1,720,974 research outputs found
Replication Data for: Information Exchange and Policy Adoption Decisions In the Context of U.S. State Energy Policy
No full textA persistent question in the literature on policy adoption and diffusion focuses on the ways in which jurisdictions gather policy information. Decades of research have offered numerous conclusions regarding knowledge transfer mechanisms assumed to drive diffusion. While important, we suggest that the characteristics of existing work may have limited what we know about the exchange of policy information among peers. Most studies infer learning indirectly and, as a result, the literature has tended to focus on exchange between geographic and ideological peers, to the exclusion of other channels. As an alternative, this study takes a more direct approach and draws on a survey of 112 U.S. expert informants in the area of energy policy. We use the information exchange channels revealed by these informants to predict the diffusion of state renewable portfolio standards and electricity deregulation among the American states in order to determine if they offer explanatory leverage beyond the “traditional” channels
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Too Complex to Deliver? Administrative Capacity, Governance, and Waste Management in Peruvian Municipalities
Get PDFThesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs and the Department of Political Science, 2022Global South cities vary in their ability to provide complex social services, like environmentally proper solid waste disposal, but typically perform better with simple services, like trash collection from the streets. This dissertation examines whether core local governance factors determine these performance disparities to help bring light to a consequential pattern of service delivery issues in Global South municipalities. Three crucial factors are studied to answer the following overarching puzzle: Why are some local governments successful at providing simple services while at the same time blatantly failing at providing complex services, when other, similar municipalities can do both? I focus on service-specific municipal administrative capacity, formal community-based civil society organizations (CSO) involvement, and local collaborative governance. In this dissertation, I make four principal arguments. The first argument is that it is insufficient to examine municipality-wide administrative capacity to understand what is happening to service performance in a particular policy area. Instead, the second argument states that it is more accurate to assess service-specific administrative capacity, and such capacity may differ across simple and complex tasks, even in the same service. Drawing on comparative quantitative and qualitative evidence, I show that similarly-resourced municipal waste suboffices that can do both simple and complex services differ from those that fail in that they have multilevel capacity tailored to service complexity level. The third argument is that CSOs can substitute for or complement local government in implementing simple service provision, but complex service provision requires strong, specialized capacity within the local government offices. CSOs are unlikely to be able to provide such complex services in the absence of administrative capacity. I show that, at least in Global South cities like those in Peru, organizationally strong CSOs can manage waste collection efficiently and effectively, but their missions, planning, operational, and leadership capabilities limit their involvement in disposal due to the complexity of disposal’s requirements. Moreover, most CSOs do not have the type of relationship with municipal government ––nor the respect of local officials–– needed to provide complex services. The fourth argument claims that local collaborative governance contributes to performance improvements if it addresses performance issues equally across services. I find that cogovernance venues matter locally, in the Global South, for improving simple service performance. This work employs a mixed-methods research design. It uses a unique panel dataset of all Peruvian municipalities across three years for quantitative analysis of the effect of municipal capacity, CSO presence, and cogovernance on simple collection and complex disposal. It also draws on qualitative interview and ethnographic data from four and a half months of intensive fieldwork in three municipalities, which was used for comparative analysis of the conditions in which municipal capacity and CSO participation affect both waste services
How Historical and Social Comparisons Influence Interpretations of Performance Information
Get PDFColor versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www. tandfonline.com/upmj.The article of record as published may be found at https://dx.doi.org10.1080/10967494.2018.1550129The ways in which managers use performance information is among the most salient topics in the study of public management. Drawing inspiration from several recent studies on the use of performance information by citizens, we adopt a behavioral approach to understand the influence of reference dependence on the interpretation of performance information by managers. Specifically, we run two experiments in a sample of professional managers, which allows us to test whether social and historical comparisons influence how respondents interpret performance information. The results suggest that framing an objective performance metric as poor relative to peer or competitor organizations leads managers to rate overall organizational performance significantly lower than managers in a control group who received the same metric, but no comparative frame. The results support expectations about the importance of social comparisons, particularly in the case of negative deviations from the reference point. The fact that we find no impact of historical comparisons on the interpretation of performance information deviates from recent work on citizen evaluations and suggests differences in the ways in which elites process such information. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our results for the study of performance management and the behavioral approach to public management more generally
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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