Carey Doberstein
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 4373538 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Carey Doberstein |
| PRENOMES | Carey |
| SOBRENOME | Doberstein |
| ASSINATURA | DOBERSTEIN C |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5106-8484 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 25 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 132 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 25 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2011 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Mandated Return-to-Office Policies and Federal Employee Well-Being
This study investigates how U.S. federal employees responded to the January 2025 return-to-office (RTO) mandate, which abruptly ended widespread telework arrangements across executive branch agencies. Using qualitative data from three federal workforce surveys conducted between 2024 and 2025, this research examines employee perspectives on the transition back to in-person work. The analysis reveals that the RTO order disrupted established routine…
Arm's‐Length Agencies and Authorities in Canada
Arm's-length agencies and authorities are a core feature of Canada's administrative state, with governments at all levels and stripes routinely establishing entities that act with some degree of autonomy from traditional departments and ministerial leadership. From financing infrastructure, to managing energy development, to coordinating health delivery, to building and operating mass transit, or regulating public procurement, these organizations…
Politicization within Government Agencies in the Canadian Federal Government
The proliferation of agencies and arm's-length bodies provides opportunities for elected governments to reassert political control in a fragmented public service through staffing and board appointments. We have little basis to make systematic claims about the politicization of agencies in Canada. This study addresses this gap by drawing on the Government of Canada's Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey (SNPS) micro data from 2018 and 2021, which …
The Political Character of Agency and Board Appointments in Alberta
Agencies, boards, and commissions (ABCs) in Canada have a distinct character and set of governance dynamics compared with the conventional public service. ABCs are often conceived to deliver a particular service or regulate or adjudicate matters with some distance from the government of the day, yet (perhaps counter-intuitively) are among the few remaining sites of patronage-like appointments in Canada. This article compiles ABC appointment data …
How Public Servants Confront Common Dilemmas in Public Engagement
Governments engage the public and stakeholders at various scales and scopes prior to the launch of new policy initiatives or reforms to existing programs. This article presents the results of a survey of Canadian public servants (N = 663) in which respondents were presented with common dilemmas faced when conducting public engagement, such as those related to time pressure, inclusion, representation, and public resistance, all of which represent …
Trends in the performance of arms‐length agencies in the Government of Canada
Canada mirrors developments in most countries with the growth of government agencies created to deliver public goods—whether it is service delivery, adjudication of disputes, regulatory oversight, enforcement activities—purported to benefit from an arms‐length relationship to cabinet. There is a robust comparative literature documenting the “agencification” of the state, yet Canadian studies remain mostly absent. This article draws on the Governm…
Alienation in Pandemic-Induced Telework in the Public Sector
Most of our knowledge of the benefits and costs of telework are based on self-selected workers who have worked remotely part-time. Full-time, pandemic-induced mass telework may present benefits and costs that differ from what was understood in the prior context. Informed by conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study examines the effect of pandemic-induced remote working on work alienation in the public sector with two Canadian surveys: a …
Assessing the Promise and Performance of Agencies in the Government of Canada
Canada has not escaped trends in most liberal democracies with the rapid growth of agencies created by government to deliver public goods, often justified on elements of their mandate—service delivery, adjudication of disputes, regulatory oversight, among others—benefiting from an arm's-length relationship to the government of the day. Yet Canadian studies of this phenomenon remain mostly absent from the robust comparative literature theorizing a…
Understanding inclusion in collaborative governance
Who should be included in collaborative governance and how they should be included is an important topic, though the dynamics of inclusion are not yet well understood. We propose a conceptual model to shape the empirical analysis of what contributes to inclusion in collaborative processes. We propose that incentives, mutual interdependence and trust are important preconditions of inclusion, but that active inclusion management also matters a grea…
Role-playing in public engagement for housing for vulnerable populations
