Linking Public Housing to Education: A Comparative Case Study of HOPE VI

This research examines the federally funded HOPE VI urban revitalization program’s influence on neighborhood public school performance. A comparative case study was conducted in two HOPE VI neighborhood public schools, one that improved significantly (Philadelphia), and one that experienced a decline (Washington DC). The analysis revealed several insights into neighborhood factors that may influence school performance: the most vulnerable residents were least likely to gain reentry, mixed income housing residents often opt out of traditional public schools, and partnerships between public housing and education officials have been historically overlooked.     

Examining the Effects of Social Media Use on Job Satisfaction in the Australian Public Service: Testing Self-Determination Theory

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between social media usage for work purposes and employee job satisfaction in the public sector. Because social media is a relatively recent phenomenon, the ways in which it affects employee attitudes such as job satisfaction are not well-known. Using self-determination theory (SDT) as a framework, this study tests whether perceived competence, relatedness, and autonomy mediate the relationship between social media usage for work purposes and employee job satisfaction. Data were obtained from the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC). Overall, results generated from the structural equation models support SDT, suggesting that employees using social media for work purposes have higher self-determination and higher self-determination increases their job satisfaction. In particular, the effect of competence to job satisfaction is very high. However, while social media usage for work purposes can enhance employees’ need for autonomy and competence, it does not have any statistical effect to employees need for relatedness. In addition, social media does not have any statistical and direct effect to job satisfaction. The results suggest that social media has an indirect effect to job satisfaction. This article discusses the implications of these findings.     

Public Service Motivation,Organizational Social Capital,and Knowledge Sharing in the Korean Public Sector

This article investigates whether public service motivation (PSM) and organizational social capital predict knowledge sharing in the public sector. The hypothesized relationships in the proposed model are verified with the online survey data of 506 public employees in Korea. The test results show that the two dimensions of PSM (attraction to public service and commitment to public values) and the trust component of organizational social capital are both positively related to knowledge sharing in the Korean public sector, and that the associability component of organizational social capital is indirectly associated with knowledge sharing through its influence on PSM. The article discusses the ways that PSM and organizational social capital may contribute to overcome the social dilemma of knowledge sharing in public organizations. It also suggests that there is need for further research on the individual dimensions of the PSM construct.     

The Impact of Advertising and Media on the Arab Culture: The Case of the Arab Spring,Public Spheres,and Social Media

The Arab world has experienced some unprecedented social movements, labeled by the media as the Arab Spring. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of public policy, advertising, media, and public spheres on the Arab Spring. The media and economic policies enacted in the Arab world in the 1990s played a significant role in changing consumer culture in the Arab region, resulting in significant changes in public policy. Two studies were conducted to test how the change in consumer culture along with new public polices in the region contributed to the uprisings.     

Senior Public Managers’ Engagement: A Person–Situation-Interactionist Perspective

This article examines the engagement of senior public managers by developing a person–situation-interactionist perspective. It integrates the literature on social exchange theory and person–organization fit to explore the effects of decision autonomy and shared vision on the engagement of more than 2,000 senior public sector managers in the central government agencies of three continental European countries: France, Germany, and The Netherlands. Then, it examines whether the locus of control of those managers moderates the decision autonomy–engagement and shared vision–engagement relationships. The structural equation modeling results suggest that there are positive relationships between both decision autonomy and shared vision and employee engagement. Further analysis revealed that an internal locus of control strengthened the decision autonomy–engagement relationship, but that it weakened the shared vision–engagement relationship.     

The Role of Citizen Participation and the Use of Social Media Platforms in the Participatory Budgeting Process

In the United States participatory budgeting (PB) is a relatively new and innovative approach to municipal budgeting that has implications for improving the role of citizen participation in the budgetary process. The research is based on personal interviews with local community leaders involved in the PB process in the 49th Ward of Chicago, Illinois; the 6th Ward of St. Louis, Missouri; and the City of Boston, Massachusetts. Highlights are provided of the specific experiences and perceptions of these community leaders with a particular emphasis on the use of social media platforms in engaging citizens in the PB process. This article concludes with recommendations for creating a PB infrastructure, for increasing citizen participation in the PB process, and for assessing and increasing the impact of PB in cities within the United States.     

Measuring Policy Success: Evaluating Public Sector Reform in Bhutan

There has been resurgence in evaluation of policy, reflected mostly by an increase in ex ante studies. Although there is a shift towards ex post evaluation, this has been gradual, resulting in a paucity of ex post evaluation literature. To address this gap, we apply a revisionist approach to evaluate a major public sector reform in the Bhutanese civil service. We conclude that it provides a more holistic approach for ex post evaluation policy, and also a more nuanced evaluation which moves us beyond the narrow binary view of success or failure in reform.     

国际组织对公共养老保险改革的影响

本文采用文献法和历史分析法,研究了国际组织在不同阶段对各国公共养老保险改革施加影响的途径和方式,尤其是国际组织在我国养老保险"统账结合"制度的建立与发展过程中发挥的作用。在此基础上,提出了针对我国养老保险制度改革的政策建议。     

The use of intergovernmental grants to municipalities for electoral purposes by subnational governments

Subnational governments devote a significant share of their financial resources to help municipalities provide local public services to their citizens. Compared to the large number of studies on national governments, little effort has been devoted to the influence of distributive politics on the use of intergovernmental grants by subnational governments. To fill this gap, this study uses a data set covering the period 2001–2011 to verify to what extent the Québec government used conditional grants to municipalities for electoral purposes. The results of this study show that the allocation of grants to municipalities is not exempt from electoral politics as municipalities located in districts held by governing parties or in high electoral competition districts receive more grants than other municipalities. However, the influence of electoral politics decreases substantially when the management of intergovernmental grants is under tight scrutiny by the opposition parties, mass media and the population. These findings suggest that distributive politics can be conceptualised as a political agency problem whose prevalence is seriously constrained by the improvement of the transparency of public policies management.     

Big change,little change? Punctuation,increments and multi-layer institutional change for English local authorities under austerity

This paper draws on new institutionalist theories to consider how we might characterise the process and outcomes of change occurring in English local government as a result of the UK’s austerity policies. It uses national and local empirical data to argue that changes are best understood as multi-layer processes, whereby radical ‘punctuated’ shifts in national funding can be mitigated to incremental adjustments in service delivery at a local level. However, the paper also suggests that the incremental appearance of change may be temporary, and that diminishing institutional resilience and emergent discursive shifts potentially prefigure a paradigm change in local governance.