Lidewij Tummers
Biographic Data
| ID | 1593688 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lidewij Tummers |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lidewij |
| FAMILY NAME | Tummers |
| SIGNATURE | TUMMERS L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Utrecht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9940-9874 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1017 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Breaking down administrative burdens
This study investigates whether reducing administrative burdens can increase interest in active labor market programs among job-seeking women. Employing a user-centered approach, the research is divided into two phases. In Phase 1, we conduct interviews with women and a focus group with service providers to identify relevant barriers for take-up. The qualitative data shows that learning costs were the most prominent barrier. Learning costs could …
Discrimination Against People With Disabilities in Hiring and Strategies to Reduce It
People with disabilities receive fewer callbacks when applying for jobs compared to people without disabilities. To minimize the adverse effects of having a disability in the job application process, some people with disabilities use mitigation strategies during the disclosure of a disability. We test the impact of two often‐used and recommended mitigation strategies in resumes: (1) claiming, that is, emphasizing positive attributes, and (2) down…
Empowering leadership in crisis
Existing research suggests that empowering leadership enhances employee well-being, but context-specific empirical studies in the public sector remain scarce. We investigated whether this positive impact persists during a public health crisis. To test this, we conducted a natural experiment, utilizing a longitudinal survey of healthcare employees and administrative data on geographical variance in hospitalization rates during a public health cris…
Digital transformation leadership
The threat of appearing lazy, inefficient, and slow? Stereotype threat in the public sector
Public employees are stereotyped as lazy, inefficient, and slow. When made aware of such stereotypes, they may experience stereotype threat that impairs their task-performance. Across two pre-registered, large-scale between-subjects experiments (n1 = 1,543; n2 = 1,147), we found that performance in terms of task correctness, processing time, and effort was unaffected by information of negative public employee stereotypes. Our results do not indic…
Working 9 to 5? A cross-national analysis of public sector worker stereotypes
We present an inductive, citizen-driven appraoch to identify stereotypes of public sector worekrs across the United States, Canada, the Netherlands and South Korea (Study 1: n=918; Study 2: n=3,042). Contrary to common negative portrayals, we idetify two positive stereotypes across countries — having job security and serving society; and one neutral/negative stereotype — going home on time. Notably, Americans and Canadians have a more favorable v…
Positive public sector stereotypes and their impact on public service delivery
There are both negative and positive stereotypes about public sector workers. Most studies focus on negative stereotypes, like the idea that public servants are lazy. We, however, do the opposite. We focus on a positive stereotype: public sector workers are seen as caring and helpful. We test the effects of positive stereotypes on the quality of public service delivery. Using a pre-registered audit experiment in elderly care in the Netherlands an…
Getting what you expect
This study tests whether civil servant stereotypes affect how citizens experience public service delivery. Using a pre‐registered survey vignette experiment ( n = 1130), we activate civil servant stereotypes (negative, positive, or control) and assess whether this affects subsequent perceptions and evaluations of public services. Results indicate that stereotypes shape experiences, with the activation of negative stereotypes leading to lower leve…
Nudges can be both autonomy-preserving and effective
Nudges are widely employed tools within organizations, but they are often criticized for harming autonomy and for being ineffective. We assess these two criticisms simultaneously: can nudges be both autonomy-preserving and effective in changing behavior? We developed three nudges – an opinion leader nudge, a rule-of-thumb and self-nudges – to reduce a particularly sticky behavior: email use. In a survey experiment of 4,112 healthcare employees, w…
Spatiotemporal variations of public opinion on social distancing in the Netherlands
Background: Social distancing has been implemented by many countries to curb the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding public support for this policy calls for effective and efficient methods of monitoring public opinion on social distancing. Twitter analysis has been suggested as a cheaper and faster-responding alternative to traditional survey methods. The current empirical evidence is mixed in terms of the correspondence between the two methods. Ob…
Habit formation of preventive behaviours during the Covid-19 pandemic
