Abstract The role of principal-agent dynamics in performance and accountability reforms has been a recurring theme in public administration research. Yet, less attention has been dedicated to how the intersection of sector and policy design shapes principal-agent dynamics and subsequent policy outcomes. This study theoretically explores and empirically tests how sector and policy design shape the effects of state legislation that seeks to prevent shirking (mismanagement and underreporting) in the context of sexual misconduct outcomes in U.S. colleges and universities. We code every state policy designed to regulate higher education institutions’ management of sexual misconduct from 2007 to 2018 in the U.S. and leverage a Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood with a staggered difference-in-differences design to identify the effects. Our findings suggest that both sector and policy design matter: public institutions increase reporting in response to prevention policies that promote education and awareness, but prevention policies have no effect on private institutions. Other policies regulating enforcement and infrastructure produce null effects across both sectors. These findings have important implications for principal-agent theory and policy design research on effective methods for reducing shirking in social equity, accountability, and performance reporting.
Abstract Existing research suggests that a lack of institutional memory causes history to repeat in problematic ways within public administration agencies. However, this claim has not been well supported by theory or data that illuminate the process and effects of history repeating. To remedy this, the nascent concept of institutional amnesia is presented here as a means of theorizing repetitions of public administrative history. A sequential explanatory mixed method research design uses quantitative survey data (n = 1608) and qualitative interview data (n = 75) generated in the public services of Australia, New Zealand, and the UK to show how institutional amnesia can lead to the recycling of ideas and practices, the inefficient relearning of information-seeking processes and the delivery of conducive decision-making environments that can help address historical problems. These findings draw attention to the fact that administrative history does indeed repeat in public agencies because of institutional amnesia, but that it does so in positive as well as negative ways.
Abstract In cross-sector collaborations, leaders must navigate the complex and often conflicting demands of the public, business, and nonprofit sectors. This study explores how leaders manage this institutional complexity through a multilevel framework, drawing on a case study of a tri-sector partnership developing technology for disaster management. Based on evidence from 27 interviews, observations, and documentary material, we identify the leadership repertoire and, as our core contribution, uncover four distinct types of interdependencies between these behaviors: enabling, substituting, stabilizing, and inhibiting. Our findings reveal that leadership in cross-sector collaborations goes beyond adopting a single style; rather, it requires a strategic orchestration of how different behaviors interact. We identify two overarching strategies (selective targeting and sequential switching) that leaders use to combine complementary behaviors while preventing them from undermining each other. By focusing on leaders’ microlevel agency in response to macrolevel sector differences, this study provides a clearer understanding of how interdependent leadership behaviors converge into what we theorize as institutional leadership in CSCs.
Abstract Refugee camps have evolved into durable governance sites characterized by centralized authority and monopolistic service environments where residents lack “exit” options. While public administration scholarship extensively theorizes the benefits of participation, research often assumes a baseline of stable, democratic institutions, leaving “participation under constraint” underdeveloped. This study examines whether “thin” participation—awareness of feedback mechanisms and consultative outreach—is associated with refugees’ perceived outcomes at individual, community, and institutional levels. Using household-level survey data from 876 households across thirty-three refugee sites in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, we find that both latent awareness and consultation are significantly associated with improved subjective well-being. Our findings reveal a tiered impact: passive awareness correlates with community and institutional gains, while the relational intensity of consultation is required for individual-level improvements. These results suggest that even minimal engagement functions as a vital generative mechanism for institutional legitimacy in high-dependency, non-democratic environments.
Street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) often employ compassion-seeking strategies when interacting with citizens under ambiguous policy conditions. However, citizens' responses to these strategies remain largely unexplored. This study thus examines whether SLBs' compassion-seeking strategies promote inspectees' cooperative responses under policy ambiguity. We conducted survey experiments using four real-world enforcement scenarios across emergency and routine regulatory contexts in China. The results show that SLBs' compassion-seeking strategies significantly increase inspectees' willingness to comply, acceptance of enforcement, emotional compassion toward SLBs, and supportive intentions. Furthermore, the effectiveness of compassion-seeking is stronger in emergency contexts than in routine regulatory contexts. The findings indicate that compassion-seeking is a context-sensitive and underappreciated mechanism through which SLBs can reduce antagonism, establish constructive relationships, and enhance both the efficacy and perceived legitimacy of frontline enforcement.
