a) bestuurskundige theorieën te testen en te verfijnen, (b) de methodologische ontwikkeling van de bestuurskunde te stimuleren en (c) de interactie tussen wetenschap en praktijk te stimuleren.Tot slot geven we suggesties om de gedragsbestuurskunde te versterken.We hopen dat dit artikel bijdraagt aan een vruchtbare conversatie die leidt tot een wetenschappelijk en praktisch relevant onderzoeksterrein waar bestuurskundigen en psychologen samenwerken en van elkaar leren.
Behavioral public administration is the analysis of public administration from the micro-perspective of individual behavior and attitudes by drawing upon insights from psychology on behavior of individuals and groups. We discuss how scholars in public administration currently draw on theories and methods from psychology, and related fields, and point to research in public administration that could benefit from further integration. An analysis of public administration topics through a psychological lens can be useful to confirm, nuance or extend classical public administration theories. As such, behavioral public administration complements traditional public administration. Furthermore, it could be a two-way street for psychologists who want to test the external validity of their theories in a political-administrative setting. Finally, we propose four principles to narrow the gap between public administration and psychology.
Citizen trust in government at the macro level has been studied by public administration scholars for many years. To further our understanding, assessing trust at the meso level of government organizations is important to more precisely determine effects and antecedents of trust at the organizational level. The organizational trust literature has shown that organizational trustworthiness is multidimensional, but the extant literature has not validated such measures in a public administration context. The proposed scale builds on and adapts an existing organizational trust scale to a public administration context. The ‘Citizen Trust in Government Organizations’ scale is validated using data from two different samples (total n = 991), resulting in a scale of nine items measuring three dimensions: perceived competence, benevolence, and integrity. This scale can be used by other researchers and is valuable to gain a more specific and multi-dimensional understanding of trust in government organizations. Points for practitioners A major problem for government organizations worldwide is the lack of perceived trustworthiness by the public. To tackle this problem, a way to measure it is needed, but at the moment there are only generic measures to assert perceived trustworthiness in a government organization. This article presents a first validation and incorporates three dimensions: perceived competence, benevolence, and honesty. Practitioners can use this scale and adapt to their relevant local context to identify specific trustworthiness problems.
Computer-mediated transparency is seen as a powerful tool to attain policy goals and to transform government. This is based on the idea that transparency is something good in itself, which can be attained by using ICTs eventually improving government
Transparency and responsiveness are core values of democratic governments, yet do Freedom of Information Laws - one of the legal basis for such values - actually help to increase these values? This paper reports a replication of a field experiment testing for the responsiveness of public authorities by Worthy et al (2016) in the United Kingdom. We sent 390 information requests to Dutch local government bodies, half of which were framed as official FOIA requests, the other half as informal requests for information. We were able to reproduce the original findings, that is, we found a positive effect of FOIA requests on responsiveness. The overall response rate of local governments was much higher (76%) and the size of the effect was larger than in the original experiment. Furthermore, the strongest effect of FOI was found on proactive disclosure (concordance), something that governments - strictly speaking - are not obliged to do according to the Dutch FOIA. Implications for future replication studies are discussed.
Les spécialistes de l’administration publique étudient depuis des années la question de la confiance des citoyens dans le gouvernement au niveau global. Afin de mieux comprendre les choses, il est important d’évaluer la confiance au niveau intermédiaire des organisations gouvernementales pour déterminer de façon plus précise les effets et les antécédents de la confiance au niveau organisationnel. La littérature sur la confiance organisationnelle indique que la loyauté organisationnelle est multidimensionnelle, mais la littérature existante n’a pas validé ces mesures dans un contexte d’administration publique. L’échelle proposée s’appuie sur une échelle de la confiance organisationnelle existante, adaptée à un contexte d’administration publique. L’échelle de la « Confiance des citoyens dans les organisations gouvernementales » ( Citizen Trust in Government Organizations , ou CTGO) est validée au moyen de données extraites de deux échantillons différents ( n total=991), ce qui donne une échelle à 9 items mesurant trois dimensions : les compétences perçues, la bienveillance et l’intégrité. Cette échelle, qui pourra servir à d’autres chercheurs, est intéressante car elle permet de comprendre de manière plus précise et plus multidimensionnelle la question de la confiance dans les organisations gouvernementales. Remarques à l’intention des praticiens L’un des problèmes majeurs pour les organisations gouvernementales dans le monde entier concerne le manque de loyauté perçue par le public. Pour faire face à ce problème, un moyen de le mesurer s’impose, mais il n’existe pour l’instant que des mesures très génériques pour vérifier la loyauté perçue des organisations gouvernementales. Le présent article présente une première validation et contient trois dimensions : les compétences perçues, la bienveillance et l’honnêteté. Les praticiens pourront se servir de cette échelle et l’adapter à leur contexte local pour identifier les problèmes de loyauté présents.