Experimenting with public sector innovation
In 1988, James Iain Gow surveyed public servants across Canada on how they access and utilize research from various sources and how that is linked to policy innovation. He documented this research in his book Learning from Others (1994). Thirty years later, we replicate selected parts of the original survey conducted by Gow, but also add an experimental dimension that tests how subjects respond to public service innovations from around the world.…
An Empirical Assessment of the Intrusiveness and Reasonableness of Emerging Work Surveillance Technologies in the Public Sector
As public sector work environments continue to embrace the digital governance revolution, questions of work surveillance practices and its relationship to performance management continue to evolve, but even more dramatically in the contemporary period of many public servants being forced to shift to remote work from home in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. This article presents the results of three surveys, two of them population‐based survey e…
Venue Coupling and Actor Circulation in Deliberative Systems
The “systemic turn” has been one of the most important developments in deliberative democracy in the past decade. Through a deliberative systems approach, scholars and practitioners are challenged to think about ways in which various venues and institutions interact together to produce a healthy democratic subsystem. One major challenge to this approach, however, is its methodological weakness. How exactly are various venues and institutions conn…
Citizen support for spending to reduce homelessness in Canada’s largest urban centres
We present the results of a randomized controlled survey experiment involving 1508 Canadians using hypothetical vignettes of homelessness experiences, allowing us to examine the extent to which Canadians who live in large urban centres hold different attitudes towards homeless populations and may differ systematically in terms of supporting expanding homelessness investments. The findings point to differences not only among major urban centres, b…
The origins and effects of public servant confidence in whistleblowing protection regimes
We examine the various whistleblowing regimes in Canada which, across 13 provinces and territories and a single federal government, exhibits theoretically interesting variation on procedures, incentives and protections that are well positioned for comparative analysis. Drawing on a panel of Canadian public servants, we conducted a survey with both descriptive and experimental dimensions to identify and measure knowledge and confidence in the cont…
When political values and perceptions of deservingness collide
Citizen attitudes toward welfare state investments are often explained by their ideological values and their perceptions of deservingness of welfare recipients, yet recent experimental research has led to the theorization that clear deservingness cues can overwhelm otherwise strong ideological beliefs. We tested these claims with respect to homelessness in Canada using a vignette survey experiment and found evidence that citizens with very differ…
The Credibility Chasm in Policy Research from Academics, Think Tanks, and Advocacy Organizations
How do key policy professionals inside government view various sources of policy research? Are there systematic differences in the perceptions of the quality and credibility of research derived from different sources? This is a replication of and expansion on Doberstein (2017), which presented a randomized controlled survey experiment using policy analysts to systematically test the source effects of policy research. Doberstein's experimental fin…
An emerging experimental approach to public administration research in Canada
Whom Do Bureaucrats Believe? A Randomized Controlled Experiment Testing Perceptions of Credibility of Policy Research
More than ever before, analysts in government have access to policy‐relevant research and advocacy, which they consume and apply in their role in the policy process. Academics have historically occupied a privileged position of authority and legitimacy, but some argue this is changing with the rapid growth of think tanks and research‐based advocacy organizations. This article documents the findings from a randomized controlled survey experiment u…
Designing Collaborative Governance Decision-Making in Search of a ‘Collaborative Advantage’
Collaborative governance institutions consisting of government and civil society actors often emerge to solve complex policy problems. Yet decades of research on collaborative governance has found that realizing the ‘collaborative advantage’ is often very difficult given the multitude of actors, organizations and interests to be managed. This article deploys a participant observation approach that also harnesses data from a natural experiment in …
Nudging Nimby
Balancing a House of Cards
This article examines the interaction of different modes and levels of legitimacy within network governance institutions over time. Drawing on new theoretical directions in European governance studies and empirical findings from Canada, we contend that whereas input legitimacy can be exchanged, or traded-off, with output legitimacy to reinforce the overall legitimacy of a network governance institution, “throughput legitimacy” functions as a nece…
