The American Review of Public Adminstration (ARPA) aspires to be the premier academic journal in the field of public affairs and public administration. As a peer-reviewed journal with the combined goals of advancing the knowledge of public administration and improving its practice, ARPA features articles that address rapidly emerging issues in public administration and public affairs and is open to both traditional and nontraditional apporaches. ARPA has no methodological bias other than a preference for an analytical approach to the issue(s) being addressed. Of particular interest are theory-based empirical research, commentaries on pressing issues, reviews or syntheses of research, and conceptual/theoretical discussions on or over the boundaries of traditional public administration.

The American Review of Public Administration (ARPA) aims to be the leading academic journal in the field of public affairs and public administration. As a peer-reviewed journal, ARPA seeks to advance the knowledge of public administration and improve its practice. The journal features articles that address rapidly emerging issues in public administration and public affairs, welcoming both traditional and nontraditional approaches. ARPA does not have a methodological bias, other than a preference for an analytical approach to the issues being discussed. Of particular interest are theory-based empirical research, commentaries on pressing issues, reviews or syntheses of research, and conceptual or theoretical discussions that explore the boundaries of traditional public administration.

《美国公共行政评论》(American Review of Public Administration) 旨在成为公共事务和公共行政领域的顶尖学术期刊。作为一本经过同行评审的期刊，ARPA的目标是推动公共行政的知识发展并改善其实践。期刊刊登的文章关注公共行政和公共事务中快速出现的问题，欢迎传统和非传统的方法。ARPA没有特定的方法论偏见，但偏好对所讨论问题的分析性探讨。特别关注基于理论的实证研究、对紧迫问题的评论、研究的综述或综合，以及关于传统公共行政边界的概念性或理论性讨论。

American Review of Public Administration

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 PSM and job performance in the federal service. There is mixed evidence on whether PSM positively affected grades and performance ratings, clearer evidence that employees who expected to receive a material reward for exceptional performance attained higher grades and performance ratings, and no evidence that the link between material rewards and performance mattered any less to those with high PSM.

Pablo Alonso

Gregory B. Lewis

The American Review of Public Administration

Public Service Motivation and Job Performance

公共服务动机与工作绩效

Public management scholars have made impressive strides in explaining managerial usage of performance information (PI). Does such PI use matter to performance? If so, what types of use make a difference? To answer these questions, we connect managerial self-reported behavior with objective organizational outcomes in Texas schools. We control for lagged comparative school performance and employ inverse probability weighting to mitigate endogeneity concerns. The results show that managerial use of PI is associated with objective indicators of performance, and that the type of use matters. In particular, school principals’ use of PI for strategic planning is positively associated with better high-stakes test scores. The findings suggest that maturity of performance management system can shape the relationship between managerial PI use and organizational performance, thereby contributing to a contingency-based understanding of the relationship between performance management and organizational performance.

Xu Han

Donald Moynihan

Does Managerial Use of Performance Information Matter to Organizational Outcomes?

管理者使用绩效信息对组织成果重要吗？

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 argued that discretion and decision-making are strongly influenced by intelligence, and that improvements in intelligence, such as those that can be found within the field of AI, can help improve the overall quality of administration. Furthermore, the characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses of both human discretion and AI are explored. Once these characteristics are laid out, a further exploration of the role AI may play in bureaucracies and bureaucratic structure is presented, followed by a specific focus on systems-level bureaucracies. In addition, it is argued that task distribution and task characteristics play a large role, along with the organizational and legal context, in whether a task favors human discretion or the use of AI. Complexity and uncertainty are presented as the major defining characteristics for categorizing tasks. Finally, a discussion is provided about the important cautions and concerns of utilizing AI in governance, in particular, with respect to existential risk and administrative evil.

Justin B. Bullock

Artificial Intelligence, Discretion, and Bureaucracy

人工智能、自由裁量权与官僚制

Homeownership has been widely regarded as a critical determinant of public participation in social science research. However, the role of homeownership in public service coproduction has been under-researched. This study advances a theory of public service coproduction that accounts for the effect of homeownership and its underlying mechanisms by theorizing that homeownership increases coproduction participation by directly motivating individuals to protect their financial investments and indirectly improving their knowledge about government. Original data from a random telephone survey of 2,167 residents conducted in August 2022 in Beijing, China were used to test the hypotheses, and a series of analytical tools (e.g., weighted models, matching, and sensitivity analysis) were used to validate the theorized effects and mechanisms. Results consistently show that homeowners are more likely to report public service complaints to the government than nonowners. These findings have important implications for future theoretical research and practical efforts to promote public service coproduction.

Youlang Zhang

Wenzhao Li

How Does Homeownership Shape Public Service Coproduction? Evidence from a Public Complaint System in Beijing, China

住房产权如何塑造公共服务共创？来自中国北京公共投诉系统的证据

In recent years, public administration scholars investigated the relationship between employee turnover and public sector performance in settings where tasks are routine and frequently executed. This article builds on that foundation by investigating the contribution of organizational memory to the execution of infrequent and extraordinary tasks, theoretically distinguishing it from routine and ordinary tasks. Using a panel of administrative state employee payroll data from 45 states, this article tests the relationship between state health department employee turnover, retention, and performance in response to an emergency: the COVID vaccination campaign of 2021. Results show that recent health department turnover rates are a more substantive predictor than retention of employees with long-term experience. It is estimated that a one percentage point reduction in turnover would cost about $1.6 billion in additional compensation to state health departments and would produce reduced mortality benefits of $2.4 billion.

