Understanding why public organizations manipulate performance data has become an essential theme in public administration scholarship. While prior research has extensively explored the individual and contextual drivers of gaming, the temporal dimension–specifically when manipulation occurs–remains remarkably underexplored. Moving beyond the impact of sporadic political events, this study examines the routine, institutionalized rhythms of the bureaucratic calendar. Utilizing satellite nighttime light data as an objective benchmark to detect distortion in officially reported GDP across 271 Chinese cities (2013–2020), we uncover a systematic, cyclical pattern of strategic gaming. Manipulation is substantial in the first quarter, consistent with political pressure for a “good start”, recedes during the middle of the year, and surges to its annual peak in the fourth quarter (Q4) as the final performance assessment looms. Furthermore, we show that this Q4 effect is contingent on local context: cities with lower fiscal autonomy and reduced marketization exhibit a significantly greater propensity to inflate year-end figures. By uncovering a routine form of manipulation embedded in bureaucratic practices, our study advances theories of performance gaming and sheds light on the strategic use of time in public management.

Refugee camps have evolved into durable governance sites characterized by centralized authority and monopolistic service environments where residents lack ‘exit’ options. While public administration scholarship extensively theorizes the benefits of participation, research often assumes a baseline of stable, democratic institutions, leaving ‘participation under constraint’ underdeveloped. This study examines whether ‘thin’ participation—awareness of feedback mechanisms and consultative outreach—is associated with refugees’ perceived outcomes at individual, community, and institutional levels. Using household-level survey data from 876 households across 33 refugee sites Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, we find that both latent awareness and consultation are significantly associated with improved subjective well-being. Our findings reveal a tiered impact: passive awareness correlates with community and institutional gains, while the relational intensity of consultation is required for individual-level improvements. These results suggest that even minimal engagement functions as a vital generative mechanism for institutional legitimacy in high-dependency, non-democratic environments.

Lived experience representative bureaucracy theory has expanded the scope of representative bureaucracy by exploring traits beyond race, ethnicity, and gender. However, scholars have yet to focus on the intersection of symbolic representation, intersectionality, and professional qualities. In this article, we employ lived experience representative bureaucracy theory and intersectionality theory to understand which identities (veteran status, gender, and disability status) and professional qualities shape client preferences on which bureaucrat they want to help them navigate administrative burdens. We analyze data from a conjoint experiment of 964 military veterans, showing that lived experience, intersectionality, and professional qualities matter, with the strongest preferences for employees who are responsive and competent. Regarding identity-based characteristics, veteran status and disability status representation were more salient than gender representation in helping veterans navigate healthcare-related administrative burdens. In line with our expectations grounded in intersectionality theory, we find that veterans with a disability prefer to be served by VA employees with a disability, demonstrating the importance of this combination of lived experiences and intersecting identities. We find further evidence that intersectionality matters among male respondents; the positive effects of veteran status were nullified in cases where the VA employee was transgender, revealing the importance of anti-transgender bias in shaping male veterans’ preferences. Exploratory analyses suggest that weak professional qualities can nullify or reverse the positive effects of shared identity, whereas strong professional qualities can compensate for the absence of representation. This study contributes to the literature by exploring the symbolic representative effects of various forms of lived experience representation alongside gender representation and professional qualities, as well as by examining representative bureaucracy through an intersectional lens. Additionally, our research provides a novel examination of disability status as an important and understudied identity with symbolic representative effects.

The literature on knowledge mobilization (KM) acknowledges the complex processes involved in the application of evidence to policy. However, the everyday activities employed by knowledge mobilizers to facilitate these processes have proved difficult to capture and codify. We address this gap in current understanding through empirical analysis of the practices used to mobilize knowledge in local policy making. We find that effective KM is characterized by relational interactions with diverse actors across research, policy and practice settings; constant and consistent engagement with the local and policy contexts in which evidence is being applied; and the integration of different types of knowledge (including research findings, professional expertise and lived experience) to collectively respond to policy and practice needs. These practices of KM have important implications for how evidence is defined, validated, and used by policymakers and practitioners.

