Public Administration Dissertations and Theses
https://hdl.handle.net/1808/14397
2024-03-28T15:21:15ZStreet-Level Judgments: How the Role of Judges Influences the Decision to Collaborate in Juvenile Courts
https://hdl.handle.net/1808/31364
Street-Level Judgments: How the Role of Judges Influences the Decision to Collaborate in Juvenile Courts
Grayer, Misty Johnson
The use of problem-solving collaborations, much like in other areas of public management, is widespread in the United States juvenile court system. These problem-solving collaborations include, but are not limited to, problem-solving, or accountability, courts; citizen review panels; and multi-disciplinary or inter-agency review teams. As expected in public administration discourse, the notion of collaboration is deemed an imperative, and many juvenile court judges engage their courts in collaborative partnerships in order to provide innovative solutions to meet the needs of vulnerable youth and their families. Nevertheless, the use of problem-solving collaborations is often at odds with some of the central features commonly associated with the judicial system, particularly as it relates to notions of accountability, due process, and representation. Some scholars, in fact, argue that the presence of collaborations shifts the role of judges from objective arbiters to more centralized, team-player roles. This dissertation explores the factors that lead juvenile court judges to engage problem-solving collaborations. Relying on neo-institutional theory, street-level bureaucracy theory, and collaborative governance theory, and using semi-structured interviews and document analysis, I find that judges use their discretion in their dual roles as street-level bureaucrats and as managers to determine whether and how to collaborate. Specifically, I argue that juvenile court judges are most likely to engage problem-solving collaborations when such collaborations promote the goals of the court and when the use of collaboration aligns with a judge’s own conception of his/her professional identity.
2019-08-31T00:00:00ZThe Influence of Business Interest Groups in Urban Policymaking: An Empirical Exploration of a Low Salience Policy Setting
https://hdl.handle.net/1808/31357
The Influence of Business Interest Groups in Urban Policymaking: An Empirical Exploration of a Low Salience Policy Setting
Martel, JC
The lack of a national comprehensive climate change policy in the United States has prompted cities to take the lead on urban sustainability actions. Extent research has explored various political, socio-economic and institutional factors to explain why some cities pursue sustainability actions and others do not. The role of organized interest groups – particularly business interest groups – is unclear as to whether their involvement correlates with more or less likelihood of sustainability policy adoption. The pluralist nature of the American political system suggests that various organized interests compete to advance their policy positions, and business interest groups have generally been theorized as economically rational profit-maximizers who would presumably oppose environmental regulation. The overall rise in environmental awareness (Yale University and George Mason University, 2017) raises the possibility that business interest groups will support urban sustainability policies, as firm can be profitable while also limiting environmental impacts. This dissertation explores how various types of business interest groups effect the adoption of select urban sustainability policies that regulate the environmental impacts of buildings. My rationale for studying buildings is that urban sustainability is too broad of a concept to get at the nuances of interest group activity occurring in each sector, and distinctive business interest groups participate in urban policy processes depending on what sector is being regulated as many firms only work in one sector (e.g., buildings, transportation, water). Further, urban sustainability research commonly operationalizes business interest groups as one group which assumes a singular profit interest, but not all businesses respond to urban sustainability in the same way. I segment the business interest groups in an attempt to measure the effects of distinctive organized interests within a single industry – the construction industry. I generate sector-specific business interest group data rather than relying on survey data or general proxies for business interests which are more common approaches in urban sustainability research. This work overcomes the issue with obtaining business interest group data in cities by using an algorithmic approach to data collection using the Python programming language for text mining industry association websites and member directories. Using various regression methods, my findings suggest that this approach to operationalizing interest groups has merit. The segmented business interest groups have divergent effects on the energy efficiency and green building policies with traditional construction interest groups having a negative effect on policy adoption while ‘green’ construction groups have a positive effect (Chapter 3 and Chapter 4). In Chapter 5, I explore the effects of organized interests on reported energy savings in published studies using a regression-based meta-analysis approach. My results suggest that organized interests have an effect on reported energy savings, supporting a theory of advocacy bias in information sharing. On a theoretical level, this research contributes to understanding business interest groups in local urban policymaking in a low salience policy setting. It provides the insight that some segments of business interest groups are likely to have a positive effect on urban sustainability and environmental policy adoption while other segments are likely to have a negative effect, so it is important to segment business interest groups rather than treating them as one group with the same motivations. Also regarding theory, this work supposes that the buildings policy domain is low salience but it does attract political participants, albeit a narrowly focused group of technical professionals, which is divergent from some extent literature that suggests that low salience policy issues do not attract interest groups. Considering other urban sustainability sectors as low salience may be appropriate, as other areas may also attract groups of technical experts more so than citizen groups. Methodologically, this research promotes algorithmic data collection as a way to overcome difficulties in collecting city-level data.
