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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...

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.

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.

Research has long suggested that public employee unions may influence public organization performance by changing the allocation of resources and the management of personnel. Other elements of the governance context, such as the characteristics and behaviors of those who design public policies and run public programs, have less often been considered by researchers, an omission that helps to explain the mixed findings and conflicting conclusions regarding the influence of unions on outcomes. This study develops arguments regarding the impact of governance strategies on the relationship between collective bargaining and organizational performance and tests them in a sample of educational organizations. The results suggest that there is an association between strong teachers' unions and lower student performance, but that the relationship can sometimes be moderated by school boards and superintendents.

There is a growing recognition that charitable organizations are important actors in the policy process, but research has not, to date, systematically investigated whether reporting policy activity influences private giving to such organizations. This article develops the argument that reported lobbying should be positively related to donations because organizations seeking policy change consider such activities to be vital to their clients and missions and communicate that belief to potential donors. This article tests for the relationship between reported lobbying activities and private giving in analyses of 501(c)(3) organizations that filed Internal Revenue Service form 990 s in fiscal years 2000 and 2001. The results suggest that organizations that report policy activity receive more donations in the following fiscal year, with some variation across service type. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for the policy process and scholars of nonprofit organizations.

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.

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...

Scholarly interest in the ways in which nonprofit organizations (NPOs) engage in the policy process has increased markedly in recent years, but one arena of participation about which we still know very little is administrative lobbying. To date, no study has investigated the factors that influence the strategic decision by an NPO to focus their advocacy resources on the bureaucracy. This essay models the decision to engage in administrative advocacy by 501(c)(3) organizations as a function of the state-level political environment in which they deliver services and the organizational resources that they possess. Data on advocacy activities and organizational characteristics of family planning NPOs are drawn from tax records and data compiled by the National Center for Charitable Statistics.

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.

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.