| Research Articles Contemporary Challenges in Local Government: Evolving Roles and Responsibilities, Structures, and Processes John Nalbandian (University of Kansas), Robert O'Neill Jr. (International City/County Management Association), J. Michael Wilkes (City of Olathe, Kansas), and Amanda Kaufman (City of Marion, Iowa) discuss how three contemporary leadership challenges face local governments today. The first encourages department heads to more actively work the intersection between political and administrative arenas. The second promotes collaborative work, synchronizing city and county boundaries with problems that have no jurisdictional homes. The third argues that citizen engagement is no longer optional-it is imperative-and that connecting engagement initiatives to traditional political values and governing processes is an important mark of successful community building. These three leadership challenges stem from a widening gap between the arenas of politics and administration-that is, between what is politically acceptable in public policy making and what is administratively sustainable. The gap is fueled by conflicting trends experienced locally and common internationally. Failure to bridge this gap between political acceptability and administrative sustainability results in decreasing legitimacy for governing institutions and increasing challenges. Link to PAR Article Place Marketing as Governance Strategy: An Assessment of Obstacles in Place Marketing and Their Effects on Attracting Target Groups Place marketing is increasingly being used as a governance strategy for managing perceptions about regions, cities, and towns. What are the most important obstacles to implementing place marketing? Based on a survey of 274 public managers involved in place marketing in the Netherlands, Jasper Eshuis, Erik Braun, and Erik-Hans Klijn (Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands) analyze the main obstacles as perceived by public managers. They also analyze the effects of obstacles on perceived results of place marketing in terms of attracting target groups. A factor analysis of a variety of obstacles investigated in the survey shows three clearly demarcated obstacles: administrative obstacles within municipalities, obstacles in developing the substance of marketing campaigns, and political obstacles. Obstacles in developing the substance of the marketing campaigns have significant effects on the results of place marketing in terms of attracting stakeholders, whereas the two other obstacles have no significant influence. Link to PAR Article Policy Area as a Potential Moderator of Transparency Effects: An Experiment Building on the counterintuitive findings of recent empirical studies that transparency in political decision making may have a negative effect on public legitimacy beliefs, Jenny de Fine Licht (University of Gothenburg, Sweden) suggests that transparency has different effects depending on the policy area. Specifically, she argues that transparency is less effective in policy decisions that involve trade-offs related to questions of human life and death or well-being. Using an experiment that involved 1,032 participants, the effect of transparency is tested in two policy areas that represent routine priority setting (culture and leisure) and policy decisions implicitly related to human life and well-being (traffic security). Results indicate that transparency can increase public acceptance of political decisions, but this effect is moderated by the type of policy area. Furthermore, a limited type of transparency in which decision makers provide justifications for their decisions can result in benefits while avoiding potential costs. Link to PAR Article Social and Political Consequences of Administrative Corruption: A Study of Public Perceptions in Spain Spain experienced an outbreak of public sector corruption-much of it related to the involvement of regional and local administrators and politicians in the country's urban development boom-that angered the public and sparked calls for government reform. Using data from a 2009 survey that followed these events, Manuel Villoria (King Juan Carlos University, Spain), Gregg G. Van Ryzin, and Cecilia F. Lavena (Rutgers University) examine the association between perceived corruption and the attitudes and behaviors of citizens, including satisfaction with government and democracy, social and institutional trust, and rule-breaking behaviors. The findings suggest that perceptions of administrative as well as political corruption are associated with less satisfaction, lower levels of social and institutional trust, and a greater willingness to break rules. Although these survey results cannot prove causation, they are consistent with the notion that administrative and political corruption damages the legitimacy of government in the eyes of citizens and weakens the social fabric of democratic society. Link to PAR Article The New Public Service Revisited The New Public Service describes a set of norms and practices that emphasize democracy and citizenship as the basis for public administration theory and practice. Janet V. Denhardt and Robert B. Denhardt (University of Southern California) revisit some of the core arguments of the New Public Service and examine how they have been practiced and studied over the past 15 years. They conclude that neither the principles of the New Public Service nor those of the New Public Management have become a dominant paradigm, but the New Public Service, and ideas and practices consistent with its ideals, have become increasingly evident in public administration scholarship and practice. Link to PAR Article On the Development of Public–Private Partnerships in Transitional Economies: An Explanatory Framework Yongheng Yang (Tsinghua University, China), Yilin Hou (University of Georgia), and Youqiang Wang (Tsinghua University, China) develop a generic framework to explain the environment for public–private partnership (PPP) development in transitional economies. The framework stands on a tripod that includes the market, the operating environment, and the government, each containing several factors that support aspects of PPPs. The authors apply the framework to analyze the results of a multicountry survey in an effort to identify key factors that facilitate PPP development in transition countries. The identified factors are market potential, institutional guarantee, government credibility, financial accessibility, government capacity, consolidated management, and corruption control. The framework and identified factors may serve as effective tools to diagnose and monitor PPP development in a broader array of countries. The framework is applied in analyzing data from four transitional economies and several advanced economies. The efficacy of the framework is further justified by its explanatory power of PPPs' practicality and is largely confirmed by results from a