LibGuides: Advanced Reading: Government & Public Administration

More Article Choices for Government & Public Administration

Afonso, Whitney B. "Citizens Engaging Government: Participatory Budgeting In Greensboro, North Carolina." Public Administration Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 1, 2017, pp. 7-42. ProQuest Local governments are responding to growing pressures to increase transparency and citizen engagement, particularly in light of the fiscal stress created by the Great Recession. Historically, the budget process has been a target for these efforts, generally through public hearings and requirements for publicly available budget documents. However, there is growing interest in moving past information sharing to more dynamic and interactive engagement. A review of citizen engagement literature reveals the diverse ways in which local governments and citizens engage with each other. It also reveals that most studies are presented primarily from the perspective of the local government. This article responds by presenting a case study on Greensboro, North Carolina, where a citizen-led effort successfully introduced participatory budgeting (PB). In October 2014, Greensboro passed a resolution in which it committed $500,000 annually to PB, allowing citizens to develop and vote on budget proposals. The research presented here is a first step toward understanding efforts to increase transparency and engagement from a citizen perspective, and it highlights some of the unique challenges that citizens face when they take on such an initiative.
Ayers, Rebecca S. "Building Goal Alignment in Federal Agencies' Performance Appraisal Programs." Public Personnel Management, vol. 42, no. 4, 2013, pp. 495-520. ProQuest ublic managers wrestle with how to influence organizational performance. Results-based management approaches point to the goal alignment's importance in performance management programs for meeting organizational goals. This research examines the extent to which federal agency organizational factors allow for performance appraisal goal alignment. Goal alignment is operationalized in two ways: embedding of strategic plan goals into employee performance plans and employee knowledge of how their work relates to the agency's goals and priorities. Using data from U.S. Office of Personnel Management's evaluation of federal agency appraisal programs, results indicate leadership support of the program is a determining factor of plan alignment. Communication of the organization's goals, the climate fit for achieving results, and whether the strategic plan was written for the agency program level tend to predict employee alignment. Strategic plan level is particularly important for strategic management literature, which has limited empirical evidence for the effectiveness of program-level strategic plans.
Ertas, Nevbahar. "Turnover Intentions and Work Motivations of Millennial Employees in Federal Service." Public Personnel Management, vol. 44, no. 3, 2015, pp. 401-423. ProQuest In the face of looming retirements in the federal service, retaining and motivating the next generation of workers has emerged as a critical concern for human resource professionals in federal agencies. While a growing body of work provides advice and strategies on making government work more inviting for the members of the Millennial generation, those born after 1982, not much is known about the turnover intentions of those already in public service. Do Millennial workers in the federal agencies resemble older workers in terms of their work motivations and turnover intentions? This study compares Millennial and older generation workers in U.S. federal agencies, in terms of their turnover intentions and work motivations. The analyses show that they are more likely than their older counterparts to report an intention to leave their jobs, and most work attributes do not matter more for Millennial workers' decisions to leave.
Hur, Yongbeom, and Ruth A. Strickland. "Diversity Management Practices, Do They Make a Difference? Examining Consequences of Their Adoption In Local Governments." Public Administration Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 2, 2015, pp. 325-357. ProQuest Organizations in both the private and public sectors have adopted diversity management practices (DMPs), hoping that they could better manage diversity-related issues with adopted practices. However, those adopted diversity management practices may be best guesses at best due to lack of hard evidence about their effects. With the data collected from the surveys sent to local governments in North Carolina, we probe the effects of adopted DMPs, conducting regression, analysis of variance, and correlation analyses. According to the findings of this study, adopted DMPs did not seem to work in achieving the goals of managing diversity, which is more likely when local governments adopt DMPs reactively, not proactively, or if there is a threshold in the number of adopted DMPs. If management-oriented goals such as reducing conflicts are not achieved in diversity management, local governments may not fully enjoy the benefits of being diverse in their organizations or may even hurt themselves because diversity in the workplace can be a double-edged sword in the end.
