James W Douglas
Biographic Data
| ID | 3571802 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James W Douglas |
| GIVEN NAMES | James W |
| FAMILY NAME | Douglas |
| SIGNATURE | DOUGLAS J W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Charlotte |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3804-1337 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 273 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1903 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Regulatory sandboxes and innovation hubs for FinTech
Political tax cycles in the US states
Do politicians behave opportunistically regarding their tax proposals during the election cycle, or do they maintain ideological sincerity? We examine U.S. governors' revenue proposals between the years of 1989 and 2018 to assess gubernatorial behavior during election years. We find that governors, in general, do indeed follow a political budget cycle where they request lower revenues during election years. However, this finding is largely driven…
Do balanced budget practices of U.S. states make sense? Alternatives from the Eurozone
Purpose The purpose of this article is to challenge the balanced budget practices of U.S. state governments and offer alternatives that may lead to better fiscal, economic and policy outcomes. We contend that the norm of balance may be leading U.S. states to make fiscal decisions that result in less-than-ideal outcomes, especially during economic downturns. Design/methodology/approach This is a normative article. We examine the scholarly evidence…
Creating the executive budget process
The recent centennial of the 1921 Budget and Accounting Act presents an opportunity to reconsider the importance of the federal executive budget to American political development. Of particular interest is the apparent shift in political authority from Congress to the president that is sometimes attributed to the Act. The 1921 Act generally marks the rise of the modern presidency, where the president received a durable grant of authority. We exam…
Which managerial reforms facilitate public sector innovation
A key question of public sector innovation (PSI) scholarship is: which factors influence innovation? This paper focuses on managerial practices as drivers of PSI and addresses two research questions. First, how have the main types of managerial reforms—pertaining to marketization, results‐orientation, and collaboration—influenced PSI? Second, how have different features of public sector reform strategies influenced PSI? Using survey data from 19 …
Exploration of the technocratic mentality among European civil servants
Civil servants vary in the degree to which they hold technocratic attitudes. We explore whether bureaucrats’ exposure to politics and politicians is associated with the depoliticization dimension of the technocratic mentality. We use survey data of high-level executives in 19 European countries to explore factors that are associated with executives’ perceptions that removing issues and activities from the realms of politics leads to more farsight…
This time was different
Purpose Since regaining its independence, the Estonian government has followed policies of fiscal consolidation when responding to economic crises. Its response to the COVID-19-crisis has been quite different – it has authorized additional expenditures, cut taxes and incurred considerable debt. This paper gives an overview of the budgetary measures adopted and explores the question: why was it different this time? Design/methodology/approach The …
Comparative Analysis of Financial Bureaucracies of Europe
The broader goal of the paper is to explore one of the core questions in comparative research on public policy and administration: What is more important in influencing public officials’ attitudes towards policymaking − the distinctive administrative style of the country or the specific features of a policy sector? This article is particularly concerned with the attitudes of the public officials working in the field of finance regarding their pol…
What Is the Remedy for State and Local Fiscal Squeeze During the Covid-19 Recession? More Debt, and That Is Okay
The COVID-19 crisis is placing a tremendous fiscal squeeze on state and local governments in the United States. We argue that the federal government should increase its deficit to fill in the fiscal gap. In the absence of sufficient federal assistance, we recommend that states suspend their balanced budget rules and norms and run deficits in their operating budgets to maintain services and meet additional obligations due to the pandemic. A compar…
Comparing Cost Accounting Use across European Countries
Cost accounting in public organizations is not often studied from a comparative perspective , particularly at the national level of government . While it is often claimed that factors such as New Public Management (NPM) and fiscal stress are the primary drivers of government cost accounting , an important but understudied factor is the administrative tradition of the government , which may influence the use of cost accounting and tools like it . …
The Impact of Greater Centralization on the Relevance of Performance Information in European Governments During the Fiscal Crisis
The Great Recession resulted in fiscal crises for governments across the Western world. Our article explores whether, as a result of the crisis, the relevance of performance information in organizational decision-making increased. Furthermore, we examine how centralizing shifts in governmental decision-making processes influenced the shifts in the relevance of performance information for public sector organizations. Using a survey of senior gover…
