Scott Everett Robinson

• PhD in Political Science
• Chair at Northern Illinois University

We examine the shape of policy change in the US federal bureaucracy. Punctuated equilibrium suggests institutional friction and limited attention as prime influences on policy change. We build on this literature by exploring how organisational forms shape policy change. We also conceptualise the key difference between budgets and laws as measures a...

National Weather Service (NWS) forecasters have many roles and responsibilities, including communication with core partners throughout the forecast and warning process to ensure that the information they are providing is relevant, understandable, and actionable. Although the NWS communicates to many groups, members of the emergency management commu...

Emergency managers face a variety of planning challenges, especially because the needs of any community are heterogeneous. One illustration of these planning challenges is the historical neglect of community members with disabilities or other functional needs. The salience of including residents with disabilities and other functional needs gained m...

Non‐profit organisations operate with the advantage of a generally positive social image. Workers and managerial employees of nonprofits are commonly thought of as altruistic, trustworthy and respectable actors who assist their communities. However, the non‐profit sector has faced several notable scandals and crises that have tested this positive s...

The book discusses the results of our surveys through 2020 about trust in health agencies related to COVID-19 information. As the US faced its lowest levels of reported trust in government, the COVID-19 crisis revealed the essential service that various federal agencies provide as sources of information. This Element explores variations in trust ac...

The use of social media and other communication technologies have created a new ecology of public messaging. As it is a core task of government to inform its residents about risks, public managers and emergency managers, specifically, must understand this new ecology if they are to effectively communicate with the public. A challenge of this new me...

As the United States is at historic lows of trust in government, various agencies are seeking to convince members of the public to take key protective actions and to support novel policy actions intended to reduce the spread of COVID‐19. This article assess the status of trust in key organizations relevant to pandemic information based on a nationa...

Scholars from various disciplines have long attempted to identify the variables most closely associated with individual preparedness. Therefore, we now have much more knowledge regarding these factors and their association with individual preparedness behaviors. However, it has not been sufficiently discussed how decisive many of these factors are...

The COVID‐19 crisis has called for the mobilization of diverse resources and coordination through administrative networks. This mobilization has brought to light the challenges involved in the recruiting and retention of diverse administrative networks. This article reviews the importance of and difficulties in maintaining diverse administrative ne...

Objective This article examines various determinants of communication behaviors related to natural hazards and how those determinants vary for those at home or those away from home. We use the context of a series of storms that provoked communication to determine differences across media platforms, location during the event, sending versus receivin...

The complexity of the modern information ecosystem raises many questions for public organizations. In the context of emergency management, information (such as warning messages) is communicated not only from a source of authority to the public but also between members of the public. The authors use a series of storms that affected Oklahoma in the s...

Punctuated equilibrium theory seeks to explain policy volatility and stability in government attention. In previous research into the temporal dynamics of punctuations, scholars found that punctuations occur in clusters – a recent budgetary punctuation increases the likelihood of a subsequent punctuation. This article examines the direction, positi...

A 2009 flooding disaster in Alaska produced a unique intersector operational collaborative model between voluntary nonprofit organizations and state and federal agencies. This article investigates the value and impact of those disaster recovery services provided by the nonprofit sector under this management approach. Doing so is important because t...

Past research on problem definition and public policy primarily focuses on the macro-system level. In this study, we propose a micro model of problem definition and policy choice at the individual level. We argue that while individual citizens' problem definitions and policy preferences are rooted in and filtered through their predisposition charac...

In a democratic policy system, the management and administration of policy requires attention to the desires of the democratic public. there are a variety of points in the policy process where this opinion could be relevant - including in the implementation stage that is the subject of much attention in public administration research. As policy mak...

Growing disenchantment with political institutions and policy processes has generated interest in trust in government. For the most part, research has focused on trust in government as a general attitude covering all political institutions. In this book, Scott E. Robinson, James W. Stoutenborough and Arnold Vedlitz argue that individual agencies de...

Darrick Evensen has responded to our recently published article, "Is 'fracking' a new dirty word? The influence of word choice on public views toward natural gas attitudes." He has expressed concerns regarding our conclusions and has pointed out some omissions in our literature review. We appreciate the discussion on this topic and for pointing out...

In a number of important articles and books—most notably Agendas and Instability in American Politics (1993) , The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems (2005)—Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones have pioneered a distinctive approach to the study of agenda setting that has shaped research in both the U.S. politics and compa...

The increased public attention to hydraulic fracturing as a technique for extracting natural gas has raised the stakes of the political and regulatory struggle that surround it. This increased attention has also raised questions about the levels of popular support or opposition to the technique. Before we can assess this support or opposition, we m...

