how to structure a 30 marker politics essay

Our analysis employs multivariate regression and other methods, considering variables for major threat categories, consequences of terrorist attacks, and terrorist funding potential through irregular trade. Additional control variables include political, power, and demographic factors. This approach provides a more comprehensive assessment of terrorism risks and funding allocation efficiency.

The latter has become especially salient in public administration, with social equity being elevated as a core public service value and the demonstrated performance benefits of a(n) (effectively managed) diverse workforce. More historically, public organizations have sought to be demographically representative institutions, with recognizable implications for responsiveness among street-level bureaucrats, especially in arenas with administrative discretion (Keiser et al., 2002).

The objective of this paper is to address these policy-salient concerns by examining what qualities of public sector jobs are most attractive across age groups, as well as race and gender. To do so, we utilize a large-scale pre-registered conjoint experiment that allows us to make valid inferences on the impact of our independent variables on job attractiveness.

Our contributions are two-fold: first, we compare the simultaneous effects of a range of variables on job attractiveness whereas previous work has examined them in isolation; and secondly, we devote specific attention to comparing differences in the needs and work values of individuals across age groups. The findings highlight what matters the most in how job seekers self-select into differing organizational/policy domains, professional contexts, as well as job characteristics. The paper ends with a discussion of the findings and future work to advance this area of research.

This study focuses on one such stressed organizational context -child welfare services- and uses the job demands-resource model to unpack the reform needed to motivate and engage child welfare caseworkers. By doing so, it builds on the literature of how work engagement in public sector contexts, especially highly stressed ones, may be differently affected by clusters of job demands and resources. Using an explanatory sequential mixed method approach, the study first identifies the clusters of job demands and job resources that are antecedents of high satisfaction and overall work commitment in child welfare caseworkers. This is done by analyzing secondary survey data from the second cohort of the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being(NSCAW II).

This analysis is followed by in-depth interviews with current child welfare caseworkers to understand the relative importance of the identified job demand and resource clusters. Additionally, the interviews will add richness to the study by unpacking the personal experiences of caseworkers in the post-pandemic public sector human service work environment. The study, therefore, will provide useful insights to better inform the design and implementation of human resource policy reforms in the public sector.

In this paper, we develop a model for understanding where organizations fall on the continuum of preventing exclusion to promoting inclusion in their DEIA work. Preventing exclusion is associated with legal compliance, internal processes, and diversity inputs while promoting inclusion is associated with creating equitable environments where individuals feel a sense of belonging.

We test this model using survey data from veteran serving organizations (VSOs) participating in 18 AmericaServes networks across the United States (n=1,000) and individual surveys of veterans utilizing services (n=2,731). We propose that how organizations define and do DEIA work has profound impacts for whether historically marginalized groups access and utilize services. We conclude with guidance for organizations to develop and implement substantive and systematic DEIA work.

This work is funded by USAA and done in partnership with the D’Aniello Institute for Veteran and Military Families.

Specifically, this study explores the impact of organizational inclusion and justice on the behavioral pathways that employees strategically choose in response to harassment experiences and their willingness to report such incidents. The findings reveal diverse effects on behavioral choices: Enhanced justice significantly predicts both the willingness to report incidents and turnover intention, though it is not significantly associated with changes in assignment or transfer. Inclusion, conversely, exhibits nuanced effects across behavioral strategies, significantly predicting the willingness to report but demonstrating positive associations with turnover intention and transfer.

Qualitative data further confirm that organizational inclusion and justice play a crucial role in reshaping policies to protect victims, although mixed perspectives exist among employees regarding their behavioral choices when addressing harassment experiences. The study highlights the substantial impact of organizational inclusion and justice as proactive measures in curbing misconduct within highly bureaucratic settings. However, it underscores the necessity for delicate management strategies to ensure effectiveness in addressing workplace harassment.

To address the gaps, we employ a quasi-experimental method, regression discontinuity (RD) design, based on school performance data and ratings from New York City public schools from 2007 to 2013. We find that performance signals affect overall turnover, but only at the lower end of performance ratings. Compared with schools earning a C grade, schools earning a D grade have higher levels of teacher turnover. Moreover, teachers from different racial groups respond to low-performance signals differently. Compared to their counterparts in schools that earned a C, white teachers in D schools are more likely to transfer to higher-rated schools. In contrast, Black teachers in D schools are more likely to exit NYC schools to join other districts or leave the profession entirely. This study deepens our understanding of employee turnover under performance regimes and shows an unintended effect of performance management: performance regimes drive minority teachers away and worsen the lack of representation.

