Performance management is used by governments worldwide to incentivize professionals in schools and other public organizations. Yet, much research shows that these incentives may generate perverse dysfunctional effects. Based on a Bayesian model of learning, we propose that simply providing professional teachers with performance information— without changing their extrinsic incentives—may be enough to make them update their beliefs about their students and act accordingly. However, measuring performance may itself affect professionals’ behavior, which makes it difficult to isolate the effect of providing performance information. We designed and preregistered a field experiment in which we can isolate the effect of making performance information available to teachers and study how it affects their posterior beliefs and behavior towards the students (N=2028). The results confirm the primary hypothesis and thereby provide indications that information provision itself may be effective in the governance of public organizations.
{"title":"A Learning Approach to the Governance of Professionals. Field Experimental Evidence","authors":"Simon Calmar Andersen, Thorbjørn Sejr Guul","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muaf028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muaf028","url":null,"abstract":"Performance management is used by governments worldwide to incentivize professionals in schools and other public organizations. Yet, much research shows that these incentives may generate perverse dysfunctional effects. Based on a Bayesian model of learning, we propose that simply providing professional teachers with performance information— without changing their extrinsic incentives—may be enough to make them update their beliefs about their students and act accordingly. However, measuring performance may itself affect professionals’ behavior, which makes it difficult to isolate the effect of providing performance information. We designed and preregistered a field experiment in which we can isolate the effect of making performance information available to teachers and study how it affects their posterior beliefs and behavior towards the students (N=2028). The results confirm the primary hypothesis and thereby provide indications that information provision itself may be effective in the governance of public organizations.","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":"27 10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2025-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145068477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper examines how tax salience—or how aware individuals are of their property tax payments that finance local public services—correlates with citizens’ evaluation of their local government. Drawing on theories of expectation formation for public services and fiscal illusion, we hypothesize that reduced tax salience is associated with lower normative expectations, which will correlate with increased reported satisfaction with their local government and a higher willingness to support additional taxation. Using data from a nationwide survey of homeowners (n = 10,066), we provide evidence of robust correlations between lower tax salience and more positive citizen evaluation of government. This paper contributes to a growing literature in public administration that finds that the design of tax systems, tax complexity, and other factors outside of the control of street-level bureaucrats that provide public services can influence how individuals evaluate a government or public service.
{"title":"Tax Salience and Citizen Evaluation of Government","authors":"David J Schwegman, Yusun Kim","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muaf025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muaf025","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines how tax salience—or how aware individuals are of their property tax payments that finance local public services—correlates with citizens’ evaluation of their local government. Drawing on theories of expectation formation for public services and fiscal illusion, we hypothesize that reduced tax salience is associated with lower normative expectations, which will correlate with increased reported satisfaction with their local government and a higher willingness to support additional taxation. Using data from a nationwide survey of homeowners (n = 10,066), we provide evidence of robust correlations between lower tax salience and more positive citizen evaluation of government. This paper contributes to a growing literature in public administration that finds that the design of tax systems, tax complexity, and other factors outside of the control of street-level bureaucrats that provide public services can influence how individuals evaluate a government or public service.","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":"119 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2025-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144910687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Street-level bureaucrats' coping mechanisms are an integral part of their interaction with clients, and as such have received much research attention. Since the last review of the behavioral coping mechanisms adopted by street-level bureaucrats, conducted more than 10 years ago, many researchers have focused on understanding these mechanisms and what influences them. Using the PRISMA model, we conducted a systematic review of 165 studies to update our understanding and explore the manifestations of both old and new coping mechanisms identified in the literature. Moreover, we seek to determine the antecedents of these coping mechanisms. From our findings emerged a new family of coping mechanisms that we call “moving with clients.” These behaviors include intentional efforts to involve clients in the process of service delivery, for example, by deliberating and cooperating with them to achieve the desired policy goals. We find that most street-level bureaucrats’ behaviors are associated with organizational and environmental factors. Personal factors, although highlighted frequently in the literature, are not associated with most coping behaviors.
