaced the ethical and political conversations? This paper examines discussions of HAVs, driver responsibility, and technology failure to highlight the differences between how the policy‐making institutions in the United States (Congress and the Public Administration) and technology and transportation experts are or are not speaking about responsibility in the context of autonomous systems technologies. We report findings from a big data analysis of corpus‐level documents to find that enthusiasm for HAVs has outpaced other discussions of the technology.     

Transdisciplinary public leadership theory: Between the extremes of “traditional public administration” and “new public management”

The 21st century public organization is faced with complex problems, informed stakeholders, and information flows, which necessitate a corresponding open system view of leadership. The traditional notions of public administration and new public management had been structured by strict bureaucratic rules and managerial flexibility, respectively. This paper begins by theorizing two hypothetical constructs (helicopter and deadbeat leadership), which engage in extreme micromanagement/surveillance and negligence/indifference, respectively. Those form basis for designing an optimal (transdisciplinary) leadership, which forges synergistic link between leaders, subordinates, and external actors in codesigning objectives and strategies to address societal problems. Strategies to promote transdisciplinary leadership are discussed.     

Slovenia: Interest group developments in a postsocialist‐liberal democracy

Slovenia has a rich tradition of associations and interest group activity dating back to the 19th century. To some extent, the development of the group system was stymied by the 60 years of authoritarian rule from the early 1930s to the late 1980s. However, the resilience of this tradition is evident in major developments in group activity since the return to democracy. In addition to influences from the past, including a neocorporatist tradition, is the impact of Slovenia's process of integration into the European Union. This article considers the extent to which the modern nature of the interest group system is both constrained by hangovers from the past but enhances by European integration, both of which have affected the development of Slovenia's majoritarian democracy.