Fiscal Crisis and Expenditure Cuts
The Great Recession resulted in fiscal crises for governments across the Western world. Significant cuts in government programs and in public administration itself were initiated as many governments scrambled to reduce their growing budget deficits. We are interested in how European governments have reacted during the most recent crisis. In particular, our article explores whether rationally oriented management approaches are associated with targ…
The Impact of Fiscal Crisis on Decision‐Making Processes in European Governments
The Great Recession resulted in fiscal crises for governments across the Western world. Significant cuts in government programs were initiated as many governments scrambled to reduce their growing budget deficits. This article explores how European governments reacted during the recent crisis. In particular, the authors focus on the interlinkages between shifts toward more centralized decision making. The article uses a survey of thousands of pub…
Shifting Constellations of Actors and Their Influence on Policy Diffusion
The existing studies of policy diffusion have paid insufficient attention to how policy actors in the macroenvironment of local jurisdictions influence the process of policy diffusion, what kind of mechanisms drive the interdependent spread of a policy, and how the diffusion process changes over time. We explore, both theoretically and empirically, the role different go‐betweens can play in policy diffusion, what kind of interactions take place b…
Organizational Structure and the Optimal Design of Policymaking Panels
Increasing both the size and diversity of policymaking panels is widely thought to enhance the accuracy of collective policy decisions. This study advances the theoretical conditions in which improving collective accuracy necessitates an efficient trade‐off between a panel's size and its level of organizational diversity. This substitution effect between these organizational characteristics is empirically supported with data on official general‐f…
Politics Can Limit Policy Opportunism in Fiscal Institutions
Governments make policy decisions in the same areas in quite different institutions. Some assign policymaking responsibility to institutions designed to be insulated from myopic partisan and electoral pressures and others do not. In this study, we claim that differences in political context and institutional design constrain the policy choices governments make. Testable propositions based on an analysis of varying electoral incentives and time ho…
Political Appointments, Civil Service Systems, and Bureaucratic Competence
Scholarship on executive politics provides conflicting views about whether staffing administrative agencies through politicized or (politically) autonomous means is the best method for maximizing bureaucratic competence. We offer a theoretical account which maintains that obtaining a proper balance between both types of personnel systems across the supervisory and subordinate levels of an organization will best foster bureaucratic competence. We …
Does agency competition improve the quality of policy analysis? Evidence from OMB and CBO fiscal projections
Public management scholars often claim that agency competition provides an effective institutional check on monopoly authority, and hence, leads to improvement of administrative performance in public sector agencies. This logic was central for creating the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in 1975 to challenge the policy information provided by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). We challenge this conventional wisdom by demonstrating that …
Impoundment at the State Level
Presidential impoundment authority has been given extensive attention in the budgeting literature. Little research, however, has examined impoundment powers at the state level. This research note is an exploratory study of impoundment powers at the state level, focusing primarily on gubernatorial rescission authority. We use a survey of executive budgeting officers to examine the structure, use, and effectiveness of impoundment powers in the stat…
The Politics of Court Budgeting in the States
Judicial independence in American politics has been hailed as a means of preserving individual liberty and minority rights against the actions of the majoritarian branches of government. Recently, however, legal professionals and scholars of the courts have begun to question the magnitude of judicial independence, suggesting that budgeting and finance issues pose a threat to judicial independence. This article explores whether state judiciaries a…
Court strategies in the appropriations process
Little is known about the strategies used by state courts during the appropriations process. This article examines court budgetary practices in the state of Oklahoma. It reveals how court funding works in Oklahoma, what strategies are used by the state courts, and which factors are most important in determining the success of the courts in getting the funds they need. It shows that the judiciary is not necessarily at the mercy of the other branch…
State Court Budgeting and Judicial Independence
Perceived assaults on the independence of the judiciary have called new attention to how courts obtain their funding. Little scholarly activity has examined the question of how courts negotiate the politics of budgeting in state arenas. Expanding our knowledge in this area is necessary if we are to understand fully how budgeting affects the ability of the judiciary to effectively play its vital role as an independent branch in American government…
