Amy K. Donahue

A Framework for Analyzing Emergency Management with an Application to Federal Budgeting

Emergency management is a complex policy subsystem that involves an intergovernmental, multiphased effort to mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. This article develops a framework for analyzing the fiscal and functional aspects of disaster policy. It uses established theories of intergovernmental relations to offer a rationale for examining the capabilities required to implement disaster policy and the behavioral incentives that drive policy formulation. In particular, the article identifies the extent to which the capabilities and political objectives characteristic of each level of government are aligned, and illustrates the interplay between incentives and competencies by reviewing the federal disaster funding process. The current rules for federal budgeting may inappropriately promote spending on disaster response and recovery, while de-emphasizing mitigation and preparedness. Various proposals for reform could establish more coherent incentives, making disaster spending more consistent with the relative functional capabilities of the various levels of government.

Experience, Attitudes, and Willingness to Pay for Public Safety:

Conditions of fiscal stress in local governments prompt researchers and public officials to seek to assess citizens’ attitudes about public services and their inclination to fund enhanced service levels and quality. This study explores the questions of how citizens’ attitudes about services influence their willingness to pay for them and how direct and mediated experience with services influence attitudes about them. The authors draw from two broad bodies of work: the public finance literature about demand and the psychology literature about attitudes. The authors propose a conceptual model of the relationships between citizens’ direct and mediated exposure to public services, their attitudes about these services, and their willingness to pay for them. The authors present data from a survey of Connecticut adults and use these data to estimate statistical models of the relationship between media exposure and attitudes with regression analysis. They find evidence that direct experience and media exposure affect attitudes and that attitudes predict willingness to pay.

Ready or Not? How Citizens and Public Officials Perceive Risk and Preparedness:

The more prepared people are, the less harm they will suffer when disaster strikes. Yet anecdotal and empirical evidence shows that people overestimate their preparedness and are underprepared. While a robust literature has matured around hazards, risk, and vulnerability, and disaster policy, politics, and management, the literature about individual preparedness is much more limited and inconsistent. We know little about why people prepare (or why they do not), and what would make them prepare more. As a result, public managers are at a loss about how to design effective preparedness programs. In this paper, we survey the literature on preparedness to crystallize the gaps in our understanding of when and how citizens react to the threat of disaster. We then examine and compare the views of risk and preparedness held by individuals and government officials drawing on insights from a 4-year study that involved three national surveys and intensive studies in two communities. We use this analysis to address two questions: What do citizens think and do about risks and preparedness, and why? How do local government officials understand what citizens think and do about risks and preparedness?

Citizen Preferences and Paying for Police

ABSTRACT: Researchers frequently approach questions dealing with local fiscal decision-making using economic models. These models typically base the demand for public services on a set of socioeconomic characteristics that serve as rough proxies for voter preferences. Our study focuses more directly on preference formation and explores the nature of the relationship between citizens’ attitudes about police services and their willingness to pay for them. We pay particular attention to the role of demographic traits, television media, and direct contact with service providers. We present data from a survey of Connecticut adults and use these data to test direct and indirect effects models with regression analysis. We find evidence that attitudes about police predict willingness to pay for police services, holding the demographic attributes of respondents constant. We also find that the effects of some demographic traits on demand for services are mediated by preferences, as are some types of experience and media exposure.

Managerial Perceptions and the Production of Fire Protection

Despite compelling impetus to carefully specify the influences on public performance levels, the role of public managers in public production has not been fully characterized or measured. This article argues that an issue central to the study of local government performance is how public managers perceive their decision-making environments. It examines a key aspect of the relationship between public management and government performance by explicitly incorporating public managers in an economic production framework for public services. Aportion of themodel developed in the article is applied to the case of fire chiefs as the primary managers of the production of fire protection by local fire departments. The Q factor analysis technique is used to typologize fire chiefs’ perceptions of their managerial environments.

