My coauthors Andy Sinclair, Haram Lee, and I are honored and delighted to have won the 2016 Haldane Prize for the best article published in Public Administration in 2015. The article selected is entitled “Media Attention and the Demise of Agency Independence: Evidence from a Mass Administrative Reorganization in Britain” and is an output of the Shrinking the State project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council.
New Research – Agency Termination and Democratic Accountability
The third paper from my pillar of the Shrinking the State project, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, has now been accepted for publication. Democratic Accountability and the Politics of Mass Administrative Reorganization written with my NYU Wagner colleague Andy Sinclair will appear in the British Journal of Political Science. Here’s the abstract:
Governments face different incentives when they reorganize many administrative agencies at one time rather than making infrequent, case-by-case changes. Our theory of mass administrative reorganizations posits that their politics is focused on government accountability for policymaking. Viewing mass reorganization as a structured decision, we argue that choices about independence, agency organization, and functional disposition have different impacts on the political costs of administrative policymaking. Analyzing novel data from a recent British reorganization with sequential logistic statistical models provides substantial support for our claims. Our study challenges the focus on organizational survival in the existing literature. By eschewing more fundamental political questions of democratic accountability, the prevailing approach masks essential politics, and in our data, all influence of conflict due to party and agency policy positions.
Who are the policy workers and what are they doing?
My first paper in a new project on democratic accountability in a world of complex governance has been accepted by Public Performance Management Review. Some of the ideas in this project were presented in my Jacob K. Javits Visiting Professorship Lecture at New York University Law School. A fuller exposition of these ideas will appear in a book, currently under contract with Cambridge University Press.
It will appear in a symposium issue following a wonderful session at last year’s meeting of the American Society of Public Administration in Chicago organized by Kaifeng Yang and Mel Dubnick. Here’s the abstract:
Two critical questions for the study of accountability in contemporary governance can focus attention on the citizen, rather than the official. I begin with the question of whether a citizen can identify a policy worker—that is, the bureaucrat, contractor, or other actor acting in pursuit of a legislated policy goal. I then turn to whether a citizen can evaluate policy work that is done to further a legislated policy goal. Both identification and evaluation prove tricky to assess in a great deal of policy work, leaving accountability an important, but elusive, democratic value. This paper provides a framework for analysts to understand when and why accountability works from a citizen’s perspective and what incentives policy workers and politicians have when it does.
Media Response to Agency Termination Paper Now Available at Public Administration
A paper entitled “Media Attention and the Demise of Agency Independence: Evidence From a Mass Administrative Reorganization in Britain” written with Andy Sinclair and Haram Lee and discussed in a previous post is now available via early view at Public Administration.
Media and Mass Reorganization Paper Now Available at PAR
A paper entitled “Mass Administrative Reorganization, Media Attention, and the Paradox of Information” written with Andy Sinclair and discussed in a previous post is now available via early view at Public Administration Review.
New Research – Media Response to Agency Termination: Out with a whimper?
A second paper from my part of the Economic and Social Research Council funded Shrinking the State project has now been accepted for publication. Media Attention and the Demise of Agency Independence: Evidence from a Mass Administrative Reorganization in Britain written with my NYU Wagner colleague Andy Sinclair and USC Price doctoral student Haram Lee is forthcoming in Public Administration. This is Haram’s first publication, so we’re very excited about that. Here’s the abstract:
When administrative agencies are terminated, do they quietly fade from public view? On the one hand, the terminated agencies may have weak issue networks and agency reputations allowing them to lose public salience. On the other hand, strong issue networks and agency reputations may mean that termination increases attention to the agencies, making the government pay the cost of public attention generated by the actors within the issue networks. We assess these competing claims by using a unique dataset from a recent mass reorganization of independent agencies in Britain as well as data capturing media attention to agencies in major national newspapers. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that the agencies subject to termination experience reductions in the number of media coverage in major newspapers, disappearing from public view during the post-decision reform period.
The paper is available via SSRN.
New Research – Media Attention and Agency Termination
I am pleased to announce that my contributions to the Shrinking the State project are making their way into publication. “Mass Administrative Reorganization, Media Attention, and the Paradox of Information” with my colleague on the project and at the Wagner School, Andy Sinclair, is now forthcoming in Public Administration Review. Here’s the abstract:
How does media attention influence government decisions about whether to terminate independent administrative agencies? We argue that an agency’s salience with partisan audiences has a direct effect, but a high media profile can disrupt normal government monitoring processes and obfuscate termination decisions. We evaluate our argument in the context of a recent mass administrative reorganization by the British coalition government using probit and heteroscedastic probit regression models. Evidence suggests that termination is less likely for agencies salient in newspapers popular with the government’s core supporters, but not those read by its minority coalition partner. We also find that agencies with greater overall newspaper salience as well as younger agencies have a higher error variance.
The paper and its supplementary appendix is available via SSRN.
