Changing discourse of public administration: Where PAD stands?

Abstract

Public administration in the recent years has become a very dynamic and vast domain owing to evolving challenges. Our study aims to comparatively evaluate the changing discourse in public administration research in general and ‘Public Administration and Development’ (PAD) in particular. For this purpose, we have taken research articles from nine journals of public administration domain for the period of 2010–2022. We have used the text‐mining based approach of Dynamic Topic Modelling to understand the evolution of topics in public administration research. This is followed by the Named Entity Recognition (NER) to discover the geographic importance given in public administration research vis‐à‐vis PAD. We have used the measure of ‘Jaccard similarity’ to compare the changing discourse of PAD with respect to other journals. We have found that topics on approaches to governance, organization performance and health were always on the priority in literature. We have also found that topic coverage in PAD is more diverse and niche compared to the overall trends in public administration research. NER findings suggest that public administration research is more Euro‐North American centric while PAD has pan‐continental presence with focus on developing countries.