{"title":"Revisiting Coping Mechanisms on the Street-Level: A Systematic Literature Review","authors":"Ofek Edri-Peer, Nissim Cohen","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muaf022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muaf022","url":null,"abstract":"Street-level bureaucrats' coping mechanisms are an integral part of their interaction with clients, and as such have received much research attention. Since the last review of the behavioral coping mechanisms adopted by street-level bureaucrats, conducted more than 10 years ago, many researchers have focused on understanding these mechanisms and what influences them. Using the PRISMA model, we conducted a systematic review of 165 studies to update our understanding and explore the manifestations of both old and new coping mechanisms identified in the literature. Moreover, we seek to determine the antecedents of these coping mechanisms. From our findings emerged a new family of coping mechanisms that we call “moving with clients.” These behaviors include intentional efforts to involve clients in the process of service delivery, for example, by deliberating and cooperating with them to achieve the desired policy goals. We find that most street-level bureaucrats’ behaviors are associated with organizational and environmental factors. Personal factors, although highlighted frequently in the literature, are not associated with most coping behaviors.","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2025-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144629818","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Recent research suggests that bureaucratic responsiveness to political preferences may depend as much on organizational capacity as it does on incentive alignment, information recovery, and the strategic interaction of principal and agent. Better-resourced bureaucracies should be more able to comply with new political directions, irrespective of their willingness to do so. But because so much bureaucratic capacity is sunk into implementing the prior policy commitments of current and former principals, responding to new political signals will depend – much more specifically – on agents possessing adequate slack resources. This spare capacity should aid signal detection and program development; decrease hesitance at over-committing to new assignments in volatile environments; and provide resources for implementing changes whilst maintaining prior commitments. Using two-way fixed-effects regression and a novel dataset of 1,430 legislative requests of the UK executive, we confirm that possession of slack resources specifically (rather than organizational capacity generally) significantly increases the likelihood of bureaucracies consenting to make program changes requested by parliament. Agents with slack also commit to more precise timelines for implementation. And survival analysis further reveals that, once committed, bureaucracies with more budgetary slack complete their assignments more expeditiously.
{"title":"Ready, willing, and able? Bureaucratic capacity, slack resources and political control","authors":"Thomas Elston, Yuxi Zhang","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muaf021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muaf021","url":null,"abstract":"Recent research suggests that bureaucratic responsiveness to political preferences may depend as much on organizational capacity as it does on incentive alignment, information recovery, and the strategic interaction of principal and agent. Better-resourced bureaucracies should be more able to comply with new political directions, irrespective of their willingness to do so. But because so much bureaucratic capacity is sunk into implementing the prior policy commitments of current and former principals, responding to new political signals will depend – much more specifically – on agents possessing adequate slack resources. This spare capacity should aid signal detection and program development; decrease hesitance at over-committing to new assignments in volatile environments; and provide resources for implementing changes whilst maintaining prior commitments. Using two-way fixed-effects regression and a novel dataset of 1,430 legislative requests of the UK executive, we confirm that possession of slack resources specifically (rather than organizational capacity generally) significantly increases the likelihood of bureaucracies consenting to make program changes requested by parliament. Agents with slack also commit to more precise timelines for implementation. And survival analysis further reveals that, once committed, bureaucracies with more budgetary slack complete their assignments more expeditiously.","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":"109 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2025-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144611274","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Constantin Kaplaner, Christoph Knill, Yves Steinebach
Recent research suggests that additional public policies can sometimes decrease overall policy effectiveness rather than improve the problem-solving capacity of the state. This occurs when new policies are not supported by additional administrative capacities, leading to an overburdened administration. Public authorities handle the increased workload by employing “policy triage,” which involves reallocating resources among different policies. Despite this straightforward argument, a systematic understanding of these dynamics is lacking in the existing literature. This paper addresses this by examining the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) introduction of the Acid Rain Program. Utilizing a difference-in-differences analysis, it reveals a significant reduction in inspections for industrial sites not covered by the Acid Rain Program as administrators redirected enforcement efforts. These findings, robust against various alternative explanations, highlight the inherent trade-offs in the public sector when policy and administrative expansions are not considered together. To assess broader relevance, we complement our analysis with 28 interviews in Germany, Italy, and Portugal, showing that policy triage is a common response to administrative overload across diverse institutional contexts.
