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The representative bureaucracy literature focuses on how passive representation translates into substantive benefits for the represented individuals. Although scholars have found substantial empirical support for representation based on gender, most studies have examined the United States, a country with high levels of democracy and gender equality compared to much of the rest of the world. This article first investigates whether the effects of gender representation differ across countries using cross‐national education data. Evidence from 44 countries shows that representative bureaucracy findings are relatively rare across the world. Second, this article contributes to contextual theories of representative bureaucracy by examining how the policy and political environments influence the link between passive representation and policy outcomes. The findings suggest that bureaucratic representation is more effective in countries where gender equality is high and political support for women is greater. These findings indicate that representative bureaucracy is enhanced by favorable policy and political environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reporting government performance to the public is key tool in improving accountability. Some evidence, however, has shown that individuals' anti‐public sector biases may distort performance information about public organizations. Using an experimental vignette on U.S. nursing homes, this study fills four gaps in the literature: (1) the need to include nonprofit organizations rather than just public and for‐profit, (2) consideration of the credibility of the source of performance information, (3) the use of simple commonly used performance metrics, and (4) the willingness to use services as a performance dimension. We find the public has a general but modest anti‐for‐profit sector bias in nursing home care with nonprofits perceived the most positively. Sector biases generally disappear when clear performance data are presented. The credibility of the source matters, and respondents' willingness to use organizational services is more sensitive to both sector bias and performance ratings than are performance measures. Practitioner Points: In the field of long‐term care, individuals have no anti‐public sector bias, and they have more favorable views of nonprofit organizations than for‐profit organizations.Perceived sector bias disappears when simple and unambiguous performance information is introduced.The source of performance information matters: individuals perceive the information from government and nonprofit sources as more credible than that from for‐profit sources.A high degree of credibility amplifies the effect of performance information in shaping individuals' evaluations of public services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines whether the public holds biased perceptions of public organizations (in this case, hospitals) in the United States and whether organizations get credit for positive results from program evaluations. Using an experimental design that replicates Hvidman and Andersen's 2016 Danish study, the study finds no negative public sector biases in the United States, but organizations are not given any credit for positive program evaluations. These results hold in two experimental replications. The implications of the findings for the measurement of public perceptions of government programs and for effective democratic governance are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fundamental to democratic societies, citizen participation is an important tool for promoting active, informed, and empowered citizenry as well as responsive and accountable administration. Past literature on citizen participation has focused on its determinants, forms, and prevalence. This study examines the relationship between a specific form of citizen participation—client participation—and organizational performance. We use hybrid data on U.S. nursing homes that combine a survey of nursing home administrators' managerial practices with federal performance appraisal data. Our empirical findings suggest that more intense levels of client participation, such as the use of clients' feedback in decision-making, are positively associated with performance: They increase the overall five-star ratings and lower health deficiencies. In contrast, less intense client participation efforts, such as merely communicating with client/family groups, are not significantly related to performance. This study highlights the role of participation intensity, suggesting that public administrators should not only go beyond informing and listening to their stakeholders, but also take steps to use the obtained feedback in organizational decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study argues that country music can be viewed in terms of identity politics that seeks to define an American identity. Methods: A textual analysis of country music songs is used to illustrate the various components of this American identity associated with the U.S. South and West. Results: Six key dimensions of the country music American identity are identified‐–the goodness of the common man, family values, patriotism, race, religion, and nostalgia. Dissenting views on several themes are also illustrated. Conclusion: U.S. country music can be viewed as the symbolic politics version of redistributive politics that defines values to be accepted and cherished as well as values to be denigrated and shunned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although demographic diversity has been of paramount concern to researchers and practitioners in public management, studies exploring managerial strategies to capitalize on and respond to the needs of diverse client populations are scarce. This article examines strategies for managing diversity as a way to buffer environmental challenges in service delivery and performance resulting from heterogeneous client demands. Findings suggest that administrators prioritize diversity efforts when faced with higher levels of regulatory violations (a performance measure). A higher percentage of black residents is associated with lower service quality. However, the effect of managerial strategies for diversity on performance is conditioned by the racial composition of the clients: as the percentage of black nursing home residents increases, diversity management efforts are associated with a lower number of regulatory violations. Similarly, at higher levels of racial heterogeneity, diversity management efforts are associated with fewer regulatory violations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accountability pressures have generated complex performance measurement regimes to evaluate and improve public or publicly funded services. Performance management, however, faces many challenges including the tradeoffs posed by numerous dimensions of performance and a lack of consensus on which organizational and environmental factors can improve these results. This study seeks to understand the effect of management and other factors on different dimensions and measures of performance in US public, nonprofit, and for-profit nursing homes. Using a hybrid data set that combines archival government data on performance in nursing homes with a recent nursing home administrators' survey, we find that innovative management significantly1 improves the quality of care. In addition, more innovation and less power sharing in management are associated with serving fewer Medicaid-funded clients. Significant differences in performance exist across public, nonprofit, and for-profit organizations. These differences are notable across both the archival and perceptual models of performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human resource management and managerial capacity are well documented in the public management literature as integral management functions. The field has devoted attention to the importance of human resources, but it has yet to consider whether human resource management interacts with capacity in attaining organizational outcomes. Using a large-N, multiyear data set of public organizations, this article seeks to rectify this gap in the literature. The findings validate scholarly arguments on the importance of public organizations' need to manage human resources and capacity effectively, identifying just the right combination for performance gains. Empirical results encourage practitioners to consider the ways in which human resource management and capacity work together to influence performance but sometimes undermine each other in counterintuitive ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act targeted electoral structures as significant determinants of minority representation. The research regarding electoral structures and representation of constituents, however, has produced conflicting results, and the continued application of some of the provisions set forth in the Voting Rights Act is in doubt. This article addresses the impact of at-large elections on African American representation and reveals a striking and unanticipated finding: African Americans are now overrepresented on school boards that have at-large elections when African Americans are a minority of the population. Using the 1,800 largest school districts in the United States (based on original surveys conducted in 2001, 2004, and 2008), we find that partisanship changes the relationship between electoral structures and race to benefit African American representation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