Redirection in Georgia
The budgeting reform literature is replete with examples of reforms such as performance budgeting, program budgeting, and zero-base budgeting that have failed to achieve their stated goals. This article analyzes a new budgetary reform that has been introduced in the state of Georgia, which appears to be accomplishing what its proponents have pronounced. This reform is known as redirection. The article defines redirection, explains how it works, a…
Determinants of Graduate Research Productivity in Doctoral Programs of Public Administration
Given that research is the first step in improved practice, how can public administration doctoral programs train more productive research scholars? This article reports details on the first systematic attempt to answer this question empirically. Specifically, the authors collect data from 47 NASPAA-affiliated doctoral programs and test conventional wisdom distilled from the literature. Three factors prove to be important in doctoral programs tha…
Response to Guyot, Rohrbaugh, and Andersen
Political Appointments, Civil Service Systems, and Bureaucratic Competence
Scholarship on executive politics provides conflicting views about whether staffing administrative agencies through politicized or (politically) autonomous means is the best method for maximizing bureaucratic competence. We offer a theoretical account which maintains that obtaining a proper balance between both types of personnel systems across the supervisory and subordinate levels of an organization will best foster bureaucratic competence. We …
Maternal Care and Mental Health
The Impact of Fiscal Crisis on Decision‐Making Processes in European Governments
The Great Recession resulted in fiscal crises for governments across the Western world. Significant cuts in government programs were initiated as many governments scrambled to reduce their growing budget deficits. This article explores how European governments reacted during the recent crisis. In particular, the authors focus on the interlinkages between shifts toward more centralized decision making. The article uses a survey of thousands of pub…
Shifting Constellations of Actors and Their Influence on Policy Diffusion
The existing studies of policy diffusion have paid insufficient attention to how policy actors in the macroenvironment of local jurisdictions influence the process of policy diffusion, what kind of mechanisms drive the interdependent spread of a policy, and how the diffusion process changes over time. We explore, both theoretically and empirically, the role different go‐betweens can play in policy diffusion, what kind of interactions take place b…
Politics Can Limit Policy Opportunism in Fiscal Institutions
Governments make policy decisions in the same areas in quite different institutions. Some assign policymaking responsibility to institutions designed to be insulated from myopic partisan and electoral pressures and others do not. In this study, we claim that differences in political context and institutional design constrain the policy choices governments make. Testable propositions based on an analysis of varying electoral incentives and time ho…
Does agency competition improve the quality of policy analysis? Evidence from OMB and CBO fiscal projections
Public management scholars often claim that agency competition provides an effective institutional check on monopoly authority, and hence, leads to improvement of administrative performance in public sector agencies. This logic was central for creating the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in 1975 to challenge the policy information provided by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). We challenge this conventional wisdom by demonstrating that …
Organizational Structure and the Optimal Design of Policymaking Panels
Increasing both the size and diversity of policymaking panels is widely thought to enhance the accuracy of collective policy decisions. This study advances the theoretical conditions in which improving collective accuracy necessitates an efficient trade‐off between a panel's size and its level of organizational diversity. This substitution effect between these organizational characteristics is empirically supported with data on official general‐f…
Delinquency and Social Class
J. W. B. DOUGLAS, J. M. ROSS, W. A. HAMMOND, D. G. MULLIGAN; DELINQUENCY AND SOCIAL CLASS, The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 6, Issue 3, 1 July 19
Determinants of Graduate Research Productivity in Doctoral Programs of Public Administration
Given that research is the first step in improved practice, how can public administration doctoral programs train more productive research scholars? This article reports details on the first systematic attempt to answer this question empirically. Specifically, the authors collect data from 47 NASPAA-affiliated doctoral programs and test conventional wisdom distilled from the literature. Three factors prove to be important in doctoral programs tha…
Comparing Cost Accounting Use across European Countries
Cost accounting in public organizations is not often studied from a comparative perspective , particularly at the national level of government . While it is often claimed that factors such as New Public Management (NPM) and fiscal stress are the primary drivers of government cost accounting , an important but understudied factor is the administrative tradition of the government , which may influence the use of cost accounting and tools like it . …
