Accepting Authoritative Decisions: Humans as Wary Cooperators

Why are people more willing to accept some governmental decisions than others? In this article, we present results from a series of original experiments showing that people's reactions to a given outcome are heavily influenced by the procedure employed to produce the outcome. We find that subjects react much less favorably when a decision maker intentionally keeps a large payoff, thereby leaving the subject with a small payoff, than when that same payoff results from a procedure based on chance or on desert. Moreover, subjects react less favorably to outcomes rendered by decision makers who want to be decision makers than they do to identical outcomes selected by reluctant decision makers. Our results are consistent with increasingly prominent theories of behavior emphasizing people's aversion to being played for a “sucker,” an attitude that makes perfect sense if people's main goal is not to acquire as many tangible goods as possible but to make sure they are a valued part of a viable group composed of cooperative individuals.     

Who Said Production Was Simple?: Delineating the ‘Public Production Process’

This is a response to Robert Gregory's discussion of the author's article 'Towards a New Public Management Model', AJPA 52(2). It argues that Gregory has misunderstood the rationale of the author's 'public production process' model. He misrepresents the model as simplistic and as understating the complexities of politics in public administration. As a result, the potential promise of Gregory's alternative conception is inadequately realised.     

Co‐Production of Public Services in Australia: The Roles of Government Organisations and Co‐Producers

This article adds to the emerging empirical literature on citizen co‐production. Based on a telephone survey of 1000 Australian adults, it replicates a five‐country European study focusing on three policy domains: neighbourhood safety, environment, and health (Loeffler et al. 2008). It shows that individually performed and closely reciprocal activities with high levels of private value are performed the most often, whereas group activities producing mainly public value are the least performed. We found no evidence of a relationship between service satisfaction and co‐production, or between information provision/inclusion/consultation and co‐production, which challenges some of the previous literature on what might motivate citizens to co‐produce. Citizen self‐efficacy has a modest relationship with co‐production levels in each of the three policy domains. These findings have implications for policymakers, and pave the way for future empirical research in this field.     

WHAT DO CHIEF ADMINISTRATORS DO? FINDINGS FROM VICTORIA

Abstract: This study explores the views of Victorian Chief Administrators (CAs) about their jobs. CAs report that the environment of administration has changed in three broad areas: greater public expectations, a breakdown of the politics-administration dichotomy and difficulties reconciling managerial accountability with limited managerial autonomy. In response, CAs describe a distinctive pattern of concerns — with the "what", "why" and "how" of agency operation. First, they attempt to shape the "what" or the ends and values their agency creates. Second, they act to enhance the "why" or their agency's legitimacy and the support it attracts from constituencies. Third, CAs are concerned with "how" to mobilise organisational resources, particularly by moulding culture towards the agency values they identify. These findings suggest that CAs have devised understandings of their responsibilities which conform more to theoretical conceptions of leadership than either administration or management. The research points to the emergence of a distinctive type of administrative leadership.     

Biology,Ideology, and Epistemology: How Do We Know Political Attitudes Are Inherited and Why Should We Care?

Evidence that political attitudes and behavior are in part biologically and even genetically instantiated is much discussed in political science of late. Yet the classic twin design, a primary source of evidence on this matter, has been criticized for being biased toward finding genetic influence. In this article, we employ a new data source to test empirically the alternative, exclusively environmental, explanations for ideological similarities between twins. We find little support for these explanations and argue that even if we treat them as wholly correct, they provide reasons for political science to pay more rather than less attention to the biological basis of attitudes and behaviors. Our analysis suggests that the mainstream socialization paradigm for explaining attitudes and behaviors is not necessarily incorrect but is substantively incomplete.     

Not by Twins Alone: Using the Extended Family Design to Investigate Genetic Influence on Political Beliefs

Variance components estimates of political and social attitudes suggest a substantial level of genetic influence, but the results have been challenged because they rely on data from twins only. In this analysis, we include responses from parents and nontwin full siblings of twins, account for measurement error by using a panel design, and estimate genetic and environmental variance by maximum‐likelihood structural equation modeling. By doing so, we address the central concerns of critics, including that the twin‐only design offers no verification of either the equal environments or random mating assumptions. Moving beyond the twin‐only design leads to the conclusion that for most political and social attitudes, genetic influences account for an even greater proportion of individual differences than reported by studies using more limited data and more elementary estimation techniques. These findings make it increasingly difficult to deny that—however indirectly—genetics plays a role in the formation of political and social attitudes.