The American Review of Public Administration
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (US) |
| ISSN | 0275-0740 / 1552-3357 |
| Scopus | 16051 |
| Wikidata | Q7713541 |
| OpenAlex | S106702950 |
| MAG | 106702950 |
| Website | http://arp.sagepub.com/ |
| Total publications | 1.345 |
| Coverage period | 1981 - 2026 |
| Country | US |
| Language | EN |
| Indexing | Scopus indexed |
| Cited by | 10.863 |
| Impact factor | 2.373 |
| SJR | 1.221 (Q1) |
| SNIP | 1.302 |
| CiteScore | 4.7 |
| h-index | 39 |
| i10-index | 318 |
| 2-year mean citedness | 0.2642 |
| Overton policy citations | 1 |
| Female authorship share | 47.3% |
This journal focuses on public administration, a field within political science and policy studies. Its intersection with social anthropology is loose and anthropological content is likely occasional rather than structural
Public Administration · Sociology and Political Science · Marketing · Accounting and Organizational Management · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Disaster Management and Resilience · E-Government and Public Services · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Evaluation and Performance Assessment
Transnational Nonprofit Action
This article explores transnational nonprofit action through diaspora-led nonprofit organizations in the United States (U.S.) and their funding and support of public goods and services in the home country. Diaspora communities around the world make contributions to their homelands in various ways that have impact on public governance. Specifically, diaspora members engage in philanthropic giving behaviors towards their countries of origin, includ…
Exploring How Demand and Supply Knowledge Can Improve Centralized Public Health Procurement
Despite the growing shift towards procurement centralization among governments around the world, questions remain as to how to increase purchasing within centralized frameworks. While centralized purchasing offers many benefits related to efficiency and quality control, users often prefer more flexible options for purchasing. An unanswered question is how knowledge of user requirements and market trends leads to framework agreements that reduce t…
When Markets and Democracy Coincide
This article investigates the effects of participation on performance assessment in government, for-profit, and nonprofit organizations that deliver public services. In addition to examining the impact of participation on public assessments of performance, we also test the perceived tradeoff between efficiency and participation, as well as the sectoral differences in the participation-performance relationship. We conducted a preregistered vignett…
Conceptualizing and Measuring the Rule of Law in Public Administration—Regulations, Organization, and Decision-Making
The rule of law is foundational to Public Administration (PA), yet the field has long lacked a clear conceptualization of what the rule of law entails and, furthermore, an objective measurement system. Grounded in the “thin” conception of the rule of law and integrated within the public administration context, we propose a three-dimensional framework: Regulations, Organization, and Decision-making. We operationalize this framework as the Public A…
“You Keep Using That Word. I do not Think it Means What you Think it Means”
Fairness in tax policy is a widely shared goal among scholars, policymakers, and the public, yet equity remains a contested concept. This study examines interjurisdictional equity in the context of local option taxes (LOTs), which have become an increasingly significant revenue source for local governments. While much of the existing research on LOTs focuses on competition, rate setting, and adoption, this paper considers how different dimensions…
Experimental Evidence on the Effect of Decision Justification Strategies on Citizen Perceptions of Government
Abundant literature documents a range of factors that shape citizen perceptions of government. However, attention to how the justification of a policy decision shapes citizen perceptions remains limited. In this study, we consider how justifications influence citizen trust and legitimacy through a 2 × 2 × 2 pre-registered factorial survey experiment that manipulates justification strategy, policy position, and policy type. Results indicate that o…
Personality Traits and Agency Politicization
Not all federal employees experience the presence of political appointees in their agencies in the same way. Drawing on a 2022 survey of 1,306 federal bureaucrats in the United States, we show that personality traits—especially Neuroticism—condition how formal politicization translates into perceived political influence. Ordered logistic regression models reveal that, when formal politicization increases, more Neurotic employees are significantly…
Procurement with a Purpose
This study examines how the salience of social movements influences public procurement decisions and how agency mission shapes these responses. Findings show heightened social movement salience correlates with greater spending on minority-owned businesses, particularly among agencies without explicit equity-oriented missions. The results underscore the moderating role of organizational missions in shaping responsiveness to external pressures. Thi…
Whose Voices Are Being Heard? The Impacts of Public Participation on Policy Attention in China
The growing prominence of environmental research in public administration underscores the need to examine how public participation shapes environmental regulations. Yet, the impact of public participation on government policy attention remains underexplored. This article explores whether public participation has practical implications for policymaking or merely serves a normative role within authoritarian environmentalism. According to the visibi…
Authoritarian Attitudes and Public Service Motivation
Amidst declining public trust in the U.S. government, understanding what shapes public views of different levels of government is vital to gaining public support and confidence. This study investigates how authoritarian attitudes, defined as dispositional preferences for conformity, obedience, and conventional social order over autonomy and independent thinking (Feldman & Stenner, 1997), shape public trust across the federal, state, and local gov…
Military Personnel, Order Following, and Anti-Democratic Leadership
