Many low-income households in the US miss out on social safety net benefits because of the information, compliance, and psychological costs associated with take-up of government assistance. Yet, the empirical evidence on the impact of learning and psychological costs on take-up, and how to reduce them, is mixed. Leaning on an administrative burden framework, this paper measures the role of reducing

How does contracting out affect service performance? Evidence to date is mixed. We argue that this is partially due to prior studies focusing often on whether – not how – services are contracted. Yet, how services are contracted matters. In particular, we argue that whether users pay user fees for services to contractors affects efficiency. Where they do, contractor revenue depends on user satisfaction

This article aims to contribute to street-level bureaucracy theory by bringing to the forefront the experiences and perspectives of the Global South. Our argument is that mainstream literature in this field overlooks the social tensions that are more explicit in developing societies, resulting in a structurally limited analytical framework. We identify two key factors from the Global South that are

Persistent disparities in program access jeopardize social equity and erode a key pillar of democratic governance. Scholars have uncovered the causes of these disparities, including administrative burden and front-line discrimination, but less attention has been devoted to identifying tools for reducing disparities. We build on this work by arguing that reducing street-level bureaucrats’ workload may

In complex, polycentric environmental governance systems, actors may choose to collaborate with one another to reduce their collective vulnerability and enhance system function. However, collaboration can be costly, and little evidence exists for how particular collaborative forums impact the broader governance system in which they are embedded. To address this gap, we investigate the role of intermediate

Volunteer use as an alternative service delivery arrangement entails public organizations directly incorporating volunteers in service production through a quasi-employment relationship. However, research evaluating the contributions of volunteer labor to organizational performance are relatively few. This article fills this gap by drawing from two theoretical insights. First, this study tests a linear

This paper explores the speed of rulemaking in American state governments. Drawing on a unique data set of over 250,000 individual rules issued by states from 1993 through 2009, we introduce new measures of the speed and breadth of rulemaking in American state bureaucracies, providing a new way of evaluating the incidence of rulemaking delay within and across governments. We focus specifically on how

While prior research has long identified the centrality of critical supply acquisition to the government’s response to a crisis, there is less understanding of how to secure critical supplies that depend on global supply chains. The acquisition of personal protective equipment (PPE) in the immediate aftermath of the coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak (COVID-19) proved challenging not only due to threats

Much of policy-making involves prioritization—deciding not only what to do, but also when—and uncertainty—not knowing exactly how the choices made will affect actual policy outcomes. I present a theory of dynamic prioritization within a hierarchical organization. The model illustrates how notions such as an agency’s performance, mission, and critical tasks are linked with details such as institutional

This article explores how deliberation affects distributive justice for minority view participants in policy decisions made through collaborative governance. It also examines whether the quality of deliberation (i.e., willingness to accept opposing viewpoints) and quantity of deliberation (i.e., length of discussion) can be an effective tool for minority view participants to overcome power imbalances

Understanding differences between working in the public and private sectors is core to public management research. We assess the implications of a theory of public ownership, testing an expectation that work is of higher quality when performed under public ownership status compared to a private company. We conducted two, pre-registered, field experiments with a routine data processing task and workers

Targeted transparency has become an essential tool for regulation. Through information disclosure, regulatory agencies try to get regulated companies to improve their practices and comply with regulations. In the past, regulation was associated with distrust in regulated sectors. Recent research suggests that regulation, especially targeted transparency, may also increase citizen trust in regulated

Applications based on artificial intelligence (AI) play an increasing role in the public sector and invoke political discussions. Research gaps exist regarding the disclosure effects—reactions to disclosure of the use of AI applications—and the deployment effect—efficiency gains in data savvy tasks. This study analyzes disclosure effects and explores the deployment of an AI application in a pre-registered

Deliberation is ubiquitous in street-level work. Scholars and practitioners increasingly promote it, as it has the potential to improve existing practices and procedures and provide customized, yet consistent, services. Little is known, however, about the situated performance of deliberation in street-level work. Drawing on Routine Dynamics Theory and based on an ethnographic study of street-level

Stakeholder theory has been advocating the inclusion of affected parties in organizational processes to increase the legitimacy and effectiveness of organizational governance. However, organizations can fail to achieve these objectives if there is no systematic link between stakeholders and their constituency. Based on democratic notions of representation, we argue that democratic stakeholder representativeness