Over the past three decades, drug policy discourse in British Columbia, Canada, has shifted from an enforcement-centered paradigm toward harm reduction and public health. This article asks how discursive paradigms change in domains characterized by heightened moral contestation. Drawing on discursive institutionalism and scholarship on epistemic authority, we develop a theory of discursive leadership as temporal sequencing, whereby actors with recognized professional expertise introduce interpretive frames that subsequently migrate across institutional actors. Using a corpus of 5,560 media-reported statements (1995–2025) and transformer-based text clustering, we test hypotheses concerning temporal priority, epistemic advantage, and crisis amplification. Results show that health-sector actors exhibited temporally prior and direction-setting shifts in harm-reduction and decriminalization discourse, with crisis conditions amplifying rather than originating these frames. Discursive leadership was measurable, cluster-specific, and domain-bounded. The study operationalizes discursive leadership as a testable temporal mechanism for application in various hybrid moral–crisis policy contexts.

As governments develop immigrant integration policies, they draw on and express conceptions about what successful integration looks like—what we call “imagined integration.” Yet this imagination likely displays variation that matters for implementation: integration policymaking is increasingly multilevel as it involves subnational layers of bureaucracy, and it may differ across national contexts which have distinct immigration experiences and political dynamics. In response, we trace the logics within Japan's approach to integrating a range of immigrants (“multicultural coexistence”) as its objectives pass through to subnational (prefectural) governments. As a major industrialized economy, Japan is instructive because its centrally organized approach to integration differs from Western cases, and yet its growing policy attention to integration typifies trends in neighboring Asian countries facing similar demographic and economic challenges. Through the first comprehensive content analysis of all available prefectural plans regarding multicultural coexistence ( N = 31 as of 2025), we identify how subnational policymakers conceive coexistence, its justification, and its successful achievement on paper. Our study contributes to better connections between empirical understanding of important policies affecting immigrants in a key world region, as well as to theorization about the ideational aspects of policymaking.

Public bureaucracies address challenging and complex problems by applying agile work practices when standard operating procedures or routines fail. In these situations, public managers need to decide whether to exploit existing bureaucratic routines or explore novel solutions through non‐routine agile work practices. This study shows how public managers maneuver between different adoption decisions: (1) remain ambivalent and reject agile, (2) accommodate the needs of the bureaucracy and adjust agile work practices to align with administrative routines, or (3) adapt in an ambidextrous manner by becoming agile literate and choosing the appropriate work practices depending on the public management problem. This study contributes to the literature on agile governance by incorporating the notion of ambidexterity into the existing theory of 21st‐century bureaucracy.

Transparency is often assumed to strengthen accountability by reducing information asymmetries between governments and citizens. Yet when transparency is designed primarily for hierarchical monitoring rather than societal oversight, its broader societal effects remain unclear. This study examines how a state‐led targeted transparency reform and the organizational strength of environmental civil society jointly shape public concern about pollution in China. Exploiting the staggered rollout of the National Air Quality Monitoring Stations and drawing on a unique panel dataset on environmental nonprofits and public concern from 2011 to 2019, we find that targeted transparency significantly increases public concern about air pollution, and that cities with stronger environmental civil society also exhibit higher levels of concern. However, the two effects are not additive: once the state becomes the dominant provider of credible pollution information, the marginal effect of environmental nonprofits declines. The findings suggest that transparency can heighten public attention while narrowing the informational role of nonprofit organizations. More broadly, the study shows that targeted transparency can reshape the distribution of informational authority between the state and civil society.

The development of national strategic plans (NSPs) under the EU's common agricultural policy (CAP) involves considerable coordination between Member States and the (European) Commission. In this process, the Commission provides recommendations to each Member State before they submit their draft NSPs and observations at a later stage before Member States submit their final NSP. The Commission's assessment is based on the NSPs' contribution to the formal CAP's objectives, as well as the (not binding) EU Green Deal (EGD) objectives. Comparisons of NSPs show a wide variation in Member States' level of ambition regarding the EGD objectives, including targets for reducing pesticide use. This paper examines under which conditions Member States set high pesticide reduction targets or increase their targets during the process, and what the role of the Commission is in this process. Based on the existing literature on EU policy coordination, we expect that the extent to which Member States set ambitious targets for pesticide reduction and respond to the Commission's recommendations and observations depends on the perceived legitimacy of the Commission, the presence of Green parties in government, existing national pesticide use trends, and domestic power concentration. Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis, we show that the Commission has a role here. Its recommendations can contribute to higher ambition in Member States, but always in combination with other conditions. We find four pathways that are associated with high levels of ambition and three pathways explaining an increase in ambition after the publication of draft NSPs. These findings provide new insights for the debate on the Commission's soft power in EU policy coordination.