{"title":"Administrative Overload and Policy Triage: Causal evidence from the Introduction of the Acid Rain Program in the United States","authors":"Constantin Kaplaner, Christoph Knill, Yves Steinebach","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muaf020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muaf020","url":null,"abstract":"Recent research suggests that additional public policies can sometimes decrease overall policy effectiveness rather than improve the problem-solving capacity of the state. This occurs when new policies are not supported by additional administrative capacities, leading to an overburdened administration. Public authorities handle the increased workload by employing “policy triage,” which involves reallocating resources among different policies. Despite this straightforward argument, a systematic understanding of these dynamics is lacking in the existing literature. This paper addresses this by examining the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) introduction of the Acid Rain Program. Utilizing a difference-in-differences analysis, it reveals a significant reduction in inspections for industrial sites not covered by the Acid Rain Program as administrators redirected enforcement efforts. These findings, robust against various alternative explanations, highlight the inherent trade-offs in the public sector when policy and administrative expansions are not considered together. To assess broader relevance, we complement our analysis with 28 interviews in Germany, Italy, and Portugal, showing that policy triage is a common response to administrative overload across diverse institutional contexts.","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":"61 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144513244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The timely disbursement of government program benefits is a core attribute of effective administration. In recent decades, American states charged with administering unemployment insurance programs have instituted IT modernization reforms to improve the timely delivery of unemployment benefits. Variation among those 28 states instituting IT modernization reforms between 2002 and 2022 reveals that these reforms improved the timely delivery of initial unemployment benefits by increasing the rate of meeting target performance benchmarks by 5.26%, while reducing the tardy disbursement of unemployment benefits by 2.90%, thus constituting a net performance swing of 8.16%. These performance benefits, however, are most pronounced for agency leaders holding prior appointed administrative leadership experience. More broadly, these findings indicate that appropriate matching of the type of prior government experience held by agency leaders in accordance with the nature of administrative reforms is critical for realizing these performance benefits.
{"title":"Agency Leaders and Organizational Adaptation to Administrative Reform: Evidence from IT Reforms and the Timely Disbursement of Unemployment Insurance Benefits in the American States","authors":"George A Krause, Ji Hyeun Hong","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muaf018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muaf018","url":null,"abstract":"The timely disbursement of government program benefits is a core attribute of effective administration. In recent decades, American states charged with administering unemployment insurance programs have instituted IT modernization reforms to improve the timely delivery of unemployment benefits. Variation among those 28 states instituting IT modernization reforms between 2002 and 2022 reveals that these reforms improved the timely delivery of initial unemployment benefits by increasing the rate of meeting target performance benchmarks by 5.26%, while reducing the tardy disbursement of unemployment benefits by 2.90%, thus constituting a net performance swing of 8.16%. These performance benefits, however, are most pronounced for agency leaders holding prior appointed administrative leadership experience. More broadly, these findings indicate that appropriate matching of the type of prior government experience held by agency leaders in accordance with the nature of administrative reforms is critical for realizing these performance benefits.","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144513256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper proposes a theory of organizational memory predicting that task knowledge retained in organizational structures (i.e., agency centralization and task standardization) buffers the disruptive effects of employee turnover. Using a dataset of information technology (IT) projects implemented by 94 U.S. federal agencies between FY2015-FY2021, estimates from fractional panel probit models reveal that both centralized authority under chief information officers and task standardization reduce project delays associated with IT workforce turnover; they are particularly effective in mitigating knowledge loss from voluntary and managerial position turnover. This evidence highlights the contingent nature of the turnover–performance relationship, suggesting that government agencies with high turnover may experience fewer delays when organizational structures retain task knowledge.