Fiscal Crisis and Expenditure Cuts
The Great Recession resulted in fiscal crises for governments across the Western world. Significant cuts in government programs and in public administration itself were initiated as many governments scrambled to reduce their growing budget deficits. We are interested in how European governments have reacted during the most recent crisis. In particular, our article explores whether rationally oriented management approaches are associated with targ…
The People and the Party System
Differences in Test Score and in the Gaining of Selective Places for Scottish Children and Those in England and Wales
The National Survey is a longitudinal study of 5,000 boys and girls born in 1946. In this paper the test scores and allocation to selective courses of children living in Scotland are compared with those in England and Wales. The Scottish pupils were superior to the English and Welsh in the tests of sentence completion and reading at 8 years, in arithmetic at 11 years and in mathematics at 15 years, whereas the English and Welsh were superior in t…
Which managerial reforms facilitate public sector innovation
A key question of public sector innovation (PSI) scholarship is: which factors influence innovation? This paper focuses on managerial practices as drivers of PSI and addresses two research questions. First, how have the main types of managerial reforms—pertaining to marketization, results‐orientation, and collaboration—influenced PSI? Second, how have different features of public sector reform strategies influenced PSI? Using survey data from 19 …
State Court Budgeting and Judicial Independence
Perceived assaults on the independence of the judiciary have called new attention to how courts obtain their funding. Little scholarly activity has examined the question of how courts negotiate the politics of budgeting in state arenas. Expanding our knowledge in this area is necessary if we are to understand fully how budgeting affects the ability of the judiciary to effectively play its vital role as an independent branch in American government…
Social class differences in health and survival during the first two years of life; the results of a national survey
This paper compares social class differences in mortality and morbidity in a national sample of 5380 children born in March 1946 and followed up when they were 2 years old. There are significant social class differences in mortality during the first year but not during the second. If all classes had the same mortality rates as the well-to-do, some 4000 lives would be saved in the first month of life and 6300 in the rest of the first year. A consi…
Exploration of the technocratic mentality among European civil servants
Civil servants vary in the degree to which they hold technocratic attitudes. We explore whether bureaucrats’ exposure to politics and politicians is associated with the depoliticization dimension of the technocratic mentality. We use survey data of high-level executives in 19 European countries to explore factors that are associated with executives’ perceptions that removing issues and activities from the realms of politics leads to more farsight…
Longitudinal surveys and the study of social mobility
The Effects of Absence on Primary School Performance
Detailed absence records are available for 3,273 primary school children from the National Survey of Health and Development. They are grouped in seven categories, according to the history of school attendances between 6 1/2 and 10 1/2 years. In the upper middle classes the eleven-year mental ability and school performance test scores are unaffected by the amount of absence and by the age distribution of the absences. In all other social classes, …
Political tax cycles in the US states
Do politicians behave opportunistically regarding their tax proposals during the election cycle, or do they maintain ideological sincerity? We examine U.S. governors' revenue proposals between the years of 1989 and 2018 to assess gubernatorial behavior during election years. We find that governors, in general, do indeed follow a political budget cycle where they request lower revenues during election years. However, this finding is largely driven…
Creating the executive budget process
The recent centennial of the 1921 Budget and Accounting Act presents an opportunity to reconsider the importance of the federal executive budget to American political development. Of particular interest is the apparent shift in political authority from Congress to the president that is sometimes attributed to the Act. The 1921 Act generally marks the rise of the modern presidency, where the president received a durable grant of authority. We exam…
Comparative Analysis of Financial Bureaucracies of Europe
The broader goal of the paper is to explore one of the core questions in comparative research on public policy and administration: What is more important in influencing public officials’ attitudes towards policymaking − the distinctive administrative style of the country or the specific features of a policy sector? This article is particularly concerned with the attitudes of the public officials working in the field of finance regarding their pol…
What Is the Remedy for State and Local Fiscal Squeeze During the Covid-19 Recession? More Debt, and That Is Okay
