Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory

Allen, Madaline; Drolc, Cody A

doi: 10.1093/jopart/muag007pmid: N/A

Administrative burdens can deter individuals from engaging with government programs before they ever encounter formal application requirements. Drawing on the administrative burden framework and theories of heuristic decision-making, this study examines how prospective applicants form early judgments about program accessibility when presented with varying levels of compliance costs. Using three survey experiments centered on a fictional grocery benefit (N = 2,407, N = 965) and a one-time federal tax rebate (N = 1,004), we assess how documentation requirements and effort cues shape perceptions of eligibility, willingness to apply, and perceived accessibility. We find that greater documentation requirements or mismatched time cues lowered perceived eligibility and willingness to apply. Yet asking respondents to pause and estimate the effort reversed those effects, but only for individuals who already possessed the documentation or could form a concrete time estimate about the effort. These findings highlight the role of expected burden and heuristic judgments in shaping pre-application decisions, extending administrative burden research beyond realized experiences to the earliest stages of program engagement.

Nowlan, Oscar

doi: 10.1093/jopart/muaf038pmid: N/A

This article examines blame shifting, where elected officials attempt to deflect blame for negative outcomes onto other actors. While prior research suggests that citizens generally disapprove of this tactic, this study re-evaluates how contextual factors shape these reactions, focusing specifically on cases of public service failure. In many areas of public management, service delivery is delegated or contracted out to public or private organizations, raising the question of whether such institutional arrangements make it easier for politicians to shift blame onto these agents. A survey experiment (n = 955) was conducted in the United Kingdom involving a hypothetical public service failure. Information cues varied the response strategy of local elected officials (shifting blame or accepting responsibility) and the service delivery model (public or private sector; high or low delegation). The results from OLS regression analyses show that participants were generally less approving of blame shifting compared to accepting responsibility. However, approval increased when the organization being blamed was viewed by participants as carrying more blame for failures in service delivery than the official. Although delegation levels did not directly moderate the effect of blame shifting, further logistic regression analysis shows that higher delegation made participants more likely to view the service provider as culpable, which in turn influenced how they reacted to blame shifting tactics. These findings highlight the conditional nature of public reactions to blame avoidance behavior, showing that citizens’ evaluations of tactics like blame shifting depend on their beliefs about who is responsible, which can be shaped by institutional context. The study offers new insights into when blame shifting may appear more credible or justified and underscores the role of context in shaping the effectiveness of political blame avoidance strategies.

Malatesta, Deanna; Cheema, Faisal Saeed

doi: 10.1093/jopart/muag010pmid: N/A

This study extends relational contract theory by showing how behavioral reference points can be established through policy. We theorize that contracts are governed by dual anchors: backward-looking relational history and forward-looking renewal expectations. Analyzing 430 public legal service contracts using Heckman selection models, we find relational history increases prices in amendments, revealing its “dark side.” A nonbinding renewal clause, however, significantly attenuates this effect, reducing price increase probability by up to 37 percentage points. These findings resolve the puzzle that renewal clauses, though present in fewer than half of contracts, disproportionately appear in amended agreements. The clause does not guarantee renewal but alters behavioral logic, transforming the supplier’s reference point from backward-looking entitlement to forward-looking relationship preservation. Our findings provide microfoundations for how institutions structure relational dynamics and demonstrate how procurement design can shape expectations to improve outcomes.

Cui, Manqian; Zhang, Xuelian; Li, Jiayuan

doi: 10.1093/jopart/muag008pmid: N/A

Despite the ubiquity of self-reported data in social science and public administration research, widespread concerns persist regarding common method variance (CMV) and its potential to distort observed correlations. In this article, we estimate CMV’s biasing effects through five preregistered studies (including eight survey experiments) with UK and Chinese civil servants (N = 3,159), focusing on the relationship between public service motivation (PSM) and job performance—a proposition of PSM theory often subject to CMV concerns. Our findings indicate that procedures widely advocated by methodological scholars to mitigate CMV did not substantially attenuate the PSM-performance relationship. A single-paper meta-analysis integrating these survey experiments reinforced this result, revealing a negligible overall moderating effect (mean effect size = −0.018, 95% CI [−0.08, 0.04]). Our results offer insights into the quality of self-reported measures, call into question the notion that CMV uniformly biases self-reported correlations, and strengthen the PSM theory by providing evidence for the validity of its core theoretical relationships against the CMV’s biasing effect.

