Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory - current issue

Politics versus Professionalism: The Effect of Institutional Structure on Democratic Decision Making in a Contested Policy Arena

Bourdeaux, C. — 2008-06-11

Public administrators have long wrestled with the problem of bringing professional policy knowledge or technical expertise to bear on decision making in a contentious policy arena. A common solution addresses political conflict by developing institutions that buffer decision making from the regular influence of elected official. This article compares the effects of politically buffered decision making relative to politically influenced decision making by drawing on case studies of county efforts to site and develop landfills and incinerators in New York State. Some of these counties created a special district government known as a "public authority" in an effort to remove the "politics from decision making." Others used their regular line agencies. The cases show that the public authority siting processes were less likely to accommodate political concerns and more likely to focus on research-based policy or technical criteria. However, this professional focus then made them vulnerable to political conflict and likely contributed to the high failure rate of the public authority projects. In contrast, the more successful line agency processes, influenced by elected officials' political concerns, tended to arbitrage away political conflict at the expense of professional or technical considerations—but these processes were more likely to succeed. One case provides a possible middle ground. Rather than arbitraging away points of conflict, the administrators aggressively pushed decision making back into the political process, making elected officials choose the policy options. This process required elected official leadership, education, and commitment and resulted in decisions that were professionally and technically informed as well as resilient to political conflict.

What Determines How Long Political Appointees Serve?

Wood, B. D., Marchbanks, M. P. — 2008-06-11

The president's role as chief executive depends on the quality and tenure of political appointees who assist with the constitutional charge to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." This study explores the determinants of the duration of political appointee service. Using an agency theory framework, we propose that appointee tenure depends on financial incentives, executive-legislative conflict, solidary, and material benefits offered by the president, as well as implicit incentives that differ across presidential administrations. Using Office of Personnel Management records from January 1982 through August 2003, we employ multivariate survival analysis to confirm most aspects of the theory. The results imply that the most important determinants of political appointee tenure are financial and the difficulty of public administrative service. However, the president can affect exit propensities at the margins by manipulating rewards and implicit incentives that promote loyalty to public service and the administration.

Choosing Public Sector Employment: The Impact of Wages on the Representation of Women and Minorities in State Bureaucracies

Llorens, J. J., Wenger, J. B., Kellough, J. E. — 2008-06-11

In the past, researchers in the field of public administration have been hindered in their ability to study trends in the representation of women and minorities in state government due to limitations in data availability. This article develops an alternative approach to examining the representation of women and minorities in state government bureaucracies over the period from 1987 to 2002. Based on estimates constructed using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Population Survey, our analysis shows that women are generally overrepresented in state government employment relative to their civilian labor force representation within a state, and African-Americans are overrepresented in many states. Latinos are typically underrepresented. We also examine the potential determinants of representation for women and minorities, and find, among other factors, private sector race and sex-based wage differentials, relative to those in the public sector, are positively associated with the representation of women, African-Americans, and Latinos in state government workforces.

Political Insulation, Information Exchange, and Interest Group Access to the Bureaucracy

Reenock, C. M., Gerber, B. J. — 2008-06-11

Under political uncertainty, legislative coalitions have incentives to insulate policy from future coalitions. While there is evidence of legislators' use of agency design to insulate the bureaucracy from elected officials, little is known about the ultimate consequences of such design choices on the policy participation of interest groups. How such design choices affect group access is important because of the centrality of groups in providing both bureaucratic accountability and information for policy development. Accordingly, we examine the consequences of the so-called "insulation game" on group access to the bureaucracy. We develop an information exchange theory that portrays the impact of agency design choices on group-reported access as a function of the level of design-induced political insulation and the quality of the information offered by a given group. We test our theory with two original datasets that include design parameters of US state environmental agencies and survey data measuring reported agency access by state-level interest groups. Our results suggest that insulating agencies via design does lead to lower reported access to regulators by interest groups, but only among those groups who supply less valuable information.

Nonprofit Organizations in Environmental Management: A Comparative Analysis of Government Impacts

Nikolic, S. J. S., Koontz, T. M. — 2008-06-11

Across a range of issue areas, governments are increasingly collaborating with nonprofit organizations (NPOs) to achieve policy goals. In the environmental arena, growing concerns over nonpoint source pollution1 have led governments to work through NPOs rather than rely on traditional regulatory approaches. But past studies suggest that government assistance to NPOs can diminish their autonomy, flexibility, and responsiveness—the very qualities that make them attractive to policymakers. Prior research on government-NPO interactions has emphasized government funding, and it has focused largely on NPO managers and boards of directors. In this article, we examine a broader range of factors through which government assistance impacts NPOs. A comparative, longitudinal case study of collaborative watershed partnerships participating in Ohio's state grant program indicates the varied pathways through which government institutions and actors can affect NPOs. Results suggest how government involvement impacts resources, issue definition, and organizational structure and decision processes for environmental management.

Sector Perceptions among State-Level Public Managers

Feeney, M. K. — 2008-06-11

In this article, I investigate whether or not there is variance in public managers' perceptions of worker quality and work life, by sector. Specifically, I investigate whether state-level public managers perceive the public sector or the private sector as having more challenging work and more talented workers, and how those perceptions are conditioned by previous work experience, motivations for taking their current jobs, education, race, and other demographic characteristics. Using multinomial logistical regression of data from the National Administration Studies Project-III survey of managers in Georgia and Illinois, I find that public managers motivated by desires for advancement and public service motivation are more likely to report positive perceptions of the public sector. Managers whose last job was in the private sector, compared to those whose last job was in the public sector, are less likely to respond favorably about the private sector. Increased perceptions of red tape increase the odds of having positive private sector perceptions and having a business degree, compared to another degree, decrease favorable public sector perceptions. These findings are important to understanding the relationships between manager characteristics and sectors perceptions among state-level public managers.

Transit Contracting Reexamined: Determinants of Cost Efficiency and Resource Allocation

Zullo, R. — 2008-06-11

National Transit Data from 1993 through 2004 is analyzed to examine the effects of contracting out on the cost efficiency and resource allocation of motor bus and demand response services. For motor bus service, results indicate no difference in cost between in-house and fully contracted operations. Contracting has a weak curvilinear association to total cost, suggesting that the most cost-efficient agencies either fully contract or they provide full in-house service. In contrast, demand response contracting is associated with about 20% lower total costs. Competitive conditions or the choice by agencies to offer specialized services may explain this result. Transit agencies that contract with multiple motor bus providers pay a cost premium, whereas multiple providers have no effect on demand response cost. Contracting does not affect the growth of cost for either service. An examination of expense subcategories reveals no reduction in administrative expenses when agencies contract services and only a partial reduction in nonoperational maintenance expenses. Overall, the results call into question the efficacy of competitive contracting models of transit service delivery and the use of fully allocated costing methods in make-versus-buy decisions.