Jung, Kyujin, Simon A. Andrew, and Wei-Ning Wu. "Illuminating the in-House Provision of Emergency Services: A Test of Organizational Capacity Hypotheses." International Review of Public Administration, vol. 19, no. 3, 2014, pp. 238-251. ProQuest While much has been written about the importance of organizational capacity, few have examined systematically the influence of organizational capacity on local service delivery arrangements. This paper highlights the importance of organizational capacity in influencing local government decisions to provide services in house in the realm of public safety (e.g., fire, police and emergency medical services). Our empirical study, conducted in Texas, provides evidence that a local government may reduce the risks of contract failure when it produces services in house, especially in the presence of institutionalized evaluation mechanisms. Instead of relying on alternative service providers to acquire, store and move emergency medical supplies and services, local governments are building capacity to better equip themselves to deliver emergency services and plan for disasters.
Lacy, Dean, and Dino P. Christenson. "Who Votes for the Future? Information, Expectations, and Endogeneity in Economic Voting." Political Behavior, vol. 39, no. 2, 2017, pp. 347-375. ProQuest Voters' four primary evaluations of the economy--retrospective national, retrospective pocketbook, prospective national, and prospective pocketbook--vary in the cognitive steps necessary to link economic outcomes to candidates in elections. We hypothesize that the effects of the different economic evaluations on vote choice vary with a voter's ability to acquire information and anticipate the election outcome. Using data from the 1980 through 2004 US presidential elections, we estimate a model of vote choice that includes all four economic evaluations as well as information and uncertainty moderators. The effects of retrospective evaluations on vote choice do not vary by voter information. Prospective economic evaluations weigh in the decisions of the most informed voters, who rely on prospective national evaluations when they believe the incumbent party will win and on prospective pocketbook evaluations when they are uncertain about the election outcome or believe that the challenger will win. Voters who have accurate expectations about who will win the election show the strongest relationship between their vote choice and sociotropic evaluations of the economy, both retrospective and prospective. Voters whose economic evaluations are most likely to be endogenous to vote choice show a weaker relationship between economic evaluations and their votes than the voters who appear to be more objective in their assessments of the election. Economic voting is broader and more prospective than previously accepted, and concerns about endogeneity in economic evaluations are overstated.
Lu, Jiahuan. "How Political Are Government Contracting Decisions? An Examination of Human Service Contracting Determinants." Public Administration Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 2, 2013, pp. 182-207. ProQuest Government contracting has become a common practice at all levels of governments. However, the motivations behind government make-or-buy decisions are still not well understood. Public management operates in a complex organizational environment, integrating both political and pragmatic forces. This study explores the potential determinants of state governments' contracting out human services with nonprofit organizations. Based on a survey of state government-nonprofit human service contracting across the fifty states in 2009, the research presented here develops a regression model including multiple variables capturing both political and pragmatic factors that are theoretically assumed to affect government contracting decisions. The results show public employee unions as political factors, combined with human service demands and state fiscal difficulty as pragmatic factors, account for the variations in state government human service contracting.
Wynen, Jan, de B. op, and Silke Ruebens. "The Nexus between Gender and Perceived Career Opportunities: Evidence from the U.S. Federal Government." Public Personnel Management, vol. 44, no. 3, 2015, pp. 375-400. ProQuest Although the horizontal representation of women in the U.S. workforce has significantly increased, numerous studies have found that there is still a substantial underrepresentation of women at high-level positions. In light of this fact, this article examines differences in perceived career opportunities between men and women in the federal workforce as well as the evolution of these differences between 2006 and 2013. To do this, a heterogeneous choice model is used to examine representative samples of two waves of the U.S. federal employee viewpoint survey. We come to the finding that a difference in perceived career opportunities exists and, surprisingly, that this difference did not decrease or increase during the examined time period.