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Administrative burden imposes costs on citizens as they interact with government. A high level of administrative burden in programs is linked to negative outcomes for those engaging with the policy, such as reduced take-up. However, despite the negative effects, the mass public is often supportive of greater administrative burden for government programs, and research suggests that high levels of burden can increase favorability toward government social programs, at least for some individuals. However, research suggests that these attitudes may be affected by how target populations associated with programs are socially constructed. In this paper, we explore whether the effect of information about high and low administrative burden on program approval is influenced by the social construction of participants. Using a survey experiment, we examine how the relationship between burden and program attitudes differs across programs as well as across different types of applicants. Our results suggest the effect of burden on program approval varies by the social construction of program participants, providing insight into the role of social construction in the relationship between burden and support for government aid.

Background There is high level policy consensus in India that community engagement (CE) improves vaccination uptake and reduces burden of vaccine preventable diseases. However, to date, vaccination studies in the country have not explicitly focused on CE as an outcome in and of itself. Therefore, this study sought to examine the barriers and enablers of community engagement for vaccination in India. Methods Employing qualitative methods, twenty-five semi-structured elite interviews among vaccine decisionmakers’ were triangulated with twenty-four national-level vaccine policy documents and researcher field notes (December 2017 to February 2018). Data collected for this study included perceptions and examples of enablers of and barriers to CE for vaccination uptake. Concepts, such as the absence of formal procedures or data collection approaches related to CE, were confirmed during document review, and a final convening to review study results was conducted with study respondents in December 2018 and January 2019 to affirm the general set of findings from this study. The Social Ecological Model (SEM) was used to organize and interpret the study findings. Results Although decisionmakers and policy documents generally supported CE, there were more CE barriers than facilitators in the context of vaccination, which were identified at all social-ecological levels. Interviews with vaccine decisionmakers in India revealed complex systemic and structural factors which affect CE for vaccination and are present across each of the SEM levels, from individual to policy. Policy-level enablers included decisionmakers’ political will for CE and policy documents and interviews highlighted social mobilization, whereas barriers were lack of a CE strategy document and a broad understanding of CE by decisionmakers. At the community level, dissemination of Social-behavioral Change Communication (SBCC) materials from the national-level to the states was considered a CE facilitator, while class, and caste-based power relations in the community, lack of family-centric CE strategies, and paternalistic attitude of decisionmakers toward communities (the latter reported by some NGO heads) were considered CE barriers. At the organizational level, partnerships with local organizations were considered CE enablers, while lack of institutionalized support to formalize and incentivize these partnerships highlighted by several decisionmakers, were barriers. At the interpersonal level, SBCC training for healthcare workers, sensitive messaging to communities with low vaccine confidence, and social media messaging were considered CE facilitators. The lack of strategies to manage vaccine related rumors or replicate successful CE interventions during the during the introduction and rollout of new vaccines were perceived as CE barriers by several decisionmakers. Conclusion Data obtained for this study highlighted national-level perceptions of the complexities and challenges of CE across the entire SEM, from individual to systemic levels. Future studies should attempt to associate these enablers and barriers with actual CE outcomes, such as participation or community support in vaccine policy-making, CE implementation for specific vaccines and situations (such as disease outbreaks), or frequency of sub-population-based incidents of community resistance and community facilitation to vaccination uptake. There would likely be value in developing a population-based operational definition of CE, with a step-by-step manual on ‘how to do CE.’ The data from this study also indicate the importance of including CE indicators in national datasets and developing a compendium documenting CE best-practices. Doing so would allow more rigorous analysis of the evidence-base for CE for vaccination in India and other countries with similar immunization programs.

