ABSTRACT The moral decision‐making and behavior of politicians is influenced by the distinctive and characteristic attributes of political office. This literature review analyzes 80 articles from public administration, political science and related disciplines to systematically map these attributes and their underlying mechanisms. This study identifies six categories of attributes of political office that relate to moral decision‐making and behavior: political system design, political role, relations to societal actors, legal and regulatory measures, political cycle, and some general attributes such as the size of the political institution. Interestingly, existing research focuses mostly on unethical behavior, creating white spots in our understanding of how the attributes of political office shape individual and collective processes of moral decision‐making and behavior more generally. We conclude with an agenda for future research that advocates for more targeted research of the sociopsychological aspects that shape the moral decision‐making and behavior of politicians across their different roles.
ABSTRACT Few regulatory reforms are as celebrated or emulated as the performance measurement system of Sunnyvale, California, which inspired the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 and countless other national and local efforts. This study presents the first longitudinal, cross‐programmatic analysis of a performance measurement system, introducing a digital archival approach to analyze 152 performance indicators across 35,000 pages of documents from 1984 to 2023, supplemented with interviews of key stakeholders. Even if Sunnyvale's system initially functioned as an exemplar of performance‐based decision‐making, it deteriorated with weakened commitment and, more importantly, sustained significant implementation costs while its benefits reduced over time. The findings illustrate three core trade‐offs for performance measurement systems: measuring what matters (the “quantity‐quality” tradeoff); ensuring continuity while allowing for adaptation (the “continuity‐flexibility” tradeoff); and ensuring accountability without having implementation detract from productivity (the “accountability‐productivity” tradeoff).
ABSTRACT The relationship between inequity and administrative burden constitutes a pivotal concern in the realm of public administration and policy, but how policy inequity (i.e., inequity in policy implementation) influences administrative burden has garnered scant attention. The present study employs data about public assistance programs in China spanning from 2015 to 2017 to examine the consequences of policy inequity on administrative burden. The empirical findings underscore that policy inequity augments psychological and compliance costs while concurrently diminishing citizens' participation in welfare programs, thereby indicating that policy inequity intensifies administrative burden. Notably, individual‐level social capital and contextual‐level information transparency in terms of public exposure related to welfare approval and receipt significantly moderate this relationship. Contrary to our theoretical expectations, social capital and public exposure amplify, rather than dampen, the impact of policy inequity on administrative burden. This study highlights the policy inequity lens and offers important implications for burden reduction.
ABSTRACT Public and nonprofit organizations exhibit high rates of female employment often attributed to sector structures and social roles. To better understand how individual behaviors dynamically contribute to these distinctive ratios, we deconstruct public and nonprofit employment into gendered patterns of attraction and attachment. Using duration analysis and following a cohort from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, this research finds that women demonstrate a higher attraction to their first public and nonprofit job compared to men, evidenced through a faster rate of entry into this employment. There are no significant gender differences when considering the duration of an individual's first stint in these sectors. Additional investigation finds that these sector‐level patterns, when decomposed to account for gender‐dominant professions, are driven by stronger female attraction to female‐dominated professions while masking higher female turnover from male‐dominated professions. Results inform recruitment and retention strategies for public and nonprofit organizations.
ABSTRACT A growing body of experimental public administration research examines how structural arrangements in public services, such as delegating service delivery to public or private actors, shape citizens' blame attributions for service failures. However, the mechanisms underlying these attributions are less well understood. This article investigates two mechanisms, focusing on the mediating roles of citizens' perceptions of politicians' causal responsibility (perceived control over service delivery) and functional responsibility (perceived duty to ensure service quality). A UK‐based survey experiment on local waste collection failures tests these mechanisms using causal mediation analysis. The results show higher levels of delegation reduce blame primarily by lowering perceptions of politicians' control over service delivery. In contrast, there is no strong evidence of mediation through perceived duty, suggesting that role‐based expectations of functional responsibility are more resistant to change. These findings provide new insight into how different public service delivery methods influence blame attribution for service performance.