People's adaptations to physical-distancing and hand washing measures involve both intentional and habitual processes. For public health management, our findings highlight the importance of using contextual cues to promote habit formation, especially for maintaining physical-distancing practices. For habit theories, our study provides a unique dataset that covers multiple health behaviours in a critical real-world setting
Core values for ideal civil servants
What do citizens want? How do citizens think public servants should behave? Although such questions seem straightforward, little is known about the values citizens expect public servants to uphold. This paper therefore identifies such values through extensive coding of qualitative data from representative samples of United States ( n = 395), Dutch ( n = 369), and South Korean ( n = 379) citizens. Surprisingly, and contrasting to assumptions in th…
Nudge in the news
Governments use nudges to stimulate citizens to exercise, save money and eat healthily. However, nudging is controversial. How the media frames nudge impacts decisions on whether to use this policy instrument. We, therefore, analyzed 443 newspaper articles about nudging. Overall, the media was positive about nudges. Nudging was viewed as an effective and efficient way to change behavior and received considerable support across the political spect…
Socioeconomic Status and Public Sector Worker Stereotypes
What views do people have of public sector workers? Public sector workers are often portrayed negatively. It is unclear, however, to what extent such negative perceptions are shared among different groups in society. Using a large representative survey in the Netherlands, we study whether people's socioeconomic status is related to having more negative stereotypes about public sector workers. Contrary to expectations, education and income are unr…
Compassion, Bureaucrat Bashing, and Public Administration
How citizens behave toward public sector workers is crucial for the well‐being and performance of workers. Scholars have mainly focused on understanding negative citizen behaviors, such as aggression. We study a positive behavior, namely compassionate behavior. We study real compassionate behavior in the form of writing positive encouragement messages that are distributed to social workers in the field. We test if showing difficulties faced by pu…
An open source machine learning framework for efficient and transparent systematic reviews
To help researchers conduct a systematic review or meta-analysis as efficiently and transparently as possible, we designed a tool to accelerate the step of screening titles and abstracts. For many tasks—including but not limited to systematic reviews and meta-analyses—the scientific literature needs to be checked systematically. Scholars and practitioners currently screen thousands of studies by hand to determine which studies to include in their…
Keep your distance for me”
The outbreak of COVID-19 has turned out to be a major challenge to societies all over the globe. Curbing the pandemic requires rapid and extensive behavioural change to limit social interaction, including physical distancing. In this study, we tested the notion that inducing empathy for people vulnerable to the virus may result in actual distancing behaviour beyond the mere motivation to do so. In a large field experiment with a sequential case-c…
Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis
Trust in leaders is central to citizen compliance with public policies. One potential determinant of trust is how leaders resolve conflicts between utilitarian and non-utilitarian ethical principles in moral dilemmas. Past research suggests that utilitarian responses to dilemmas can both erode and enhance trust in leaders: sacrificing some people to save many others ('instrumental harm') reduces trust, while maximizing the welfare of everyone equ…
Discretion from a Psychological Perspective
Working on working together. A systematic review on how healthcare professionals contribute to interprofessional collaboration
Gender mainstreaming planning cultures
This contribution looks at strategies for gender mainstreaming (GM) in planning practice applying gender/diversity design criteria. It offers a critical discussion of the ‘city of proximity’ (CoP) as a guiding principle for genderaware planning. Examples of guidelines and handbooks from different planning cultures show that the CoP is a widely adopted model, not only in gender mainstreaming, however it is seldom associated with its feminist origi…
A Systematic Review of Field Experiments in Public Administration
Field experiments have become popular in public administration. By allowing for the identification of causal effects in realistic settings, field experiments may become central in several research agendas of relevance to the field. Conducting field experiments is difficult and problems often occur along the way. However, researchers new to the method have few resources in public administration to consider the problems that arise when conducting f…
Organizational Citizenship Behavior in the Public Sector