sensitivity test. Link to PAR Article Looking for Friends, Fans, and Followers? Social Media Use in Public and Nonprofit Human Services David A. Campbell, Kristina T. Lambright, and Christopher J. Wells (Binghamton University) use interviews and internet data to examine social media use among nonprofit organizations and county departments involved in the delivery of human services in a six-county area in south-central New York State. Social media use was modest, with nonprofit organizations much more likely to use it than county departments. Organizations used social media primarily to market organizational activities, remain relevant to key constituencies, and raise community awareness. Most organizations either had a narrow view of social media's potential value or lacked a long-term vision. Barriers to use included institutional policies, concerns about the inappropriateness of social media for target audiences, and client confidentiality. Findings build on recent research regarding the extent to which nonprofit organizations and local governments use social media to engage stakeholders. Future research should investigate not only the different ways organizations use social media but also whether organizations use it strategically to advance organizational goals. Link to PAR Article The Other Type of Performance Information: Nonroutine Feedback, Its Relevance and Use The literature on performance information use explains how public managers deal with mainly quantitative data that are systematically collected and formally reported. Alexander Kroll (University of Potsdam, Germany) argues that such a narrow understanding is incomplete, as it excludes all kinds of nonroutine performance information, including verbal, ad hoc, and qualitative feedback. To understand how responsive public managers are to performance feedback, alternative sources of performance information need to be taken into account. A literature review suggests considering two important sources of nonroutine feedback: organizational insiders and relevant external stakeholders. Using survey data from German local government, this article shows that public managers prefer to use nonroutine feedback over routine data from performance reports. Furthermore, a regression analysis indicates that different sources of performance information require different determinants to trigger their use. This finding is essential because it suggests that explanations of performance information use can covary with the information source studied. Link to PAR Article Coproduction and Equity in Public Service Delivery Public managers and researchers devote much attention to the benefits of coproduction, or the mixing of the productive efforts of public employees and citizens in public service design and delivery. One concern, however, is the distributional consequences of coproduction. Morten Jakobsen and Simon Calmar Andersen (Aarhus University, Denmark) propose that disadvantaged citizens may be constrained by a lack of knowledge or other resources necessary to contribute to and benefit from the coproduction process. From this assumption, they develop the theoretical argument that if coproduction programs were designed to lift constraints on disadvantaged citizens, they might increase both efficiency and equity. This claim is tested using a field experiment on educational services. A coproduction program providing immigrant parents with knowledge and materials useful to their children's early educational development had a substantial positive impact on the educational outcomes of disadvantaged children, thereby diminishing inequity. Economically, the program was more efficient than later compensation of low-performing children. Link to PAR Article Neoliberalism for the Common Good? Public Value Governance and the Downsizing of Democracy Adam Dahl and Joe Soss (University of Minnesota) raise a set of cautions regarding public value governance along two dimensions. First, they question the common claim that public value governance poses a direct challenge to the economistic logic of neoliberalism. Second, although public value is often presented as a democratizing agenda, leading works sidestep foundational questions of power and conflict and advance prescriptions that are at odds with important democratic values. Without attending to these problems, the public value concept risks producing a new variant of neoliberal rationality, extending and strengthening the de-democratizing, market-oriented project that its proponents seek to overturn. Link to PAR Article Networks and Networking: The Public Administrative Agendas Published in 1997, the article "Treating Networks Seriously: Practical and Research-Based Agendas in Public Administration" outlined the importance of networks for the field of public administration and suggested a series of research agendas that should be pursued. Laurence J. O'Toole Jr. (The University of Georgia; University of Twente, The Netherlands) discusses how that argument has received substantial attention in the years since. Research on networks and networking has made substantial progress, particularly on some questions-the descriptive agenda, for instance, and some aspects of the practical agenda. However, considerable work remains to be done. More needs to be known about the ways in which networks and networking behavior can shape performance and affect the most salient values in our governance systems; better empirical theory is also needed in this regard. Such further developments would be of immense value to the practice of public administration. The world of public administration has for some time been treating networks seriously, but the work is far from complete. Link to PAR Article Evaluating Urban Public Schools: Parents, Teachers, and State Assessments Among the most contentious questions in public administration is how the performance of public organizations should be evaluated, and nowhere is this issue more salient than in urban public schools. While significant attention has been devoted to studying administrative measures of public organizations, the views of citizens concerning performance have been widely criticized and are not frequently gathered by schools. How these assessments relate to each other is central to many questions in education policy (e.g., choice, equity) and has important implications for democracy, bureaucratic professionalism, and public performance. This debate can be viewed as focusing on the distinction between convergent validity and discriminant validity. Using data from New York City's public school system with a cross-sectional time-series approach, Nathan Favero and Kenneth J. Meier (Texas A&M University) compare parent and teacher evaluations to government records of schools' characteristics and performance. The findings suggest that parents and teachers are able to conduct intelligent, meaningful evaluations of school quality. Link to PAR Article |