Public Administration Review

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• Andrew G. Ferguson, The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2017). 272 pp. $28.00 (hardcover), ISBN: 1479892823
• Portable Innovation, Policy Wormholes, and Innovation Diffusion

  This article explores the effects of city managers' career paths on the diffusion of climate policy innovation among municipal governments in the United States. Using the agent network diffusion (AND) model, the authors hypothesize that local climate policy innovations are portable and that cities may learn from distant jurisdictions to which they are connected through the career paths of managers, a phenomenon termed the “policy wormhole” effect. Employing a dyadic panel data set of more than 400 Florida cities from 2005 to 2010, these hypotheses are tested using dyadic event history analysis. The results support both the portable innovation hypothesis and the policy wormhole hypothesis. Cities can facilitate the diffusion of policy innovations by paying special attention to the recruitment process of city managers.

• What a Difference a Grade Makes: Evidence from New York City's Restaurant Grading Policy

  Can governments use grades to induce businesses to improve their compliance with regulations? Does public disclosure of compliance with food safety regulations matter for restaurants? Ultimately, this depends on whether grades matter for the bottom line. Based on 28 months of data on more than 15,000 restaurants in New York City, this article explores the impact of public restaurant grades on economic activity and public resources using rigorous panel data methods, including fixed‐effects models with controls for underlying food safety compliance. Results show that A grades reduce the probability of restaurant closure and increase revenues while increasing sales taxes remitted and decreasing fines relative to B grades. Conversely, C grades increase the probability of restaurant closure and decrease revenues while decreasing sales taxes remitted relative to B grades. These findings suggest that policy makers can incorporate public information into regulations to more strongly incentivize compliance.

• Guest Editorial: From Working Class to Middle Class
• Setting the Regulatory Agenda: Statutory Deadlines, Delay, and Responsiveness

  Congress imposes statutory deadlines in an attempt to influence agency regulatory agendas, but agencies regularly fail to meet them. What explains agency responsiveness to statutory deadlines? Taking a transaction cost politics approach, the authors develop a theory of responsiveness to deadlines centered on political feasibility to explain how agency managers map rulemaking onto calendar and political time. This theory is tested on all unique rules with statutory deadlines published in the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions between 1995 and 2012. The argument and findings about the timing and ultimate promulgation of rules have implications that reorient the study of the regulatory agenda from legal and political into more managerial terms.

• From Policy to Practice: From Ideas to Results, From Results to Trust

  Few areas of public administration have been more discouraging, over a longer period of time, than the struggle to build public trust in government's work. However, new research suggests that public administrators can build trust by improving the results they produce for citizens. Practical, practicable steps can produce big improvements: improving government's focus on citizens' needs; engaging employees; focusing on fairness; and, especially, concentrating on the delivery of public services at the “retail” level. Citizens, research shows, can discriminate among levels of government, the administration of different programs in different functional areas, and the work of individual administrators. That provides strong hope for improving trust, in an era when too often government appears too untrustworthy.

• Revitalize the Public Service, Revitalize the Middle Class

  The reinventing government movement of the 1990s reshaped the public sector in significant ways. Creating a government that worked better and cost less was accomplished through streamlined federal middle management ranks and privatized service delivery, which contributed to the emergence of a “hollow state.” Workforce reductions that addressed short‐term economic realities effectively threatened the long‐term sustainability of governmental organizations and the communities they serve. A variety of forces are now ushering in a new era of hollow government, including a changing context for public work, shifting bureaucratic expectations, and reduced capacity for workforce management. The public sector and its employees represent an important contributor to the vitality of our economy and communities. Revitalizing the public sector workforce is critical for revitalizing the middle class, and both represent urgent policy priorities.

• From Research Evidence to “Evidence by Proxy”? Organizational Enactment of Evidence‐Based Health Care in Four High‐Income Countries

  Drawing on multiple qualitative case studies of evidence‐based health care conducted in Sweden, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, the authors systematically explore the composition, circulation, and role of codified knowledge deployed in the organizational enactment of evidence‐based practice. The article describes the “chain of codified knowledge,” which reflects the institutionalization of evidence‐based practice as organizational business as usual, and shows that it is dominated by performance standards, policies and procedures, and locally collected (improvement and audit) data. These interconnected forms of “evidence by proxy,” which are informed by research partly or indirectly, enable simplification, selective reinforcement, and contextualization of scientific knowledge. The analysis reveals the dual effects of this codification dynamic on evidence‐based practice and highlights the influence of macro‐level ideological, historical, and technological factors on the composition and circulation of codified knowledge in the organizational enactment of evidence‐based health care in different countries.

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Featured documents

• How Voluntary Environmental Programs Reduce Pollution

  This article investigates the mechanisms that voluntary environmental program (VEP) participants adopt to reduce pollution. The focus of this article is the 33/50 program, a VEP introduced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1991 and discontinued in 1995. The program called for emissions ...

• Public Value Governance: Moving Beyond Traditional Public Administration and the New Public Management

  A new public administration movement is emerging to move beyond traditional public administration and New Public Management. The new movement is a response to the challenges of a networked, multisector, no‐one‐wholly‐in‐charge world and to the shortcomings of previous public administration...

• Framing Effects under Different Uses of Performance Information: An Experimental Study on Public Managers

  Combining insights from public administration, accounting, and psychology, this article explores the microprocesses by which public managers use performance information, investigating whether the type of performance information use and the request to justify decisions affect the way in which...

• Public Value and the Integrative Mind: How Multiple Sectors Can Collaborate in City Building

  Creating the public realm in an era of constrained resources demands a level of cooperation among multiple sectors rarely seen before and a recognition that the boundaries between what we have considered “public” and “private” have become porous and blurred. A number of recent projects on either...

• Administrators’ and Elected Officials’ Collaboration Networks: Selecting Partners to Reduce Risk in Economic Development

  Networks play an important role in collaboration, but previous work has not examined the different roles of elected and appointed officials in these networks. This article investigates local economic development policy networks to address (1) the extent to which the structure of relationships...

• Information Technology, Public Administration, and Citizen Participation: The Impacts of E‐Government on Political and Administrative Processes
• Explaining Self‐Interested Behavior of Public‐Spirited Policy Makers

  Public choice theory (PCT) has had a powerful influence on political science and, to a lesser extent, public administration. Based on the premise that public officials are rational maximizers of their own utility, PCT has a quite successful record of correctly predicting governmental decisions and...

• Coproduction of Government Services and the New Information Technology: Investigating the Distributional Biases

  This article investigates how communications advances affect citizens’ ability to participate in coproduction of government services. The authors analyze service requests made to the City of Boston during a one‐year period from 2010 to 2011 and, using geospatial analysis and negative binomial...

• From Participatory Reform to Social Capital: Micro‐Motives and the Macro‐Structure of Civil Society Networks

  Although a wide‐ranging literature explores the favorable effects of social capital, it is only relatively recently that systematic attention has been directed to the manner in which social networks emerge and the consequent implications for civic engagement and collaborative governance. This...

• Setting a Good Example? The Effect of Leader and Peer Behavior on Corruption among Indonesian Senior Civil Servants

  Standard anticorruption interventions consist of intensified monitoring and sanctioning. Rooted in principal‐agent theory, these interventions are based on the assumption that corrupt acts follow a rational cost‐benefit calculation by gain‐seeking individuals. Given their mixed results, however,...