This case study analyzes interviews with 23 CoC representatives, a survey of 114 CoCs (33% response rate), and HUD performance data. We find limited evidence that funding levels are associated with reported measures of performance. Broadly, our data show that governance complexities and environmental constraints violate many of the principal-agent assumptions embodied within performance management doctrine. At the same time, interviews suggest that some CoCs use HUD reporting requirements for varied purposes, including catalytic and discursive capacities (Musso and Weare, 2019; Moynihan, 2008; Nathan 2008). Overall, CoCs are building performance management systems capacities, but still face challenges regarding sustainable organizational culture. Impediments to performance include both internal organizational factors and external factors such as lack of housing, limited funding, and regulatory restrictions. Overall, the evidence supports a more cooperative and discursive model for capacity building rather than a top-down view of performance management governance in networked grant-in-aid systems.

Our paper contributes to the collaborative performance literature. We argue that to understand shared data use during the implementation phase, we need to examine groups’ engagement with performance practices during the earlier planning and coordination phases using a temporal view. We also submit that the three mechanisms constitute broader theoretical streams that call for theorizing about specific causal pathways within them. We identify and examine three lower-level mechanisms that can help explain collective data use: ambiguity reduction, formality-informality complementarity, and identity creation.

To develop and illustrate our arguments, we employ a mechanism-based case study. This approach relies on the use of explanatory narratives, and it is particularly appropriate if the unit of the analysis is a social, interactive process. As our case, we selected the Citizen Security Plan in Jamaica (2020-2023). The Plan is an initiative that aims to combine addressing crime and safety issues with efforts of community development. It was selected because it requires government to collaborate; it relies on the use of goals and data; and it allowed us to observe changes across project phases.

This study conducts a nationwide survey of 50,000+ faculty at public postsecondary education institutions to assess what factors impact their awareness of student homelessness. We will conduct exploratory factor analysis to investigate a myriad of personal backgrounds, professional experience, university engagement, and campus resource item variables. We hypothesize that faculty with personal experience with homelessness, those in human service and social work fields, and those who frequently engage with their university resources are more likely to have increased awareness of student homelessness. Data collection was completed in December 2023.

To accomplish this, I will employ a two-way fixed-effect model using data sourced from the U.S. Census Bureau, Georgia Department of Education, Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, and National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The dataset spans the school years from 2011 to 2019, with dependent variables of financial outcomes (total expenditure, instructional expenditure, fixed cost) and student outcomes (Georgia Milestones scores, graduation rate, school safety index).

To study this, we investigate disaster resilience planning in a rural county in the Southeast of the US exposed to several natural disasters, including tornadoes, ice storms, and strong winds. The county is characterized as having a high level of social vulnerability compared to the rest of the US (US Federal Emergency Management Administration, 2023). The empirical base includes data from observations of local government public meetings, content analysis of relevant planning documents, and interviews with collaborative partners. The data are analyzed using social network analysis methods, including descriptive and inferential techniques. The findings have implications for public management theory and practice in resilience planning.

Ordinal representation pertains to altering the order of representation among bureaucrats when cardinal representation cannot be improved. For instance, in an organization with four bureaucrats where two are female and two are male regarding gender representation, cardinal representation cannot be enhanced. To address the question of whether ordinal representation holds significance in coproduction, this study examines the ordinal effects of gender representation on individuals’ decisions to coproduce.

By employing two distinct policy areas—recycling and emergency preparedness—the study randomizes the order of female officials in a setting with two males and two females, where gender representation cannot be enhanced in a cardinal manner. Both experiments failed to consistently identify evidence of the ordinal effects resulting from placing females in different orders on citizens’ overall willingness to coproduce. However, the results revealed a pattern indicating that the gender of the chief leader influences an increase in the willingness of others of the same gender—and simultaneously decreases the willingness of their gender counterparts—to participate in coproduction.

This paper addresses the widening academic gap and examines the role of public education in fostering academic equity. This study responds to the call for a more holistic understanding of what perpetuates academically successful youth from historically inequitable backgrounds by linking the individual with their greater environment (McCoy & Bowen, 2015). Specifically, we ask, “what individual and institutional factors promote equitable access to higher education across marginalized student identities?” We propose a two-level, intersectional public education equity framework.

The framework is tested using data from surveys conducted among 1,400+ high school seniors and 50 guidance counselors in ten public high schools in the United States. The findings reveal misalignments between schools and individuals regarding perceptions of protective factors for social equity, indicating significant variations in the factors believed to impact access to higher education. Additionally, the study identifies certain risk factors for academic inequity, such as homelessness, first-generation status, lack of school resources, and financial constraints, which can be mitigated through protective factors such as societal expectations, family support, mentorship programs, and peer norming.

