This study examines whether representative bureaucracy improves organizational integrity. The evidence is from English and Welsh police forces that implemented ambitious targets to increase ethnic minority officers during the 1999-2010 period. Specifically, we present evidence of an association...

To what extent do bond market reactions to an unexpected deficit shock depend on state-specific politics? To answer this question, we calculate German state bond spreads over government benchmark paper using information from Datastream for the period 2006-2010. We test for a variety of...

This study examines whether a public-private partnership (PPP) arrangement improved operational cost efficiency in Korea's urban rail transit system. Overall, evidence suggests that private participation has not contributed to cost reduction in service operation. The study also explains how the...

This study explores the impact of balanced-budget rules on states' fiscal policy outcomes, and tests whether this impact depends on the political and economic environments in light of the American states' experience from 2004 to 2010. The findings suggest that (1) budget rules are more binding...

Political-institutional factors — such as the political composition of state legislatures, and interstate variations in public sector labor environments, such as union strength, and collective bargaining rights — can explain a significant proportion of interstate variation in bankruptcy...

Does the revolving door phenomenon erode bureaucratic integrity? To answer this question, we undertake a quantitative case study of a private university in South Korea that recruited a former vice minister of education as its president. Specifically, we investigate whether after employing this...

Many researchers have assumed that social media will reduce inequalities between elite politicians and those outside the political mainstream and that it will thus benefit democracy, as it circumvents the traditional media that focus too much on a few elite politicians. I test this assumption by...

Although the theory of punctuated equilibrium is one of the most widely cited theories in policy studies, most of the research has paid relatively little attention to the conditions under which a policy punctuation is likely to occur. In this study, we argue that one of the likely causes of a...

This paper puts forth a simple model explaining the manner in which news aggregators such as Google News or Yahoo! News build herd behavior through information cascades. The model suggests that (1) an increase in the number of Internet users will make herding more significant over the Internet,...

Using both large-sample regressions and a case study with a synthetic control method, we show that local governments’ contracting-out of public services is associated with improved efficiency but lowered citizen satisfaction. As local governments are subject to elections whereas the...