Background: Vaccination literature highlights programmatic and ethical pertinence of ‘community engagement’ in ensuring efficacious vaccines becoming effective vaccinations. However, lack of consensual definition of community engagement, recurring evidence of community backlashes especially during vaccine introductions, and paucity of literature on community engagement’s effectiveness in achieving vaccination outcomes is problematic because assuming a shared understanding of community engagement will only lead to erroneous assumptions about its value, or lack thereof. This study examines conceptualization of community engagement by vaccine decisionmakers in India and efforts to foster it during the Decade of Vaccines.Methods: Elite interviews were carried out (December 2017 to February 2018) with 25 national-level vaccine decisionmakers in India. Study participants included policymakers, immunization program heads, and vaccine technical committee leads representing Government, international non-profits, and donors. Using Schutz’ Social Phenomenological theory, an a priori framework guided coding decisionmakers’ conceptualizations of ‘communities’, ‘community engagement’, and fostering the same. NVivo12 was used for data analysis placing exemplar community engagement interventions on a low to high spectrum. Findings were validated in a one-day member check-in meeting with study participants and teams. Results: Barring themselves, decisionmakers defined ‘communities’ as vaccine-eligible children, their parents, frontline healthcare workers, and vaccination influencers namely- religious leaders, and members of local youth clubs and non-profits. ‘Community engagement’ was variously defined as vaccine outreach, capacity-building of healthcare workers, and information dissemination to guardians of vaccine-eligible children. There was no explicit policy guideline defining community engagement, and no metrics assessing its effectiveness in vaccination uptake. Participants agreed that ‘community engagement’ though evolving is a complex and under-researched area. Community engagement spectrum exemplified seven intersecting layers, with ‘low’ as ‘vaccine impositions’, and ‘high’ as ‘community’s vaccination decision-making’. Participants in the member check-in meeting proposed an operational definition of community engagement and discussed gaps/concerns related to defining/implementing it.Conclusions: It is critical to build-in the operational definition of community engagement in vaccine guidelines, develop its performance and outcome indicators, and advocate their incorporation in immunization surveillance instruments in India. Acknowledging relational gains of community engagement is pertinent to improve vaccination outcomes in India and is relevant for consideration by other countries too.

The article of record as published may be found at https://doi.org/10.30636/jbpa.21.3 Modern reforms meant to incentivize public managers to be more innovative and accepting of risk are often implicitly based in the longstanding assumption that public employees are more risk averse than their private sector counterparts. We argue, however, that there is more to learn about the degree to which public and private managers differ in terms of risk aversion. In order to address this gap, we field a series of previously validated experiments designed to assess framing effects and status quo bias in a sample of public and private sector managers. Our results indicate that public managers are not more risk averse or anchored to the status quo than their private sector counterparts; in fact, the findings suggest the opposite may be true under some conditions. In addition, our results fail to confirm previous findings in the literature suggesting that public service motivation is associated with risk aversion. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these results for the study of risky choice in the public sector and for modern public management reforms.

State governments have considerable discretion regarding when they use federal grants to deliver goods and service themselves and when they pass those grants through to fund service delivery by local governments, nonprofit organizations, and other substate entities. This discretion influences the expenditure, and potentially the impact, of many billions of dollars every year. Unfortunately, we know very little about the decisions states make regarding the volume of federal grant aid they pass through, or about the types of subrecipients most likely to receive that money. Drawing on delegation theory, this study develops the argument that the amount and target of pass-through funding will be a function of the state's capacity to produce desired goods, shared policy preferences between state and local actors, and the relative capacity of substate actors to produce those same goods. We test these hypotheses in analyses of the pass-through of ARRA grants to subrecipients by state governments between 2009 and 2012. The results from those analyses suggest that delegation theory provides a useful way to understand both the volume of pass-through that states engage in as well as the target of those monies.

An extensive literature explores the correlates of bureaucratic influence in the implementation of public policy. Considerably less work, however, has investigated the conditions under which bureaucratic actors influence legislative outcomes. In this article, we develop the argument that effectiveness should be a key determinant of bureaucratic influence in the legislative process and identify a set of institutional characteristics that may facilitate or constrain this relationship. We test these expectations in an analysis of legislator perceptions of bureaucratic influence over legislative outcomes in the 50 US states. The results suggest that the impact of bureaucratic effectiveness on the influence of the bureaucracy over legislative outcomes is greater in states with legislative term limits, united governments, and fragmented executive branches.

Despite the negative rhetoric surrounding the immigration issue, recent policy in many states has provided significant benefits to both legal and undocumented immigrants. Previous scholarship on state-level immigrant policy suggests that differences in the degree of public animosity toward this group may help to explain variation in state policy, but that work largely neglects the influence that industries that employ immigrants may have on state policy decisions. This essay develops the argument that industries that employ immigrants have a substantial impact on policy decisions in some states. It also suggests that the response of state policy makers to public pressure for more restrictive immigrant policy may be moderated by the political and economic importance of those industries. The authors test specific assertions drawn from this argument in an analysis of immigrant policy making in the American states between 2005 and 2007.