The COVID-19 crisis is placing a tremendous fiscal squeeze on state and local governments in the United States. We argue that the federal government should increase its deficit to fill in the fiscal gap. In the absence of sufficient federal assistance, we recommend that states suspend their balanced budget rules and norms and run deficits in their operating budgets to maintain services and meet additional obligations due to the pandemic. A compar…
The Impact of Greater Centralization on the Relevance of Performance Information in European Governments During the Fiscal Crisis
The Great Recession resulted in fiscal crises for governments across the Western world. Our article explores whether, as a result of the crisis, the relevance of performance information in organizational decision-making increased. Furthermore, we examine how centralizing shifts in governmental decision-making processes influenced the shifts in the relevance of performance information for public sector organizations. Using a survey of senior gover…
Human Bones Found near Galveston
Supplementary maternal and child health services. Part I. Post-natal care. Part II. Nurseries
Women interviewed during the maternity survey in 1946 were revisited 2 years later and asked questions relating to post-natal care and ill-health attributed by them to childbearing. Only 45 % had had a post-natal examination. This low figure may be attributed on the one hand to lack of facilities for examination and for care of children while their mothers are being examined and, on the other, to failure to emphasize at ante-natal clinics and aft…
A Pattern for Hospital Care
Deux enquetes nationales sur la maternite et la sante de l'enfant en Grande-Bretagne
Douglas J.W.B. Deux enquêtes nationales sur la maternité et sur la santé de l'enfant en Grande-Bretagne. In: Population, 5e année, n°4, 1950. pp. 625-642
Social class differences in health and survival during the first two years of life; the results of a national survey
This paper compares social class differences in mortality and morbidity in a national sample of 5380 children born in March 1946 and followed up when they were 2 years old. There are significant social class differences in mortality during the first year but not during the second. If all classes had the same mortality rates as the well-to-do, some 4000 lives would be saved in the first month of life and 6300 in the rest of the first year. A consi…
Maternal Care and Mental Health
Children under Five
Morbidity and Mortality in the First Year of Life
Children under Five
Children Under Five
Cinq Cents Familles d'une Commune de l'Agglomeration Bruxelloise
Ministry of Health and General Register Office
Report on Hospital In-Patient Enquiry for the Year 1961. (Part II. Detailed Tables.)
The Effects of Absence on Primary School Performance
Detailed absence records are available for 3,273 primary school children from the National Survey of Health and Development. They are grouped in seven categories, according to the history of school attendances between 6 1/2 and 10 1/2 years. In the upper middle classes the eleven-year mental ability and school performance test scores are unaffected by the amount of absence and by the age distribution of the absences. In all other social classes, …
Air Pollution and Respiratory Infection in Children
The children whose respiratory illnesses are described in this paper were all born during the first week of March, 1946, and have been reported on at intervals by health visitors, school nurses, school doctors, and teachers.A full description of the survey will be found elsewhere (Douglas, 1964).In 1961, when the children were 15 years old, 4,592 of the original survey sample (5,362) were living in Great Britain and information on air pollution i…
Delinquency and Social Class
J. W. B. DOUGLAS, J. M. ROSS, W. A. HAMMOND, D. G. MULLIGAN; DELINQUENCY AND SOCIAL CLASS, The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 6, Issue 3, 1 July 19
Differences in Test Score and in the Gaining of Selective Places for Scottish Children and Those in England and Wales
The National Survey is a longitudinal study of 5,000 boys and girls born in 1946. In this paper the test scores and allocation to selective courses of children living in Scotland are compared with those in England and Wales. The Scottish pupils were superior to the English and Welsh in the tests of sentence completion and reading at 8 years, in arithmetic at 11 years and in mathematics at 15 years, whereas the English and Welsh were superior in t…
A djustment and E ducational P rogress
From Birth to Seven. The Second Report of the National Child Development Study (1958 Cohort)
Longitudinal surveys and the study of social mobility
Success and Failure in the Secondary School
Equal Opportunity in Education
Environmental Medicine
The School Years in Newcastle upon Tyne
Britain at the Polls, 1979
Journal Article Britain at the Polls, 1979: A Study of the General Election, by Howard R. Penniman Get access Britain at the Polls, 1979: A Study of the General Election edited by Howard R. Penniman. Washington, D.C., American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1982. 345 pp. Cloth, $16.25; paper, $8.25. James Douglas James Douglas Northwestern University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Politi…
Political science (30 works) · Economics (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Business (15 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Public Administration (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Medicine (14 works) · Public Administration (14 works) · Politics (13 works)