Abstract This study examines incomplete participation in social benefit programs by focusing on individual income tax refund claims in China. Despite growing evidence on this issue, there remains a need to directly compare the effectiveness of addressing behavioral barriers versus alleviating administrative burdens in promoting program take-up. Moreover, when administrative burdens are targeted, it is unclear whether reducing learning, compliance, or psychological costs is most effective. To address these questions, we investigate how policy interventions designed to enhance program awareness and reduce participation costs affect individuals’ tax refund take-up. In collaboration with a local taxation bureau in China, we conducted a randomized field experiment involving approximately 23,000 eligible taxpayers assigned to different intervention groups. Using administrative data, we tracked their tax refund filing activities during the settlement period. Results show that awareness-enhancing interventions increased take-up by 2.19 percentage points, whereas cost-reduction efforts yielded limited or unintended negative effects.
Abstract Despite widespread recognition that institutional environment shapes citizen behavior, we have limited understanding of how anti-corruption efforts influence citizens’ willingness to challenge government actions through formal accountability mechanisms. This study examines how provincial leaders’ corruption convictions affect citizen-initiated administrative litigation in China, exploring the mediating role of judicial remedies and the moderating effect of local corruption environments. Drawing on comprehensive data including over 1.25 million judicial documents and corruption prosecutions, we find that provincial leaders’ corruption convictions significantly increase citizen accountability actions, with this effect mediated by enhanced judicial remedies. However, this direct relationship is substantially weakened when local corruption levels are higher. These findings reveal that anti-corruption efforts can catalyze citizen engagement with accountability institutions, but their effectiveness depends critically on the broader institutional context. This research advances public administration literature by revealing how anti-corruption efforts and judicial review function as institutional mechanisms that activate citizen-initiated legal accountability, reshaping incentive structures for citizen participation in government accountability.
Abstract Politically motivated personnel turnover affects government bureaucracy’s legitimacy and performance. To understand the conditions of meritocracy, the article explores how variability in hierarchy moderates the effect of government transitions on bureaucratic turnover. Event history analysis of the careers of 948 Norwegian senior bureaucrats (1884–2024) reveals that the organizational layers separating bureaucrats from ministers moderate the effect of government change differently depending on the layer’s political or bureaucratic nature. Bureaucrats directly exposed to political appointees experience heightened turnover during government transitions, while the turnover of bureaucrats separated from appointees by an intervening layer of career employees is unaffected by government transitions. Further analysis of different time periods and senior bureaucratic roles shows that layering alone does not fully explain political influence on bureaucratic careers. Positions must be hierarchically exposed (lacking intervening bureaucratic layers), functionally politicized (involved in tasks that are strategically important to political leadership), and subject to administrative politicization (by being under the purview of political appointees) to be vulnerable to politically motivated turnover. The article advances scholarship on the politicization of senior bureaucrats in merit bureaucracies by examining 140 years of politically induced turnover through a theory of how layering moderates political dynamics.
Abstract Can a good argument change an individual’s mind? In three preregistered experiments, we explore this question in the domain of public sector organizational performance. We observe human subjects as they engage in conversations with a generative artificial intelligence programmed to argue in one of seven distinct “styles,” including a confrontational challenger style, a didactic style, and a sycophantic style. We develop a theory of effective argumentation predicting that conversational styles which are pleasant and engaging will be more persuasive than styles which are unpleasant or unstimulating. Contrary to this prediction, we find that conversational styles which challenge subjects’ negative views of government agencies produce significant positive attitude change, while sycophantic styles that indulge those views do not. Troublingly, subjects find the sycophantic styles more enjoyable, less frustrating, and more credible than the challenger styles. This dissociation between user experience and persuasive outcome—what we call “grudging persuasion”—suggests that attitude change does not require a pleasant conversational experience, and that the styles subjects enjoy most may be precisely the ones least likely to move them. Our findings point to a potentially dark side of large language model-based persuasion: sycophantic styles that users find most appealing are the least effective at correcting misinformed views.