{"title":"When Does Employee Turnover Matter? Analyzing the Role of Organizational Memory in the Federal IT Workforce","authors":"Ji Hyeun Hong","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muaf019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muaf019","url":null,"abstract":"This paper proposes a theory of organizational memory predicting that task knowledge retained in organizational structures (i.e., agency centralization and task standardization) buffers the disruptive effects of employee turnover. Using a dataset of information technology (IT) projects implemented by 94 U.S. federal agencies between FY2015-FY2021, estimates from fractional panel probit models reveal that both centralized authority under chief information officers and task standardization reduce project delays associated with IT workforce turnover; they are particularly effective in mitigating knowledge loss from voluntary and managerial position turnover. This evidence highlights the contingent nature of the turnover–performance relationship, suggesting that government agencies with high turnover may experience fewer delays when organizational structures retain task knowledge.","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144290149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Bjorn Kleizen, Wouter Van Dooren, Muiris MacCarthaigh, Céline Vanden Abbeele
In recent years, there have been numerous cases where citizens have found themselves stuck in highly protracted administrative processes affecting outcomes vital to their lives and livelihoods. However, systematic inquiries into the experience of being trapped by bureaucratic procedures or state inaction for sometimes multiple years are still lacking. To study the interactions between citizens and the state when long waiting times and significant outcomes are involved, we introduce the concept of administrative limbo. We examine administrative limbo using primary and secondary interview data from the Irish defective concrete block crisis, the Dutch childcare benefits affair, and the Dutch Groningen gas crisis. Findings suggest that experiences of administrative limbo are marked by prolonged and extensive uncertainty, accumulating strain, and negatively impacted life perspectives. We find that the effects of being stuck in administrative limbo are profound, indicating that temporal experiences of inaction and action should be further explored in public administration.
{"title":"Stuck in the waiting room: citizen experiences of administrative limbo in three European crises","authors":"Bjorn Kleizen, Wouter Van Dooren, Muiris MacCarthaigh, Céline Vanden Abbeele","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muaf017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muaf017","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, there have been numerous cases where citizens have found themselves stuck in highly protracted administrative processes affecting outcomes vital to their lives and livelihoods. However, systematic inquiries into the experience of being trapped by bureaucratic procedures or state inaction for sometimes multiple years are still lacking. To study the interactions between citizens and the state when long waiting times and significant outcomes are involved, we introduce the concept of administrative limbo. We examine administrative limbo using primary and secondary interview data from the Irish defective concrete block crisis, the Dutch childcare benefits affair, and the Dutch Groningen gas crisis. Findings suggest that experiences of administrative limbo are marked by prolonged and extensive uncertainty, accumulating strain, and negatively impacted life perspectives. We find that the effects of being stuck in administrative limbo are profound, indicating that temporal experiences of inaction and action should be further explored in public administration.","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":"224 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2025-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144290153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Leonardo Henrique Lima de Pilla, Alketa Peci, Rodrigo de Oliveira Leite
Corporatization in the public sector entails decentralizing the provision of public goods and services to more autonomous entities, including state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Research indicates that the decision to corporatize is driven, among other factors, by the pursuit of financial sustainability in public organizations. A continuing debate revolves around whether the political ideology of incumbents is linked to the creation of SOEs. However, limited attention has been given to understanding if incumbents’ ideology shapes SOEs’ financial performance and, hence, financial sustainability. This is concerning because SOEs operate beyond political cycles, facing pressures from ideologically different governments over time. Herein, we investigate whether the incumbents’ ideologies shape SOEs’ financial performance. We hypothesize that the more right leaning the incumbent, the greater the SOEs’ financial performance. However, given that incumbents’ decisions are influenced by their political parties’ behaviors, the effects of ideology may be contingent on these factors. Thus, we investigate whether the association of incumbents’ ideology with SOEs’ financial performance is weaker when incumbents’ political parties display non-policy behaviors (e.g., by prioritizing electoral outcomes or office occupation). We analyze a 2019–2022 panel of 317 SOEs controlled by 27 subnational governments in Brazil with both FGLS and instrumental variable regression approaches. The data comprising 1,116 SOE-year observations confirm our hypotheses. Our research contributes to scholarship on the drivers of public organizations’ financial performance and sheds light on the role of political contingencies, such as incumbents’ ideology and party predominant behaviors regarding SOEs’ financial performance—a commonly overlooked gap in current research.
