Why PAR?

Is the Public Administration Review still necessary? Some think that PAR, which debuted in 1940 as America's first and only generalist scholarly public administration journal, belongs to a bygone era of two‐cent postage stamps—a time of coal furnaces, steam radiators, and wood‐burning stoves, when language was crafted longhand or by manual typewriter; when a slide rule calculated most math problems; when a long‐distance telephone call was rare and expensive; when the entire Army, Navy, and State departments were housed within a single building in Washington, DC, the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House; when President Franklin D. Roosevelt communicated to Americans through fireside chats; and when many in the United States still worried about keeping their jobs in the aftermath of the Great Depression, fiercely favoring isolationism over foreign entanglements and strict racial segregation throughout the South.     

Unpacking the Global Perspective: Examining NISPAcee Region-Focused Public Administration Research in American Scholarly Journals

Comparative and international public administration research in the United States (US) has enjoyed moments of both prestige and inattention over the last several decades, variation that is important in that it reflects the efforts of a scholarly field to contribute to improved individual and organizational performance. These contributions are, in and of themselves, worthy of attention and critical reflection. This article examines public administration research focused on the Network of Institutes and Schools of Public Administration in Central and Eastern Europe region published in US-based academic journals from 1997 to 2012, discussing trends that have characterized empirical and conceptual research during that period. The article concludes with comments on collaboration in public administration research.     

Why can voters anticipate post-election coalition formation likelihoods?

A number of scholars have argued that, in contexts with multi-party governing coalitions, voters can use historical patterns to anticipate the ideological composition of likely post-election coalitions and make vote choices accordingly. In this paper we analyze historical coalition formation data from the period 1960–2007 in order to determine whether the historical regularities in the party composition of coalition governments are such that voters can use this information to assess the likelihood that different coalitions would form after an election. Specifically, we examine: (1) the likelihood of party pairs joining a coalition; (2) the likelihood of different coalition permutations; and (3) the likelihood of a party occupying the Prime Ministership.     

Measuring the democracy–repression nexus

A considerable amount of time and intellectual energy has been expended detailing the nature of the relationship between democracy and a state's use of repressive force against its citizens. This article moves the discussion forward both methodologically and substantively. I use a fully Bayesian structural model with latent variables to mitigate the effects of measurement error in both democracy and repression. Further, I estimate two models, one treating democracy as a single overarching concept, similar to the strategy followed by Davenport and Armstrong (2004), Poe and Tate (1994) and one treating democracy as two-dimensional (voice and veto) as suggested by Davenport (2007b). I find that the two models, though closely related offer substantively different predictions. Statistical measures of fit favor the two-dimensional model. Further, I find that the effects of voice and veto are each strongly conditioned by the other.     

Life, Health, and Disability Insurance: Understanding the Relationships

Communitarian values are stronger in health insurance than in life or disability insurance. This correlates with increased tolerance for insurers' use of genetic information in disability insurance underwriting, which, in turn, is relevant to the scope and content of proposals to regulate such use.