Employing loyal external appointees has been identified as a key strategy used by incumbents to gain control over the state bureaucracy. This phenomenon is known as politicization and has been associated with democratic backsliding. Frequently, career civil servants perceive these appointees as illegitimate outsiders, leaders whose main objective is to ensure political compliance rather than advance

Increasingly, scholars and practitioners are interested in evaluating the effectiveness of interorganizational networks. We use a configuration approach to study network effectiveness. This research is a mixed-method study of 26 education networks in the United States. We measure network effectiveness by comparing 4th-grade literacy, 8th-grade literacy, and high-school graduation rates. We compare

The provision of public services by for-profit and non-profit organizations is widespread in OECD countries, but the jury is still out on whether outsourcing has improved service quality. This article seeks to nuance existing debate by bringing to the fore variation in service quality between different types of non-public providers. Building on theories of dimensional publicness and incomplete contracts

Local governments consider a wide range of policies to increase resilience in the face of myriad risks, and employ a variety of tactics to communicate about these policies to external actors. An important platform to signal resilience as a policy priority is through the budget process wherein local communities decide ‘who gets what, when, and how’. Using computational text mining techniques, we assess

This article uses survey experiments to assess whether administrative procedures fix cognitive bias. We focus on two procedural requirements: qualitative reason-giving and quantitative cost-benefit analysis (“CBA”). Both requirements are now firmly entrenched in U.S. federal regulation-making. Multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, OECD, and EU have encouraged their broad diffusion across

This paper reports the results of a field experiment to assess the collaborative effects of community participation in the Ugandan oil and gas sector. Our research design assesses collaborative impacts as relational between community members and different decision-makers in the sector and measures these impacts from the point of view of local people. Local people often face power imbalances in collaborative

Spoken administrative language is a critical element in the relationship between citizens and the state, especially when it comes to face-to-face interactions between officials and citizens during the delivery of public services. But preceding work offers little insights on the verbal features of street-level bureaucracy. Drawing on communication studies, we argue that administrative language differs

The process of corporatization in public services has led to the emergence of new, more autonomous organizational forms. However, while these reforms have been centrally about the development of management capabilities in public sector organizations, we know surprisingly little about what this process involves. To address this concern, we draw on the literature on administrative intensity (AI) to frame

Despite burgeoning research on representative bureaucracy theory, there is limited examination of how environmental contexts shape the manner in which the demographic makeup of a bureaucracy is linked to distributional bureaucratic outcomes. Scholars in the field of social psychology, however, have suggested that community-level variation in the pervasiveness of biases against particular social groups

The purpose of this article is to highlight meta-ethnography – the interpretive synthesis of ethnographic studies on a given theme – as a useful tool in the study of social policy and public administration. We claim this approach can maximise the impact of rich idiographic research to enable theory-refining and evidence-building efforts in the field. We illustrate these benefits through reference to

While the theory of representative bureaucracy originates from concerns about the class composition of the public sector workforce, questions of class background have been notably absent in subsequent scholarship. In this paper I take advantage of new data on the class backgrounds of UK civil servants (N= 308, 566) to, first, explore descriptively how class shapes the composition of the civil service

Do governmental institutions constrain state actors? I investigate this question by examining the relationship between the design of state legislative fiscal offices and the health of state budgets. These budgetary bodies serve a supporting role for legislatures, designed to advance sound fiscal policy and sustainable public finance. With an original data set encompassing all state legislative budgetary

Financial scarcity is a fundamental condition for recipients of social welfare. We draw on scarcity theory to suggest that the condition of scarce resources may have a range of important psychological consequences for how welfare recipients’ cope with their problems, navigate citizen-state interactions, for their perceived ability to deal with their problems, and for their psychological well-being

Understanding how stakeholders choose to participate in different policy forums is central to research on complex, polycentric governance systems. In this paper, we draw upon the Ecology of Games Theory (EGT) to develop theoretical expectations about how four incentive structures may guide how actors navigate the world of policy forums. We test these expectations using unique data on a three-mode network

While the public and private labor markets are marked by significant differences in the institutions of wage formation, very few studies have examined workers’ wages and employment in the public and private sectors when solving the same tasks. Focusing on government contracting out, we examine the changes in work income, employment, and government income benefits when public workers are transferred

