An Empirical Note on Economic Freedom and Income Inequality

I report estimates for a fixed-effects model of country-level Gini coefficients as a function of economic freedom along with relevant control variables. Gini coefficients are drawn from the UNU/WIDER World Income Inequality Database Version 2.0a, while economic freedom is measured by the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World index. Controls are included for per capita income, political structure, education, demographics, and industrial composition. Over a broad range of freedom, the estimated relation between economic freedom and income inequality is positive, statistically significant, but relatively inelastic.     

Behavioral Public Administration ad fontes: A Synthesis of Research on Bounded Rationality,Cognitive Biases,and Nudging in Public Organizations

This article provides a comprehensive overview of how policy makers, practitioners, and scholars can fruitfully use behavioral science to tackle public administration, management, and policy issues. The article systematically reviews 109 articles in the public administration discipline that are inspired by the behavioral sciences to identify emerging research trajectories, significant gaps, and promising applied research directions. In an attempt to systematize and take stock of the nascent behavioral public administration scholarship, the authors trace it back to the seminal works of three Nobel Laureates—Herbert Simon, Daniel Kahneman, and Richard Thaler—and their work on bounded rationality, cognitive biases, and nudging, respectively. The cognitive biases investigated by the studies reviewed fall into the categories of accessibility, loss aversion, and overconfidence/optimism. Nudging and choice architecture are discussed as viable strategies for leveraging these cognitive traps in an attempt to alter behavior for the better, among both citizens and public servants.     

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.     

How interest groups influence public opinion: Arguments matter more than the sources

Through what mechanism do interest groups shape public opinion on concrete policies? In this article, three hypotheses are proposed that distinguish between the effect of the arguments conveyed by interest groups and the effect of interest groups as source cues. Two survey experiments on the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TIPP) and the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change allow the testing of these hypotheses. The resulting evidence from several countries shows that, with respect to interest groups’ attempts at shaping public opinion, arguments matter more than their sources. This is so even when accounting for people's trust in the interest groups that serve as source cues and for people's level of information about a policy. The finding that interest groups affect public opinion via arguments rather than as source cues has implications for the literature on elite influence on public opinion and the normative evaluation of interest group activities.     

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.     

Sex and the genuine marriage: consummation and conjugality in Canadian citizenship

The idea of consummation as definitive of a marriage seems antiquated today. Yet, consummation operates as a central criterion in determinations of a ‘genuine marriage’ in Canadian immigration law. Drawing on the marriage and migration literature, theorizations of sexual citizenship, and critical multiculturalism, we explore recent judicial considerations of consummation in Canadian family sponsorship adjudications. We searched the CanLII database (a Canadian database of legislation and judicial records) for the keywords ‘non-consummation’ and ‘genuine marriage’ and identified 68 cases. Of these cases, three primary themes emerged: the use of consummation as a ‘technology of love’ – a requirement for assessing the authenticity of the spousal relationship and hence the worthiness of sponsorship; the discursive construction of sexual and gendered norms in expectations around marital intimacy, and the articulation of liberal tolerance and the cultural other in the assessments of genuine marriages among primarily racialized Canadians or permanent residents and their foreign spouses. We challenge these discursive narratives and conclude by arguing that instead of consummation as the basis for genuine marriage, the Law Commission of Canada’s ‘close personal relationship’ model is a better way to assess the ‘genuineness’ of relationships for determining Canadian citizenship.