Metagovernance of urban governance networks in Canada
This article introduces the concept of “metagovernance” into the C anadian public administration literature. The term captures the relationship and tension between the willingness of the state to engage with civil society representatives in substantive policy planning and decision‐making via purpose‐focused governance networks, while maintaining some degree of control over their activity consistent with traditional notions of democratic accountab…
Applying European Ideas on Federalism and Doing It Better? The Government of Canada’s Homelessness Policy Experiment
Même s’il n’a pas de façon explicite autorité pour légiférer dans ce domaine, le gouvernement fédéral a, en 2000, mis sur pied l’Initiative nationale pour les sans-abri. Dans cet article, j’avance que ce programme fédéral ressemble beaucoup, dans plusieurs de ses aspects fondamentaux, à un modèle de gouvernance conçu par l’Union européenne et appelé « méthode ouverte de coordination » (MOC). Le contexte institutionnel dans lequel ce modèle a été …
Institutional Creation and Death
Urban development agreements (UDAs) in Canada represented an innovative governance approach that involved all three levels of government and civil society organizations jointly deliberating and setting policy to address enduring and seemingly intractable issues like homelessness and economic development. By 2010, however, all UDAs in Canada had been terminated. This article applies a new institutionalism framework to analyze and explain the creat…
Understanding inclusion in collaborative governance
Who should be included in collaborative governance and how they should be included is an important topic, though the dynamics of inclusion are not yet well understood. We propose a conceptual model to shape the empirical analysis of what contributes to inclusion in collaborative processes. We propose that incentives, mutual interdependence and trust are important preconditions of inclusion, but that active inclusion management also matters a grea…
Whom Do Bureaucrats Believe? A Randomized Controlled Experiment Testing Perceptions of Credibility of Policy Research
More than ever before, analysts in government have access to policy‐relevant research and advocacy, which they consume and apply in their role in the policy process. Academics have historically occupied a privileged position of authority and legitimacy, but some argue this is changing with the rapid growth of think tanks and research‐based advocacy organizations. This article documents the findings from a randomized controlled survey experiment u…
Metagovernance of urban governance networks in Canada
This article introduces the concept of “metagovernance” into the C anadian public administration literature. The term captures the relationship and tension between the willingness of the state to engage with civil society representatives in substantive policy planning and decision‐making via purpose‐focused governance networks, while maintaining some degree of control over their activity consistent with traditional notions of democratic accountab…
Balancing a House of Cards
This article examines the interaction of different modes and levels of legitimacy within network governance institutions over time. Drawing on new theoretical directions in European governance studies and empirical findings from Canada, we contend that whereas input legitimacy can be exchanged, or traded-off, with output legitimacy to reinforce the overall legitimacy of a network governance institution, “throughput legitimacy” functions as a nece…
Nudging Nimby
An emerging experimental approach to public administration research in Canada
Trends in the performance of arms‐length agencies in the Government of Canada
Canada mirrors developments in most countries with the growth of government agencies created to deliver public goods—whether it is service delivery, adjudication of disputes, regulatory oversight, enforcement activities—purported to benefit from an arms‐length relationship to cabinet. There is a robust comparative literature documenting the “agencification” of the state, yet Canadian studies remain mostly absent. This article draws on the Governm…
Experimenting with public sector innovation
In 1988, James Iain Gow surveyed public servants across Canada on how they access and utilize research from various sources and how that is linked to policy innovation. He documented this research in his book Learning from Others (1994). Thirty years later, we replicate selected parts of the original survey conducted by Gow, but also add an experimental dimension that tests how subjects respond to public service innovations from around the world.…
When political values and perceptions of deservingness collide
Citizen attitudes toward welfare state investments are often explained by their ideological values and their perceptions of deservingness of welfare recipients, yet recent experimental research has led to the theorization that clear deservingness cues can overwhelm otherwise strong ideological beliefs. We tested these claims with respect to homelessness in Canada using a vignette survey experiment and found evidence that citizens with very differ…
