We checked 8 public administration and policy studies journals on Friday, December 19, 2025 using the Crossref API. For the period December 12 to December 18, we retrieved 18 new paper(s) in 6 journal(s).

Governance

Bureaucratic Responsiveness and Legitimacy: The Effects of Independence, Competence, and Warmth on Citizens' Legitimacy Perceptions
Honorata Mazepus, Dovilė Rimkutė
Full text
Bureaucratic responsiveness scholarship focused on examining how independent agencies align with the expectations of political principals and professional standards. However, little is known about how citizens perceive the legitimacy of these different responsiveness behaviors. To address this gap, we draw on insights from political science, public administration, and psychology. We hypothesize that three responsiveness signals increase citizens' perceptions of bureaucracies' legitimacy: political independence, competence, and warmth signals in communication. We draw on a survey experiment in Slovakia and Finland, manipulating the independence, competence, and warmth of the European Food Safety Authority. The results suggest that when political representatives contest a scientific agency's advice, signals of competence and warmth strengthen citizens' legitimacy perceptions of the agency. This study advances responsiveness scholarship by expanding its focus to bureaucratic responsiveness models that emphasize adherence to professional standards, support from professional peers, and affective communication with citizens, addressing both cognitive and affective legitimacy evaluations .
Governing on the Edge. How International Pressures Shape the Geography of State Power
Magnus Åsblad
Full text
Most explanations of the territorial unevenness of state capacity in the contemporary non‐Western world focus on domestic factors. While international causes may have been crucial in shaping state capacity in Europe in earlier centuries, the logic goes, they are of less relevance for developing countries in the postwar era. This article nuances this picture, by arguing that international factors continue to matter for state‐building. Using the geographic location of state institutions as a measure of state capacity, it finds that the spatial distribution of coercive institutions follows a U‐shaped pattern: High capacity in the capital, lower in the middle, and then increasing again as one approach a state border. The results thus suggest a need to reconsider accounts that downplay the role of international pressures in shaping state‐building after 1945, as well as highlighting the importance of distinguishing between different types of state power.
Technocrats, Reputation, and Responsiveness in Policy Explanation
Michele Scotto di Vettimo, Christel Koop
Full text
In contemporary democracies, independent technocratic bodies take many key policy decisions. The organizations are meant to avoid traditional policy responsiveness, but still have processes in place to take into account societal views. Our study analyzes how pressure on technocratic bodies affects the audience orientation of their policy explanations. Taking a reputational perspective, we argue that the policy explanations provided by technocrats whose legitimacy depends on their outcomes will be influenced by performance‐based reputational threats. We hypothesize that such threats—whether based on perceptions or performance indicators—lead technocrats to orient themselves more toward the wider public, which we operationalize as accessibility and people centeredness of the language. We test our hypotheses on a new dataset of speeches of members of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (1997–2024). Though accessibility cannot be traced back to performance‐based threats, people centeredness is affected. Yet, while negative performance‐based perceptions are associated with more people‐centered policy explanation, negative measured performance leads technocrats to center less on people. Our findings contribute to the literature on reputation, audience orientation, and communicative responsiveness, and suggest differential effects based on whether performance is perceived or measured.

Journal of Public Policy

Strategic investment of public funds: State responses to federal R&D grants
Aichiro Suryo Prabowo, Thomas Luke Spreen
Full text
This paper assesses the impact of federal grants for research and development (R&D) on state R&D investment in the United States. We find that federal grants for academic R&D do not significantly influence state allocations to academic institutions from 2006 to 2021. By contrast, R&D performed by agencies of the state government is estimated to grow by $0.35 with each additional dollar of federal support. We argue that these divergent results reflect the localized nature of benefits generated from R&D performed by state government agencies compared to university-based research. A computational text analysis of recent federal R&D awards to academic institutions and state agencies corroborates this hypothesis.

Public Administration

Generic title: Not a research article
Issue Information
Full text
Acceptable or Not? Understanding Attitudes Toward Citizens' Discrimination Against Frontline Workers
Aske Halling, Mathilde Cecchini, Benedicte Gronhoj
Full text
Research shows that frontline workers often discriminate based on race or ethnicity. However, citizens can also display discriminatory behavior—for instance, by requesting service only from workers of the same ethnic or religious background. This discrimination exercised by citizens toward frontline employees remains underexplored. Building on research on citizen–state interactions, discrimination, and political ideology, this study examines when the public considers such requests acceptable. We employ a vignette‐based survey experiment with 2067 Danish citizens, set in the context of home care services. Our findings show that requests based on language are perceived as more acceptable than those grounded in religion. Moreover, political ideology significantly shapes these attitudes: right‐leaning respondents are more likely to approve when the requester belongs to the ethnic majority, whereas left‐leaning respondents are more accepting when the requester is from an ethnic minority. While these single‐country findings may not generalize beyond one‐to‐one interactions characterized by high intimacy, they shed light on how ideology influences public attitudes toward ethnically motivated service preferences and highlight the need to further examine citizen‐driven discrimination in public service settings.

