Turning the Page: A New Year and a New Leaf

• Date: 01 January 2019
• Published date: 01 January 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13026

8 Public Administration Review • Januar y | Fe brua ry 201 9

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 79, Iss. 1, pp. 8–11. © 2019 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13026.

Greetings, and welcome to 2019. As Public

Administration Review (PAR) enters its 79th

year of publication, the world is changing at

a feverish pace. We would like to take a few moments

to share our perspective on recent trends in public

administration research, including what we expect

to see submitted during the coming year, as well

as what—without some gentle prodding—we do

not expect to see. PAR has several exciting projects

underway in the form of symposia that highlight

major topics in need of further study and discourse.

From corruption to public entrepreneurship, and

comparative public administration, you can be on the

lookout for a variety of targeted topics in the issues

that will appear throughout this volume and beyond.

Looking Back to Look Ahead

Reflecting on our experience over the past year as we

took up the helm of PAR, we have made a number

of observations about the state of the discipline. A

number of topics have risen to the forefront of public

discourse, and scholarship has followed in lock-step.

We have seen a large number of manuscripts focused

on social equity and public sector values. In fact, this

issue is the second we have produced in the past 6

months with focus on that topic. Looking back to

issue 78(3), we saw five strong pieces that examined

inequitable public participation (Clark 2018),

disparities between men and women in academia

(Rabovsky and Lee 2018), pay equity (Lewis, Boyd,

and Pathak 2018), performance improvement through

gender matching (Guul 2018), and the role of gender

differences in managerial networking (Rho and Lee

2018). Looking back to previous years, we see a

steady trend of research concerned with social equity

in various settings and from various perspectives.

Gooden (2017) reveals how evidence-based decision

making informs social equity from a local government

perspective. Valenzuela (2017) explores one county’s

efforts to institutionalize equity and social justice.

Siddiki, Kim, and Leach (2017) look at diversity

and trust in the context of collaborative governance.

And, of course, the symposium on race and policing

(see issue 77(2)) is replete with examples of research

focused on social equity concerns (Ward and

Menifield 2017).

Responding to a call for greater awareness about

sexual harassment, such as the #MeToo movement,

scholars have rapidly moved to explore questions of

equity as it pertains to race, gender, age, and sexual

orientation. They are interested in the causes of

inequity and potential solutions, but scholarship has

also begun to demonstrate the value of equity on

public sector performance.

PAR has actively contributed to the rise of the

behavioral public administration (BPA) movement.

Rooted in psychology and behavioral economics,

this field has benefited from the use of experimental

methodologies to explore the effects of various

cognitive biases and errors in judgment to deepen

our understanding of decision making. BPA has

also been an integral factor in promulgating public

administration to the forefront of methodological

excellence in the social sciences. One need only look

back to our most recent issue to see the variety of

research examining behavioral attributes through

experimental methodologies. To be fair, not all

experimental research is behavioral, but the two can

frequently be found occupying the same territory. In

issue 78(6), we saw experimental evidence of cognitive

bias in public management (Bellé, Cantarelli, and

Bellardinelli 2018), the effects of framing on the use

of performance information (Bellardinelli et al. 2018)

as well as the complex interaction of data types and

sources on performance information use (Walker

et al. 2018), and the effect of financial rewards on

coproduction (Voorberg et al. 2017). Andersen and

Moynihan (2018) used an experimental design to

examine how socially distinctive newcomers fare

within organizations, while Bromberg, Charbonneau,

and Smith (2018) used a list experiment to examine

citizen support policing strategies. The emphasis on

behavioral public administration and experimental

design will only strengthen. To fuel discourse on the

Jeremy L. Hall

University of Central Florida

R. Paul Battaglio

University of Texas at Dallas

Turning the Page: A New Year and a New Leaf

Editorial