This article presents a systematic literature review of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) in the public sector. The findings show that although OCB is gaining more attention in the public sector, research often does not take specific public sector characteristics or concepts into account. Based on the available evidence, the authors develop a framework of antecedents, outcomes, mediators, and moderators of OCB. Three areas for future rese…
Designing to Debias
Public managers’ decisions are affected by cognitive biases. For instance , employees’ previous year's performance ratings influence new ratings irrespective of actual performance. Nevertheless , experimental knowledge of public managers’ cognitive biases is limited, and debiasing techniques have rarely been studied. Using a survey experiment on 1 , 221 public managers and employees in the United Kingdom, this research (1) replicates two experime…
Nudging healthcare professionals towards evidence-based medicine
Translating medical evidence into practice is difficult. Key challenges in applying evidence-based medicine are information overload and that evidence needs to be used in context by healthcare professionals. Nudging (i.e. softly steering) healthcare professionals towards utilizing evidence-based medicine may be a feasible possibility. This systematic scoping review is the first overview of nudging healthcare professionals in relation to evidence-…
Which Clients are Deserving of Help? A Theoretical Model and Experimental Test
Street-level bureaucrats have to cope with high workloads, role conflicts, and limited resources. An important way in which they cope with this is by prioritizing some clients, while disregarding others. When deciding on whom to prioritize, street-level bureaucrats often assess whether a client is deserving of help. However, to date the notion of the deserving client is in a black box as it is largely unclear which client attributes activate the …
Coping During Public Service Delivery
Frontline workers, such as teachers and social workers, often experience stress when delivering public services to clients, for instance because of high workloads. They adapt by coping, using such practices as breaking or bending rules for clients, or rationing services. Although coping is recognized as an important response to the problems of frontline work, the public administration field lacks a comprehensive view of coping. The first contribu…
Behavioral Public Administration
Behavioral public administration is the analysis of public administration from the micro‐level perspective of individual behavior and attitudes by drawing on insights from psychology on the behavior of individuals and groups. The authors discuss how scholars in public administration currently draw on theories and methods from psychology and related fields and point to research in public administration that could benefit from further integration. …
The Necessity of Discretion
The topic of discretion continues to be hotly debated in policy design and policy implementation. In top-down theories, discretion at the frontline is often seen as a control problem: discretion should be avoided as it can mean that the policy is not implemented as intended. Conversely, bottom-up theories state that discretion can help policy implementers tailor a policy to specific circumstances. However, there has been little systematic researc…
The Relationship Between Coping and Job Performance
Workers on the frontline of public service, such as teachers and social workers, cannot provide unlimited support to all their clients, because of among else scarce time and money. To deal with this, they use various coping strategies. We analyze one important coping strategy such “street-level bureaucrats” can use: prioritizing motivated clients over unmotivated clients. We study the effect of this coping strategy on job performance, as rated by…
Serving Clients When the Server Crashes
Implementing e‐government in the contemporary American state is challenging. E‐government places high technical demands on agencies and citizens in an environment of budget austerity and political polarization. Governments developing e‐government policies often mobilize frontline workers—also termed “street‐level bureaucrats”—to help citizens gain access to services. However, we know little about how frontline workers cope in these challenging ci…
Leadership and Meaningful Work in the Public Sector
There have been many important studies on leadership in the public administration discipline; however, scholarly inquiry still lags behind related disciplines such as psychology and business administration. This article helps fill that gap by analyzing the role that public leaders play in making work more meaningful for their employees, which, in turn, has a positive influence on employee job outcomes. Specifically, the authors analyze the mediat…
Measuring Public Leadership
This article on public leadership contributes to the literature by focusing on the ‘public’ aspect of leadership and developing quantitative scales for measuring four public leadership roles. These roles all refer to the extent to which public leaders actively support their employees in dealing with public sector issues: (1) accountability leadership, (2) rule‐following leadership, (3) political loyalty leadership, and (4) network governance lead…
