Despite growing attention to culture in public administration responses to crisis events, culture is often treated as background context rather than as part of the administrative infrastructure through which governance occurs. This article extends the theory of administrative capacity by arguing that culture can function as administrative infrastructure in post-disaster public management. Using qualitative interviews with community members, grassroots organizers, and nonprofit leaders in Maui, as well as public forum data collected within 12 months of the 2023 Maui wildfires, we examine how culture shaped legitimacy, coordination, authority, and recovery capacity in the aftermath of disaster. Findings show that culturally grounded relationships to land, water, community, and history shaped how residents interpreted formal recovery efforts, mobilized outside government systems, asserted authority over rebuilding, and defined what recovery should mean. We develop a culture as administrative infrastructure framework that shows how culturally grounded forms of authority, resistance, and place-based knowledge reveal the limits of culturally neutral administrative systems. The article contributes to public administration theory by showing that administrative capacity is not only built through agencies, resources, procedures, and networks, but also through culturally embedded systems of legitimacy, knowledge, authority, and collective care.
What do citizens believe to be guiding motives behind the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in government, and how are these beliefs related to AI acceptance? Drawing on moral judgment theory, the present article argues that the presumed intentions behind AI use matter for citizens’ evaluations of this use. It studies how citizens’ beliefs about public values motives are associated with AI acceptance across four types of AI use that involve different citizen-state relationships. The analysis uses survey data from 2072 respondents in Germany and the Netherlands and finds that that acceptance of AI use hinges on whether citizens believe that government AI adoption is guided by performance-related values – efficiency, effectiveness, productivity. Beliefs about procedure-related public values motives – impartiality, equal treatment, transparency – do not matter. The findings have implications for how to engender public support for government AI use and for understanding imbalances in public values driving AI adoption.
How do front-line public managers become institutional entrepreneurs? This article answers that question through a longitudinal single-case study of a large Norwegian municipality's healthcare services. Drawing on organizational institutionalism and public management scholarship, I first show how front-line public managers initiate divergent change by leveraging a sensing–legitimation nexus. They detect external and internal triggers, frame the need for change, and secure political, administrative, and professional support through direct negotiation and compelling operational narratives. They then act as co-creation catalysts, engaging residents and building cross-sector partnerships to adapt service designs and mobilize scarce resources. Finally, they institutionalize transformative public healthcare delivery by embedding routines in daily operations, formalizing interdisciplinary team structures, clarifying roles, and demonstrating performance gains. Evidence from two innovation projects shows that resource-constrained, non-heroic actors can disrupt entrenched practices and stabilize innovation as the new institutional arrangement. The study contributes to institutional entrepreneurship theory by positioning front-line public managers as credible entrepreneurial agents and by identifying co-creation as a core mechanism of public sector institutional change.
This study explores the intersection of religion and state through a single-case, mixed-methods research design, focusing on Israeli state elementary school principals, who administer religious directives embedded in state legislation. We ask: Under what conditions street-level managers’ discretion in policy implementation increases social satisfaction and cohesion? We argue that such discretion increases social satisfaction and cohesion under the following conditions: (1) When state policies are explicitly or implicitly vague and flexible, (2) When official policy is contested among societal groups, and (3) When street-level managers opt to respond to client preferences. In addition, we suggest that public satisfaction with the resulted public services increases when a manager's personal ideology aligns with client attitudes and expectations. The study demonstrates how principals exercise significant discretion in implementing religious policy and thus contributes to broader public administration literature by highlighting the role of street-level managers in navigating policy ambiguity, while mediating societal tensions.
This article explores transnational nonprofit action through diaspora-led nonprofit organizations in the United States (U.S.) and their funding and support of public goods and services in the home country. Diaspora communities around the world make contributions to their homelands in various ways that have impact on public governance. Specifically, diaspora members engage in philanthropic giving behaviors towards their countries of origin, including via collective and social remittances. How does this diaspora giving contribute to the provision of public goods and services in the country of origin? This research uses a multi-sited, comparative case study design that included extensive fieldwork in the U.S. and Colombia, and the transnational space between these settings. Building on theory about public governance and nonprofit organizations, the research generates and further explores empirically a framework of three sets of resources that condition transnational nonprofit action—material, relational, and institutional. Material resources illuminate how diaspora-funded projects directly support public service delivery. Relational resources capture how trust, credibility, and embedded community ties via diaspora-led organizations provide access to both networks and funding sources. Institutional resources, namely norm-setting, explain how collective and social remittances have the potential to shape expectations, standards, and practices about the nonprofit sector, philanthropic giving, and public governance more broadly.