Transparency has often been hailed as a golden tool to bolster citizens’ trust in government and improve public governance. However, there is a considerable disparity in theoretical reasoning and empirical findings. Through a meta-analysis of 49 studies with 436 effect sizes, this study provides novel perspectives for understanding the effect of transparency on citizens’ trust in government. To test

Flexibility in administrative crisis management is a frequently reported determinant for a successful crisis response. But there is little agreement about how to conceptualize, measure and explain flexibility. We use a three-dimensional measure of administrative flexibility, capturing employees’ decision leeway, staff mobility, and organizational innovation in a crisis response. We then develop and

Performance information use is an essential component of performance management, which is an important tool to manage purpose-oriented networks (PONs). Conceptualizing performance information use in PONs as network members’ presentation, discussion, and interpretation of performance information during their interactions and communication, this study explores its drivers. Extant studies on performance

Scholars have long recognized the role of race and ethnicity in shaping the development and design of policy institutions in the United States, including social welfare policy. Beyond influencing the design of policy institutions, administrative discretion can disadvantage marginalized clientele in policy implementation. Building on previous work on street-level bureaucracy, administrative discretion

Environmental collaboration has become an increasingly common approach to the management of natural resources. Scholars and practitioners have tried to understand how collaborative structures impact performance using a multitude of single case studies and comparative studies. However, despite calls for the evaluation of collaborative performance, little quantitative research exists that explores the

A large body of research shows that clients of government services benefit from the presence of bureaucrats with whom they share race or ethnicity. These benefits arise from active or symbolic representation, which scholars argue are grounded in the shared backgrounds, language, and values that race and ethnicity proxy. We suggest that these shared connections are likely to be even more salient for

Innovation in public services is propelled by collaborations between public actors, private actors and service users. A substantial literature has centered on the benefits of user involvement in public services, but how user involvement can stimulate collaborative innovation is still largely unknown. This article develops and tests a theoretical framework based on the combined effect of 1) the empowerment

The combination of the high workload associated with keeping top executive branch positions filled and political dysfunction has led to longer and more frequent periods of vacancies in the U.S. executive branch. While scholars commonly claim that such vacancies are harmful for performance, this claim has been difficult to evaluate because of theoretical disagreement, conceptual confusion, and measurement

Climate change can bring about large-scale irreversible physical impacts and systemic changes in the operating environment of public organizations. Research on preconditions for organizational adaptation to climate change has produced two parallel lines of inquiry, one focusing on macro-level norms, rules and expectations and the other on meso-level culture, design and structure within the organization

The impacts of money in US politics have long been debated. Building on principal-agent models, we test whether and to what degree companies’ political donations lead to their favoured treatment in federal procurement. We expect the impact of donations on favouritism to vary by the strength of control by political principals over their bureaucratic agents. We compile a comprehensive dataset of published

This study aims to advance our knowledge about the role of public participation in formulating budgetary decisions of local governments. By focusing on participatory budgeting as a prominent form of public participation in the budgetary process, we posit that participatory budgeting serves two important roles in aligning the fiscal outcomes of local governments with citizen preferences: (1) increased

What drives collaborating participants to leave collaborative arrangements? Collaboration is a dynamic and emergent process rather than a static condition. Previous studies focus on collaboration’s emergence and performance; few empirical studies examine why participants stop collaborating. We address this question by studying how the history and structure of the Illinois enterprise zone program relate

This paper proposes a practice-based perspective on how managers resource goal-directed networks in the public sector, especially those governed by a network administrative organization. While previous literature shows that network managers need to acquire and allocate resources in order to achieve network goals, little is known about specific resourcing practices and related challenges to resourcing

Grantmaking organizations (GMOs) exert considerable influence on education systems, public policy, and its administration. We position the work of GMOs—in the distribution and management of funds for the public good—as a form of public management. Using recent work on racialized organizations from sociology, critical theories of race, and institutional theory, we address the role of GMOs in dismantling

Street-level bureaucrats assess increasing amounts of digital, often text-based, client representations. These representations have been criticized for oversimplification. However, frontline workers have also been known to develop simplified perceptions, or “shortcuts,” in their work. This study explores frontline workers’ assessments of digital client representations using observations of fifteen