State fiscal policy frequently focuses on stimulating a healthy business environment with the assumption that this is linked with long-term economic growth. The conventional wisdom is that a state’s tax rates are negatively correlated with economic development, prompting states to decrease business-targeted taxes to stimulate the economy. Surprisingly, however, very few studies have documented the long-term effects of these tax policies on different facets of the state economy and overall business atmosphere. In short, we do not know how the level of business taxation actually affects the economies of states. Using panel data for all 50 U.S. states from 1977 to 2005, this article examines the impact of state business taxes on the overall economic position of the state, specifically looking at their effect on economic development and business growth. With an elaborate set of controls, the article finds that state business tax cuts have little to no positive impact on gross state product, job creation, personal income, poverty rates, and business establishments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Studies in public management show that agencies draw different types of support from different actors and organizations in their environment. If this is true, we would expect that managers differentiate their networking activity toward different types of external actors and organizations. However, empirical studies of the networking activities of managers do not reveal such a differentiation: these studies consistently report the existence of only one factor of managerial networking activity. The present article aims to solve this puzzle by disaggregating managerial networking into multiple scales of managerial networking activity, each related to a specific type of support from the agency’s environment. A cumulative scaling analysis of the network ties of Texas school district superintendents for the years 2002 and 2005 shows the existence of three such stable and homogeneous networking scales, respectively, providing (a) political support, (b) bureaucratic coping, and (c) coproduction. We compare these results with those of the method used in previous studies: factor analysis. We illustrate the potential of cumulative scaling for the analysis of managerial networking by comparing the effect of the managerial networking factor with those of the three networking scales on the pass rates of Latino students on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for our understanding of managerial networking. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Objective The sheer size of the Latino population in the United States has resulted in increased scholarly attention to the role Latinos play in the U. S. political system. A less-studied phenomenon, however, is whether the diversity of Latinos matters for electoral representation. This analysis tests how Latino homogeneity might influence representation by evaluating three contingencies: Latino majority versus minority status, electoral structure, and partisan versus nonpartisan election rules. Methods This study combines original survey data with data gathered by the U. S. Census on the national origin of Latinos in the United States. Results Latino homogeneity affects the chances of gaining representatives; however, this impact is evident only when Latinos constitute a numerical minority, hold at-large elections, and engage in nonpartisan contests. Conclusion Theories of representation must move beyond traditional assessments of context and examine how the seemingly negligible characteristics of minority populations might affect their prospects for politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A turbulent external environment is widely believed to have damaging effects on public service performance. Much less consensus has been reached on whether the best response to turbulence is to retain or alter existing organizational structures. We provide the first comprehensive empirical analysis of these issues by testing the links between turbulence, structural stability, and performance in a large sample of public organizations. Our results show that turbulence has a negative effect on performance, and that this is compounded by internal organizational change. Thus public managers can mitigate the harmful effects of volatility in the external environment by maintaining structural stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the politics of higher education diversity for both African Americans and Latinos, by investigating how the structure of the bureaucracy affects the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation. The key theoretical determinants of minority college enrollments are legislative representation, bureaucratic structure, university-level policies, and restrictions on affirmative action. A hierarchical linear model of 500+ universities over an 11-year period shows that each of these factors affects minority enrollments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public managers must often cope with competing and conflicting goals. The common formulation is to assume that managers must trade-off goals against each other. But is this always true? An alternative hypothesis is that sometimes managers may instead be able to improve outcomes on multiple goals simultaneously—by altering management practices. We test this “trade-off” notion using a panel of state-level administrative data from the U.S. unemployment insurance (UI) system from 1997 to 2004 and qualitative interviews from selected states. The trade-off examined is timeliness of UI benefit payments versus the quality of UI determinations. In general, we find that state administrators often adopt management practices that facilitate improved outcomes for both timeliness and quality, indicating no trade-off but instead a synergy between outcomes. We also find evidence of a feedback effect linking higher performance on timeliness to better quality determinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Representation scholars link descriptive representation of blacks and Latinos in legislative bodies to substantive policy representation. We examine this relationship on local school boards where issue salience is high, the cost of gaining legislative access is relatively low, and nonpartisan elections produce a greater likelihood of linking policy preferences to racial cues. Theoretically, we connect substantive representation to the method of election; blacks and Latinos elected at-large face different constraints than their ward-elected counterparts, and thus behave differently on an at-large board than they would on a ward-elected one. This theoretical story suggests a number of hypotheses that we test using cross-sectional data from 1000+ school districts in Texas. Using OLS, we find that the type of election has significant direct and indirect effects on the hiring of black and Latino administrators and teachers to the school district, after controlling for other factors. We find that election type has descriptive representational effects for Latinos, but more importantly, electoral constraints produce variable substantive policy outcomes once both black and Latino officials take office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes compelling empirical evidence to demonstrate that country music has dominated the politics of ideas and thus fundamentally shaped public policy in the U.S. Rather than joining forces in an advocacy coalition, Professors Peter deLeon and Richard Waterman attack from two separate directions. deLeon advocates an elitist view contending that Broadway musicals are the true source of policy ideas; Waterman, in contrast, opts for the lowest common denominator, arguing that television has always been the dominant force in designing public policy, even before the U.S. government under President George W. Bush administration.