Work on bureaucratic representation suggests that minority citizens benefit when the programs that serve them are administered by bureaucrats with similar characteristics. This literature has not sufficiently dealt with the long-standing concern that minority benefits may come at the expense of citizens from other groups, which some critics argue makes representative bureaucracy irreconcilable with democratic values. This article suggests distributional equity as a potential moderator of bureaucratic representation and as a potential source of reconciliation. It tests for the effects of representation under different distributional conditions in a policy area in which outcomes approach a zero-sum game. Analyses of a nationally representative sample of public organizations find a relationship between bureaucratic representation and citizen outcomes only in those instances where program benefits are being inequitably distributed to the relevant group. The article concludes with a discussion of the significa...

Research on term limits suggests that they have substantial consequences for the power of legislatures vis-a-vis the executive and interest groups and for the relationship between leaders and rank-and-file members within a chamber. Existing work, however, has not accounted for the actual power of relevant state actors. We contribute to this research by examining the effect of term limits on the influence of institutional actors conditional on the existing political power structure in a state. The inclusion of controls for the direct and moderating effect of actual institutional power suggests some significant extensions of previous findings regarding the institutional effects of term limits.

Scholars of representative bureaucracy have long been interested in the linkage between passive representation in public agencies and the pursuit of specific policies designed to benefit minority groups. Research in this area suggests that the structural characteristics of those organizations, the external political environment, and the perceptions of individual bureaucrats each help to facilitate that relationship. Work to date has not, however, sufficiently investigated the impact of region on representation behavior, which is surprising given the emphasis that it receives in the broader literature on race and politics. Drawing on that literature, this study argues that, for black bureaucrats, region of residence is an important moderator of active representation because it helps to determine the salience of race as an issue and the degree of identification with racial group interests. It tests hypotheses related to that general argument in a nationally representative sample of more than 3,000 public schools. The results suggest that black teachers produce greater benefits for black students in the South, relative to other regions. A supplementary analysis also confirms the theoretical supposition that race is a more salient issue for Southern black bureaucrats, when compared with their non-Southern counterparts.

Using the theory of representative bureaucracy, this paper investigates the relationship between women police officers and sexual assault reports and arrests. The theoretical contribution is to establish a case in which representation is likely to occur, even without a conscious effort on the part of the bureaucrat involved but simply because of the shared experiences of the bureaucrat and the client. Based on a pooled time series of 60 urban areas over an eight-year time frame, this study finds that the percentage of women police officers is positively associated with the number of reports of sexual assault and with the number of arrests for sexual assault.

Over the past two decades, many studies have investigated the scope and significance of performance measurement in public organizations. Nonetheless, there is more to learn about the challenges facing public managers who want to measure organizational outputs and use the feedback to improve performance. Specifically, managers are often faced with redundant measures of the same output, each of which may be preferred by a different political principal or stakeholder. Furthermore, a manager's choice of measures can have serious consequences for both the estimation of agency problems and the success of programmatic solutions. We test these assertions in an analysis of educational organizations in Texas. We find that managers’ assessments of organizational performance and decisions regarding solutions depend on the choice of performance measures.

Theoretical and normative studies by both public management scholars and political scientists have long suggested that interest groups have a nontrivial degree of influence over decision making in public organizations. This study contributes to this previous research by developing specific expectations about conditions under which such influence should be greater or lesser and by testing those expectations in an analysis of over 500 top-level public managers. Specifically, the theory offered herein suggests that the level of access to the decision maker as well as the perceived power of a group relative to others in the organizational environment serve as moderators of group influence. The findings from the empirical analysis provide significant evidence that access and power both help to determine the degree of influence that interest groups have over the agendas that managers set for their organizations. In fact, the results suggest that these factors may be necessary conditions for influence.

Objectives. This article develops and tests a concise multi-stage approach for assessing the impact of social construction on the implementation of public programs designed to benefit negatively constructed groups. The framework suggests that negative constructions lead to policy choices that create problems in the implementation process. These problems prevent the accomplishment of key subobjectives necessary for ultimate program success. Methods. We test the utility of the framework in an analysis of a key public health issue—the spread of HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis in prisons. Despite great strides in the treatment and prevention of these diseases outside prison walls, the incidence and severity of both in the incarcerated population has increased dramatically over the last five years. We hypothesize that the problem of inadequate funding, arising from the negative social construction of this unique target population, is to blame. Results. In an analysis of 50 state correctional systems, we find that states with the most negative constructions of criminals and potential criminals spend dramatically less on inmate health, relative to other states. Conclusions. Our analysis suggests that inadequate funding levels in states with negative constructions of criminals and potential criminals jeopardizes the implementation of prison programs targeted at the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.