Institutional Creation and Death
Urban development agreements (UDAs) in Canada represented an innovative governance approach that involved all three levels of government and civil society organizations jointly deliberating and setting policy to address enduring and seemingly intractable issues like homelessness and economic development. By 2010, however, all UDAs in Canada had been terminated. This article applies a new institutionalism framework to analyze and explain the creat…
Assessing the Promise and Performance of Agencies in the Government of Canada
Canada has not escaped trends in most liberal democracies with the rapid growth of agencies created by government to deliver public goods, often justified on elements of their mandate—service delivery, adjudication of disputes, regulatory oversight, among others—benefiting from an arm's-length relationship to the government of the day. Yet Canadian studies of this phenomenon remain mostly absent from the robust comparative literature theorizing a…
The Credibility Chasm in Policy Research from Academics, Think Tanks, and Advocacy Organizations
How do key policy professionals inside government view various sources of policy research? Are there systematic differences in the perceptions of the quality and credibility of research derived from different sources? This is a replication of and expansion on Doberstein (2017), which presented a randomized controlled survey experiment using policy analysts to systematically test the source effects of policy research. Doberstein's experimental fin…
Role-playing in public engagement for housing for vulnerable populations
Citizen support for spending to reduce homelessness in Canada’s largest urban centres
We present the results of a randomized controlled survey experiment involving 1508 Canadians using hypothetical vignettes of homelessness experiences, allowing us to examine the extent to which Canadians who live in large urban centres hold different attitudes towards homeless populations and may differ systematically in terms of supporting expanding homelessness investments. The findings point to differences not only among major urban centres, b…
Politicization within Government Agencies in the Canadian Federal Government
The proliferation of agencies and arm's-length bodies provides opportunities for elected governments to reassert political control in a fragmented public service through staffing and board appointments. We have little basis to make systematic claims about the politicization of agencies in Canada. This study addresses this gap by drawing on the Government of Canada's Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey (SNPS) micro data from 2018 and 2021, which …
The origins and effects of public servant confidence in whistleblowing protection regimes
We examine the various whistleblowing regimes in Canada which, across 13 provinces and territories and a single federal government, exhibits theoretically interesting variation on procedures, incentives and protections that are well positioned for comparative analysis. Drawing on a panel of Canadian public servants, we conducted a survey with both descriptive and experimental dimensions to identify and measure knowledge and confidence in the cont…
The Political Character of Agency and Board Appointments in Alberta
Agencies, boards, and commissions (ABCs) in Canada have a distinct character and set of governance dynamics compared with the conventional public service. ABCs are often conceived to deliver a particular service or regulate or adjudicate matters with some distance from the government of the day, yet (perhaps counter-intuitively) are among the few remaining sites of patronage-like appointments in Canada. This article compiles ABC appointment data …
Institutional Creation and Death
Urban development agreements (UDAs) in Canada represented an innovative governance approach that involved all three levels of government and civil society organizations jointly deliberating and setting policy to address enduring and seemingly intractable issues like homelessness and economic development. By 2010, however, all UDAs in Canada had been terminated. This article applies a new institutionalism framework to analyze and explain the creat…
Applying European Ideas on Federalism and Doing It Better? The Government of Canada’s Homelessness Policy Experiment
Même s’il n’a pas de façon explicite autorité pour légiférer dans ce domaine, le gouvernement fédéral a, en 2000, mis sur pied l’Initiative nationale pour les sans-abri. Dans cet article, j’avance que ce programme fédéral ressemble beaucoup, dans plusieurs de ses aspects fondamentaux, à un modèle de gouvernance conçu par l’Union européenne et appelé « méthode ouverte de coordination » (MOC). Le contexte institutionnel dans lequel ce modèle a été …
Metagovernance of urban governance networks in Canada
This article introduces the concept of “metagovernance” into the C anadian public administration literature. The term captures the relationship and tension between the willingness of the state to engage with civil society representatives in substantive policy planning and decision‐making via purpose‐focused governance networks, while maintaining some degree of control over their activity consistent with traditional notions of democratic accountab…