What makes accountability work? To answer this question, public administration research has long focused on formal mechanisms--rules, audits, and performance indicators-intended to ensure that public employees answer for their actions. Yet these mechanisms alone rarely determine how accountability plays out in practice. Rather, it depends on how they are recognized, internalized, and enacted by those expected to comply. This realization has spurred growing interest in how employees perceive and enact accountability in the context of public service delivery. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this study unpacks how street-level bureaucrats navigate tensions between formal accountability demands and their internalized perceptions of accountability. The findings reveal how employees weigh, reinterpret, or reframe accountability based on what they perceive to be at stake. To conceptualize this, the article introduces a concentric model of accountability.
This study extends relational contract theory by showing how behavioral reference points can be established through policy. We theorize that contracts are governed by dual anchors: backward-looking relational history and forward-looking renewal expectations. Analyzing 430 public legal service contracts using Heckman selection models, we find relational history increases prices in amendments, revealing its "dark side." A nonbinding renewal clause, however, significantly attenuates this effect, reducing price increase probability by up to 37 percentage points. These findings resolve the puzzle that renewal clauses, though present in fewer than half of contracts, disproportionately appear in amended agreements. The clause does not guarantee renewal but alters behavioral logic, transforming the supplier's reference point from backward-looking entitlement to forward-looking relationship preservation. Our findings provide microfoundations for how institutions structure relational dynamics and demonstrate how procurement design can shape expectations to improve outcomes.
Public administration plays a fundamental role in accountability relationships between citizens and the State, but how these take shape in public encounters is remarkably understudied. Analyzing relational dynamics within and around public encounters expands the relational perspective on accountability in public administration-challenging core assumptions of the principal-agent model underpinning studies of citizen-State accountability relationships. We conducted a critical-interpretivist ethnography of public encounters in the UK Tax Credits (TC) system and share findings from our Constructivist Grounded Theory Analysis of multiple data sources, including twenty-eight open interviews. We discuss four relational dynamics of account-giving-emerging from the interplay of neoliberal discourse, digital technologies, and communicative practices-that "reversed the accountability chain." We demonstrate how claimants experiencing significant financial and emotional hardship, in their encounters with an unaccountable State, became accountable for their TC obligations and welfare. We explain these findings by mobilizing interdisciplinary theory from critical accounting research on relational power to offer original conceptual and empirical insight into the interactive, dynamic, and emergent accountability relationships between citizens and agents of the State.
Despite the ubiquity of self-reported data in social science and public administration research, widespread concerns persist regarding common method variance (CMV) and its potential to distort observed correlations. In this article, we estimate CMV's biasing effects through five preregistered studies (including eight survey experiments) with UK and Chinese civil servants (N = 3,159), focusing on the relationship between public service motivation (PSM) and job performance-a proposition of PSM theory often subject to CMV concerns. Our findings indicate that procedures widely advocated by methodological scholars to mitigate CMV did not substantially attenuate the PSM-performance relationship. A single-paper meta-analysis integrating these survey experiments reinforced this result, revealing a negligible overall moderating effect (mean effect size = -0.018, 95% CI [-0.08, 0.04]). Our results offer insights into the quality of self-reported measures, call into question the notion that CMV uniformly biases self-reported correlations, and strengthen the PSM theory by providing evidence for the validity of its core theoretical relationships against the CMV's biasing effect.