Over the last decade, elected leaders across a number of established democracies have sought to subvert democratic processes. These moments create a dilemma for public employees who have competing allegiances to neutral competence and protecting popular sovereignty. Some recent work has explored how public employees respond to this dilemma but, to date, few studies have focused on military personnel. This is an important omission because, histori…
Management Impact on Performance in Public, Nonprofit, and For-Profit Organizations
While numerous studies support the notion that management matters for performance, the varying nature of its impact across the public, nonprofit, and for-profit sectors remains underexplored in the literature. This article examines how management affects performance differently across these sectors by focusing on tangible management practices such as internal management, the exploitation of new opportunities, and strategies for buffering environm…
Communicating the Evidence
As movements to use evidence to inform policy have gained traction, so have calls for greater transparency of that evidence. Indeed, transparency research suggests that disclosing the evidence justifying a new policy may positively impact citizens’ support for the policy, voluntary compliance, and even coproduction. Still, outcomes of transparency are nuanced. Research indicates that citizens’ understanding of government information is critical f…
Hometown Transparency
This exploratory study surveyed 330 U.S. public record requesters on their local, state, and federal experiences and behaviors. Findings showed requesters with more experience submitting requests to local and state governments had better odds of successfully receiving their records. Federal requesting experience was negatively associated with receiving requested records. Structural equation analysis also showed a significant relationship between …
Challenges to Public Management and the Institutions of the U.S. Federal Government
Enhancing Service Delivery Efficiency Through Inter-Local Collaboration
Fragmentation among local governments often leads to inefficiencies in public service delivery. This challenge is particularly salient in delivering services for small communities. This study applies the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) framework and network analysis to examine how inter-local collaborative agreements can improve cost efficiency in water and wastewater services in Iowa. Integrating the theories of economies of scale and tran…
The Impacts of Political Leaders’ Social Capital on Policy Success
Network approaches to collaborative leadership suggest that local leaders’ success depends on activities that connect their organization to diverse stakeholders and resources. Drawing on the literature on managerial networking and a mixed-methods approach that includes 38 semi-structured interviews and a survey of 185 New York State municipal leaders, we explore the impact of leaders’ networking efforts on food access and security in their commun…
Organizational Memories of Extreme Events
The increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events require organizations to effectively manage the threats these phenomena pose. To respond to these challenges, public agencies often turn to their organizational memories for guidance. Organizational memories support information processing capacity, facilitate sensemaking, and legitimize and speed up decision-making processes. While memories influence different aspects of organization…
Navigating Economic Turbulence
Property taxes serve as the largest own-source revenue source for local governments in the United States. Unlike property values, which fluctuate with the economy, assessed values—the foundation of property taxes—are not routinely updated and reassessments often occur infrequently. The timing of these reassessments holds significant implications, particularly during economic fluctuations. For instance, reassessing during periods of depressed prop…
You Have One Job
In recent decades, special districts have come to outnumber general purpose governments in the United States. Yet, little is known about special district workforces and how they compare to general purpose government workforces. Special districts and general purpose governments provide many of the same services (e.g., parks maintenance, drinking water and sewer provision, libraries) and ostensibly have similar workforce needs for similar functions…
Network Embeddedness and Monitoring Mechanisms in Government-Nonprofit Public Service Delivery Agreements
We examine monitoring decisions made by governments when delivering services with nonprofit organizations in formal agreements. Our analysis suggests that the breadth of monitoring mechanisms that governments employ is more complex than shown in previous studies. We coded agreements in accordance with mechanisms identified in extant literature and employed inductive content analysis to establish 37 previously unexplored monitoring mechanisms. We …
Sanctions on Local Government Officials
Sanctions play a pivotal role in ensuring accountability among local government officials. The existing literature, however, falls short in characterizing sanction measures and examining how sanction decisions are made in practice. We address this critical research gap by leveraging an innovative data set encompassing all sanction announcements against local officials during the most recent public health crisis in China. Beyond a rich descriptive…
Socioeconomic Shadows
Drawing on theoretical perspectives from the literature on childhood socialization and cultural capital, we investigate how the socioeconomic status (SES) background of public administrators shapes their relationships with elected political officials and their staff. Analyses of over 30 years of survey data indicate that American state agency directors from higher SES backgrounds report more frequent interaction with political principals, suggest…
Checked Out
Public library employees in the United States constitute a fundamental example of street-level bureaucrats who endure pressure from politicization, affecting how they interact with the public. The politicization of public jobs may produce burnout and health issues, and embattled employees may even leave their profession. This study uses the job demands-resources model (JD-R) to investigate whether demands resulting from politicization increase tu…