While policy agenda studies have extensively examined the interplays of various venues, one under-explored area is the internal dynamics within an agenda venue. In this study, we focus on one of the important venues—news media—and investigate the inherent connections between how a public problem is characterized and how problem solutions are genera...

The field of risk, hazards, and crises (if, indeed, it is coherent enough to be called a field) crosses over a staggering array of traditional and emergent academic disciplines. One point of intersection in particular seems to have generated less attention than it warrants—the intersection of disaster research and public health. It is in the contex...

Among many potential causes for policymakers’ contention over whether there is a largely unified scientific agreement on global warming and climate change (GWCC), one possible factor, according to the information deficit theory, is that the scientists who testified in congressional hearings might be substantially divided in their views and position...

Homeland Security continues to struggle to define itself as a field of practice and scholarship. The difficulty in defining the field has led to a variety of conflicts over membership, content, and focus. This article reviews some of the prominent debates over the meaning of homeland security as a field of study and practice. It then defines a simp...

Work in public health increasingly requires coordination of multiple organizations within a community to achieve positive change. Successful collaboration requires the connection of diverse organizations to tackle complex and pressing problems at multiple levels of the social ecological model (McLeroy et al., 1988). Diversity though can create chal...

The study of managerial networking has been growing in the field of public administration; a field that analyzes how managers in open system organizations interact with different external actors and organizations. Coincident with this interest in managerial networking is the use of self-reported survey data to measure managerial behavior in buildin...

Research reveals that levels of reported trust in government are at a relatively low level—among the lowest in the period studied. At the same time, reported approval for specific administrative agencies varies widely, with some agencies receiving little support and others a great deal. This raises an important question: what factors drive trust in...

It is increasingly clear that one cannot understand emergency and disaster management without understanding the various roles nonprofits play in these processes. From traditional actors like the Red Cross to emergent participants at the local level, nonprofit organizations are affecting every phase of disaster management. This introductory article...

Leadership theory has focused on interpersonal dynamics (such as motivation) and broad social leadership (such as national leaders during crises). Analyzing data from emergency response incidents, we describe a role for leadership between these micro-social and macro-social contexts. At the meso level, emergency managers both design and react to in...

The basic dynamics of punctuated policy change have been found to be present in a wide variety of political institutions from a range of countries. The presence -- even commonality -- of punctuated change has been clearly and persuasively demonstrated. A key challenge in the literature is now to identify the conditions and institutional arrangement...

Emergency planning and response increasingly involve close interactions between a diverse array of actors across fields (emergency management, public health, law enforcement, etc.); sectors (government, non-profit and for-profit); and levels of government (local, state and federal). This article assesses the temporal dynamics of emergency managemen...

Research into emergency management has made clear that collaboration is a common strategy to prepare for and respond to disasters. The Department of Homeland Security has embraced a "whole-of-government" approach within its most recent quadrennial report. At times, it has broadened this approach to include non-governmental organizations in a "whole...

Bounded Bureaucracy and the Budgetary Process in the United States. By Jay EunghaRyu. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011. 223p. $49.95. - Volume 10 Issue 4 - Scott E. Robinson

Emergency preparedness and response is moving from a specialized circle of emergency management professionals and select nonprofit organizations (such as the Red Cross and other national relief organizations) to include a broader variety of organizations not traditionally fulfilling emergency management roles, including schools. It is not clear who...

Emergency management is a field in which collaborative activities are inescapable. Emergency planning and response increasingly involve close interactions between a diverse array of actors across fields (emergency management, public health, law enforcement, etc.), sector (government, nonprofit, and for-profit), and level of government (local, state...

Studies of collaborative public management have relied on a number of concepts that are time-bound. Collaborative networks rely on trust and stable expectations – both elements that have strong temporal elements. Despite this attention, there has been less research into the evolution of collaborative relationships than one would expect – especially...

The literature on the management of policy networks has expanded greatly in the past decade. In spite of this attention, no consensus has emerged on how to measure collaboration or even what constitutes collaboration. This article uses data from a postdisaster survey to compare some existing approaches to measuring collaboration. We analyze various...

Emergency management calls for collaboration among a wide range of organizations. Many of these organizations are involved in matters of emergency management by statute or organizational mission. However, other organizations participate in emergency management as a task secondary to some other core mission. Why and to what extent these organization...

Emergency managers face a variety of challenges planning for disasters, especially because the needs of any community are heterogeneous. One illustration of these challenges in planning processes is the historical neglect of community members with disabilities or other functional needs. This paper reviews recent events that have caused the inclusio...

