Federalism Revised: The Promise and Challenge of the No Child Left Behind Act

Federalism in education has undergone significant changes since the Winter Commission. During the early 1990s, federal policy makers faced the challenge of organizational fragmentation and policy incoherence in public education. In the last 15 years, the intergovernmental system has evolved from one that is predominantly compliance‐driven to one that is performance based, as suggested by the congressional adoption of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. While the former is often characterized by images of “picket fence” federalism and administrative silos, the latter remains very much a work in progress, with the promise of raising academic proficiency. This paper first examines the paradigm shift and then considers emerging politics in intergovernmental relations. The author explores the ways in which state and local policy makers are altering the rules governing education service provision in response to performance‐based federal expectations.     

Managing Racial Diversity: Matching Internal Strategies with Environmental Needs

Although demographic diversity has been of paramount concern to researchers and practitioners in public management, studies exploring managerial strategies to capitalize on and respond to the needs of diverse client populations are scarce. This article examines strategies for managing diversity as a way to buffer environmental challenges in service delivery and performance resulting from heterogeneous client demands. Findings suggest that administrators prioritize diversity efforts when faced with higher levels of regulatory violations (a performance measure). A higher percentage of black residents is associated with lower service quality. However, the effect of managerial strategies for diversity on performance is conditioned by the racial composition of the clients: as the percentage of black nursing home residents increases, diversity management efforts are associated with a lower number of regulatory violations. Similarly, at higher levels of racial heterogeneity, diversity management efforts are associated with fewer regulatory violations.     

Measuring and Explaining Political Sophistication through Textual Complexity

Political scientists lack domain‐specific measures for the purpose of measuring the sophistication of political communication. We systematically review the shortcomings of existing approaches, before developing a new and better method along with software tools to apply it. We use crowdsourcing to perform thousands of pairwise comparisons of text snippets and incorporate these results into a statistical model of sophistication. This includes previously excluded features such as parts of speech and a measure of word rarity derived from dynamic term frequencies in the Google Books data set. Our technique not only shows which features are appropriate to the political domain and how, but also provides a measure easily applied and rescaled to political texts in a way that facilitates probabilistic comparisons. We reanalyze the State of the Union corpus to demonstrate how conclusions differ when using our improved approach, including the ability to compare complexity as a function of covariates.     

Employee Perceived Effect of Leadership Training: Comparing Public and Private Organizations

This study reports on the effectiveness of a year-long field experiment involving training in transformational and transactional leadership in the public and private sectors. Using before and after training assessments by employees of several hundred Danish leaders, the analysis shows that transformational leadership training is associated with increases in behaviors linked to both transformational leadership and the use of verbal rewards, but only for public sector organizations. There is no impact in private sector organizations. Transactional leadership training appears to be equally effective in stimulating the use of pecuniary rewards in both public and private organizations.     

Counterterrorism,Community Policing and the Flags Protests: An Examination of Police Perceptions of Northern Ireland's Operation Dulcet

In 2013 Northern Ireland (NI) witnessed the most protracted period of public-disorder ever seen in the United Kingdom. After Belfast City Council voted to fly the Union flag in-line with the manner adopted in the rest of the United Kingdom, loyalist protestors blocked roads, attacked offices, and held marches through Belfast city center. During what became known as Operation Dulcet, police had to respond to the protests and violence, mindful of existing tensions in NI. This article reports on data collected from interviews conducted with officers involved in the policing of these events. The findings demonstrate that the police response was understood using narratives concerning the primacy of human rights, a focus on perceived proportionality, and ultimately, related to the potential violence linked to historic conceptions of community divisions in NI.     

International Administration Between the Wars: A Reappraisal

This article traces the chronology of the interwar decline of European influence and power, arguing that its origins outside Europe are to be found as much in the paradoxical status of international administration of colonial and post-colonial areas as in the direct challenges posed to European stability by revisionist states in the early 1930s. It demonstrates that an inherent ambivalence toward the interwar colonial world and its relationship to Europe presaged and conditioned the collapse of Europe's own balance of power.     

Digital dilemmas: Values,ethics and information technology

In writings on public administration, the subject areas of values and ethics and of information technology (IT) have received substantial, but largely separate, attention. The public administration community can benefit by drawing on scholarship in the field of information and computer ethics and developing its own body of research with a view to sensitizing public servants to the effects of changes in IT on values and ethics. This article focuses on developments in the use of IT (for example, self‐service technologies, Big Data, the Internet of Things) as a basis for assessing their implications for public sector values and ethics. Research is needed on the extent to which the values and ethics regimes of public organizations take account of the impact of changes in IT; the degree to which the various components of these regimes can foster sensitivity to the implications of these changes; and the significance for the public sector of such emerging ethical issues as robot ethics. Value conflicts and dilemmas arising from advances in digital technologies argue for vigorous measures to alert public servants to the technologies' impact.     

The rights and wrongs of robotics: Ethics and robots in public organizations

Some electronics experts believe that robots, like present‐day computers, will be commonplace. A diverse assortment of robots, with varying purposes, capacities, forms, and sizes, is emerging with significant implications for the policy, service and regulatory responsibilities of government. This paper explores three public policy fields – aging, health care and defence – where the use of robotics is already substantial or where it is projected to grow substantially and where significant ethical issues exist or are anticipated. Applying ethical theories to the use of robotics is difficult. In the near‐term, the focus should be on the ethical standards and behaviour of those designing, manufacturing, programming and operating robots. Several key topics in contemporary public sector ethics, including personal moral responsibility, privacy and accountability, are central to the emerging field of robot ethics. This suggests developing an ethics regime for robotics and examining the need for laws and regulations governing its use.