Disclosure of information is an increasingly popular policy instrument. While the use of disclosed information by consumers has been studied, little is known the disclosure practices of organizations. The central question in this paper is: how do organizations translate the trade-off be tween legal and communicative quality into an organizational arrangement for the production of client communication products? Scholars suggest that the translation of this trade-off into organizational practices is influenced by the perception of the regulatory environment. We present an empirical study of 24 pension funds in the Netherlands to investigate this issue. Our findings falsify the expected relations between perceptions of the environment and organizational arrangements for client communication practices. Instead, this study highlights that a hybrid organizational arrangement for communicating with clients is the modus operandi for most organizations as it is an attractive way of integrating both legal and communicative expertise.
The field of public management is methodologically underdeveloped as compared to other disciplines. In order to derive the fullest benefits of methodological advancements, the field needs to invest in discussing and deliberating over the state of the art in methodological advances. Using state-of-the-art methods helps to produce knowledge that is useful for scholars and practitioners. This symposium aims to add to and improve the methodological toolkit available to public management scholars. We distinguish three categories that could strengthen the methodological toolkit: underutilized methods (such as ethnography), innovations in current methods (such as the synthetic control method for comparative case studies), and novel methods (such as natural language processing for content analysis). We hope that this symposium encourages scholars to seek for novel and improved methods to produce research that lives up to scientific scrutiny and is valuable for practitioners.
Het doel van dit document is om de relaties tussen verschillende vormen van participatie en overheidsdienstverlening te verkennen om zo gericht keuzen te kunnen maken over de bijdrage van e-participatie aan geintegreerde, persoonsgerichte dienstverlening. Achtereenvolgens wordt ingegaan op de volgende vragen: • Welke vormen van participatie in de overheidsdienstverlening kunnen we onderscheiden? • Welke bijdrage kan e-participatie theoretisch en praktisch leveren aan het versterken van de overheidsdienstverlening? • Welke normatieve vragen kan de vormgeving van de verschillende vormen van e-participatie oproepen? • Welke media kunnen worden gebruikt om de verbeteringen van de bijdrage van e-participatie aan de overheidsdienstverlening vorm te geven? Het document eindigt met een voorstel voor een onderzoeks- en ontwerptraject. Daarbij zijn vier vormen van participatie als kansrijk gedefinieerd: Coproduceren op overheidssites, Tips and tricks, Feedback en Coproduceren op burgersites. Al deze vormen worden allereerst ondersteund met eenvoudige technologieen (asynchroon, tekstueel) om vervolgens ook te zoeken naar synchrone en multimediale mogelijkheden
Government decision-making procedures and transparency ensure responsive governance. Yet, there are few attempts to assess how these two factors shape citizens’ intentions to voice opposition to government decisions. We predict that the effect of decision-making procedures on voice is contingent upon the fairness of government decision-making procedures. We also hypothesize that the strength of this effect will vary according to how transparent the decision-making process is. We test these hypotheses using two survey experiments, where we assess how the effect of procedural fairness of a decision-making process on citizen voice varies according to the level of transparency. Findings reveal that participants are least inclined to voice opposition when a decision-making process is fair and transparency high. However, when a decision-making process is unfair, greater transparency did not increase voice. We conclude that transparency can stifle voice for fair decision-making procedures but does not stimulate voice when decision-making procedures are unfair.