In recent years, there have been multiple calls for public administration scholars to adopt an intersectional approach to the study of diversity within public organizations. This paper empirically examines the simultaneous influence of multiple dimensions of individual identity on employee burnout. We advance a better understanding of disparities in individual well-being outcomes for public servants

Public service organizations periodically collect and disseminate performance information that enables frontline employees to act based on two aspects of performance: current performance (how is the client performing right now?) and performance progression (is the client performing better, similarly, or worse than previously?). Yet knowledge of how frontline employees use performance information about

Abstract The outcomes of centralized or decentralized decision making in public organizations have been a subject of intense debate in the literature for more than a century now. This study revisits this debate by examining whether the degree of centralization influences the implementation of four types of organizational changes: reorganization, service contracting, technology adoption, and performance

Most studies in collaborative governance examine system-level or agency-level drivers of the horizontal dimension of collaboration, i.e., the specific forms of collaboration among an existing set of actors. Few have examined the vertical dimension, i.e., what actors are involved and the scope of collaboration. This study examines the latter issue by studying the implementation of the California Sustainable

Behavioral theory states that decision-makers engage in search in response to a performance shortfall. However, public administration research has remained remarkably inattentive of decision-makers’ attention. This study conceptually disentangles problem-defining and solution-generation as two distinct search objectives, in order to test theoretical expectations concerning individual decision-makers’

This article posits that racialized administrative power is the status quo in the United States and results from a wicked problem broadly construed as institutional racism. Acknowledging a baseline reality of racialized administrative power in the US allows public administration theory to more directly grapple with the institutional racism that paradoxically may seem too big and complex to empirically

Policy reforms of public service encounters often seek to control, delegate, or eliminate discretion at the frontline. In this paper, we show that rather than eclipsing discretion, the technologies meant to standardize and optimize decision-making in public service delivery introduce rough categorizations and scripts for action that make new types of discretionary responses and workarounds necessary

Public service delivery by African states is often characterized as particularist, favoring ethnic, personal or political networks of those inside the state over universalist, pro-social services to citizens. One explanation for particularist service delivery focuses on societal patronage norms, with ‘Big Men’ providing for members of their networks. Despite the prominence of this line of reasoning

Artificial intelligence algorithms are increasingly adopted as decisional aides by public bodies, with the promise of overcoming biases of human decision-makers. At the same time, they may introduce new biases in the human-algorithm interaction. Drawing on psychology and public administration literatures, we investigate two key biases: overreliance on algorithmic advice even in the face of ‘warning

We situate public sector leaders as actors who deal with competing institutional demands, and examine how public sector leaders can facilitate reform implementation in the face of institutional inertia in a transitional setting, Bangladesh public administration. Bases on 32 interviews with current and former Bangladeshi civil servants and local public administration experts supported by secondary analysis

What role does sector play in citizens’ perceptions of products or services in mixed-market settings where governments compete with for-profit and nonprofit vendors, or when governments partner or contract with private-sector providers? Do the public and nonprofit sectors have an advantage over for-profit providers? Using choice-based conjoint analysis with a nationally representative paid consumer

This article develops the concept of racialized burdens as a means of examining the role of race in administrative practice. Racialized burdens are the experience of learning, compliance and psychological costs that serve as inequality reproducing mechanisms. To develop this concept, we examine administrative burdens in the US state from the theoretical perspective of racialized organizations. Using

I denne artikel udvikler og tester vi en forholdsvis enkel teori på individniveau om det offentlige frontpersonales implementeringsadfærd. Artiklen systematiserer og etablerer en syntese af indsigter fra Ajzens teori om planlagt adfærd, Banduras teori om oplevet selvværd (self-efficacy) og implementeringslitteratur. På denne baggrund hævder vores teori, at frontarbejderes beslutninger om implementering

Managers of street-level organizations play an important role in the successful implementation of public reforms. A prevailing view within the public administration literature is that this work involves the adaptation between reforms and local contexts, where divergence is viewed as a form of resistance to change. The paper challenges this prevalent reform-centric view by introducing a situation-centric

A perennial task for the state is the creation and policing of categories. State-created categories have real world impacts on the public. The consequences of racial categorizations, for example, are well-documented. We examine a less studied consequence of state categorization, which are the administrative burdens created when individuals attempt to match themselves to state-created categories. Matching