John Stavick

Organizational Memory and Snap Back Performance in Public Agencies

公共机构的组织记忆与快速恢复表现

Social equity has been considered a pillar that supports the legitimacy of the field of public administration, with affirmative action as one of the most visible vehicles of the principle. However, the Supreme Court's decision in Students for Fair Admissions calls for a reconsideration of the practice and the value it supports. Though the Court has long viewed affirmative action to be suspect, it has now declared that the practice undermines the Constitution's mandate for equal treatment. This decision confronts not only what university administrators have done in the past, it also raises concerns about the field's broader relationship to the value of social equity more generally. The Court's opinion is a call to the field to recognize that public action which rests on social equity must be in alignment with a stiffened strict scrutiny in order to meet constitutional standards.

Chad B. Newswander

A Challenge to the Spirit of Public Administration: Social Equity Reconsidered in Light of <i>Students for Fair Admissions</i>

公共行政精神面临的挑战：基于《学生争取公平录取》案的社会公平再思考

School meal programs have positive effects on student nutrition and academic outcomes, but participation is far from universal. A set of recent school food policies, such as Universal Free Meals (UFM) and Breakfast in the Classroom (BIC), aim to reduce the administrative burden of participating students. While studies find UFM and BIC are effective in increasing participation, little is known about how schools’ physical capacity constraints may limit the effectiveness of these policies or further impose administrative burden. In this study, we use longitudinal school-level data from New York City public schools for academic years 2010–2014 and find that UFM is less effective in schools that share buildings with other schools (“co-located”), especially for low-income students. BIC, however, appears to be similarly effective regardless of school co-location status, suggesting that decentralizing locations for school meal distribution and consumption may serve as an effective policy lever in capacity-constrained settings. We find “overcrowding,” another capacity constraint, does not moderate the effectiveness of either UFM or BIC. Our study provides new evidence of physical barriers in public school settings that may impede policies that aim to increase take-up of school meal programs and the extent to which this burden is unevenly borne by low-income students, which in turn may result in inequitable nutritional, health, and academic outcomes.

Jeehee Han

Michah W. Rothbart

Administrative Burden in the Cafeteria: Evidence from School Meal Participation in Shared Buildings

自助餐厅中的行政负担：共享建筑中学校用餐参与的证据

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 participants. It was found that transformational leadership was significantly related to outcomes at both individual (motivations, attitudes, and behaviors) and organizational (performance and innovation) levels, and positively related to transactional leadership and leader-member exchange. Moderation analyses revealed that national cultural values and public/semipublic affiliation of the studied samples, as well as measurement scales of transformational leadership explained some of the transformational leadership-outcome relationship variations. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Yuanjie Bao

Zixu Zhang

Chang Yang

A Meta-Analytic Review of Transformational Leadership Research in Public Administration

公共行政领域变革型领导研究的元分析综述

Complex global challenges cut across organizational and sectoral boundaries, increasing calls for holistic responses. Seeing the whole across diverse stakeholders is challenging for participants in complex systems, yet doing so is essential for engaging effectively in systems change. A promising new method known as relational mapping, based on relational coordination theory, has been used to facilitate complex systems change. Here, we propose that relational mapping can be applied to help participants (1) see the whole in relation to the parts, (2) share their explicit and tacit knowledge, (3) engage in dialogue across distinct perspectives supported by the map as a boundary object, (4) reduce the impact of power differences, and (5) prepare to co-design interventions from multiple perspectives. This paper presents an illustrative case of relational mapping in the context of public administration in a South Carolina community engaging in complex systems change. Our analysis suggests a set of boundary conditions for the success of relational mapping, including the willingness of participants to seek integrative solutions to a conflict or problem and facilitation that is attentive to differential power and status among stakeholders. We conclude that relational mapping is a powerful, theoretically grounded method that enables the visual assessment of multi-level stakeholder relationships, preparing participants to engage in complex systems change and then present a template for use of relational mapping more broadly.

Abbreviation	Am. Rev. Public Adm.
Journal Impact	2.47
Quartiles(Global)	PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION(Q2)

ISSN	0275-0740, 1552-3357
h-index	76

Publication Information	Publisher: SAGE Publications Inc.，Publishing cycle: ，Journal Type: journal，Open Access Journals: No
Basic data	Year of publication: 1987，Proportion of original research papers: 91.30%，Self Citation Rate:8.00%， Gold OA Rate: 12.96%

American Review of Public Administration

Journal Citation Format

A journal article with 1 author

A journal article with 2 authors

A journal article with 3 authors

A journal article with 5 or more authors

Books Citation Format

Thesis Citation Format

Web sites Citation Format

Patent Citation Format

Staying up late manually editing references? ivySCI automatically matches journals and helps you generate references with a single click.

Share Submission Experience

Public Service Motivation and Job Performance

Does Managerial Use of Performance Information Matter to Organizational Outcomes?

Artificial Intelligence, Discretion, and Bureaucracy

How Does Homeownership Shape Public Service Coproduction? Evidence from a Public Complaint System in Beijing, China

Organizational Memory and Snap Back Performance in Public Agencies

Organizational Memory and Snap Back Performance in Public Agencies

A Challenge to the Spirit of Public Administration: Social Equity Reconsidered in Light of Students for Fair Admissions

Administrative Burden in the Cafeteria: Evidence from School Meal Participation in Shared Buildings

A Meta-Analytic Review of Transformational Leadership Research in Public Administration

Seeing the Whole Together Through Relational Mapping: A Method for Engaging in Complex Systems Change