Public Policy Investment Book
I am pleased to announce that my new book with Peter John has been released. Public Policy Investment addresses one of the enduring questions of democratic government: why do governments attend to some public policies but not others? Political executives focus on a range of policy issues, such as the economy, social policy, and foreign policy, but adjust their priorities over time. Despite an extensive literature, it has proven surprisingly hard to explain policy prioritization. This book offers a new theoretical mechanism underlying observed public policy priorities, public policy investment, by which governments enhance their chances of getting reelected by managing a portfolio of public policies. Governments invest for the public, making choices about risk to yield electorally recognized returns. The public provides signals about their policy priorities that can be measured by expressed opinion in polls, and the clarity of these signals is important for a government’s public policy investment decisions. Priority-setting is thus a form of conditional representation that evaluates information about public priorities in the light of objective indicators about the state of the world that impact many policy domains in different ways; recognizes the clarity and volatility of the policy priorities of the electorate; and incorporates non-policy factors like the leadership traits of political executives and the partisanship of voters. The quality of conditional representation is captured the performance of a government’s public policy portfolio, which has an important impact on election outcomes. The book develops a quantitative strategy for capturing the performance of public policy portfolios, showing evidence in the case of Britain between 1971 and 2000 that governments with better performing portfolios are favored at the ballot box. Case studies of general elections illustrate the role of public policy investment in the statecraft practiced by prime ministers from Edward Heath to Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair. The book also challenges comparative scholars to consider public policy investment and conditional representation in a variety of political systems that incorporate the separation of powers, multiparty government, and decentralization.
Ian Budge, Bryan Jones, and Liz Gerber provided the following endorsements, for which Peter and I are very grateful.
‘This ambitious book takes a new look at party policy prioritization in government, drawing on financial theory to systematize the way decision-makers think about their political agenda. Using the language and formalizations of asset management and investment, the book gives new rigour to ideas about parties emphasising the issues they will benefit from in terms of elections and votes, which it tests out against British politics 1970-2000, using measures and interpretations suggested by the theory.
The book is not just an impressive intellectual achievement but a fresh and invigorating way of viewing politics within the rational choice tradition. This makes it of interest to political scientists and economists alike, not to mention the political practitioners whose strategies form its subject matter. A must-buy for anyone really interested in the development of political science and the forces driving contemporary British politics.’
Ian Budge, Research Professor in Government, University of Essex.
In Public Policy Investment, Tony Bertelli and Peter John have produced a major innovation in the study of policy processes that will change how we think about the linkages between public opinion and public policy. Most importantly, they view the set of policy issues currently being addressed by government as a portfolio, akin to an investment portfolio, and see public attention to those issues as signals about the relative values of priorities that government should pursue. Government must decide whether to address the issue or not; any issue addressed comes at the expense of the other issues in the portfolio. This is in stark contrast to current treatments of the linkage between policy and opinion, which take each issue separately, hence missing the inevitable trade-offs. Using data collected through the British Policy Agendas Project, they go on to study changes in the composition of the government of Britain’s policy portfolio, and address the issue of how investing in attention can pay dividends to the re-election potential of government.
Bryan D. Jones, J.J. “Jake” Pickle Regent’s Chair in Congressional Studies, Department of Government, University of Texas
Bertelli and John offer a fresh and compelling lens through which to understand one of the most consequential challenges facing governments, namely deciding which issues will be given priority on the policy agenda. Building on insights from financial economics, their theory of public policy investment posits that government leaders “invest” attention in public policies based on their assessments of the risks and returns of alternative policy portfolios. The book grounds its empirical component in modern British politics, but the concepts and insights transcend the immediate empirical setting and are broadly applicable to a wide range of policy-making environments. By focusing attention on the importance of executive leadership and the difficult business of statecraft, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in government decision-making and the public policy process.
Elisabeth R. Gerber, Jack L. Walker, Jr. Professor of Public Policy, University of Michigan
New Research – Measuring Attributes with Attitudes
I am very pleased to report that a paper entitled “Measuring Agency Attributes with Attitudes Across Time: A Method and Examples Using Large-Scale Federal Surveys” and written with USC Price School Ph.D students Dyana Mason, Jennifer Connolly and David Gastwirth is forthcoming in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. Public management researchers are interested in many characteristics of organizations that cannot be directly captured, making aggregated attitudes from surveys an attractive proxy. Yet difficulties in measuring meaningful attributes over time and across organizations have frequently limited statistical designs to a single organization or time. We offer a method for creating such statistical measures across agencies and time using item response theory. Focusing our attention on U.S. federal administrative agencies, we marshal a variety of questions from surveys commissioned by the Office of Personnel Management and Merit Systems Protection Board and employ statistical models to measure three important attributes — autonomy, job satisfaction, and intrinsic motivation — for 71 agencies between 1998-2010. Our study provides a wealth of data for quantitative public management research designs as well as an adaptable framework for measuring a wide range of concepts. A previous version of this paper won the Herbert Kaufman Award from the American Political Science Association. We were fortunate to receive funding for this project from the Bedrosian Center on Governance and the Public Enterprise. The paper is available here: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2265678. We hope you find it of interest!