Many organization theories suggest that divergent goals can hamper an organization's pursuit of its primary mission. An earlier version of this article analyzed the effect of the pursuit of divergent goals on American public schools. This is an update of the original article that adds two years of data to the original study. Using an educational production function, this article assesses the relationships between athletic budgets and various aggregate measures of academic performance. Controlling for various known components of academic performance, athletic budgets have a significant negative relationship with academic performance. Schools that devote a large amount of resources to athletic budgets have lower levels of academic achievement. A focus on athletics seems to institutionalize goals that conflict with the schools’ academic missions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the determinants and consequences of Latino political representation in the field of K-12 education. The first task is to examine the association between Latino population and the Latino presence on school boards. We then investigate if Latino representation is affected by the electoral structure of school boards, as scholars have reached differing conclusions on whether at-large and ward systems hinder or enhance minority descriptive representation. The next step examines the consequences of Latino representation, specifically whether board membership is associated with the share of Latino school administrators and teachers. The regression results show that Latino population positively affects Latino board representation, but that at-large systems hinder descriptive representation. The primary determinant of Latino administrators is Latino school board membership, and the primary determinant of Latino teachers is Latino administrators. In sum, at-large elections negatively influence Latino educational representation, which produces a ripple effect that ultimately reduces the share of Latino teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is contracting used more frequently under some circumstances than others? What is its impact on spending for core mission and on service quality? These questions are explored with data from more than 1,000 Texas school districts. The evidence for a recent three-year period shows that contracting is negatively related to spending on school districts' central task and is not positively associated with district performance. Why, then, do districts contract? While several variables are associated with the degree of contracting, the most interesting is the relative size of a district's bureaucratic staff. Furthermore, the relationship between contracting and bureaucracy is reciprocal: Each is associated with subsequent growth in the other. The dynamic suggests an updated version of Parkinson's law. These findings indicate the need for researchers to probe the causes and consequences of contracting more thoroughly to help public managers assess this important option. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The incarceration rate in federal penitentiaries has tripled in the past twenty-five years, marking an unprecedented incursion by the federal government into what was the near exclusive domain of sub-national jurisdictions. Numerous scholars, particularly outside the field of political science, have hypothesized about the causes of the burgeoning prison population; but few have systematically tested these propositions. Borrowing insights from organizational theory and the literature on bureaucratic politics, this article proposes a framework that incorporates the most plausible hypotheses from the literature and empirically models the environmental, structural, and political influences on the implementation of federal criminal justice sanctions. The analysis demonstrates that federal incarceration rates are largely uncorrelated with the national crime rate, but that other variables significantly affect the number of commitments, the average sentence of convicted prisoners, and the number of paroles annually. The model also reveals that the outputs of criminal justice bureaucracies are extremely autoregressive, with current sanctions determined largely by past agency behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. Higher education governance structures; Structure of postsecondary education governance boards; Political influence on higher education governance.