2019-08-31T00:00:00ZBeyond Adoption: The Influence of Local Institutional Arrangements on Sustainability Policy Implementation and Management
https://hdl.handle.net/1808/30220
Beyond Adoption: The Influence of Local Institutional Arrangements on Sustainability Policy Implementation and Management
Park, Young Shin
As we are more than a decade into describing and understanding local sustainability as a major phenomenon, local governments now face new challenges as they begin moving from commitment (i.e. stage of adopting sustainability goals and initiatives) to action (i.e. stage of implementing those). Research on post-adoption challenges is slowly emerging yet is still far from constituting a concrete understanding of the effective implementation of sustainability programs. This dissertation helps fill these gaps. It identifies the needs and challenges facing local governments in realizing their sustainability goals and, more importantly, investigates institutional conditions that may ease these challenges. In particular, it examines the following two topics that are known to be critical, yet challenging to achieve, for the effective implementation of sustainability programs: collaboration and performance management. The broad definition of sustainability, as embedded in its three-legged stool trope – environment, economy, and equity – means that many sustainability pogroms are likely to exist beyond the sole purview of a single department. In fact, according to a recent study, some cities have created an office entirely responsible for sustainability management, but in most cases, sustainability program management is diffused across several departments, such as land-use management, water quality control, and infrastructure maintenance. Thus, while the cross-cutting nature of sustainability necessitates collaboration among local departments involved in sustainability management, this can be challenging given the functionally departmentalized structures commonly found in our local governments. Therefore, two chapters of this dissertation examine how various institutional arrangements and conditions shape inter-departmental collaboration in sustainability management with one at the implementation stage (Chapter 1) and the other at the evaluation stage (Chapter 3). Performance management is another topic that is under-researched in sustainability literature despite its potential to advance local sustainability efforts. The data-driven approach to sustainability management is rising, as found through multiple publications of best practices and case studies, yet research evidence as to what conditions effective sustainability performance management occurs under is largely lacking, especially employing large-N data. Chapter 2 thus investigates how local governments are using performance information for sustainability management and what institutional conditions may promote such evidence-based practice using information from their performance management systems. Through the examination of the three research questions, this dissertation provides an empirical understanding of local governments’ sustainability efforts at post-adoption stages and, more importantly, identifies various institutional factors that may impede or advance efforts. In order to better assess the connection between institutional conditions and managerial practices, this dissertation employs two prominent institutional theories: rational-choice institutionalism that focuses on the role of formal institutions, such as structure, mechanisms, and resources, for understanding organizational behavior, and sociological institutionalism that broadly considers and emphasizes informal institutions, such as culture, personal networks, and symbol systems that convey meanings and social cues (Hall and Taylor 1996; Lounsbury and Ventresca 2003). Overall, this dissertation provides supporting evidence for the latter in fostering a collaborative, data-driven approach to sustainability management (CH1 and CH2). Yet, it also finds that these cultural and social cues must be directly tied to the specific action or change an organization desires to make (CH2 and CH3). This point is further confirmed in the cases of formal institutions. While formal institutions tend to have relationships that are either indirect (CH1) or of small magnitude (CH2 and CH3) with the outcome of interest in each chapter, the magnitudes of the relationships are fairly substantial when designed to target a specific action (CH3). Overall, on a theoretical level, this dissertation contributes to the rich collection of institutional studies by employing prominent theoretical perspectives and providing empirical evidence from an under-researched topic area: sustainability. This dissertation reveals a complex picture of an institutional environment where local governments translate ambiguous sustainability goals into concrete plans and actions. The implications of the study findings are discussed for both practice and future research. On a practical level, this dissertation utilizes several original large-N datasets and explores the needs for and drivers of collaborative and data-driven management of sustainability programs beyond the anecdotal evidence found in case studies and best practices. While qualitative evidence offers an invaluable source of understanding of local sustainability efforts, its limitation in generalizing findings requires co-efforts from quantitative research to establish a robust and systematic body of research evidence for effective sustainability management. This dissertation, therefore, suggests some potential ways in which our local governments can design their institutional contexts in such a way that they help them realize sustainability goals they arduously put in place.
2019-05-31T00:00:00ZThree Essays on the Economics of For-Profit Colleges
https://hdl.handle.net/1808/27895
Three Essays on the Economics of For-Profit Colleges
Shannon, Eric William
This dissertation consists of three studies regarding the growing role of for-profit colleges and universities in the United States. Analyzing the behaviors of these institutions through a microeconomic lens, I investigate the ways in which the internal and external environmental factors in which for-profit colleges and universities operate influence their behaviors as well as impact on traditional colleges and universities. The three separate research questions asked by this dissertation are all analyzed using sophisticated quantitative econometric models. The substantive conclusions of this dissertation is that many of the assumed behaviors of for-profit colleges and universities – such as the predatory targeting of minority communities – are not empirically realized. Additionally, this dissertation illustrates that the competitive forces introduced by for-profit colleges and universities may lead to positive increased in the efficiency of public institutions. For all three chapters, practical policy recommendations are forwarded in order to promote evidence-based policymaking as it relates to for-profit colleges and universities. Major empirical contributions of this dissertation include one of the first applications of a novel bias correction – the split-panel jackknife - to a substantive policy area as well as a comparison and discussion of the quasi-experimental methodologies used by researchers in applied policy analysis.
2018-05-31T00:00:00Z