Public Administration Review

Generic title: Not a research article
Issue Information
Full text
American Society for Public Administration Code of Ethics
Full text
Citizen Centricity in Public Policy Making: Approaches, Mechanisms, and Beyond. By NaciKarkin and VolkanGöçoğlu, Cham: Springer Cham, 2025. 172 pp. €119.99 (hardcover); €96.29 (electronic). ISBN (hardcover): 978‐3‐03‐192300‐5; ISBN (electronic): 978‐3‐03‐192301‐2
Atahan Demirkol
Full text
Agency, Interrupted: Does Organizational Restructuring Improve Managerial Gender Parity? Testing a Disruption Hypothesis
Rebecca A. E. Kirley, Carlotta Varriale
Full text
Administrative restructuring is an organizational phenomenon suggested to improve under‐represented groups' managerial representation by disrupting networks and institutions. However, extant tests of a ‘disruption hypothesis’ are collectively inconclusive. We elaborate and test it with a qualitative‐to‐quantitative study of local health agency managers and mergers across the Italian NHS from 2014 to 2020. Agency leader interviews reveal disruption indicators: number of agencies merging, staff rationalization, changes in geographical scale, and agency heterogeneity. Using administrative data, we find disruption measures have some positive associations with women's share of management, post‐merger retention, and new hires, providing modest support for the disruption hypothesis. However, there is an unexpected ‘winners‐and‐losers’ dynamic: incumbent women had higher post‐merger attrition than men, but merged agencies hired more women than non‐merging agencies. We offer three abductively developed interpretations of this finding, extending the disruption hypothesis' connections with public management theory on the informal, organizational antecedents of diversity in senior management.
Celebrating 85 Years
Full text
Public Sector Work and Happiness
Michael Howell‐Moroney, Nevbahar Ertas
Full text
Are public sector workers happier than their private sector counterparts? Recent research has found an association between public sector employment and happiness but leaves many questions unanswered. The major question that remains is why this association exists. Scholars have speculated that job‐related characteristics like financial satisfaction and union status may be mediators, but this has not been established empirically. Our article provides the first empirical evidence of mediation in the relationship between public sector work and happiness. Using large sample data from the World Values Survey ( n = 124,541), we find that financial satisfaction and union status both mediate the association between public sector work and happiness, with financial satisfaction being the dominant mediator in most cases. When the association between public sector work and subjective well‐being is stratified by household income and country income, we find that the effects are strongest among low‐income government workers in low‐income countries.
Do Markets Shape Management? Experimental Evidence for the Effects of Competition on Contract Management
Alice Moore
Full text
A central aim of contracting is to introduce competition into public service delivery. Public organizations are facing calls to generate more competition for their contracts, yet there is conflicting evidence about the effects of competition in practice. This research aims to explain some of those mixed findings by investigating the effects of different levels of competition on contract management. It examines two crucial elements of contract management that previous literature has shown can substantially influence performance outcomes: flexibility and monitoring. In highly contested markets, relationships are likely to be shorter and the payoffs from more restrictive styles of management are higher, thereby encouraging managers to be less flexible and monitor more. Findings, from an online survey experiment with 576 public managers, indicate that high competition does indeed lead to less flexibility and more monitoring, while low competition leads to less intense monitoring.
Institutional Reforms, Governance, and Services Delivery in the Global South. By Hamid E.Ali and ShahjahanBhuiyan (eds.), Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. 301 pp. $139.99 (hardback). ISBN: 978‐3‐030‐82256‐9
Long Tran
Full text

Public Management Review

Fit or commitment? A meta-analytic investigation of the relationship and mediating mechanisms between public service motivation and turnover intention
Xiaoyu Guan, Fabian Homberg, Haibo Yu, Qing Li
Full text
Citizens’ experiences with a public ombud: applying Beck Jþrgensen and Bozeman’s public values model to empirical data
Julia Dahlvik, Hannah Medea Breier
Full text
Performing change: the institutional logics of internal restructuring in the public sector
Annika Naschitzki, Karl Löfgren, Geoff Plimmer
Full text
Learning from public administration faculty: emotional labour, burnout, and solutions
Sara R. Rinfret, Sean McCandless, Bruce D. McDonald
Full text

Regulation & Governance

Trust, Crisis, and Delegation: A Comparative Analysis of Public Health Authorities During the COVID ‐19 Pandemic
Jana GĂłmez DĂ­az
Full text
In times of crisis, maintaining citizens' trust in government is crucial for policy legitimacy. Yet, research on how institutional design shapes trust under crisis conditions remains limited. This study addresses this gap by examining how the delegation of authority and the degree of institutional independence of public health agencies relate to citizens' trust in government across 28 European countries during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Using country‐level panel data, the analysis shows that trust tends to be higher in contexts where delegated agencies enjoy substantial independence from ministerial control. Moreover, governments with either strong ministries or fully independent agencies display higher average trust levels than those with intermediate or overlapping institutional arrangements. These findings highlight an independence–legitimacy nexus, suggesting that clear authority, political insulation, and policy stability are key to sustaining public trust during crises.
Power Unleashed: Theorizing a Weak Ecology of Checks and Balances and Its Consequences. A Case From the Global South
Oliver Meza, Elizabeth PĂ©rez‐ChiquĂ©s, Aldo MartĂ­nez‐Hernandez
Full text
This article theorizes about weak checks and balances (C&B) and its plausible consequences. Drawing on empirical data from over 1100 municipal officials in Mexico, the study examines how executive dominance over three key institutions—the local council, internal comptroller offices, and human resources offices—facilitates consequences associated with abuse of power and a demise in democratic regimes. We use the case of systemic corruption in local governments to propose how C&B erosion undermines institutional autonomy and capacity, thereby fostering conditions in which corruption becomes normalized and self‐sustaining. By offering theoretical propositions supported by extensive survey data, the article illustrates how C&B mechanisms are systematically undermined. These findings have broader implications for understanding the global drift toward illiberal governance and the challenges to revert the situation. The study contributes to global debates on democratic backsliding by highlighting how subnational dynamics reflect broader patterns of authoritarian power consolidation.