Assessing the Past and Promise of the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey for Public Management Research: A Research Synthesis

Since 2002, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management has used the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) to monitor efforts by federal executive agencies to manage human capital. Public management researchers have used FEVS data to produce dozens of peer‐reviewed publications on a range of topics of interest to policy makers, practitioners, and academics. Despite the proliferation of these empirical studies, the field of public management until now has lacked a critical assessment of the FEVS and of how researchers have used the data. In this article, the authors discuss the strengths of the FEVS and the opportunities this survey has created for public management researchers. Despite important contributions made to the literature using the data, there are weaknesses in the content, design, and implementation of the FEVS. The authors offer a set of recommendations for refining the survey and its implementation with the aim of improving the quality and value of the data. In doing so, they hope to foster a dialogue between public management researchers and the Office of Personnel Management on the future of the FEVS and to forge a stronger link between these two communities.     

Social Protest and Policy Attitudes: The Case of the 2006 Immigrant Rallies

Do protests sway public opinion? If so, why and how? To address these questions, we examine the impact of the 2006 immigration protests on immigration policy preferences. We use the 2006 Latino National Survey coupled with protest data to examine whether temporal and spatial exposure to the protests are associated with policy preferences. Our findings lend evidence that protest activity influences Latinos’ immigration policy preferences. However, the findings suggest the effect of protest on immigration policy preferences is not uniform across the population, but rather contingent on generational status and the intensity of protest activity at the local level.     

Affordability After Subsidies: Understanding the Trajectories of Former Assisted Housing in Florida

Each year, thousands of units are lost from the assisted rental housing inventory through deterioration and default, subsidy expiration, and market-rate conversion. While a good deal of research and data collection has focused on identifying at-risk developments, less is known about what happens to former assisted developments after they exit income and rent restrictions. This article uses a survey of former assisted properties in Florida to identify their postsubsidy trajectories—that is, as to whether developments continue as rental housing, are converted to condominiums, or leave the housing stock through vacancy and demolition; and for those that continue as rental housing, whether they continue to offer affordable rents. Using logistic regression models, the article examines the property, housing market, and neighborhood characteristics that determine these trajectories. The results show that smaller properties, those that have been out of subsidy programs longer, and those in stronger neighborhood housing markets are more likely to be converted to condominiums. Among developments that continue as rental housing, those that previously had more stringent rent restrictions, those in strong rental submarkets, and those with better transit access tend to become unaffordable compared with previous rent limits.     

The correctional staff burnout literature

Correctional staff job burnout is costly to all involved. As such, it has generated a growing body of research. This study reviewed 53 empirical studies of correctional staff burnout and two review articles published between 1981 and 2014. The majority of studies focused on staff working in a variety of institutional positions, fewer studies focused exclusively on the subgroup of correctional officers, and even fewer focused on a different subgroup. The majority of studies also involved staff at US government-run adult prisons. Most but not all studies utilized Maslach’s Burnout Inventory. Research on the antecedents of job burnout among correctional staff is more common than research on the possible consequences or outcomes of job burnout. Interestingly, despite the empirical emphasis on antecedents of burnout, there has been almost no research on effective interventions designed to deal with correctional staff burnout. Based on this narrative review, significant gaps remain in the research on correctional staff burnout.     

Female serial killers in the United States: means,motives, and makings

Most studies that have focused on female serial killers (FSKs), although informative, have examined limited sample sizes. We consulted mass media reports of demographics, motives, methods, mental health, and victim characteristics of 64 FSKs who committed their crimes in the US from 1821 to 2008. Consistent with other studies, our data showed that FSKs were typically White, educated, have been married, and held a caregiving role (e.g. mother, health care worker). Nearly 40% of FSKs in this sample experienced some form of mental illness. Their most common motive for murder was financial gain, and their most common method of killing was poisoning. FSKs knew all or most of their victims, and most were related to their victims. In all cases, FSKs targeted at least one victim who was a child, elderly, or infirm – those who had little chance of fighting back. We interpret these killers’ behaviors from clinical and evolutionary angles.     

You’ve got to fight to be white: the rural foundation of the new militia for race control

In this paper, we situate the recent rise of racialized and often violent political discourse within a framework of a class-based conception of nature and property. In this theoretical work, we contribute to thinking about how Whites are racially constituted by showing how an understanding of whiteness among the far right is significantly linked to narratives surrounding rural spaces as havens of individualism and in sharp contrast to the perceived multiculturalism of the city. In developing our argument, we utilize public statements made by Ted Nugent as observable examples of this far-right, violent, and racialized rhetoric. We argue that the far right is able to create a common ground with moderate conservatives around a shared understanding of rural places as embodiments of virtuous white culture, private property, and individualism. This politicized whiteness project, we argue, helps to galvanize and strengthen a conservative coalition while simultaneously pulling their collective ideology further to the right.     

The Committee of the Parents of the Missing and Disappeared: 30 Years of Struggle and Protest

This article investigates the work of a Lebanese non-governmental organization (NGO) called the Committee of the Parents of the Missing and the Disappeared. Although the successive Lebanese governments, most political leaders, ex-militia leaders and ex-combatants did not want to help in revealing the truth about what had happened to the people who went missing during the Lebanese civil war of 1975, the Committee managed to mobilize the families of the missing people under one banner for more than 30 years and was successful in making the Lebanese government and the legal authorities take few but important decisions that favoured the cause of the families of the missing people. It managed to do so without being deterred by the social, political and economic challenges it faced and due to the ability of its leadership to clearly define the sources of contention it wanted to protest against and by selecting the protests methods that best serve its cause.