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September 2018 - present
September 2004 - present
Publications
Publications (365)
Scholarly debate over bureaucratic and democratic values has been one of the fundamental questions in the field of public administration. Despite a volume of theoretical discussions, we know little about how the general public cares about these two sets of administrative values in practice. This research fills the gap in the literature by investiga...
Public views of government are linked to trust, coproduction, regulatory compliance, and political participation. This study focuses on factors shaping public attitudes toward government programs by exploring whether direct participation in governance matters for how the public evaluates the performance of government programs. With an experiment in...
Manipulation checks in behavioral public administration are commonly used and reported to determine if the experimental and control group have received different treatments. This paper uses three experiments to argue that manipulation checks for experimental treatments can have secondary benefits that can be used to improve the quality of behaviora...
Debates over public programs frequently focus on questions of effectiveness, equity, and efficiency and the tradeoff among these objectives. Missing from the literature is whether the general public cares about these tradeoffs, can perceive such differences, and will act on them. This article reports on two pre‐registered vignette experiments where...
This handbook surveys knowledge from all six of the planet’s continuously inhabited continents to understand how governments and related institutions have attempted to advance human development and improve social outcomes over the past several decades. The current state of knowledge about the social welfare sphere is robust, but explorers of its tw...
How public participation shapes effective and equitable service outcomes has been extensively discussed but rarely tested in the public administration literature. This article examines how parent participation in schools affects overall student performance and whether socially marginalized students benefit more or less when schools involve greater...
This article on representative bureaucracy and social equity addresses three normative questions in the literature. First, concerns that active representation creates biases in what are normally unbiased, rational bureaucratic processes both fail to understand the process of bureaucratic representation and have little empirical support. Representat...
This study tests the explanatory power of two prominent public administration theories—political control and representative bureaucracy—in understanding disparities in public service provision. While prior research focused on street‐level bureaucracy, we study here how political and group identities of top elected law enforcement officials affect t...
Systematically examining the mentoring process for PhD students’ needs to recognize that it has characteristics of unit/small batch production and relies heavily on the coproduction of the PhD student. This article examines one mentor’s experiences with 80+ PhD students over an extended period of time using these conceptual lenses. Three general pr...
During a global pandemic, individual views of government can be linked to citizens’ trust and cooperation with government and their propensity to resist state policies or to take action that influences the course of a pandemic. This article explores citizens’ assessments of government responses to COVID‐19 as a function of policy substance (restric...
The study of representative bureaucracy traces out multiple organizational and individual-level pathways through which identity-based representation contributes to improvements in bureaucratic processes, outcomes, and legitimacy. Leveraging a multi-level dataset of Florida emergency room visits, we simultaneously model aggregate (indirect) and indi...
Studies of representative bureaucracy frequently reference the need for a critical mass before an underrepresented group can influence policy outputs or outcomes, but the empirical literature is modest and presents mixed findings. This article presents a theoretical exploration to illustrate how critical mass can link individual behavior to organiz...
This paper advances the theory of turnover and performance in public organizations, incorporating labor market conditions and quality of labor. In doing so, we first present theories on optimal turnover rates, based on a cost-benefit theoretical framework. We then discuss how optimal turnover rates in public organizations change according to labor...
Representation frequently links state politics to policy. Current research, however, overlooks the interplay between bureaucratic and legislative representation and how local representation may be influenced by state policy environments. There is also a need to test current theories of state politics and policy, driven by the study of US federalism...
Structuring managerial discretion has been a key government policy tool in contemporary regulation and governance. This article explores how a policy that constrains managers’ discretion in recruitment influences the performance of public services. The National Background Check Program (NBCP) is a federal program aimed at strengthening states’ crim...
As issues of social equity and inclusiveness have become increasingly salient to political discourses, they are also more strongly emphasized as dimensions of effective public service delivery. As a consequence, representative bureaucracy has become more significant to the study of public management. The theory of representative bureaucracy assumes...
The representative bureaucracy literature focuses on how passive representation translates into substantive benefits for the represented individuals. Although scholars have found substantial empirical support for representation based on gender, most studies have examined the United States, a country with high levels of democracy and gender equality...
Reporting government performance to the public is key tool in improving accountability. Some evidence, however, has shown that individuals’ anti-public sector biases may distort performance information about public organizations. Using an experimental vignette on U.S. nursing homes, this study fills four gaps in the literature: 1) the need to inclu...
The management literature has highlighted the role of a manager’s gender in adopting and practicing managerial innovation. The conditions that affect female (or male) managers’ decision making on innovations, however, have been less explored. Using a national survey of top-level administrators in US nursing homes and archival nursing home quality d...
Through bringing the concept of status distance to representative bureaucracy and diversity management literature, this article develops new hypotheses that can guide future studies on representation and diversity in public organizations. First, including status distance brings consideration of the tensions that minority representation creates betw...
Bureaucracies representative of the public can affect programme outcomes either through active representation by bureaucrats or symbolic representation via changes in client behaviour. Separating out these different aspects of representation requires understanding the interaction of bureaucrats and clients which is difficult using only quantitative...