Teaching Leadership in Public Administration

Abstract Graduates of public administration programs regularly find themselves in roles accorded substantial responsibility and authority. It is therefore crucial that these programs provide effective instruction that helps students develop leadership skills and attributes. The dilemma is that leadership concepts are not susceptible to traditional didactic instructional approaches, which are cognitively based. Leadership learning is best accomplished in the affective and behavioral domains as well as in the cognitive. We present a pedagogical model that we believe is more appropriate for teaching leadership in public administration, public policy, and public affairs. This model marries the key competencies of effective leaders with suitable teaching orientations. We illustrate how this model may be applied by describing a graduate leadership course we have developed and taught.

Taxes, Time, and Support for Security

New technologies have been developed in response to terrorism. These present problems for local officials: implementing technologies will be expensive, and no technologies exist that can be used to gauge demand. We apply contingent valuation methodologies to determine support for additional taxes to pay for new terrorism-related technologies and services. We present findings from a national survey about peoples attitudes toward terrorism prevention and response. We find that respondents generally support new services and technologies and local tax increases to pay for them. We also find that respondents are willing to pay more if programs have everyday uses that would enhance public safety, but are less supportive as inconveniences increase.

Risky Business: Willingness to Pay for Disaster Preparedness

A primary government responsibility is ensuring citizen safety and security. Individuals share responsibility for their own protection, but research shows they are typically under‐prepared. Despite a growing literature, broad gaps remain in our understanding of peoples preparedness choices. This paper focuses on two empirical objectives: understanding peoples assessments of the risks they face and their preparedness to meet them, and examining the extent to which people are willing to pay to improve community‐level preparedness and individual household preparedness. These objectives are grounded in descriptive analysis of peoples perceptions of risk and preparedness. The analysis draws on two original national random surveys of household decision‐makers. The findings yield insight into peoples support for preparedness and potential response to incentive programs that can inform more effective program designs.

Integrating labor relations and human resource management: Impacts on state workforces

What is the combined effect of labor relations and human resources management on results that are important to managers? This article provides a preliminary answer to this question using data from the 50 state governments. Research considering the influence of public sector unions on public sector outcomes typically operationalizes unionization as bivariate, which greatly understates the complexity of the relationships. Furthermore, labor relations research often fails to consider the human resources management systems in which labor relations operates. Considering the effects of labor relations and human resource management policies together on intermediate outcomes such as quality of hires, turnover, and tenure begins to provide a more complete picture of the workforce management system, and provides a roadmap for future research which can be informative for both the public and private sectors.

A Review of: “Lessons of Disaster: Policy Change After Catastrophic Events by Thomas A. Birkland”

Disasters are chaotic events that disrupt the normal routines of society. The new circumstances created by disasters alter people’s perceptions, often prompting individuals and political actors to question policy priorities and to scrutinize the effectiveness of public management systems. Disasters can illuminate gaps and weaknesses in the existing policy regime and crystallize problems that demand solutions. In this environment, public officials often feel motivated to make changes that will improve outcomes the next time disaster strikes. To do so requires individuals and public institutions alike to be able to identify, understand, and ultimately learn the lessons disasters reveal. A profound challenge is that the infrequency with which disasters occur makes it hard for policymakers to specify problems correctly, and to configure and confirm the utility of new policy approaches. Thus, while governments readily identify the urgent lessons disaster experiences teach, learning is much harder to achieve—and beyond that, permanent policy change does not automatically result. Thomas Birkland offers an analysis of the challenge of policymaking in the wake of disasters in his second book on this topic. Birkland’s first book, After Disaster: Agenda Setting, Public Policy, and Focusing Events, asked what effects natural disasters have on the problems governments choose to focus on solving. He concluded that disasters increase the attention particular policy problems get, but that the agenda that emerges depends on the nature of the political process that operates in a given hazard domain. Lessons of Disaster extends his assessment of policymaking to examine institutional learning and policy change. The book’s goal is to determine whether, how, and how quickly the desire to make substantial changes to public policy—and to improve society’s preparedness for future events—may be International Public Management Journal