Explaining the Willingness of Public Professionals to Implement Public Policies
The willingness of public professionals to implement policy programmes is important for achieving policy performance. However, few scholars have developed and tested systematic frameworks to analyze this issue. In this study, we address this by building and testing an appropriate framework. The aims have been: (1) to build a three‐factor model (policy content, organizational context, and personality characteristics) for explaining willingness to …
Designing to Debias
Public managers’ decisions are affected by cognitive biases. For instance , employees’ previous year's performance ratings influence new ratings irrespective of actual performance. Nevertheless , experimental knowledge of public managers’ cognitive biases is limited, and debiasing techniques have rarely been studied. Using a survey experiment on 1 , 221 public managers and employees in the United Kingdom, this research (1) replicates two experime…
Public Policy and Behavior Change
Changing behavior is often necessary to tackle societal problems, such as obesity, alcohol abuse, and debt problems. This article has two goals. First, it aims to highlight how governments can try to change the behavior of citizens. Government can use policy instruments to do so, including incentives, bans and mandates, information campaigns, and nudges. However, the government should not be a manipulator that applies policy instruments without s…
Financial Rewards Do Not Stimulate Coproduction
Western governments are increasingly trying to stimulate citizens to coproduce public services by, among other strategies, offering them financial incentives. However, there are competing views on whether financial incentives stimulate coproduction. While some argue that financial incentives increase citizens' willingness to coproduce, others suggest that incentives decrease their willingness (i.e., crowding out). To test these competing expectat…
Explaining the willingness of public professionals to implement new policies
Nowadays, many public policies focus on economic values, such as efficiency and client choice. Public professionals often show resistance to implementing such policies. We analyse this problem using an interdisciplinary approach. From public administration, we draw on the policy alienation concept, which consists of five dimensions: strategic powerlessness, tactical powerlessness, operational powerlessness, societal meaninglessness and client mea…
Do consistent government policies lead to greater meaningfulness and legitimacy on the front line
We investigate the impact of policy consistency on frontline workers’ perceptions of policy meaningfulness and legitimacy. The results from an experiment involving 779 teachers indicate that policy consistency does have a positive effect on legitimacy and to a lesser extent on meaningfulness. However, the extent depends on policy content and the degree of autonomy. Overall, our findings emphasize the potential positive impact of policy consistenc…
Organizational Citizenship Behavior in the Public Sector
This article presents a systematic literature review of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) in the public sector. The findings show that although OCB is gaining more attention in the public sector, research often does not take specific public sector characteristics or concepts into account. Based on the available evidence, the authors develop a framework of antecedents, outcomes, mediators, and moderators of OCB. Three areas for future rese…
Formalization and consistency heighten organizational rule following
This study examines the attributes of organizational rules that influence rule following. Rule following fosters organizational effectiveness by aligning individual behaviours with organizational preference. While a range of theoretical explanations have been offered for rule following, the characteristics of rule design and implementation have received less empirical attention. Borrowing from the green tape theory of effective rules, this study …
Core values for ideal civil servants
What do citizens want? How do citizens think public servants should behave? Although such questions seem straightforward, little is known about the values citizens expect public servants to uphold. This paper therefore identifies such values through extensive coding of qualitative data from representative samples of United States ( n = 395), Dutch ( n = 369), and South Korean ( n = 379) citizens. Surprisingly, and contrasting to assumptions in th…
Reflecting on the Role of Literature in Qualitative Public Administration Research
When undertaking qualitative research, public administration scholars must walk a thin line between being theoretically sensitive and imposing preconceived ideas on their work. This article identifies opportunities and pitfalls in using literature in qualitative public administration research. Although the opportunities are already well known within the discipline, the pitfalls remain underexposed. The authors identify potential pitfalls by using…
Changing public service delivery