ABSTRACT A central challenge in government contracting is fostering cooperation between buyers and sellers where contract terms are incomplete. This article introduces a framework for formal‐relational contracting (FRC) in public sector contexts, where rigid regulations, competing values, and market imperfections make cooperation both difficult and valuable. FRC promotes cooperation through contract terms defining shared goals, guiding principles, and governance mechanisms. We present the theoretical foundations of FRC and examine its potential through 320 government contract management decision simulations where public contract managers acted as government buyers and business sellers facing sequential choices under both FRC contracts and the more conventional formal contracting approach. The results show that FRC increased managers' cooperative behavior by around 30 percentage points compared to formal contracting. Qualitative evidence further suggests that FRC shifted managers' mindsets from adversarial to cooperative. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for how FRC can enhance cooperation and mutual value in government contracting.
ABSTRACT Many U.S. municipalities face environmental service delivery challenges, including aging infrastructure and rising debt. In response, several states have adopted Fair Market Value (FMV) legislation, which aims to incentivize private firms to acquire and invest in municipal utilities—particularly in the water sector. However, the impacts of FMV privatization remain understudied. Guided by political decoupling theory, this study hypothesizes that FMV privatization improves drinking water utility management and local incumbent electoral outcomes. Using a difference‐in‐differences design, we analyze fifteen Illinois municipalities that sold their utilities after the state adopted FMV legislation relative to thirty‐four controls. Results suggest that FMV privatization improves personnel and technical management outcomes by reducing violations under the Safe Drinking Water Act but has no significant impact on incumbent vote share. These findings indicate that while FMV privatization may enhance utility management through political decoupling, its presumed political benefits warrant further investigation.
ABSTRACT Many cities have adopted net‐zero emission pledges, yet little is known about why these commitments emerge or how their determinants shift under changing policy environments. Using a panel of 148 large US cities from 2016 to 2022, this study applies the Political Market Framework and employs discrete‐time event‐history models to examine how policy demand, policy supply and institutional conditions shape adoption decisions. Results show that civic capacity, political ideology, and horizontal diffusion drive adoption in the full period, but their influence varies sharply across institutional contexts. During federal disengagement (2016–2018), cities with less population, strong vulnerability signals, supportive state policies, or fiscal cushioning through federal aid are more likely to adopt. When federal engagement returned (2019–2022), education, population size, and neighbor adoption emerged as significant correlates of net‐zero adoption. These findings extend the Political Market Framework by showing how federal contexts condition the adoption of ambitious climate commitments.
ABSTRACT Recent developments in also established democracies have made clear that public administration and management research alike have neglected giving scholarly attention to public organizations as institutions. Drawing upon research on leadership of institutions and leadership in public organizations we suggest a theory of public institutional leadership . Public institutional leadership reconnects public management with democracy by suggesting three central dimensions of leadership behaviors that instill and sustain liberal democratic values in public organizations. These behaviors include articulating and reaffirming democratic values through top‐down vision‐setting; building “character” bottom‐up through role modeling and fostering psychological safety to enable dialogue and deliberation around these values as well as demonstrating constrained responsiveness to political principals relative to those values enabled by the cultivation of bureaucratic autonomy. Although the necessity of such behaviors is made salient by rising populism and democratic backsliding, their relevance extends to public management situated in liberal democracies in general.
ABSTRACT Policy compliance, the extent to which citizens adhere to government policies, remains a central test of democratic governance, especially during the COVID‐19 pandemic in the United States. This study examines how distinct forms of social capital—relational, structural (bonding versus bridging), cognitive, and vertical linking—serve as critical preconditions for COVID‐19 vaccination uptake in 2021. Using necessary condition analysis (NCA), we uncover nuanced and context‐specific impacts of distinct social capital on policy compliance. NCA also identifies threshold levels of various social capital required to achieve specific vaccination outcomes, yielding actionable diagnostics for policymakers and administrators. Strategies to raise compliance must align with local social capital configurations, prioritizing bridging in Republican‐leaning counties and relational support and careful use of bridging in Democratic‐leaning counties. The study advances civil society research by pinpointing the civic preconditions under which democratic institutions can function effectively in a polarized environment.