Ernst, Margit

doi: 10.1093/jopart/muag011pmid: N/A

What makes accountability work? To answer this question, public administration research has long focused on formal mechanisms—–rules, audits, and performance indicators—intended to ensure that public employees answer for their actions. Yet these mechanisms alone rarely determine how accountability plays out in practice. Rather, it depends on how they are recognized, internalized, and enacted by those expected to comply. This realization has spurred growing interest in how employees perceive and enact accountability in the context of public service delivery. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this study unpacks how street-level bureaucrats navigate tensions between formal accountability demands and their internalized perceptions of accountability. The findings reveal how employees weigh, reinterpret, or reframe accountability based on what they perceive to be at stake. To conceptualize this, the article introduces a concentric model of accountability.

Closs-Davies, Sara C; Bartels, Koen P R; Merkl-Davies, Doris

doi: 10.1093/jopart/muag009pmid: N/A

Public administration plays a fundamental role in accountability relationships between citizens and the State, but how these take shape in public encounters is remarkably understudied. Analyzing relational dynamics within and around public encounters expands the relational perspective on accountability in public administration—challenging core assumptions of the principal–agent model underpinning studies of citizen–State accountability relationships. We conducted a critical-interpretivist ethnography of public encounters in the UK Tax Credits (TC) system and share findings from our Constructivist Grounded Theory Analysis of multiple data sources, including twenty-eight open interviews. We discuss four relational dynamics of account-giving—emerging from the interplay of neoliberal discourse, digital technologies, and communicative practices—that “reversed the accountability chain.” We demonstrate how claimants experiencing significant financial and emotional hardship, in their encounters with an unaccountable State, became accountable for their TC obligations and welfare. We explain these findings by mobilizing interdisciplinary theory from critical accounting research on relational power to offer original conceptual and empirical insight into the interactive, dynamic, and emergent accountability relationships between citizens and agents of the State.

Zhang, Jinfeng; Song, Minjie; Qin, Zengqiang; Xu, Ran; Ran, Rong

doi: 10.1093/jopart/muag006pmid: N/A

Public officials are traditionally thought to be more risk-averse than private sector employees, yet consistent empirical evidence is lacking. Prospect theory posits that individuals’ risk decision preferences are influenced by the framing of gains or losses, but it does not distinguish whether gains and losses pertain to personal or public interests. This study incorporates the type of interest with gain–loss framing to construct decision scenarios and compare risk preferences between public officials and private sector employees. In Experiment 1 (N public officials = 897, N private sector employees = 685), using a 3 (public interest vs. public–private mixed interest vs. private interest) × 2 (gain frame vs. loss frame) design, public officials were found to exhibit greater risk aversion than private sector employees when the loss frame involves the public interest, while no significant differences were observed for a gain frame involving either the public interest or private interest. Applying blame avoidance theory, accountability is positioned here as a core factor to further explore why public officials are more risk-averse than private sector employees when facing public interest losses. In Experiment 2 (N  public officials = 625, N  private sector employees = 630), using a 2 (reward vs. punishment-oriented accountability) × 2 (process vs. outcome-oriented accountability) design in a public interest decision-making context, public officials were found to be more risk-averse than private sector employees in the case of outcome-oriented punishment accountability. In the other three types of accountability conditions, public officials exhibited a similar risk preference to private sector employees. These findings reveal the situational factors underlying public officials’ risk aversion, and offer practical insights for designing accountability systems that effectively guide decision-making in the public sector.