Co-creation – where citizens and public organizations work together to deal with societal issues – is increasingly considered as a fertile solution for various public service delivery problems. During co-creation, citizens are not mere consumers, but are actively engaged in building resilient societies. In this study, we analyze if and how state and governance traditions influence learning and policy change within a context of co-creation. We com…
Innovation in the public sector
Innovation in the public sector is high on the agenda of politicians, civil servants and societal organizations. This attention in practice is mirrored in an increasing number of scholarly articles. In this introduction to the special issue on public sector innovation, we discuss how the scholarly perspectives on innovation have changed. Previously, it was assumed that innovation could be organized within organizations: if your organization had t…
Getting what you expect
This study tests whether civil servant stereotypes affect how citizens experience public service delivery. Using a pre‐registered survey vignette experiment ( n = 1130), we activate civil servant stereotypes (negative, positive, or control) and assess whether this affects subsequent perceptions and evaluations of public services. Results indicate that stereotypes shape experiences, with the activation of negative stereotypes leading to lower leve…
The Effects of Work Alienation and Policy Alienation on Behavior of Public Employees
Public employees are confronted with various pressures, such as increased work demands and the need to implement controversial policies. This study uses work alienation and policy alienation models to analyze work and policy pressures. Based on a survey of 790 respondents, it was first found that work alienation results in less work effort and more intention to leave. Second, policy alienation negatively affects behavioral support for a policy an…
Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis
Trust in leaders is central to citizen compliance with public policies. One potential determinant of trust is how leaders resolve conflicts between utilitarian and non-utilitarian ethical principles in moral dilemmas. Past research suggests that utilitarian responses to dilemmas can both erode and enhance trust in leaders: sacrificing some people to save many others ('instrumental harm') reduces trust, while maximizing the welfare of everyone equ…
Learning While Governing
The principal-agent framework is one of the best known frameworks in economics and beyond. It can be used to analyze problems when one party (the agent) is asked to perform actions for another party (the principal). In political science and public administration, the principal-agent framework is often used to analyze the relationship between politicians (the principals) and civil servants (the agents). Politicians have to rely on civil servants f…
Nudges can be both autonomy-preserving and effective
Nudges are widely employed tools within organizations, but they are often criticized for harming autonomy and for being ineffective. We assess these two criticisms simultaneously: can nudges be both autonomy-preserving and effective in changing behavior? We developed three nudges – an opinion leader nudge, a rule-of-thumb and self-nudges – to reduce a particularly sticky behavior: email use. In a survey experiment of 4,112 healthcare employees, w…
Policy Alienation of Public Professionals
Today, many public professionals feel estranged from the policy programmes they implement; that is, they experience ‘policy alienation’. This is of concern as, for satisfactory implementation, some identification with the policy is required. We conceptualize policy alienation based on the sociological concept of work alienation, and show how this can be used in policy implementation research. Studying a Dutch case of professionals implementing a …
Explaining the willingness of public professionals to implement new policies
Nowadays, many public policies focus on economic values, such as efficiency and client choice. Public professionals often show resistance to implementing such policies. We analyse this problem using an interdisciplinary approach. From public administration, we draw on the policy alienation concept, which consists of five dimensions: strategic powerlessness, tactical powerlessness, operational powerlessness, societal meaninglessness and client mea…
Reflecting on the Role of Literature in Qualitative Public Administration Research
When undertaking qualitative research, public administration scholars must walk a thin line between being theoretically sensitive and imposing preconceived ideas on their work. This article identifies opportunities and pitfalls in using literature in qualitative public administration research. Although the opportunities are already well known within the discipline, the pitfalls remain underexposed. The authors identify potential pitfalls by using…
Explaining the Willingness of Public Professionals to Implement Public Policies
The willingness of public professionals to implement policy programmes is important for achieving policy performance. However, few scholars have developed and tested systematic frameworks to analyze this issue. In this study, we address this by building and testing an appropriate framework. The aims have been: (1) to build a three‐factor model (policy content, organizational context, and personality characteristics) for explaining willingness to …