{"title":"Financial Performance Of State-Owned Enterprises: Does Political Ideology Play A Role?","authors":"Leonardo Henrique Lima de Pilla, Alketa Peci, Rodrigo de Oliveira Leite","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muaf014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muaf014","url":null,"abstract":"Corporatization in the public sector entails decentralizing the provision of public goods and services to more autonomous entities, including state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Research indicates that the decision to corporatize is driven, among other factors, by the pursuit of financial sustainability in public organizations. A continuing debate revolves around whether the political ideology of incumbents is linked to the creation of SOEs. However, limited attention has been given to understanding if incumbents’ ideology shapes SOEs’ financial performance and, hence, financial sustainability. This is concerning because SOEs operate beyond political cycles, facing pressures from ideologically different governments over time. Herein, we investigate whether the incumbents’ ideologies shape SOEs’ financial performance. We hypothesize that the more right leaning the incumbent, the greater the SOEs’ financial performance. However, given that incumbents’ decisions are influenced by their political parties’ behaviors, the effects of ideology may be contingent on these factors. Thus, we investigate whether the association of incumbents’ ideology with SOEs’ financial performance is weaker when incumbents’ political parties display non-policy behaviors (e.g., by prioritizing electoral outcomes or office occupation). We analyze a 2019–2022 panel of 317 SOEs controlled by 27 subnational governments in Brazil with both FGLS and instrumental variable regression approaches. The data comprising 1,116 SOE-year observations confirm our hypotheses. Our research contributes to scholarship on the drivers of public organizations’ financial performance and sheds light on the role of political contingencies, such as incumbents’ ideology and party predominant behaviors regarding SOEs’ financial performance—a commonly overlooked gap in current research.","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144153357","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Elise Zufall, Tyler Scott, Mark Lubell, Linda Esteli Mendez Barrientos
State and federal governments use governance platforms to achieve central policy goals through distributed action at the local level. For example, California’s 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) mandates local policy actors to work together to create new groundwater management institutions and plans. We argue that governance platforms entail a principal-agent problem where local decisions may deviate from central goals. We apply this argument to SGMA implementation, where local plans may respond more to local political economic conditions rather than address the groundwater problems prioritized by the state. Using a Structured Topic Model (STM) to analyze the content of 117 basin management plans, we regress each plan’s focus on core management reform priorities on local socio-economic and social-ecological indicators expected to shape how different communities respond to state requirements. Our results suggest that the focus of local plans diverges from problem conditions on issues like environmental justice and drinking water quality. This highlights how principal-agent logics of divergent preferences and information asymmetry can affect the design and implementation of governance platforms.
{"title":"Do governance platforms achieve the aims of the platform sponsor? Principal-agent tension in environmental governance reforms","authors":"Elise Zufall, Tyler Scott, Mark Lubell, Linda Esteli Mendez Barrientos","doi":"10.1093/jopart/muaf015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muaf015","url":null,"abstract":"State and federal governments use governance platforms to achieve central policy goals through distributed action at the local level. For example, California’s 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) mandates local policy actors to work together to create new groundwater management institutions and plans. We argue that governance platforms entail a principal-agent problem where local decisions may deviate from central goals. We apply this argument to SGMA implementation, where local plans may respond more to local political economic conditions rather than address the groundwater problems prioritized by the state. Using a Structured Topic Model (STM) to analyze the content of 117 basin management plans, we regress each plan’s focus on core management reform priorities on local socio-economic and social-ecological indicators expected to shape how different communities respond to state requirements. Our results suggest that the focus of local plans diverges from problem conditions on issues like environmental justice and drinking water quality. This highlights how principal-agent logics of divergent preferences and information asymmetry can affect the design and implementation of governance platforms.","PeriodicalId":48366,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143945676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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