The Role of Motivation and Leadership in Public Employees’ Job Preferences: Evidence from Two Discrete Choice Experiments

Two discreet choice experiments investigated how three styles of leadership (i.e., transformational, transactional, and ethical) and three job features aimed at activating different motivational forces (i.e., public service motivation, external regulation, and intrinsic motivation) simultaneously and independently affected the job preferences of a sample of public employees. Subjects displayed a strong preference for jobs that benefit more citizens, that are more interesting, and that require working under ethical leaders rather than unethical ones. Whereas the prospect of a 5% salary increase strengthened participants’ preferences for a given position, offering a 1% salary raise did not significantly change subjects’ job choices. Furthermore, participants did not appear to have any preference for working under a transformational leader rather than a transactional leader.     

Negotiating justice: legal pluralism and gender-based violence in Liberia

The plural legal system in post-conflict Liberia expresses tensions between modern and customary institutions. This article seeks to understand how Liberians navigate choices in the plural legal system to address gender-based violence cases. By asking how and why people make the choices they do, we highlight how Liberians solve tensions between institutions, by creating flexible categories that allow them to pursue a course of action that does not compromise their ability to access social networks and resources.     

Information Campaigns and (Under)Privileged Citizens: An Experiment on the Differential Effects of a Voting Advice Application

Information campaigns are key elements of elections. Past research has established the importance of campaigns in informing and educating citizens, and ultimately strengthening participatory democracy. While the Internet has increased the possibilities to disseminate information campaigns and eased access to political information, it is still debated whether online campaigns are effective in stimulating political interest and participation among the general public. The issue is not only one of access, but also of use of information. The investigation of main effects of campaigns obscures the fact that citizens may not use information in the same way and reap the same political benefits. In this study, I examine the conditional effects of a new type of Web information campaign, Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), on the political engagement and electoral participation of citizens with varying levels of education. By investigating who benefits most from using these apps, I evaluate whether VAAs reinforce patterns of participation or mobilize new people in politics. Building on political behavior research, communication theory, and social psychology, I study the differential effects of VAAs with an innovative randomized field experiment design. The results confirm that VAAs can stimulate the political engagement of the public. However, there is no significant impact on electoral participation. In addition, the evidence shows that VAAs work differently for more or less educated citizens, and that the lower educated users benefit the most from VAAs as they become more interested in the election and more motivated to vote.