Performance-Based Contracting (PBC) is promoted as a model that improves results, enhances quality, reduces costs, and increases accountability. It has become a standard element of government contracting worldwide and a key component of newer pay-for-success models. However, scholarly evaluations remain scattered and often lack a solid theoretical foundation. This study conducts a meta-analysis of 740 observations from 38 studies across 10 service areas to evaluate genuine performance. Utilizing principal-agent, incomplete-contract, and goal-setting theories, we examine what influences the performance of PBC. By combining these perspectives within a single empirical framework, the paper offers a systematic test of core assumptions about incentive alignment, contract incompleteness, and goal design in public contracting. Results indicate that outcome-focused contracts are more successful than those targeting process- or output-based results. This finding provides quantitative evidence supporting incomplete-contract theory's claim that performance depends on the contractibility of outcomes and extends principal-agent logic by demonstrating when and why incentives fail in multidimensional public settings. Although context matters, factors such as residual control, collaboration, and shared goals are central to PBC success. The study thus makes a theoretical contribution by bridging economic and behavioral contracting theories and empirically grounding their predictions in public-sector evidence.
This article examines the relationship between social vulnerabilities and the attention paid to them by local governments. Drawing from collective action and cognitive theories, we conceptualize planning as an organization-level inference process of selecting strategies to minimize gaps between expected and desired futures. Responding to public administration scholars who have called for advancing theories of managing risks, we examine whether local planning processes are responsive to community disadvantages and how the administrative arrangements and coordination efforts of local governments influence this sensitivity. In doing so, we highlight a phenomenon labeled organizational divergence, in which a collective's perceived community disadvantages differ from reality. Examining climate action, economic development and sustainability plans, combined with survey and spatial data on environmental burdens for 462 municipal governments, we find evidence, using a multiphase Bayesian analytic strategy, that institutional designs which empower professional city managers increase the probability cities will engage in broader types of planning but decrease the odds they will prioritize social vulnerabilities. However, these cities are more likely to minimize divergence relative to mobility and water-related vulnerabilities. Conversely, greater functional coordination across governmental units increases the probability of prioritizing vulnerabilities in planning but also increases organizational divergence.
We study the impact of policy venue specialization, the deliberate creation of domain-specific, expertise-intensive institutions, on environmental policy compliance. Leveraging a recent institutional reform in China, where municipal-level environmental courts were introduced to strengthen China's environmental governance, we use a multi-period difference-in-differences approach to assess their influence on environmental misconduct among a key group of policy targets: local businesses. Our findings indicate that these specialized venues significantly deter environmental misconduct, with stronger effects observed among larger firms and those in less-polluting industries. Mechanism analyses further show that increases in firms' innovation efforts, rather than enhanced government attention to environmental issues, help explain these observed compliance improvements, clarifying the causal pathways through which venue specialization enhances policy compliance. By linking institutional design directly to compliance outcomes, we move beyond the conventional process-oriented focus of policy venue research and demonstrate how new, specialized institutions affect governance outcomes. Additionally, our study offers new insights into the distinctive institutional capacities and policy impacts of judicial venues, complementing prior research that has primarily examined executive, legislative, or hybrid collaborative policy venues.
How do public agencies manage diverse programs under limited budgets? Resource constraints force agencies to prioritize tasks, requiring strategic decisions about how to allocate resources effectively. In this article, I develop a game-theoretical model that explores how agencies shape and restructure their task portfolios under budgetary constraints. In response to budget reductions, I argue that agencies reallocate resources by prioritizing more efficient tasks for improved performance within their portfolios. To test my theoretical claims, I analyze an original dataset of antitrust cases filed by the US Antitrust Division (AD) from 1970 to 2019. Using compositional analysis, I find systematic associations between budgetary changes and the AD's litigation portfolios. Specifically, budget cuts are associated with a higher share of antitrust criminal cases-the most efficient type for improving performance metrics-and with relatively lower shares for other case types. This study offers new insight into how public agencies navigate budgetary constraints to achieve their public missions while meeting performance expectations.