Despite the growing shift towards procurement centralization among governments around the world, questions remain as to how to increase purchasing within centralized frameworks. While centralized purchasing offers many benefits related to efficiency and quality control, users often prefer more flexible options for purchasing. An unanswered question is how knowledge of user requirements and market trends leads to framework agreements that reduce the inclination for users to purchase goods and services on their own. This study employs healthcare purchasing data from 21 regions in Italy from 2013–2023 to explore how different sources of knowledge about demand and supply affect centralization rates—both in respect to asset-specific and non-asset-specific products. Fixed effects regression results indicate that knowledge of supply gleaned from integrating technical experts into procurement teams enhances centralization for a range of offerings. The influence of demand-related knowledge on centralized purchasing varies by product type, however, with interpersonal exchanges proving more effective for non-asset-specific categories and logistical support mechanisms proving more critical for asset-specific product categories. The results provide longitudinal insights into conditions that are typically studied through cross-sectional data. They also offer important implications for the many countries operating publicly provided health programs, as well as those pursuing broader reforms tied to procurement centralization.
Abundant literature documents a range of factors that shape citizen perceptions of government. However, attention to how the justification of a policy decision shapes citizen perceptions remains limited. In this study, we consider how justifications influence citizen trust and legitimacy through a 2 & times; 2 & times; 2 pre-registered factorial survey experiment that manipulates justification strategy, policy position, and policy type. Results indicate that opposing positions reduce trust and legitimacy while the context of a highly polarized policy has the opposite effect. Emotive-based strategies decrease trust but do not affect legitimacy. Further, the effect of a supportive or opposing position varies by level of policy polarization.
This study examines how the salience of social movements influences public procurement decisions and how agency mission shapes these responses. Findings show heightened social movement salience correlates with greater spending on minority-owned businesses, particularly among agencies without explicit equity-oriented missions. The results underscore the moderating role of organizational missions in shaping responsiveness to external pressures. This research contributes to scholarship on social public procurement, organizational behavior, and mission-driven responsiveness, offering practical insights for advancing equity in public procurement.
Not all federal employees experience the presence of political appointees in their agencies in the same way. Drawing on a 2022 survey of 1,306 federal bureaucrats in the United States, we show that personality traits-especially Neuroticism-condition how formal politicization translates into perceived political influence. Ordered logistic regression models reveal that, when formal politicization increases, more Neurotic employees are significantly more likely than their less Neurotic peers to say appointees wield "a great deal" of influence. Conscientiousness displays a weaker and somewhat more ambiguous moderating effect, while Openness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness are unrelated to perception. These findings suggest identical institutional structures can generate sharply heterogeneous psychological responses across individuals and that practitioners might do well to consider management strategies anticipating such variation in an effort to preserve morale and retention in the face of intensifying politicization.
Amidst declining public trust in the U.S. government, understanding what shapes public views of different levels of government is vital to gaining public support and confidence. This study investigates how authoritarian attitudes, defined as dispositional preferences for conformity, obedience, and conventional social order over autonomy and independent thinking (Feldman & Stenner, 1997), shape public trust across the federal, state, and local government levels. Drawing upon data from the 2023 Cooperative Election Study, we find that authoritarianism is significantly associated with increased trust in federal and state governments, but not in local governments, even when accounting for political ideology. We further explore how these dynamics are moderated by public service motivation (PSM), revealing that individuals high in both PSM and authoritarianism exhibit unique trust patterns. Higher PSM corresponds with higher levels of trust across levels of government and increases trust across all levels for those with greater authoritarian attitudes. These findings offer theoretical and practical insights into how individual attitudes and motivations condition public trust in federalist systems.
