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Scholars have demonstrated that public service motivation (PSM) may be conditional and activated in certain contexts or by particular primes. However, to date researchers have focused on the impact...

High-profile fatal police shootings of persons of color in recent years have led some to propose changes in the ways that police officers are trained to reduce violence in interactions between officers and citizens. This article explores the impact of a non-stress-oriented training model that some police academies have adopted as an alternative to traditional militaristic training models. We integrate multiple theoretical perspectives to develop the expectation that training interventions will have a significant impact on the nature of police/citizen interactions only when turnover of officers is sufficiently high. Results from analyses of 133 middle- to large-sized municipal police departments in 2013 suggest that non-stress training is significantly associated with reductions in use of deadly force by officers in those departments where recruits trained under such regimes make up a larger portion of the force. We do not find a significant direct or moderated effect on the number of police injured in confrontations with citizens or in the prevalence of discretionary arrests.

Under forfeiture laws, law enforcement organizations seize billions of dollars a year from U.S. citizens based on demonstrated or suspected connections between the assets and criminal activity. Int...

Calls for more representative police forces, made regularly over the past four decades, rest in part on the assumption that hiring minority officers will help departments overcome adverse selection...

Policy diffusion scholarship has long sought to understand when lawmakers will imitate innovations adopted by other jurisdictions and when they actually invest the time and resources necessary to learn about potential policies. We develop the theoretical rationale that term limits will reduce the incentive and capacity of state legislatures to gather information about policies available from previous adoptions in other states. We hypothesize that this will decrease the importance of previous adopters when term-limited legislators consider policy innovations. A multilevel analysis of the diffusion of eighty-seven policies between 1960 and 2009 provides support for this expectation. Our findings provide insight into the way in which institutional features shape policy diffusion.

The study of nonprofit governance is coming into its theoretical heyday by incorporating a sophisticated understanding of its contingent and multidimensional nature. A systems view of governance acknowledges the interplay of internal and external dynamics on board performance. But empirically, large-scale, generalizable data that can test these concepts on board performance have been scarce. This study helps to fill that gap with a structural equation analysis of a national representative survey of member-serving organizations. The results suggest that board performance is associated with complex organizational and labor dynamics, and that performance metrics themselves are multidimensional. Furthermore, not all relationships with strong boards are directly measurable. Some appear related to indirect external market dynamics or healthy internal dynamics such as learning and self-evaluation.

In response to police-involved homicides of black citizens in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere, some have suggested that more black police officers could reduce the number of these events. The authors offer an empirical test of this assertion. The literature offers conflicting expectations: some studies suggest that increased representation reduces discrimination, while others suggest that it increases discrimination. The authors reconcile these perspectives using the concept of critical mass, which leads to the expectation that an increase in black officers will reduce the number of black citizens killed in encounters with police, but only once the proportion of black officers is sufficiently large. We test this expectation in analyses of recently compiled data on police-involved homicides in 2014 and 2015 in large U.S. cities.

Research has demonstrated that management influences the performance of public organizations, but almost no research has explored how the success or failure of a public organization influences the decisions of those who manage it. Arguing that many decisions by public managers are analogous to risky choice, the authors use a well-validated model of relative risk aversion to understand how such choices are influenced by managers’ perceptions of organizational performance. They theorize that managers will be less likely to encourage innovation or give discretion to employees when they are just reaching their goals relative to other performance conditions. Analyses of responses to the 2011 and 2013 Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys provide considerable support for these assertions. The findings have significant implications for our understanding of the relationship between management and performance in public organizations.

Despite the important symbolic and substantive benefits of political activity by nonprofit organizations, recent evidence suggests that a relatively limited number of charities actively advocate. The existing literature on nonprofit advocacy adequately explains why so few charities are actively political; however, it fails to illuminate the reasons why some individual charities choose to advocate despite documented constraints. This article offers an alternative to existing explanations for nonprofit advocacy that focuses on the causes for, and the constraints on, this behavior. It suggests that nonprofit organizations are more likely to be politically active when public policies restrict their ability to deliver core services, and when the probability of success is highest because of the presence of political allies. Analyses of advocacy behavior in more than 450 501(c)(3) organizations suggest that these factors persist as motivators of political activity even after controlling for the dominant constraints suggested in the literature.

This article examines whether governance structures facilitate or impede political forces by testing two competing hypotheses concerning the ability of bureaucratic structures to insulate higher education policies from politics. Centralized structures both create autonomy and facilitate access by environmental forces. This study examines the structures of higher education boards to gain a better understanding of how they interact with politics to affect higher education policy. To the extent that variation in governance structures is correlated with bureaucratic autonomy, it should limit the ability of elected officials to influence education policies. The transaction costs of individuals seeking to influence overall agency policy are lowered, however, in more centralized organizations. Political actors can focus their attention on a single geographic site rather than multiple sites that are adapting to different sets of institutional arrangements and different local environments. These hypotheses are tested in a 47-state, 8-year analysis.