The importance of international shipping in economic development, as well as its intersection with international security, environmental protection and other fields of global governance, has encouraged much interest in the rule‐making processes that govern the sector. While literature has often highlighted the centrality of corporate power in maritime policy processes, existing scholarship has lacked detailed accounts of how corporate power in these processes is constructed and sustained. In this context, this article examines the construction of corporate power in the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the UN specialized agency that regulates global shipping. Drawing on literature on the politics of knowledge in global governance, the article seeks to examine how corporate actors (focusing on shipowners) negotiate expert authority in the IMO. It argues that shipowners' associations, uniquely, can generate the forms of material and epistemic resources that enable shipowners' negotiation of expert authority in the organization. In making this argument, the article contributes to literatures on both maritime governance and business associations.

This comparative study spanning more than two decades examines how corporatist institutions shape the distribution of environmental tax revenue between producers and consumers. Environmental taxes have become a key policy instrument for addressing climate change and other environmental problems, but their effectiveness and political viability likely depend on how these taxes are collected and distributed. We develop two competing theoretical perspectives with opposing expectations: corporatist structures could facilitate sustainable producer responsibility through coordinated bargaining and long‐term agreements or enable organized producers to shift tax burdens onto consumers. Using panel data from 29 countries covering the period 1995–2018 and error‐correction models, we find that corporatism is associated with lower producer shares of environmental tax revenues. The study suggests that corporatist institutions may contribute to environmental tax cost shifting to consumers, potentially constraining producer incentives for green transitions and provoking public opposition to environmental taxation.

Laws often contain linguistically complex features that increase cognitive processing demands and weaken comprehension. We extend this argument to bureaucratic decision‐making by proposing that reduced legal clarity decreases the consistency of administrative decisions. We test this argument using an online survey experiment with nearly 900 current and former government officials from 33 countries, who were randomly assigned to adjudicate a real administrative case under either a less‐clear or clearer legal text. The case, which involves a building permit application, provides a realistic and broadly comparable context for examining how legal clarity shapes consistency in administrative decision‐making. Exposure to reduced legal clarity significantly decreased the consistency in law application and increased the likelihood of legally incorrect decisions. There is no evidence that reduced legal clarity systematically steers decision‐makers toward a single dominant error category.

Over the past decade, the better regulation agenda has emerged as a powerful instrument for enhancing the law‐making process across the EU. This paper empirically investigates Greece's adherence to better regulation principles, focusing on key aspects such as the regulatory text, public consultation processes, impact assessments, parliamentary procedures, and the activation of subordinate legislation. Utilizing a novel dataset spanning from 2015 to 2023, this study analyzes the developments in key better regulation principles following the enactment of two critical laws aimed at reforming Greece's lawmaking process. While notable progress has been observed in several areas, such as public consultations and the structure of the regulatory text, persistent shortcomings in amendments, impact assessments, and practical implementation remain. This analysis provides valuable insights into the dynamics of recent institutional reforms and their effectiveness in aligning Greece's legislative output with the overarching goals of better regulation.

What motivates US‐based environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) to incorporate social justice (SJ) into their missions and activities? How does this integration occur? ENGOs could integrate SJ issues that speak directly to their environmental mission or address non‐environmental topics, such as police reform. Their integration might also be symbolic or substantive. We hypothesize that ENGOs' risk/reward calculations, derived from their organizational characteristics, influenced whether and how they engaged with SJ issues between 2011 and 2023, as the social expectation that they would do so increased in parallel with support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. To study the extent and type of SJ incorporation, we examine a random sample of 500 US ENGOs at three time points coinciding with significant BLM events (2011, 2017, 2023). Cumulative ordered probit models reveal that ENGOs with larger budgets, operating at the national and international levels, and those already working across a wide range of issue areas were consistently more likely to incorporate SJ substantively over performatively. They engaged in SJ issues related to environmental concerns rather than broader, non‐environmental SJ concerns, implying that NGOs are willing to respond to changes in the external environment by expanding their missions and investing in new programs, but only to the extent that these changes align with their core mission and competencies.