A Meta-Analytic Review of Transformational Leadership Research in Public Administration
Despite the increasing research attention devoted to transformational leadership in public administration, there is still concern over whether it is appropriate and effective in the public context. To answer the important question of whether and when transformational leadership is effective, this study meta-analytically reviewed transformational leadership research based on 70 primary studies that include 151 independent effect sizes from 718,601…
Public Value Management
The aim of this article is to clarify the nature of the management style most suited to the emergence of networked governance. The paradigms of traditional public administration and new public management sit uncomfortably with networked governance. In contrast, it is argued the public value management paradigm bases its practice in the systems of dialogue and exchange that characterize networked governance. Ultimately, the strength of public valu…
From Policy “Frames” to “Framing”
The concept of frames or framing, especially cast as “frame analysis,” has an established history in public policy. Taking off from the work of Donald Schön and Martin Rein, we develop the idea of policy analytic fram ing, the more dynamic of the two terms, in ways that strengthen what we see as its promise for a more process-oriented and politically sensitive understanding of the activities it is used to characterize. We argue that such an appro…
Public Deliberation in an Age of Direct Citizen Participation
Citizen participation in the decisions that affect their lives is an imperative of contemporary society. For the first half of the 20th century, citizens relied on public officials and administrators to make decisions about public policy and its implementation. The latter part of the 20th century saw a shift toward greater direct citizen involvement. This trend is expected to grow as democratic societies become more decentralized, interdependent,…
New Media and the Coproduction of Safety
The new media have been argued to strengthen the coproduction of safety by reducing the costs of interactions between government and citizens and providing new communicative potential. Does that lead to relevant additional input from citizens in police work? Or are preexisting interactions reproduced online? This empirical study of police practices in the Netherlands shows that new media indeed strengthen the coproduction of safety by enabling th…
Citizen Attitudes Toward Transparency in Local Government
The proper balance between governmental secrecy and open government is at the forefront of contemporary public debate. Citizens have different degrees of interest in and demand for governmental transparency. Using data from a national online survey of more than 1,800 respondents, we develop several indices to measure citizens' demand for transparency at the local level and explore its correlates. We also examine the correlates of citizens' report…
Metagovernance
Current changes in governing tasks that face the political systems in liberal democracies require governance to be performed in new ways. Governance can no longer take the form of sovereign rule but must be performed through various forms of metagovernance, regulation of self-regulation. The consequence is a transformation of the role that politicians play in the governance of society that endangers representative democracy aswe knowit but does n…
Interagency Communication Networks During Emergencies
This article examines the problem of effective interagency communication among organizations and the role of information technologies to achieve effective communication and decision-making goals in emergencies. It explores what factors contribute to effective interorganizational communication and decision making and what factors inhibit their development. The theoretical framework draws on the literature of emergency communication and social capi…
The Impact of Representative Bureaucracies
Studies of representative bureaucracies are staples of public administration research; however, because of a variety of methodological problems, too few have been able to address the basic "so what?" question. Do bureaucracies with different levels of representativeness produce different policy outputs and have different policy impacts? Our research addresses these inquiries using data from the 67 public school districts in Florida. The analysis …
Reward Preferences among Public and Private Managers
A New Theory for Public Service Management? Toward a (Public) Service-Dominant Approach
This article argues that current public management theory is not fit for purpose—if it ever has been. It argues that it contains two fatal flaws—it focuses on intraorganizational processes at a time when the reality of public services delivery is interorganizational, and it draws upon management theory derived from the experience of the manufacturing sector and which ignores the reality of public services as “services.” The article subsequently a…
Addressing the Citizenship and Democratic Deficits
This article reviews and synthesizes diverse streams of literature to assess the potential of deliberative democracy for American public administration. It asserts that the field should refocus its attention on the role of citizens in the work of government to help address the pervasive citizenship and democratic deficits in the United States. American public administration has an obligation to address these deficits because (a) it is required to…
Representative Bureaucracy
The theory of representative bureaucracy suggests that a public workforce representative of the people in terms of race, ethnicity, and sex will help ensure that the interests of all groups are considered in bureaucratic decision-making processes. The theory posits that the active representation of group interests occurs because individual bureaucrats reflect the views of those who share their demographic backgrounds. Research in the public admin…
Collaborative Public Management
This article analyzes the most important issues, concepts, and ideas in collaborative public management research and practice today. The issues, concepts, and ideas are (a) competing definitions of collaboration; (b) changes in the environment of public management that have encouraged the growth of collaborative public management; (c) “thinking DaVinci”—lateral thinking and interdisciplinarity; (d) the management challenges of working in networks…