The growing prominence of environmental research in public administration underscores the need to examine how public participation shapes environmental regulations. Yet, the impact of public participation on government policy attention remains underexplored. This article explores whether public participation has practical implications for policymaking or merely serves a normative role within authoritarian environmentalism. According to the visibility theory, participation by actors with high political visibility can significantly influence public perception and policymaking. Using data from prefecture-level cities in China, we find that while participation from ordinary citizens enhances local public environmental awareness, these effects are not statistically significant. In contrast, participation from politically visible actors significantly increases environmental awareness among local citizens, leading to greater policy attention and positive short-term improvements in environmental outcomes. Moreover, public environmental awareness primarily affects absolute policy attention rather than relative policy attention. Consistent with punctuated equilibrium theory, significant shifts in relative policy attention are less likely without major disruptions or heightened visibility of environmental issues. This is because local governments in developing countries must balance multiple competing priorities, making it challenging to reallocate attention and resources away from other critical issues. Our findings point to the differential impact of public participation with varying degrees of political visibility on environmental awareness and demonstrate how such awareness influences absolute but not relative policy attention in local policymaking.
As movements to use evidence to inform policy have gained traction, so have calls for greater transparency of that evidence. Indeed, transparency research suggests that disclosing the evidence justifying a new policy may positively impact citizens' support for the policy, voluntary compliance, and even coproduction. Still, outcomes of transparency are nuanced. Research indicates that citizens' understanding of government information is critical for enhancing outcomes and that more information, especially when it is visually dense and contains a high level of detail, can hinder their understanding and, in turn, policy support. These findings leave open to question what impact transparency efforts in an evidence-intensive context might have. Drawing on communications scholarship, this study tested the effect of two strategies for communicating the evidence informing a local climate action policy - scientific evidence-based policy justifications and anecdotal evidence-based - on individuals' perceived understanding of and support for the policy. Results suggest that while greater transparency of the evidence justifying the policy decision increased individuals' support for the policy, anecdotal evidence operates through competing pathways when used to communicate evidence-informed policy. These findings suggest that each strategy was effective in a different way and, thus, different communication strategies may be more or less effective at different points of the policy process.
While numerous studies support the notion that management matters for performance, the varying nature of its impact across the public, nonprofit, and for-profit sectors remains underexplored in the literature. This article examines how management affects performance differently across these sectors by focusing on tangible management practices such as internal management, the exploitation of new opportunities, and strategies for buffering environmental influences. Using surveys from more than 1,000 top administrators in U.S. nursing homes, along with standardized archival performance data, this study finds that managerial priorities and the effect of management on performance vary significantly across sectors. While all three tangible management practices have a greater effect in for-profit than in public facilities, networking with political actors can enhance the comparative advantages of buffering in the public sector. This study contributes to the public management literature by advancing our understanding of the heterogeneity of managerial impacts on performance.
Over the last decade, elected leaders across a number of established democracies have sought to subvert democratic processes. These moments create a dilemma for public employees who have competing allegiances to neutral competence and protecting popular sovereignty. Some recent work has explored how public employees respond to this dilemma but, to date, few studies have focused on military personnel. This is an important omission because, historically, militaries have played an important role in determining whether democratic states turn toward autocracy. As such, this paper reports on the results of an experiment that explored how U.S. military servicemembers respond to anti-democratic leadership. It makes three basic findings. First, servicemembers responded in conflicting ways to anti-democratic presidential leadership: some remained committed to following orders while others indicated an openness to disobeying illiberal presidential orders. Second, a pro-democracy cue from a bipartisan Congress emboldened respondents to disobey unlawful orders; in contrast, a pro-democracy cue from military leaders had no effect on servicemembers' views. Third, an exploratory analysis revealed that respondents' answers were associated with several socio-demographic characteristics. Taken together, the results suggest that servicemembers would be divided about how to respond to anti-democratic leadership. Ultimately, their interpretation of an illiberal moment may depend upon counter-messaging from elected officials and their individual-level characteristics.
Drawing on theoretical perspectives from the literature on childhood socialization and cultural capital, we investigate how the socioeconomic status (SES) background of public administrators shapes their relationships with elected political officials and their staff. Analyses of over 30 years of survey data indicate that American state agency directors from higher SES backgrounds report more frequent interaction with political principals, suggesting that early-life exposure to elite norms and the accumulation of cultural capital facilitate access and ease in elite political spaces. In addition, these administrators report lower levels of perceived gubernatorial influence on major policy changes and agency rules and regulations, indicating the potential for high SES socialization to buttress bureaucratic autonomy and administrative discretion. These findings underscore the importance of class background as a formative social identity, and suggest that scholars should take it seriously in public administration research, particularly as a dimension of social equity and elite political navigation.
