Public Service Motivation: A Systematic Literature Review and Outlook

Over the past two decades, research on public service motivation has seen rapid growth. Despite the relatively large number of publications to date, no systematic research overview has been created, leaving the body of literature somewhat unstructured and possibly hampering future research. This article fills this void by providing a systematic literature review of 323 publications that examines six key aspects of the literature on public service motivation: the growth of research on the concept, the most prominent studies based on a referencing network analysis, the most frequent publication outlets, research designs and methods, lines of inquiry and patterns of empirical findings, and implications for practice drawn from the publications in the study sample. Strengths and weaknesses of the existing literature are identified, and future research directions are proposed.     

Regulatory dynamism of environmental mobilization in urban China

In China, urban middle class mobilization against potential pollution risk has become increasingly common. This article examines this phenomenon through a detailed case study of a 2009 anti‐waste incinerator campaign in the Panyu District of Guangzhou, which culminated in a sizeable public protest and government U‐turn. This episode revealed tension between the narrow, state‐centered regulatory model fixated on end‐of‐pipe pollution control, and a much broader decentered approach advocated – and practiced – by project opponents, which incorporated public consultation and much greater emphasis on upstream waste reduction and sorting. In the process, the Panyu campaign progressed beyond a case of “regulation by escalation,” whereby beneficial regulations are belatedly enforced following populist pressure. Instead, it transformed into an open dialogue between a plurality of actors, including citizens, journalists, experts, and officials, about what regulation should constitute and who should determine acceptable levels of risk. By focusing on the processes through which regulatory issues emerged and changed during the Panyu campaign, this article highlights the regulatory dynamism of environmental mobilization in a context of regulatory uncertainty, and campaigns against “locally unwanted land uses” more broadly.     

Police Enforcement of Domestic Violence Laws: Supervisory Control or Officer Prerogatives?

Police officers are afforded a high degree of discretion in the exercise of their authority, and the control of this discretion is an important issue. While it is assumed that individual officer attitudes and preferences shape their discretionary activity, these officers are also members of a paramilitary organization with leaders over them. The present study explored the influence of both officer attitudes and management influences to explain variation in officer domestic violence arrest rates. Hierarchical linear modeling was used with a sample of 311 patrol officers and 61 supervisors from 23 municipal police agencies across multiple states. Unlike much of the previous literature, the results revealed that officer occupational attitudes had no effect on this particular officer work behavior. Management influences (such as rewards and written policies) significantly influenced officers’ domestic violence arrest behavior. The findings emphasize the complexity involved in the control of officer discretion.     

Opening Pandora’s Box: How Does Defendant Race Influence Plea Bargaining?

Minority overrepresentation in the criminal justice system has long been an important topic of research and policy debate. In New York City, recent changes in the Rockefeller Drug Laws and the controversy around police stop-and-frisk practices have placed an even greater emphasis on the need for studying the possible impact of defendants’ race and ethnicity on criminal justice outcomes. Relatively little contemporary research, though, examines plea-bargaining outcomes. Using unique data on misdemeanor marijuana cases, this study examines the impact of defendants’ race on prosecutors’ decisions to make (a) plea offers for a lesser charge and (b) sentence offers for non-custodial punishments. Preliminary findings indicated that black defendants were less likely to receive reduced charge offers, and both black and Latino defendants were more likely to receive custodial sentence offers. However, these disparities were largely explained by legal factors, evidence, arrest circumstances, and court actor characteristics, though black defendants were still more likely to receive custodial sentence offers after including these controls. No differences were found between white and Asian defendants. Implications for research and prosecutorial practices are discussed.     

Regulation Inside Government: Public Interest Justifications and Regulatory Failures

Regulation is normally thought of as government regulation of the private sector, particularly business. However, there is a developing literature on regulation inside government, exploring the ways in which government regulates itself through a range of bodies which set standards for public sector organizations, monitor them and seek to bring about compliance with those standards. Reading across economic theories of business regulation to regulation inside government, this article suggests that the current wave of reform inside the UK public sector implicitly reflects a public interest view of regulation. However, the analogous public interest justification for the regulation of business has been heavily criticized and regulatory failures have been suggested including regulation in the interest of regulated bodies, regulation in the interest of regulators and the high costs of operating regulatory systems.     

Click to Donate: visual images,constructing victims and imagining the female refugee

This article investigates the role of visual representation through images in the international refugee regime, with a particular focus on the female refugee. I argue that visual representation illustrated by the photo archives of the unhcr in particular, but also in other institutional sources, plays a crucial role in shaping our imaginations and knowledges, and that its dynamics are important in understanding the politics of asylum. As the international refugee regime institutionalised by the unhcr has developed, the imagination of the refugee has undergone three concurrent shifts: racialisation, victimisation and feminisation. Each of these shifts has contributed to changing policies and practices in the regime, particularly the change in ‘preferred solution’ from integration to repatriation or, where possible, prevention. More importantly, these shifts have all operated within a discourse of depoliticisation of the refugee, denying the figure of the refugee the capacity for political agency. This depoliticisation works through the construction of the ‘female’ refugee, indicating important lessons for our understandings of the political agency of both women and non-citizens.     

Business Models and the Transfer of Businesslike CentralGovernment Agencies

At the same time as many researchers in public administration are suggesting the emergence of similar New Public Management (NPM) forms in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, a substantial number of those working in comparative political economy are rediscovering differences between countries. This paper explores a key component of NPM—business-like central government agencies—in four countries: the UK, the U.S., Germany, and Japan. So far, the private sector side of the NPM story has largely been neglected. However, the business-like agency model as developed in the UK was influenced by the Anglo-American system of corporate governance. In comparative political economy, the Anglo-American system is seen as different from that in Germany or Japan. These differences are important for understanding transfer through emulation of the UK agency model by policy-makers in other countries. An apparent inconsistency may be developing, with governments using an NPM form based on an Anglo-American model of business that is far from universal in business itself.