Policy Alienation of Public Professionals
Currently, there is an intense debate on the pressures facing public professionals during policy implementation. Frequently, professionals have difficulty identifying with new policies, resulting in diminished policy performance. The author examines this problem using the concept of “policy alienation” and develops and tests a scale for its measurement. Policy alienation is associated conceptually with five subdimensions: strategic powerlessness,…
Facing off with Scylla and Charybdis
Measurement invariance (MI) is a pre-requisite for comparing latent variable scores across groups. The current paper introduces the concept of approximate MI building on the work of Muthén and Asparouhov and their application of Bayesian Structural Equation Modeling (BSEM) in the software Mplus. They showed that with BSEM exact zeros constraints can be replaced with approximate zeros to allow for minimal steps away from strict MI, still yielding …
Policy Alienation and the Power of Professionals
This eloquent book by Lars Tummers develops a framework to understand these important issues with policy implementation, using the innovative concept of 'policy alienation'. Policies in healthcare, social security, and education are analyzed. The conclusions challenge the common assertions regarding the reasons why professionals resist policies. For instance, the impact of professional influence, often viewed as an end in itself, is nuanced. Lars…
Leadership and Meaningful Work in the Public Sector
There have been many important studies on leadership in the public administration discipline; however, scholarly inquiry still lags behind related disciplines such as psychology and business administration. This article helps fill that gap by analyzing the role that public leaders play in making work more meaningful for their employees, which, in turn, has a positive influence on employee job outcomes. Specifically, the authors analyze the mediat…
Policy Implementation, Street-level Bureaucracy, and the Importance of Discretion
Street-level bureaucrats implementing public policies have a certain degree of autonomy – or discretion – in their work. Following Lipsky, discretion has received wide attention in the policy implementation literature. However, scholars have not developed theoretical frameworks regarding the effects of discretion, which were then tested using large samples. This study therefore develops a theoretical framework regarding two main effects of discre…
L’habitat participatif en Europe
À partir d’enquêtes de terrain réalisées à Tübingen et Fribourg (Allemagne), Almere (Pays-Bas) et Strasbourg (France), les auteures interrogent le développement de l’habitat participatif en Europe, dans une double perspective, sociologique et urbanistique. L’habitat participatif constitue pour des ménages de classe moyenne une réponse pragmatique face aux difficultés croissantes d’accès au logement. Plus encore, il renouvelle la conception du log…
The Management of Change in Public Organizations
This article presents a review of the recent literature on change management in public organizations and sets out to explore the extent to which this literature has responded to earlier critiques regarding the lack of (public) contextual factors. The review includes 133 articles published on this topic in the period from 2000 to 2010. The articles are analysed based on the themes of the context, content, process, outcome, and leadership of change…
Learning While Governing
The principal-agent framework is one of the best known frameworks in economics and beyond. It can be used to analyze problems when one party (the agent) is asked to perform actions for another party (the principal). In political science and public administration, the principal-agent framework is often used to analyze the relationship between politicians (the principals) and civil servants (the agents). Politicians have to rely on civil servants f…
Understanding co-housing from a planning perspective
The re-emergence of Co-housing matches with the current rise of ‘DIY’, ‘Rurbanizing’ and ‘New Commons’ trends in Western European countries. Publications and websites of co-housing networks show that the ambitions of the initiatives are very similar internationally, and there is a strong information flow between projects and crossing borders. There are often high expectations, both by inhabitants and urban policy makers about the resilience and i…
Introduction to the special issue
Special thanks to Melissa Fernandez and Helen Jarvis for assistance on the English-language checks
Coping During Public Service Delivery
Frontline workers, such as teachers and social workers, often experience stress when delivering public services to clients, for instance because of high workloads. They adapt by coping, using such practices as breaking or bending rules for clients, or rationing services. Although coping is recognized as an important response to the problems of frontline work, the public administration field lacks a comprehensive view of coping. The first contribu…
The Effects of Work Alienation and Policy Alienation on Behavior of Public Employees