Sanctions play a pivotal role in ensuring accountability among local government officials. The existing literature, however, falls short in characterizing sanction measures and examining how sanction decisions are made in practice. We address this critical research gap by leveraging an innovative data set encompassing all sanction announcements against local officials during the most recent public health crisis in China. Beyond a rich descriptive analysis of sanction measures, our empirical analysis consistently indicates that, at the city level, the application of sanctions follows the principle of "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down first". At the individual level, we find that poor managerial performance and central government on-site inspections escalate the punitive degree of sanctions on senior local leaders, while political patronage appears to mitigate the severity of sanctions and potentially influence their political career.
We examine monitoring decisions made by governments when delivering services with nonprofit organizations in formal agreements. Our analysis suggests that the breadth of monitoring mechanisms that governments employ is more complex than shown in previous studies. We coded agreements in accordance with mechanisms identified in extant literature and employed inductive content analysis to establish 37 previously unexplored monitoring mechanisms. We next test the impact of governments' and nonprofits' network embeddedness on the use of these mechanisms across various institutional forms used in service delivery arrangements. Our research finds that governments increase monitoring when contracting out services in a "Service for Hire" arrangement and decrease monitoring when they are more embedded in their service delivery network. Motivated by questions of nonprofit reputation, we also find that the degree to which nonprofits are themselves connected to well connected actors reduces their monitoring burden. Further, we find that governments impose an increased monitoring burden in competitive environments while transaction costs have no unique significant effect on monitoring decisions. These findings reveal the amount of monitoring that governments use when more embedded within service delivery networks, and distinct avenues for obtaining information about nonprofits and the norms for monitoring them influence the regulatory burden imposed on nonprofits seeking to collaborate with governments.
In recent decades, special districts have come to outnumber general purpose governments in the United States. Yet, little is known about special district workforces and how they compare to general purpose government workforces. Special districts and general purpose governments provide many of the same services (e.g., parks maintenance, drinking water and sewer provision, libraries) and ostensibly have similar workforce needs for similar functions. This study explores how political institutions shape politicians' preferences for different levels of human capital investment, which in turn shapes overall workforce quality. Leveraging data on water utility operators working at special district and general purpose water utilities in Texas, I investigate differences in human capital investments across two types of political institutions. I find that special districts invest more in human capital than general purpose governments. This study innovatively explores the role of institutions in shaping workforce quality.
How does populism affect public sector innovation, and can innovation persist despite populist context? Using Israel as a case study, we examine this relationship through a two-stage mixed-methods approach: focus groups with former senior officials followed by interviews with mid-level managers who successfully implemented innovative initiatives. We find that contemporary populism manifests differently across hierarchical levels – senior officials experience direct interference through centralization, delegitimization of expertise, and politicization; while mid-level managers encounter operational constraints under indirect populist pressures. Nevertheless, innovation can persist through sophisticated adaptive strategies: building informal networks, creating protected spaces and leveraging existing frameworks to avoid political scrutiny. Our findings contribute by revealing both the differential impact of populism on innovation barriers across bureaucratic levels and identifying specific work around strategies that enable innovation to flourish despite these constraints, though with hidden transactional costs.
This article makes the following fundamental arguments. First, that the importance of democratic governance represents a central priority in modern public administration, particularly given the normative significance of the 'public', or what we'll refer to as 'publicness'. It is further argued that the case for publicness at the macro-societal level is essential for public administration to sustain its normative and intellectual integrity in meeting the daunting challenges contributing to the erosion of democratic principles and governance. This article begins stating several normative priorities of what publicness at this macro-societal level denote in protecting democratic principles and norms when threatened and undermined. Second, it is argued that the concept of 'the public' requires an affirmative role for public administration, which is highlighted in the approaches of the 'enterprise as a whole' and the 'principle of democratic transparency' in playing a crucial role strengthening the field's civic implications in this era of democratic backsliding. Finally, suggestions for future research are offered, and how both practitioners and academicians might proceed on certain important civic initiatives.