Many cities and municipalities aim to address climate change, yet their rigid administrative structures often constrain effective action. Therefore, local authorities must innovate to build administrative capacity and enable work across departmental silos. However, we lack knowledge of how such administrative innovations emerge and become more widespread. To address this gap, this article examines administrative innovation from a diffusion perspective, drawing on a novel theoretical framework of soft diffusion channels. It studies the establishment of climate manager positions across all 426 municipalities in the German state of Hessen between 2008 and 2023. Event history models suggest that the creation of these positions, most with federal grant support, is associated with various diffusion channels, including county-level policy examples and membership in a state-run climate network, as well as additional capacity indicators. Thus, the diffusion of local administrative innovation resembles a multi-channel process that practitioners at different government levels can actively support.
This paper investigates how pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs) of public sector employees can be stimulated using management control. We mobilize the theory of planned behavior to hypothesize that employee environmental concerns are associated with PEBs, and that this relation can be strengthened by management control instruments that provide structure and signals about prevailing norms. Using survey data from 151 public sector employees, we find support for most of our expectations. Specifically, our findings suggest that sustainability-related output controls (e.g., sustainable performance budgets and accounting reports) can help employees to translate their environmental concerns into action through PEBs. Furthermore, we find that behavior controls (e.g., formats that incorporate sustainability and resilience-enhancing action programs) positively associate with PEBs, regardless of employees' initial environmental concerns. Taken together, our findings have implications for public sector organizations seeking to stimulate employees to engage in more environmentally sustainable behaviors.
Max Weber's rational-legal bureaucracy remains a vital safeguard amid populist backlash, civil service politicization, and democratic backsliding. This article reframes bureaucracy as a conditional democratic safeguard-one that depends on ethical orientation and professional integrity, not technical capacity alone. When legality is hollowed out through obedience or anticipatory compliance, institutions corrode from within. Evidence from recent cases of executive politicization illustrates how ethical substance erodes behind formally intact institutions. By integrating Weber's structural rationality with Waldo's claim that democracy is fundamentally an ethic requiring value-laden judgment, the article develops the notion of a "compliance trap" and recasts public servants as ethical constitutional agents rather than passive implementers. It also advances a framework for bureaucratic renewal grounded in ethical discipline, participatory design, and professional autonomy, arguing that administrators must be prepared to exercise principled judgment when other democratic safeguards weaken.
Owing to public administrations' expansion of their roles in policy design and coordination, concerns about bureaucratic power have reemerged across democratic systems. However, little is known concerning how elected politicians experience and interpret administrative influence, particularly in local governments, in which administrative capacity often rivals political authority. This study examined how local politicians perceive administrative influence and how these perceptions vary across organizational scales and party affiliations. Using survey data from Norwegian municipal politicians, this study found that administrative influence is perceived as a normal, bounded aspect of governance, rather than bureaucratic domination. However, perceptions vary systematically by municipal size; politicians in larger municipalities report stronger administrative influence, reflecting greater specialization and delegation. These perceptions were further conditioned by political interpretations. Elite skeptical representatives evaluated administrative influence more negatively, particularly in larger jurisdictions, demonstrating how administrative power is institutionally structured and politically interpreted, offering insights relevant to governance systems globally.
ABSTRACT Previous studies on sectoral choice have examined environmental and genetic factors in isolation, with little consideration of how gene–environment interactions influence public service employment selection. Notably, altruism‐related genes have been found to play a critical role in shaping prosocial behaviors. This study investigates how early traumatic experiences affect individuals' choice of public service employment through the mediating role of religious participation. It further investigates whether the altruism‐related gene moderates the effect of early traumatic experience on religious participation, thereby establishing a moderated mediation model. Using a nationally representative UK dataset, we find that religious participation mediates the relationship between traumatic experiences and public service employment selection. Additionally, individuals carrying more alleles of the altruism‐related gene exhibit greater sensitivity to traumatic experiences, which in turn influences their religious participation and subsequent career choice.