Research on place-based incentives has primarily focused on single incentive programs, concentrating on property values or job creation as desired outcomes. Few studies have compared multiple place-based investments or evaluated the combination of investments and resulting changes in equitable access to capital for neighborhood residents. This paper contributes to existing research by analyzing several programs—Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), Neighborhood Opportunity Fund (NOF), New Market Tax Credit (NMTC), Property Tax Abatement (PTA), Small Business Improvement Fund (SBIF), and Tax Increment Financing (TIF)—and how the related investments alter the racial composition of neighborhoods as a result of home loan approvals. In doing so, this paper offers a better understanding of and policy prescriptions for enhancing social equity when redeveloping and revitalizing local communities in need.

We explore these tensions by drawing on quality rating data from England's Care Quality Commission to compare service quality across health and social care organizations that are government-run, CICs "spun-out" of the state, or privately-founded CICs. Specifically, we use ordered logit regression models to compare over 2,000 quality ratings of these three types of providers across five dimensions: safe, effective, caring, responsive, well-led, plus an overall rating. We draw on a 'publicness' theoretical framework to explore whether and to what extent public or private ownership, as well as the loss of public ownership through the ‘spin-out’ of public services into independent social enterprises, impacts quality. Our initial results show that overall, both types of social enterprise CICs performed better than government-run services, whilst non-spin-out CICs performed best on caring and responsive and spin-out CICs performed best on safe and effective dimensions.

Understanding this is important, first, because officials often have a more comprehensive view of local financial health than objective financial indicators can capture alone. Compared to information contained in financial statements, commonly used for indicators, local practitioners possess broader relevant data and a nuanced understanding of what it means in the local context. Second, local government officials, i.e. individuals positioned within a network of government and community actors, ultimately make local investment, policy, and programmatic decisions. As such, when it comes to understanding policy outputs, their perceptions of their municipality’s financial condition arguably matter more than objective measures.

Drawing from open system theory and the literature on perceived organizational outcomes, this research aims to explore whether public managers holding positions in different city departments have systematically different views on financial health. This research examines survey data from city officials in 273 Kansas cities with populations over 500. The survey, conducted between September 2023 and January 2024, targeted professionals in five positions—City Administrator and Directors of Public Works, Planning and Finance. Through descriptive and empirical analysis, this research illuminates how perceived local financial conditions in influence the decisions and fiscal responses across different organizations.

Building upon previous works on policy designs of net energy metering, which have gained less attention despite its prevalence, we explore different tariff designs and create indexes encompassing various NEM tariffs. Using panel data (about 200 investor-owned utilities in 50 states from 2013 to 2021), we evaluate how different tariff designs have affected the penetration of distributed solar. By studying the correlation between policy designs and the adoption of DERs, our study contributes to policy design literature, understanding how various policy designs affect policy outcomes and how to design policies for other distributed resources.

Strategic management is often touted as an approach for integrating strategy formulation and implementation in response to environmental challenges. As one of the popular approaches used by the public sector, strategic management is often touted as a means for effective public service delivery. However, it is unclear whether current strategic management approaches are up to the task of addressing climate-related threats to the sustainability of public services at the local level where problems are fundamentally transboundary and require coordination across typical silos. We address this gap by asking: What manager-led processes drive resource-constrained cities to adapt their capabilities to the accelerating impacts of climate change? Using a novel mixed methods approach combining survey, text analysis of planning documents, and interviews, we examine how resource-constrained cities in Indiana integrate their capabilities and planning in response to climate change in the context of GSI.

While regulatory competition suggests a state would relax its enforcement on an entity when its corporate siblings (entities that belong to the same company) in other states have been penalized for violations, regulatory learning theory, predicts otherwise. When an entity’s corporate siblings become violators, it tarnishes the reputation of the whole company and indicates possible wrongdoing of the focal entity itself, prompting regulators to increase scrutiny on the focal entity.

We test the two competing theories using a facility-level panel dataset of Clean Air Act enforcement actions. Preliminary results show a mixed pattern. While regulators increase enforcement on a facility when its same-industry siblings located in the same state become high priority violators (regulatory learning dominates), they relax enforcement on the focal facility if the same-industry violator siblings are in competitor states (regulatory competition dominates).

Public Administration scholars must pay attention to this restructuring and its impacts to agency adjudication practices. This working systematic review of the Federal Administrative Judiciary will analyze distinct approaches employed by legal and public administration scholars to explore the conceptual and very practical tension between judicial independence and bureaucratic discretion. As the first systematic review regarding this topic, I expect to chronicle the development of these positions within the federal government by exploring institutional collaboration and influences. And finally, I hope to identify topics that may bolster comprehension of administrative adjudication in the USA.