Public officials are traditionally thought to be more risk-averse than private sector employees, yet consistent empirical evidence is lacking. Prospect theory posits that individuals' risk decision preferences are influenced by the framing of gains or losses, but it does not distinguish whether gains and losses pertain to personal or public interests. This study incorporates the type of interest with gain-loss framing to construct decision scenarios and compare risk preferences between public officials and private sector employees. In Experiment 1 (Npublic officials = 897, Nprivate sector employees = 685), using a 3 (public interest vs. public-private mixed interest vs. private interest) & times; 2 (gain frame vs. loss frame) design, public officials were found to exhibit greater risk aversion than private sector employees when the loss frame involves the public interest, while no significant differences were observed for a gain frame involving either the public interest or private interest. Applying blame avoidance theory, accountability is positioned here as a core factor to further explore why public officials are more risk-averse than private sector employees when facing public interest losses. In Experiment 2 (Npublic officials = 625, Nprivate sector employees = 630), using a 2 (reward vs. punishment-oriented accountability) & times; 2 (process vs. outcome-oriented accountability) design in a public interest decision-making context, public officials were found to be more risk-averse than private sector employees in the case of outcome-oriented punishment accountability. In the other three types of accountability conditions, public officials exhibited a similar risk preference to private sector employees. These findings reveal the situational factors underlying public officials' risk aversion, and offer practical insights for designing accountability systems that effectively guide decision-making in the public sector. (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)1(N(sic)(sic)(sic) = 897, N(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic) = 685)(sic)(sic)3((sic)(sic)(sic)(sic) vs. (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic) vs. (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic))& times;2((sic)(sic)(sic)(sic) vs. (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic))(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic);(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)2 (N(sic)(sic)(sic) = 625, N(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic) = 630)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)2((sic)(sic) vs. (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic))& times;2((sic)(sic) vs. (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic))(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic).
This article examines blame shifting, where elected officials attempt to deflect blame for negative outcomes onto other actors. While prior research suggests that citizens generally disapprove of this tactic, this study re-evaluates how contextual factors shape these reactions, focusing specifically on cases of public service failure. In many areas of public management, service delivery is delegated or contracted out to public or private organizations, raising the question of whether such institutional arrangements make it easier for politicians to shift blame onto these agents. A survey experiment (n = 955) was conducted in the United Kingdom involving a hypothetical public service failure. Information cues varied the response strategy of local elected officials (shifting blame or accepting responsibility) and the service delivery model (public or private sector; high or low delegation). The results from OLS regression analyses show that participants were generally less approving of blame shifting compared to accepting responsibility. However, approval increased when the organization being blamed was viewed by participants as carrying more blame for failures in service delivery than the official. Although delegation levels did not directly moderate the effect of blame shifting, further logistic regression analysis shows that higher delegation made participants more likely to view the service provider as culpable, which in turn influenced how they reacted to blame shifting tactics. These findings highlight the conditional nature of public reactions to blame avoidance behavior, showing that citizens' evaluations of tactics like blame shifting depend on their beliefs about who is responsible, which can be shaped by institutional context. The study offers new insights into when blame shifting may appear more credible or justified and underscores the role of context in shaping the effectiveness of political blame avoidance strategies.
A core claim of the administrative burden literature is that the experience of frictions during administrative encounters can generate psychological costs. Using a split-ballot survey experiment with a question order design (n = 3,812), we show that being asked to recall administrative encounters in a welfare program negatively affects people's psychological affect. Further, we show that the responses to burdens are asymmetric and consistent with a pattern of negativity bias in how people recall citizen-state encounters. Being asked to recall encounters induces negative affect, even though the majority of respondents reported having experienced low levels of administrative burden. Respondents' negative psychological reactions are driven by individuals who rated their experience as burdensome in survey questions or reported a bad experience in open-ended responses. Positive reported experiences were not associated with more positive affect. The results also suggest that the relationship between the experience of burden and negative affect is more pronounced for women, liberals, Whites, and those in poor or fair health. Moreover, those with neutral political ideology and those in very good or excellent health experienced decreased positive affect. A key theoretical implication is that the experience of psychological costs is shaped by negativity bias: negative interactions have a larger effect on outcomes than positive interactions. A practical implication is that governments should focus attention on reducing burdensome or otherwise negative encounters.
