It's about time! Temporal dynamics and longitudinal research designs in public administration

• Published date: 01 November 2023
• Author: Zuzana Murdoch,Muiris MacCarthaigh,Benny Geys
• Date: 01 November 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13758

GUEST EDITORIAL

It’s about time! Temporal dynamics and longitudinal research

designs in public administration

Zuzana Murdoch

1

| Muiris MacCarthaigh

2

| Benny Geys

3

1

Department of Government, University of

Bergen, Bergen, Norway

2

School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy

and Politics, Queen’s University Belfast,

Belfast, UK

3

Department of Economics, Norwegian Business

School (BI), Bergen, Norway

Correspondence

Zuzana Murdoch, Department of Government,

University of Bergen, Christiesgate 19, 5007

Bergen, Norway.

Email: zuzana.murdoch@uib.no

Abstract

Many of the fundamental research questions in public administration relate to

individual- or organization-level temporal dynamics, including the impact of public

sector reforms, (in)stability of public policies and organizations, development of

public service motivation, or the workplace socialization of public employees.

However, theoretical, methodological, and empirical public administration scholar-

ship continues to take time and temporal dynamics insufficiently seriously. This

constitutes a major shortcoming within the profession and implies that we are yet

to unlock the transformative potential of longitudinal research. Building on the

recent development of novel research infrastructures that can support the study

of temporal dynamics of—and within—public organizations, this Symposium

pushes for a “longitudinal turn”in the study of public administration. We maintain

that more concerted efforts to apply a temporal lens to our research endeavors

are critical to theorize, empirically assess, and understand public administrations

as well as the bureaucrats employed within them.

INTRODUCTION

Two decades ago, Baumgartner and Jones (2002:p.6)

lamented that “one of the truly great failings of the policy

sciences has been the inability to produce reliable longi-

tudinal studies”. Contemporaneously, Gill and Meier (2000:

p. 157) argued that public administration research had

“fallen notably behind research in related fields in terms

of methodological sophistication”particularly with

respect to the use of time-series analyses. Twenty years

later, descriptive case studies and cross-sectional research

designs continue to dominate the study of public admin-

istration (Pandey, 2017; Ritz et al., 2016; Stritch, 2017).

While it is not uncommon for research papers to conclude

with a call for applying a longitudinal perspective to the

phenomenon under analysis, this rarely occurs in practice.

Moreover, longitudinal research designs and methodo-

logical approaches are still not uniformly established

within the canon of public administration research

methods. The Handbook of Research Methods in Public

Administration, Management and Policy (Vigoda-Gadot &

Vishdi, 2020) dedicates only one chapter to one specific

longitudinal research approach (i.e., difference-in-

differences models), whereas Van Thiel’s(

2022)Research

Methods in Public Administration and Public Management

engages in a broader discussion of the utility of cohort,

panel, and trend studies.

1

This observation is particularly disconcerting since

many fundamental public administration research ques-

tions relate to individual- or organization-level temporal

dynamics, or involve causality as an issue of

temporal ordering. One can think, for example, about the

impact of public sector reforms on organizational outputs

and performance (Christensen & Lægreid, 2007;

Levine, 1978,1979; Wynen et al., 2019), the development

of public service motivation or organizational citizenship

behavior (Chen et al., 2023; Kim, 2021; Miller-Mor-Attias &

Vigoda-Gadot, 2022), the socialization of public sector

We are grateful to Tobias Bach, Germà Bel, Barry Burden, Julia Fleischer, Klaus

Goetz, Fabian Hattke, Per Lægreid, Ken Meier, Rune Sørensen, Jan Wynen, and

Susan Webb Yackee for insightful discussions. Zuzana Murdoch is grateful to the

Norwegian Research Council (Project No. 314333) and the European Commission

(Horizon Europe “DemoTrans”Project No. 101059288) for financial support. Views

and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily

reflect those of the European Union or the Horizon Europe programme. Neither

the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The authors contributed equally and are presented in reverse alphabetical order.

Received: 3 October 2023

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13758

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribu tion and reproduction in any medium, provided the

original work is properly cited.

© 2023 The Authors. Public Administration Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Public Administration.

Public Admin Rev. 2023;83:1727–1736. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar 1727