Balancing a House of Cards
This article examines the interaction of different modes and levels of legitimacy within network governance institutions over time. Drawing on new theoretical directions in European governance studies and empirical findings from Canada, we contend that whereas input legitimacy can be exchanged, or traded-off, with output legitimacy to reinforce the overall legitimacy of a network governance institution, “throughput legitimacy” functions as a nece…
Designing Collaborative Governance Decision-Making in Search of a ‘Collaborative Advantage’
Collaborative governance institutions consisting of government and civil society actors often emerge to solve complex policy problems. Yet decades of research on collaborative governance has found that realizing the ‘collaborative advantage’ is often very difficult given the multitude of actors, organizations and interests to be managed. This article deploys a participant observation approach that also harnesses data from a natural experiment in …
Nudging Nimby
The Credibility Chasm in Policy Research from Academics, Think Tanks, and Advocacy Organizations
How do key policy professionals inside government view various sources of policy research? Are there systematic differences in the perceptions of the quality and credibility of research derived from different sources? This is a replication of and expansion on Doberstein (2017), which presented a randomized controlled survey experiment using policy analysts to systematically test the source effects of policy research. Doberstein's experimental fin…
An emerging experimental approach to public administration research in Canada
Whom Do Bureaucrats Believe? A Randomized Controlled Experiment Testing Perceptions of Credibility of Policy Research
More than ever before, analysts in government have access to policy‐relevant research and advocacy, which they consume and apply in their role in the policy process. Academics have historically occupied a privileged position of authority and legitimacy, but some argue this is changing with the rapid growth of think tanks and research‐based advocacy organizations. This article documents the findings from a randomized controlled survey experiment u…
When political values and perceptions of deservingness collide
Citizen attitudes toward welfare state investments are often explained by their ideological values and their perceptions of deservingness of welfare recipients, yet recent experimental research has led to the theorization that clear deservingness cues can overwhelm otherwise strong ideological beliefs. We tested these claims with respect to homelessness in Canada using a vignette survey experiment and found evidence that citizens with very differ…
Venue Coupling and Actor Circulation in Deliberative Systems
The “systemic turn” has been one of the most important developments in deliberative democracy in the past decade. Through a deliberative systems approach, scholars and practitioners are challenged to think about ways in which various venues and institutions interact together to produce a healthy democratic subsystem. One major challenge to this approach, however, is its methodological weakness. How exactly are various venues and institutions conn…
Citizen support for spending to reduce homelessness in Canada’s largest urban centres
We present the results of a randomized controlled survey experiment involving 1508 Canadians using hypothetical vignettes of homelessness experiences, allowing us to examine the extent to which Canadians who live in large urban centres hold different attitudes towards homeless populations and may differ systematically in terms of supporting expanding homelessness investments. The findings point to differences not only among major urban centres, b…
The origins and effects of public servant confidence in whistleblowing protection regimes
We examine the various whistleblowing regimes in Canada which, across 13 provinces and territories and a single federal government, exhibits theoretically interesting variation on procedures, incentives and protections that are well positioned for comparative analysis. Drawing on a panel of Canadian public servants, we conducted a survey with both descriptive and experimental dimensions to identify and measure knowledge and confidence in the cont…
Understanding inclusion in collaborative governance
Who should be included in collaborative governance and how they should be included is an important topic, though the dynamics of inclusion are not yet well understood. We propose a conceptual model to shape the empirical analysis of what contributes to inclusion in collaborative processes. We propose that incentives, mutual interdependence and trust are important preconditions of inclusion, but that active inclusion management also matters a grea…
Role-playing in public engagement for housing for vulnerable populations
Experimenting with public sector innovation