A bureaucracy that is representative of the public it serves – passive representation – can result in both active representation and symbolic representation. Symbolic representation occurs when passive representation improves perceptions of legitimacy and enhances bureaucratic outcomes because the public is more cooperative and more likely to engag...
Manipulation checks in behavioral public administration are commonly used and reported to determine if the experimental and control group have received different treatments. This paper uses three experiments to argue that manipulation checks for experimental treatments can have secondary benefits that can be used to improve the quality of experimen...
Public managers and employees should be on the same page for successful performance. Managers’ self-evaluations of their own management, however, often do not match employees’ evaluations. Despite the consistent findings of a discrepancy between managers’ and employees’ perceptions of management, little research has examined how this perceptual inc...
This article proposes that two major trends – the failure of political institutions and the globalization of minority rights – present major challenges for public administration. These changes mean that public administrators must now perform roles that were previously the realm of elected officials in relation to the broader public. Specific concer...
A bureaucracy representative of disadvantaged groups in a society has been linked to better outcomes for those groups in a wide variety of policy areas. Most of the empirical work identifying this link has used United States data, a highly conducive case for representation. Would the same relationship be seen in more challenging organizational and...
Representative bureaucracy scholarship has yet to address two interrelated phenomena: intersectionality and changes in relative disadvantage over time. This manuscript addresses these gaps by assessing representation effects at the intersection of race/ethnicity and sex and in previously, but no longer, disadvantaged client groups. It also argues t...
There is a huge gap between how employees see leaders’ behavior and how leaders see themselves regardless of sector and functional area. Because this gap can be a serious problem in managing organizations, scholars have investigated how the gap can be reduced. This article focuses on leadership training and tests whether and under what conditions i...
This study examines gender differences in leadership behaviors and whether leadership training would have different effects on leadership behaviors by gender. Using data from several hundred managers of welfare and financial agencies in Denmark, we first investigate whether leadership behaviors differ between female and male leaders. After that, we...
There is a huge gap between how employees see leaders' behavior and how leaders see themselves regardless of sector and functional area. Because this gap can be a serious problem in managing organizations, scholars have investigated how the gap can be reduced. This article focuses on leadership training and tests whether and under what conditions i...
This study investigates whether the public perceives nonprofit organizations as different from private for-profit and public organizations and whether introducing new performance management systems would provide positive credits to the organization. Using two randomized survey experiments on US hospitals (one with an adult sample and the other with...
This article investigates whether citizens’ evaluations of service performance are related to archival measures of performance, and how institutional context shapes this relationship contingent on administrative autonomy – standards, human resources, and financial autonomy. Using cross-national education data, this study finds that student performa...
Public administration research has produced a large literature on the determinants, consequences, and complexities of goal clarity and ambiguity. This article contributes to this line of work by examining how perceived goal ambiguity and goal multiplicity condition the effect of top administrators’ management on performance. In the context of U.S....
This study investigates whether the public perceives nonprofit organizations as different from private for-profit and public organizations and whether introducing new performance management systems would provide positive credits to the organization. Using two randomized survey experiments on US hospitals (one with an adult sample and the other with...
Bureaucratic reforms worldwide seek to improve the quality of governance. In this article, we argue that the major governance failures are political, not bureaucratic, and the first step to better governance is to recognize the underlying political causes. Using illustrations from throughout the world, we contend that political institutions fail to...
This study investigates linear and nonlinear effects of job tenure on organizational performance and explores how administrators' job tenure can moderate the relationship between three key managerial strategies-innovative management, participatory management, and external management-and performance. Using archival performance indicators available f...
Building on the work of Adam Herbert, this research examines how minority managers navigate the pressures of their organization versus the pressures of their community. Organizational socialization suggests that the socialization process will introduce employees to the goals and priorities of the organization and result in similar behaviors among m...
Fundamental to democratic societies, citizen participation is an important tool for promoting active, informed, and empowered citizenry as well as responsive and accountable administration. Past literature on citizen participation has focused on its determinants, forms, and prevalence. This study examines the relationship between a specific form of...
This study examines whether the public holds biased perceptions of public organizations (hospitals) in the United States and whether organizations get credit for positive results from program evaluations. Using an experimental design that replicates Hvidman and Andersen’s (2016) Danish study, we find no negative public sector biases in the US, but...
The interaction between leaders and employees plays a key role in determining organizational outcomes and performance. Although human resources management literature posits positive effects of leadership behaviors on employee job satisfaction, the causal path between the two is unclear due to potential endogeneity issues inherent in this relationsh...
This essay introduces the articles in the public administration methods symposium that will appear in this and the next two issues of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. Overall the articles present the need for a rigorous methodological pluralism in public administration where the methods used need to match the substantive qu...
The notion of a representative bureaucracy has generated a great deal of research although many issues are yet to be resolved and some have not been addressed. This theoretical essay uses a contingency theory approach to address a set of key questions relevant to representative bureaucracy. It discusses who is represented and what values get repres...