Running Government Like a Business
The public sector faces increasing demands to run government like a business, importing privatesector concepts such as entrepreneurism, privatization, treating the citizen like a “customer,” and management techniques derived from the production process. The idea that government should mimic the market is not new in American public administration, but the current situation is particularly intense. The new public management seeks to emphasize effic…
Participatory Governance as Deliberative Empowerment
This article argues that there is a need to enrich the theory of citizen participation and the design of deliberation practices through greater attention to the cultural politics of deliberative space. The article focuses on the ways the social valorization of political space influences basic discursive processes such as who speaks, how knowledge is constituted, what can be said, and who decides. From this perspective, decentralized design princi…
Artificial Intelligence, Discretion, and Bureaucracy
This essay highlights the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in governance and society and explores the relationship between AI, discretion, and bureaucracy. AI is an advanced information communication technology tool (ICT) that changes both the nature of human discretion within a bureaucracy and the structure of bureaucracies. To better understand this relationship, AI, discretion, and bureaucracy are explored in some detail. It is a…
Direct Public Engagement in Local Government
Public engagement is an umbrella term that encompasses numerous methods for bringing people together to address issues of public importance. In this article, we focus on direct public engagement in local government, exploring what we know and proposing areas where more research is needed. We first define direct public engagement and distinguish it from related concepts and terms. We then introduce a simple framework for exploring variations in di…
Governance, Complexity, and Democratic Participation
This article applies complexity theory to urban governance. It is argued that expert-based, hierarchical-instrumental policy making encounters insurmountable obstacles in modern liberal democracies. One of the root causes of this erosion of output legitimacy is the complexity of social systems. Complexity is defined as the density and dynamism of the interactions between the elements of a system. Complexity makes system outcomes unpredictable and…
Public Service Motivation and Job Performance
Perry and Wise (1990) argued that people with high public service motivation (PSM) are more likely than others to choose government jobs, to perform better on the job, and to respond more to nonutilitarian incentives once in government. Using multiple regression and logit analyses on responses by 35,000 federal, white-collar employees to the 1991 Survey of Federal Employees and the 1996 Merit Principles Survey, this article tests the link between…
Does Public Service Motivation Really Make a Difference on the Job Satisfaction and Turnover Intentions of Public Employees
Many in public administration hypothesize that public service motivation (PSM) has a direct positive impact on the attitudes and behaviors of public employees. However, there are inconsistencies in the PSM literature that challenge this hypothesis. This study sought to find out whether person-organization (P-O) fit can provide a reason for these inconsistencies. Specifically, this study explored whether the relationships among PSM, job satisfacti…
Normative and Instrumental Perspectives on Public Participation
A normative literature in political science and public administration calls for enhanced citizen participation in public decisions. However, this approach overlooks the environment that shapes administrative behavior, an oversight likely to hamper reform efforts targeted at achieving the normative goals of participation. The administrative perspective is important because public managers shape participation forums and determine whether public inp…
The Democratic Prospects of Network Governance
This article considers the democratic implications of the shift toward policy making and implementation through networks, integrating articles presented at a 2003 conference on democratic network governance. The authors argue that the effect of increased cross-sectoral and civil society involvement in governing has been to stretch liberal democratic processes to comprise greater numbers of actors involved in lateral network relationships. Althoug…
Government Employees
Are government employees lazier than private-sector employees? Drawing from theories of work motivation and public service motivation, this article examines three public-private differences that might produce different levels of work effort in the two sectors. First, government and business may offer different extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. Second, public and private workers may seek different rewards. Third, public and private workers may diff…
Red Tape and Democracy
Over the past 15 years, political science has paid increasing attention to the feedback effects of policy—the idea that the design of policies has profound effects on how citizens experience government and understand their role in the polity. One concept that is perfectly placed to explain how citizens experience administrative rules is red tape. But even as an impressive empirical scholarship on red tape has grown in recent years, it has focused…
Public Value Pragmatism as the Next Phase of Public Management
New Public Management has now been “new” for more than 15 years, and public administration scholars are calling for new approaches, such as networked governance or collaboration. However, these approaches share with their predecessors the problem that they tend toward a one-best-way orientation. Instead, the authors argue, the next phase should be what they call “public value pragmatism.” In other words, the best management approach to adopt depe…
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The Bureaucrat
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Ethical Theory for the Public Administrator
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Indiana
Diversity and Eclecticism in the Teaching of Organizational Theory
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