We checked 8 public administration and policy studies journals on Friday, July 11, 2025 using the Crossref API. For the period July 04 to July 10, we retrieved 18 new paper(s) in 6 journal(s).

Governance

Unrealized Digital Democracy: A Critical Analysis of Power in the Digital AgeBy GarrettPierman, London: Lexington Books, 2024. 96 pp. $85.00 (e‐book).
M. Anas Mahfudhi
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Risk, Inequality, and Support for Social Insurance Reform in China
Xian Huang
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Building on the policy feedback literature and the risk‐based perspective of the welfare state, this study examines the causal link between policy and opinion in a non‐democratic setting. I argue that the distinct distributional profiles of social insurance benefits and risks in the current system generate different feedback effects on public demands for social insurance reform. Drawing on original individual‐level survey data collected in China between 2022 and 2023, I find that high financial risk in social insurance significantly increases individuals' support for cross‐region integration of social insurance. In contrast, high inequality in the current social insurance has no such effects. The findings suggest that, given the looming financial pressure in China's fragmented and stratified social insurance system, citizens' support for cross‐region integration of social insurance aligns with the government's strategy of prioritizing cross‐region redistribution over cross‐group redistribution. This policy feedback explains why the Chinese government can engage in “hard redistribution” without causing significant political and social instability driven by distributive conflicts.

Journal of European Public Policy

Technological change and support for redistributive politics
Zhen Jie Im
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At the last minute: the use of the prime minister's power to amend the agenda during a crisis
Ilana Shpaizman, Sharon Gilad
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Alive and kicking or barely alive? The asymmetry thesis in the twenty-first century EU
Martijn van den Brink, Mark Dawson, Jan Zglinski
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Does climate policy backlash fuel Eurosceptic vote? Exploring the link in the European Parliament elections
Ilke ToygĂŒr, Aleksandra Sojka
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Affective regulatory governance: towards an emotion-based understanding of citizen-regulator interactions in regulatory politics
Dovilė Rimkutė
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Public Administration

Nodality Dynamics and Network Evolution in Multi‐Actor Cooperation: Insights Into Community Conflict Resolution
Yangyang Chen, Jiannan Zhu, Xiaojie Liu
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This study examines multi‐actor collaboration in resolving community conflicts in the Chinese context, with a focus on the concept of nodality in Hood's NATO framework. Drawing from 75 community cases, it employs social network analysis and the BERTopic model to uncover pivotal insights. The findings reveal the primary conflict themes to be disputes rooted in intrafamilial issues and marital relations; neighborhood tensions; labor rights; and natural resource allocation. The escalation of such conflicts from minor triggers to serious crimes underscores the intricate interplay between individuals and groups, and in dyadic relationships. A significant transformation occurs in cooperation networks, which move from centralized planning to decentralized implementation. Unlike traditional risk management paradigms, this study emphasizes the advantage of prioritizing public service delivery over control measures to resolve community conflicts. Its findings have valuable implications for enhancing conflict resolution mechanisms and improving community risk management strategies.
Gendered Perceptions of Public Services: Quality, Equality of Treatment, and Corruption in Chile
Chiara Cazzuffi, Patricia Retamal
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Public services in Latin America face persistent challenges that affect access, quality, and fairness, particularly for women and marginalized groups. This study examines gendered differences in public service perceptions in Chile, focusing on quality, equality of treatment, and corruption in education, health, and law enforcement. Using data from the Index of Perceptions of Governance Quality at the Regional Level, we investigate whether women perceive public services more negatively than men and whether explanatory factors differ by gender. Employing linear, multilevel, and seemingly unrelated regression models, we analyze individual‐level and municipal‐level variables. Women report greater perceptions of inequality and corruption in health and law enforcement, with indigenous women expressing the most negative views. Female municipal leadership is associated with lower perceived corruption among women. These findings contribute to public administration scholarship by integrating care theory, representative bureaucracy, and policy feedback to inform gender‐sensitive approaches to public service reform.
Between Trust and Blame: Citizen Perceptions of Street‐Level Bureaucrats During the Pandemic
Lu Liu, Yahua Wang
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Policy implementation studies have focused on encounters between street‐level bureaucrats and citizens. However, insufficient research has explored how citizens experience such encounters, especially during crises. To address the research gap, this study investigated citizens' perspectives on the roles of street‐level bureaucrats during the pandemic. Using a survey of Chinese citizens and employing Q methodology, we identified three distinct profiles: self‐preserving implementers, public protectors, and responsibility dodgers, which are different in their motivations and behaviors. We also found that citizens with varying perceptions of street‐level bureaucrats' roles have different expectations for forms of accountability and differing views on their own roles in policy implementation. The findings suggest practitioners should incorporate citizens' perspectives to make crisis policy implementation more effective.