Presents the study of public management quality and its effects on program performance in the U.S. Provision of additional salary to school superintendents based on quality; Presence of controls for other determinant of program success; Notion of managerial quality.

Focuses on the passive and active forms of representation of bureaucracy. Examination of the performance of the minority students; Impact of representative bureaucracy on public policy; Correlation between structural measure of discretion and representative bureaucracy.

Provides a systematic test of a formal theory on managing government programs in a network context in Texas. Creation of a network management; Relation of network management with the overall organizational performance; Interaction of the network with the other organizational resources in a nonlinear manner.

Nielsen and Wolf lodge several criticisms of Meier, Wrinkle, and Polinard (1999). Although most of the criticisms deal with tangential issues rather than our core argument, their criticisms are flawed by misguided estimation strategies, erroneous results, and an inattention to existing theory and scholarship. Our reanalysis of their work demonstrates these problems and presents even stronger evidence for our initial conclusion--that both minority and Anglo students perform better in schools with more minority teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the relationship between levels of bureaucracy and organizational performance of students in Texas school districts. Effects of bureaucratic growth on student performance; Outcomes of the growth in bureaucracy; Implications of the findings on organization theory and education policy.

Focuses on a study which assessed the degree to which government growth is an interactive process across local, state and national governments in the United States. Discussion on federalism; Results of the Granger causality tests between total national and state bureaucracy; Conclusion.

Two theories of politics predict that jurisdictional size will have different consequences for minority representation. Ostrom and colleagues suggest that representation is enhanced in smaller jurisdictions. The work of Giles and Olson, in contrast, implies that smaller jurisdictions will reduce minority representation. We expect that smaller jurisdictions will have fewer Latino representatives on school boards and on the teaching faculty, and these representatives will have less impact on Latino students. Methods. We combine census data with school district data for 1,039 school districts in Texas. Results. All other things being equal, small school districts have lower levels of Latino representation on the school board and on faculties; the representation that does exist is less effective in generating benefits for the Latino community. Conclusions. Jurisdiction size is an important variable for quantity and quality of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deals with a study that examined the relationship between representative bureaucracy of the United States Congress and its outputs for minority and non-minority students. Theory of representative bureaucracy; Model of representative bureaucracy using pooled time-series analysis; Findings of the study.

Objectives. This study examines whether state family planning expenditures and abortion funding for Medicaid-eligible women might reduce the number of low-birthweight babies, babies with late or no prenatal care, and premature births, as well as the rates of infant and neonatal mortality. Methods. Using a pooled time-series analysis from 1982 to 1988 with the 50 states as units of analysis, this study assessed the impact of family planning expenditures and abortion funding on several public health outcomes while controlling for other important variables and statistical problems inherent in pooled time-series studies. Results. States that funded abortions had a significantly higher rate of abortions and significantly lower rates of teen pregnancy, low-birthweight babies, premature births, and births with late or no prenatal care. States that had higher expenditures for family planning had significantly fewer abortions, low-birthweight babies, births with late or no prenatal care, infant deaths, and neonatal deaths. Conclusions. Funding abortions for Medicaid-eligible women and increasing the level of expenditures for family planning are associated with major differences in infant and maternal health in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the determinants of 1990 state policies toward funding abortion for low income women in the United States. Analysis of differences in outputs of state policies; Impact of advocacy groups and political forces on policy; US Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton cases.

Examines the impact of banking deregulation and the Garn-Saint Germain Act on the occurrence of bank failures. Impact of the Great Depression on the stability of the banking system in the U.S.; Use of a multivariate time series analysis of bank failures; Efforts of the government to deregulate interest rates.