Successful emergency planning and response requires the cooperation of a broad array of partners. The literature on collaboration and social networks provides conflicting predictions about how organizations choose partners. One tradition focuses on the powerful role of similarity (or homophily) as predicting partner choices. A contrasting tradition...

The creation of the Department of Homeland Security was a landmark in the history of the U.S. federal government. With the largest reorganization of the federal executive branch in decades, policymakers sought to group agencies with missions related to homeland security under one cabinet level official. It is natural to ask whether this reorganizat...

Public Administration (PA) ¡s a field characterized by great diversity in theoretical approaches and methodological tactics. This wide scope lends itself to potential epistemological and methodological fragmentation, which prevents scholars from adequately appreciating and building on each other's work. Although many scholars value PA's theoretical...

The multiple streams theory of national policymaking has been influential in the study of public administration and public policy—if not without a fair bit of controversy. While some laud the model for its openness to the important role of policy entrepreneurs and the irrationalities of the decision-making processes, others criticize the model for...

Emergency management is a field in which collaborative activities are inescapable. Emergency planning and response increasingly involves a diverse array of actors across field (emergency management, public health, law enforcement, etc.), sector (government, nonprofit, and for-profit), and level of government (local, state, and federal). The necessi...

As is well known, most emergency incidents are managed by local governments. However, when an incident of disaster-scale occurs, the traditional model of emergency management has certain limitations. Emergency response systems are primarily designed to manage incidents locally, not to facilitate coordination across multiple jurisdictional boundarie...

Mayors and Schools: Minority Voices and Democratic Tensions in Urban Education. By Stefanie Chambers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. 240p. $64.50 cloth, $21.95 paper. Schools In: Federalism and the National Education Agenda. By Paul Manna. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2006. 222p. $26.95. Interest in the politics of Ame...

In the years since O'Toole called for scholars to “[treat] network seriously,” research has progressively improved our understanding of how organizations collaborate in the development and implementation of public policy. This essay reviews recent important texts in the area of policy networks. Together the works illustrate that the scholarship on...

Recent policy research has turned from the testing of static, cross-sectional theories to time-serial analyses of dynamic processes. This attention has renewed interest in the debate over incrementalism in policy development. Recent efforts have suggested that policy histories involve a series of short periods of instability followed by extended pe...

The article focuses on the collaborative challenges and measures between disaster and nondisaster organizations in the U.S. The author discusses the shortcomings in the emergency management system of the country which is reflected in the 2005 hurricane disasters. He examines the management challenges involved in the collaboration effort like cultur...

A long tradition in public administration describes administrative decision making as incremental. Despite the dominance of incremental models of decision making, few quantitative studies of administrative behavior take the implications of incrementalism seriously. This article introduces two concepts (path dependence and path contingency) to facil...

Hurricane Katrina placed tremendous stress on America's emergency response systems. No single agency possessed the capacity required to address the needs of those affected by the hurricane. One element seen lacking in the immediate response to the hurricane was a well-coordinated effort taking advantage of the outpouring of support from distant jur...

Recent research has suggested that punctuated equilibrium models best describe the outputs of policymakers. While this literature has convincingly demonstrated that the distributions of policy outputs conform to the expectations of punctuated equilibrium theory, little attention has been paid to testing hypotheses related to the causes of punctuate...

Scholars interested in executive agencies devote a considerable amount of time to studying various proposals said to make government more effective. Some authors have studied the processes that generate the seemingly continuous stream of reform proposals. This article looks at the stream of proposals coming from one component of the administrative...

Many organization theories suggest that divergent goals can hamper an organization's pursuit of its primary mission. An earlier version of this article analyzed the effect of the pursuit of divergent goals on American public schools. This is an update of the original article that adds two years of data to the original study. Using an educational pr...

For half of a century, models of nonrational behavior have grown in popularity for explaining the behavior of administrative organizations. However, models of nonrational behavior are notoriously difficult to test because nonrational behavior is often difficult to separate from fully rational behavior. Recent research has suggested that particular...

For half of a century, models of nonrational behavior have grown in popularity for explaining the behavior of administrative organizations. However, models of nonrational behavior are notoriously difficult to test because nonrational behavior is often difficult to separate from fully rational behavior. Recent research has suggested that particular...

Can minority representation influence policy outputs when decisions are largely governed by formal and informal rules? This article addresses this question using detailed data on school district representation and budgetary allotments in Texas, assessing the link between Hispanic school board representation and budgetary support for bilingual educa...