Public Administration Review

Public Encounters and Government Chatbots: When Servers Talk to Citizens
Art Alishani, Vincent Homburg, Ott Velsberg
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Public service providers around the world are now offering chatbots to answer citizens' questions and deliver digital services. Using these artificial intelligence‐powered technologies, citizens can engage in conversations with governments through systems that mimic face‐to‐face interactions and adjust their use of natural language to citizens' communication styles. This paper examines emerging experiences with chatbots in government interactions, with a focus on exploring what public administration practitioners and scholars should expect from chatbots in public encounters. Furthermore, it seeks to identify what gaps exist in the general understanding of digital public encounters.
Public Managers and Wicked Problems of Advancing Social Equity
Thomas H. Stanton, Malcolm K. Oliver
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Over 50 years ago, Rittel and Webber published their seminal article on “wicked” problems that generate second‐order effects that often limit or defeat ambitious initiatives. The Rittel‐Webber model, in all of the 10 distinguishing characteristics they specified, closely fits dilemmas of public managers seeking to advance social equity. Analyzing the experiences of U.S. public sector social equity initiatives through the Rittel‐Webber lens provides lessons about the wickedness of problems of advancing social equity, and also about approaches to increase the chances of success. Taking multiple systematic smaller steps can be more effective and sustainable than a single large initiative. A systematic all‐of‐government approach also might achieve significant progress in advancing social equity. To advance social equity, public managers must consider multiple stakeholder perspectives, and in today's environment of polarization and heightened partisanship, they ignore lessons from the Rittel‐Webber framework at their peril.
Pathways to Climate Adaptation Policy Adoption by Local Governments
Jieun Kim
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This study examines the role of public support, climate risks, and local government capacity in the adoption of innovative climate adaptation measures, such as nature‐based solutions (NBS; e.g., green infrastructure, urban greening initiatives). I collected climate policy documents from 20 US cities published after 2010 to investigate whether each city has adopted NBS in its climate plans. Using qualitative comparative analysis, I found that: (1) high public support alone is neither necessary nor sufficient for NBS adoption, (2) high public support and high climate risk can jointly promote NBS adoption, (3) when public support or climate risk are low, high local government capacity alone can sufficiently enable NBS adoption. This paper ends with a discussion of how local governments prioritize resources and efforts to strengthen their resilience to the impacts of climate change.
The Downward Spiral of Legitimacy Erosion: Lessons on Network Governance Failure During the German “Refugee Crisis”
Iris Seidemann, Kristina S. WeißmĂŒller, Daniel Geiger
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Organizational legitimacy is essential for effective crisis governance. This study analyzes the rapid erosion of legitimacy faced by the German State Office for Health and Social Affairs (LAGeSo) during the 2015 refugee crisis, triggering cascading failures in public service delivery. Analyzing news articles and press statements, the study traces stakeholders' interactions with the LAGeSo, reconstructing key events and reactions to identify critical public governance failures. The findings show that a lack of network governance and anticipatory leadership contributed to a self‐reinforcing process of legitimacy erosion, which culminated in organizational collapse. The case demonstrates that public sector crisis management requires more than technical responses; it demands strategic awareness of legitimacy dynamics and strong leadership in network governance. Adopting a legitimacy‐as‐process perspective, the study provides novel conceptual and practical insights for improving public crisis governance.

Public Management Review

Police leadership at the political interface: A systematic literature review
Jane Roberts, Jean Hartley
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Policy implementation as social justice: a realist review of administrative burden research
Jesse W. Campbell, Emma Northcott, Sanjay K. Pandey
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Lower cost at a cost? The effects of flexible labour on non-profit operational outcomes
Hala Altamimi, Qiaozhen Liu
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Regulation & Governance

Consuming Ownership: Comparing Property Rights and Consumer Protection Law as Regulatory Methods of Corporate Power in the Market
Shelly Kreiczer‐Levy
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How should the law regulate the use and management of a resource in market activity? The resource can be perceived as an entitlement, granting market participants veto power over its use and management. Alternatively, market participants can be protected as consumers with rules focusing on disclosure, repair, and safety. The two alternative protections reflect different ways of regulating the economic power of large corporate actors in the market. Property law grants individual control over the resource, while consumer law protects consumers from exploitation but leaves them dependent on corporations for the continued use and management of the resource. This article examines the nature and scope of these protections by engaging with cases where there is a shift from a property protection to a consumer protection. In all these cases, market participants who manage resources are no longer perceived as owners; they are consumers. This article points to the normative and political economy implications of this shift.