Public employees are confronted with various pressures, such as increased work demands and the need to implement controversial policies. This study uses work alienation and policy alienation models to analyze work and policy pressures. Based on a survey of 790 respondents, it was first found that work alienation results in less work effort and more intention to leave. Second, policy alienation negatively affects behavioral support for a policy an…
Serving Clients When the Server Crashes
Implementing e‐government in the contemporary American state is challenging. E‐government places high technical demands on agencies and citizens in an environment of budget austerity and political polarization. Governments developing e‐government policies often mobilize frontline workers—also termed “street‐level bureaucrats”—to help citizens gain access to services. However, we know little about how frontline workers cope in these challenging ci…
Measuring Public Leadership
This article on public leadership contributes to the literature by focusing on the ‘public’ aspect of leadership and developing quantitative scales for measuring four public leadership roles. These roles all refer to the extent to which public leaders actively support their employees in dealing with public sector issues: (1) accountability leadership, (2) rule‐following leadership, (3) political loyalty leadership, and (4) network governance lead…
Stéréotypes de genre dans la pratique de l'urbanisme
Traditionnellement, les projets d'aménagement de territoires « inclusifs » ciblaient des « groupes vulnérables », comme « élément du décor » et non pas comme des acteurs. Dans les années 1990, des chercheuses féministes européennes et des urbanistes ont développé de nouvelles méthodes pour pallier cette carence. L'évaluation de ces nouvelles approches de planification, fondée sur l'« approche intégrée de l'égalité », montre toutefois une prise en…
Bringing History In
Research mainly looked at problems public professionals have with specific policy programmes. However, policies are not developed in a vacuum. Public professionals are often confronted with (a series of) policy changes, intended to refine, replace or complement other policies. This policy accumulation results in professionals having a certain predisposition towards policies in general. To conceptualize this predisposition, we introduce the term g…
The re-emergence of self-managed co-housing in Europe
This article reviews a decade of co-housing studies and publications, to identify major themes and research gaps. Generally, co-housing is seen as a promising model for urban development, and most empirical case studies report active and diverse communities, creating and maintaining affordable living environments. However, numbers are small and there is as yet no quantitative evidence to substantiate the claims. Nevertheless, important lessons ca…
Behavioral Public Administration
Behavioral public administration is the analysis of public administration from the micro‐level perspective of individual behavior and attitudes by drawing on insights from psychology on the behavior of individuals and groups. The authors discuss how scholars in public administration currently draw on theories and methods from psychology and related fields and point to research in public administration that could benefit from further integration. …
Learning from co-housing initiatives — Between Passivhaus engineers and active inhabitants
Following the UN world summits on Climate Change (Paris 2015) and Habitat (Quito 2016), most European cities assume an active role to implement internationally agreed goals related to climate change, translated in the so-called New Urban Agenda. At the same time, the urban housing market is increasingly inaccessible for low- and middle-income households. To overcome problems such as failing housing supply and high energy-bills, groups of resident…
Changing public service delivery
Co-creation – where citizens and public organizations work together to deal with societal issues – is increasingly considered as a fertile solution for various public service delivery problems. During co-creation, citizens are not mere consumers, but are actively engaged in building resilient societies. In this study, we analyze if and how state and governance traditions influence learning and policy change within a context of co-creation. We com…
The Relationship Between Coping and Job Performance
Workers on the frontline of public service, such as teachers and social workers, cannot provide unlimited support to all their clients, because of among else scarce time and money. To deal with this, they use various coping strategies. We analyze one important coping strategy such “street-level bureaucrats” can use: prioritizing motivated clients over unmotivated clients. We study the effect of this coping strategy on job performance, as rated by…
Political science (50 works) · Public relations (40 works) · Psychology (31 works) · Public Policy and Administration Research (27 works) · Business (21 works) · Social Psychology (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Economics (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Social Psychology (18 works)