Presents a hypothesis that information policies will interact with incentives and lessen their impact on cigarette regulation in the United States. Policy instruments offered by the regulatory policy; Lack in the comparative effectiveness of these instruments; Compliance problems that can be created if incentives policies are not uniform across the United States; Impact of information policies and incentives on cigarette consumption; Details on state tax rates.

Evaluates the success of policymakers in improving education performance in the United States in the 1980s. Aim of state reforms; Source of the variation in education performance among states; Role of social science in improving education performance.

Examines the relationship between Hispanic American representation on school boards and public policy outputs in the United States. Level of Hispanic representation on school boards; Effect of Hispanic representation on employment of Hispanic teachers; Impact of Hispanic teachers on the educational environment of Hispanic students; Policy implications of active and passive representation of Hispanics on school boards.

This article employs an interrupted time-series design to analyze the impact of the 55 mph speed limit on U.S. traffic fatalities over the period 1950 to 1980. In addition to speed such potential effects on highway fatalities as safety improvements, decreased speed dispersion and decreased travel are examined. The article concludes that the overwhelming proportion of the decline in traffic fatalities from 1973 to 1974 must be attributed to the change in the speed limit. Research literature on speed and traffic fatalities are also analyzed.

This article examines the effect of religion on referenda voting in the U.S. Despite the long-standing tradition in the U.S. of separating church and state, religious groups in this country frequently use the political process to further their own moral beliefs. Contemporary examples are numerous. The Roman Catholic Church has led the opposition to liberalizing abortion, while southern black churches spearheaded the civil rights movement. In many southern states conservative Protestant denominations strongly oppose practices they regard as sinful, including gambling, drinking, pornography and Sunday business. Although policy making via elections differs from the normal processes, the ballot box is not to be ignored for moral issues. Since a number of states provide for the initiative and referendum, we would surely expect public controversies over moral issues to find their way onto various referenda ballots. On such occasions we would expect to find religious groups actively involved in such direct democracy efforts to regulate moral behavior. Considerable support was found for the basic proposition guiding the research--religion does matter and, in fact, is clearly as important in its effect on moral votes as socioeconomic characteristics. Indeed, if Methodists had been included in a measure of religious conservatism, as some have done, no doubt fundamentalism would have emerged as clearly the most powerful influence on these moral issues. Although ruralness and social isolation are often thought to be prime determinants of less progressive social attitudes, in this research effects of such a measure were mixed. For liquor and gambling votes rural isolation was of little consequence when social status was controlled. Apparently for referenda issues of this sort--the typical moral questions--such influences as education, income and occupation are more critical than geography.

Studies the gay rights initiatives in Oregon and Colorado with the use of multiple regression method. Background on the study; Morality politics; Empirical test conducted; Gay and lesbian politics under salient conditions.

Focuses on federal aid in the United States (U.S), while examining the change which can occur if different grant mechanisms are employed in family planning. Analysis of state family planning expenditures; Information on fiscal federalism in the United States; Debates on the structure of federal aid in the U.S. in 1967 to 1996; Details on federal family planning policies in the United States.

The article examines 23 different laws passed by state governments in an effort to restrict the number of abortions in the U.S. In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court held that state governments could not regulate abortions performed in the first trimester of pregnancy and could regulate but not prohibit abortions in the second trimester. Eventually states gained control over whether to fund abortions for Medically eligible women and over certain aspects of parental involvement for minors abortions. Other restrictions, however, were struck down uniformly, until 1989, when the Supreme Court issued the Webster decision. Webster v Reproductive Health Services is regarded as a pivotal case because the Supreme Court reversed its previous trend and upheld several state abortion restrictions. In this study, we examine whether state restrictions both before and after the Webster decision actually reduced the incidence of induced abortion. Abortion restrictions, like other public policies, attempt to limit citizens' access to a good or a service. Two general approaches are commonly used. First, a policy can seek to alter a person's decision calculus by either increasing the costs of a good or service or decreasing the benefits and, in the process, reducing demand. Second, a policy can attempt to restrict the supply of the good or service that is available. Most of the state abortion policy restrictions follow one or both of these general approaches.

Presents a quantitative time-series analysis of politics and agricultural policy in the United States from 1950 to 1990. Limitation of principal agent model on in terms of agricultural policy; Political controls that shape agricultural programs; Impact of agricultural programs related to research.