This presentation is relevant to the overall theme of “Bringing Theory to Practice”. As a heavily applied social science, public administration scholars focusing in management must attend to the legal discourse, particularly regarding judicialized employees. ALJs are in such a position within an agency to provide a unique bridge between public administration and the legal discipline. With the ongoing restructuring of their position, there are ample opportunities for practice to also inform theoretical innovation.

The aim of our review is twofold. First, given the potential of relational contracting as an alternative to traditional contracting in complex situations, we aim to examine how relational approaches may or may not be a viable alternative to traditional transactional approaches. Second, we aim to contribute to the existing literature by developing an integrative framework of relational contracting as a way of managing buyer-supplier relationships in public procurement. Using ASReview Lab, an open-source machine learning software, we identify, collect, and assess relevant articles on this topic. Based on the findings, we develop an integrative framework of relational contracting in public procurement and present a research agenda to tackle theoretical and empirical lacunas in research into relational contracting.

While previous literature discusses how politics and power structure shape global public policy and governance transformation, there is a notable gap in understanding grassroots-based practices that explore innovative narratives, actors, and strategies to establish a community of practices for poverty reduction in the global south. To address this research gap, we outline a processual, multilevel, network-centric perspective by investigating two community-based poverty reduction cases in Africa and China.

Our findings reveal that development narratives, actors’ networks, and pragmatically evolutionary practices constitute the three key pillars for building a community of practice focused on poverty reduction in the global south. The paper contributes to the literatures on the role of action research in poverty reduction in the global south, aligning with the first priority of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Meanwhile, it highlights the significance of knowledge network in the formulation and implementation of public policies. The study also bridges the knowledge gap between development theory and practical applications in poverty reduction in the global south.

Our mixed method study takes place in the Puget Sound Basin of Washington state, where we gather data on stakeholder perceptions from approximately 48 CGRs working on ecosystem recovery. We use an exploratory sequential design, starting with interviews to generate a list of indicators with which stakeholders evaluate usefulness of scientific information. We then draw on this list to develop a survey sent to approximately 800 stakeholders. Our initial data show that scientific information is considered most useful when it comes from a reputable source and is produced transparently. Unexpectedly, less valuable indicators of usability included peer-review and co-production with information users. Our study contributes to CGR theory on knowledge management, identifying qualities that may enhance likelihood that information influences joint decisions. It also offers policy implications for information producers, suggesting ways to enhance information’s usability for practitioners in ecosystem recovery.

Our quantitative study investigates the link between learning organization and job satisfaction and the mediating role of psychological safety in a policing context. We use the dimensions of learning organization questionnaire (DLOQ) developed by Watkins and Marsick (1997), Edmonson’s (1999) instrument for measuring psychological safety and the short index of job satisfaction (Sinval & Marôco, 2020). The participants in our study are experienced German police officers selected for future leadership positions.

Seeking to identify effective and efficient outreach methods, in 2023 the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District conducted a field experiment involving 56,000 households in the Cleveland, Ohio metropolitan area. Using a conjoint design, the experiment randomly assigned households to a control condition or one of up to 56 combinations of treatments. Treatments included black and white postcards, color postcards, letters from the utility, letters from a community organization, English-only messages, bilingual messages, and multiple mailings. Some mailings framed assistance in terms of dollar value, while others expressed benefits as percentage discounts.

Results indicate that direct mail significantly increased CAP inquiries, and that a single, simple black-and-white postcard was the most cost-effective medium. Surprisingly, messaging variables did not drive significantly different response rates. The study is a model of university-government collaboration, and its findings provide unprecedented evidence about direct mail as a means of reducing learning burdens for public assistance programs.

To understand data and data skills in city governments, this research proposal uses survey results from local government chief administrators in the census west region of the United States. The findings of this exploratory research suggest that 1) a data-skills gap exists in local government, 2) data skill expertise contributes indirectly to a chief administrator’s satisfaction in their organization’s overall data skills, and 3) data capture, curation, and analysis skills have smaller skill gaps compared to data communication and application skills. The findings provide important insight into the data skill needs of local governments and help identify important research questions for local governments and the acquisition of data skills.