In 1988, James Iain Gow surveyed public servants across Canada on how they access and utilize research from various sources and how that is linked to policy innovation. He documented this research in his book Learning from Others (1994). Thirty years later, we replicate selected parts of the original survey conducted by Gow, but also add an experimental dimension that tests how subjects respond to public service innovations from around the world.…
An Empirical Assessment of the Intrusiveness and Reasonableness of Emerging Work Surveillance Technologies in the Public Sector
As public sector work environments continue to embrace the digital governance revolution, questions of work surveillance practices and its relationship to performance management continue to evolve, but even more dramatically in the contemporary period of many public servants being forced to shift to remote work from home in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. This article presents the results of three surveys, two of them population‐based survey e…
Alienation in Pandemic-Induced Telework in the Public Sector
Most of our knowledge of the benefits and costs of telework are based on self-selected workers who have worked remotely part-time. Full-time, pandemic-induced mass telework may present benefits and costs that differ from what was understood in the prior context. Informed by conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study examines the effect of pandemic-induced remote working on work alienation in the public sector with two Canadian surveys: a …
Assessing the Promise and Performance of Agencies in the Government of Canada
Canada has not escaped trends in most liberal democracies with the rapid growth of agencies created by government to deliver public goods, often justified on elements of their mandate—service delivery, adjudication of disputes, regulatory oversight, among others—benefiting from an arm's-length relationship to the government of the day. Yet Canadian studies of this phenomenon remain mostly absent from the robust comparative literature theorizing a…
Trends in the performance of arms‐length agencies in the Government of Canada
Canada mirrors developments in most countries with the growth of government agencies created to deliver public goods—whether it is service delivery, adjudication of disputes, regulatory oversight, enforcement activities—purported to benefit from an arms‐length relationship to cabinet. There is a robust comparative literature documenting the “agencification” of the state, yet Canadian studies remain mostly absent. This article draws on the Governm…
How Public Servants Confront Common Dilemmas in Public Engagement
Governments engage the public and stakeholders at various scales and scopes prior to the launch of new policy initiatives or reforms to existing programs. This article presents the results of a survey of Canadian public servants (N = 663) in which respondents were presented with common dilemmas faced when conducting public engagement, such as those related to time pressure, inclusion, representation, and public resistance, all of which represent …
Politicization within Government Agencies in the Canadian Federal Government
The proliferation of agencies and arm's-length bodies provides opportunities for elected governments to reassert political control in a fragmented public service through staffing and board appointments. We have little basis to make systematic claims about the politicization of agencies in Canada. This study addresses this gap by drawing on the Government of Canada's Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey (SNPS) micro data from 2018 and 2021, which …
The Political Character of Agency and Board Appointments in Alberta
Agencies, boards, and commissions (ABCs) in Canada have a distinct character and set of governance dynamics compared with the conventional public service. ABCs are often conceived to deliver a particular service or regulate or adjudicate matters with some distance from the government of the day, yet (perhaps counter-intuitively) are among the few remaining sites of patronage-like appointments in Canada. This article compiles ABC appointment data …
Mandated Return-to-Office Policies and Federal Employee Well-Being
This study investigates how U.S. federal employees responded to the January 2025 return-to-office (RTO) mandate, which abruptly ended widespread telework arrangements across executive branch agencies. Using qualitative data from three federal workforce surveys conducted between 2024 and 2025, this research examines employee perspectives on the transition back to in-person work. The analysis reveals that the RTO order disrupted established routine…
Arm's‐Length Agencies and Authorities in Canada
Arm's-length agencies and authorities are a core feature of Canada's administrative state, with governments at all levels and stripes routinely establishing entities that act with some degree of autonomy from traditional departments and ministerial leadership. From financing infrastructure, to managing energy development, to coordinating health delivery, to building and operating mass transit, or regulating public procurement, these organizations…
Political science (21 obras) · Economics (14 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Public Policy and Administration Research (14 obras) · Public relations (13 obras) · Sociology (13 obras) · Law (11 obras) · Politics (11 obras) · Public Administration (11 obras) · Business (10 obras)