The increased outsourcing of national security endeavors to private military companies (PMCs) raises questions concerning public evaluations of their performance and the extent to which government officials are held accountable. We use a survey experiment to test public blame attribution associated with a failed military operation that was conducte...
Measuring public service performance is a central issue for modern governments.
Less attention, however, has been paid to the similarities and differences
between various performance indicators. In particular, we know less about the views of
citizens concerning performance and how they are correlated with administrative performance. Examining the g...
This study reports on the effectiveness of a year-long field experiment involving training in transformational and transactional leadership in the public and private sectors. Using before and after training assessments by employees of several hundred Danish leaders, the analysis shows that transformational leadership training is associated with inc...
Objective
This study argues that country music can be viewed in terms of identity politics that seeks to define an American identity.
Methods
A textual analysis of country music songs is used to illustrate the various components of this American identity associated with the U.S. South and West.
Results
Six key dimensions of the country music Amer...
Although demographic diversity has been of paramount concern to researchers and practitioners in public management, studies exploring managerial strategies to capitalize on and respond to the needs of diverse client populations are scarce. This article examines strategies for managing diversity as a way to buffer environmental challenges in service...
Many areas of public management research are dominated by a top-focused perspective in which emphasis is placed on the notion that managers themselves are usually the best sources of information about managerial behavior. Outside of the leadership literature, managers are also the typical survey respondents in public management studies. An alternat...
The research literature on bureaucracy generally assumes that bureaucrats are risk averse, and some work goes further to characterize bureaucrats as risk avoiding and conservative (LaPiere 1965; Sjoberg, Brymer, and Farris 1966; Wolman 1971; Boyer 1973; Kaufman 1981). At the same time, the prescriptive literature, the most recent being the reinvent...
Accountability pressures have generated complex performance measurement regimes to evaluate and improve public or publicly funded services. Performance management, however, faces many challenges including the tradeoffs posed by numerous dimensions of performance and a lack of consensus on which organizational and environmental factors can improve t...
Public management research has identified a dizzying array of management variables that affect organizational performance. While scholars have learned much by analyzing one or a few specific behavioral dimensions of public management at a time, we argue for the value of a more holistic and inductive approach that uses data on several aspects of pub...
Interest in experimental research in public management is on the rise, yet the field still lacks a broad understanding of its role in producing substantive findings and theoretical advances. Written by a team of leading international researchers, this book sets out the advantages of experiments in public management and showcases their rapidly devel...
Attention has been given to the notion that organizational leaders’ expressed confidence and optimism regarding their organizations’ performance can affect that performance by increasing the motivation and/or self-efficacy of subordinates. This idea, a part of various leadership theories, we call “isopraxis leadership.” This paper examines the logi...
Inequality and a historical pattern of discrimination in housing policy have contributed to the level of trust between the U.S. government and the black community. Drawing upon the literature on policy feedback, we propose that policy effects can be race specific and that improved housing policies have a secondary effect of encouraging political pa...
Based on the 1,800 largest school districts in the United States over a decade, The Politics of African-American Education documents the status of African-American education and the major role that partisanship plays. The book brings together the most comprehensive database on minority education to date that centers around three arguments. First, p...
Human resources management and managerial capacity are well-documented in the public management literature as integral management functions. The field has devoted attention to the importance of human resources, but has yet to consider whether human resources management interacts with capacity in attaining organizational outcomes. Using a large-N, m...
Although the influence of government regulation on organizations is undeniable, empirical research in this field is scarce. This article investigates how the understanding of and attitudes toward government regulation among public, nonprofit, and for-profit managers affect organizational performance, using U.S. nursing homes as the empirical settin...
Structural elements of the political process can influence whether the interests of racial and ethnic minorities are accounted for by policy-making organizations. This study focuses on these elements by analyzing how the institutional design of local elections impacts the representation of the Latino demographic. We use an original, nationally repr...
Goal Displacement and the Protection of Human Subjects: The View from Public Administration - Volume 49 Issue 2 - Kenneth J. Meier, M. Apolonia Calderon
Managers concerned with the performance of their organizations will exploit available social, administrative, and human capital resources. However, extant theory and mixed empirical evidence leave the effect of social capital on performance unclear. The gains from these norms of reciprocity, participation, networking, and trust may disproportionate...
This article explores two questions related to whether passive representation leads to active representation using Brazilian municipal data: Does electing women to public office increase the proportion of women in public administration? Does the representation of women in elected office and public administration lead to better representation of wom...
Public management studies are increasingly using survey data on managers' perceptions of performance to measure organizational performance. These perceptual measures are tempting to apply because archival performance data or surveys of target group outcomes and satisfaction are often lacking, costly to provide, and are highly policy specific render...
Notes on the Romulan Reform of Conventions - Volume 48 Issue 2 - Kenneth J. Meier
An extensive literature finds that managerial decisions matter for the performance of public organizations, yet little attention
has been devoted to why managers make the decisions that they do. This article builds a theory of public management decision
making based on the simple assumption that managers are concerned with performance and the perfo...