To answer this question, we employ a conjoint experiment on high-level directors in local government to determine their interest in applying to management positions given different job characteristics. Our conjoint survey experiment asks respondents to make four discrete choices between paired job descriptions. These job descriptions vary in characteristics of the work of city managers including the flexibility of the schedule, after-hours commitments, paid time off, perceived stability of the position, and requirements for public engagement. The data is then analyzed considering the respondent characteristics, position, mentorship, and family life considerations to more comprehensively explore the propensity of women to seek out next-level managerial roles based on these job requirements. This paper disentangles the question of whether women would be more interested in applying to city management roles if the position was designed differently. This study offers local governments recommendations for rethinking the nature of the city manager role.

Our findings indicate that self-motivation emerges as a significant factor positively influencing innovative behavior among national civil servants. Individuals who exhibit a strong internal drive and intrinsic motivation are more likely to engage in innovative practices, contributing to a culture of creativity within the public sector. Peer trust also emerges as a noteworthy factor associated with enhanced innovative behavior.

Surprisingly, institutional support, often considered as a key determinant in fostering innovation, was not found to have a significant impact on innovative behavior in our study. Similarly, the presence of competition among organizations within the public sector was not found to significantly influence innovative behavior among national civil servants. This nuanced finding invites a deeper exploration of the nature of competition and its implications for fostering innovation within the unique dynamics of national civil service environments.

The implications of these findings are substantial for public sector leaders and policymakers:.recognizing the importance of cultivating self-motivation and fostering peer trust can serve as a strategic approach to promote innovative behavior among civil servants.

We argue that team leadership assignments are gendered in ways that will disadvantage women. Whereas men are likely to be given leadership assignments that are conducive to continuing career progress within their organizations, women are likely to be given leadership assignments that hamper their progress. One reason for this is *structural*: Women and men begin their careers in different types of teams, and consequently accumulate early-career experiences that delimit their future leadership opportunities in divergent ways. A second reason is *aspirational*: Women who are candidates for open leadership positions will be inclined to doubt their qualifications, to be skeptical of their leadership capabilities, and to experience anxiety about assuming formal team-level leadership responsibilities. And a third reason is *stereotypical*: Organizational stakeholders who have input into promotion decisions will harbor differing expectations about women's and men's leadership potential, expectations that will tend to be more negative when it comes to women's leadership capacities.

We test these expectations using longitudinal, individual-level personnel data on United States federal employees.

However, in contrast to employees, politicians can be conceived as organizational outsiders. Instead, we therefore argue that political considerations affect how politicians assess and value performance measures. Specifically, we hypothesize that (a) politicians will perceive performance information featuring high and low performance signals differently, but also that (b) political ideology in terms of being aligned/opposed to the measured public services and (c) being affiliated/in opposition to the ruling political coalition will affect their perceptions.

To test these hypotheses, we conducted a pre-registered survey experiment among political candidates for Danish regional councils charged primarily with governing health care services (n=885). Respondents were randomly exposed to either no information or true performance information (high/low) about their own region’s health care system. They were then asked to evaluate the validity, legitimacy, and usefulness of the information, and whether they wanted to receive additional information. The results have potentially important practical implications concerning when political decision-makers are willing to trust and use performance information and policy evidence.

The model captures three dimensions at which legitimacy can be created or undermined: the political articulation of public interests (input), the administrative implementation process (throughput), and the results achieved for citizens (output). A comprehensive review of the literature will be structured along the ITO model. Initial findings suggest that results for 1) input and 2) output are mixed, while they are most promising regarding 3) throughput legitimacy.

First, while performance systems can increase political control, they are modest regarding strengthening minority interests. The management literature laments that a stronger results focus has not been accompanied by more resource autonomy, but such an increase in control is not a problem from a legitimacy perspective. At the same time, though performance systems can be pluralist in nature, evidence suggests they often reinforce existing power differentials.

Second, research documents that performance systems improve outcomes, but gains may not be necessarily equitable. Third, they can enhance the evidence base for decision making, and bias here is less of an issue from a democratic perspective if it reflects political values. Performance systems create process legitimacy if they capture citizen feedback, structure interactions between government and civil society, and increase citizen trust.

In this paper, we revisit the relationship between politics and administration, emphasizing how politics can influence agency performance even in the most professional and high performing agencies.

We describe the mechanisms by which political alignment or misalignment influence performance. We detail how presidents work to 1) change outputs by directly influencing agency capacity (e.g., budget and personnel levels) and 2) change outputs without directly targeting capacity by using the tools of the administrative presidency to let capacity idle, reorient capacity, or diminish capacity indirectly.

We test these relationships using newly created measures of agency performance for 139 U.S. federal agencies during the 2000-2022 period. The new measures combine dozens of subjective and objective measures of performance that vary across agencies and time. We conclude with the implications of our findings for future research focusing on the intersection of both politics and management.