Kenneth J. Meier

Public Management and Educational Performance: The Impact of Managerial Networking

Policies are implemented in complex networks of organizations and target populations. Effective action often requires managers to deal with an array of actors to procure resources, build support, coproduce results, and overcome obstacles to implementation. Few large-n studies have examined the crucial role that networks and network management can play in the execution of public policy. This study begins to fill this gap by analyzing performance over a five-year period in more than 500 U.S. school districts using a nonlinear, interactive, contingent model of management previously developed by the authors. The core idea is that management matters in policy implementation, but its impact is often nonlinear. One way that public managers can make a difference is by leveraging resources and buffering constraints in the program context. This investigation finds empirical support for key elements of the network-management portion of the model. Implications for public management are sketched.

Lipstick and Logarithms: Gender, Identity, Institutional Context, and Representative Bureaucracy

According to the theory of representative bureaucracy, passive representation among public employees will lead to active representation in bureaucratic outputs. Existing research demonstrates that the link between passive and active representation exists for race but not for sex. Past research on this topic has not, however, taken into account the contextual environment that affects whether sex will translate into gender and lead to active representation in the bureaucracy. In this paper, we create a framework that specifies the conditions that affect whether passive representation results in active representation for sex and then test this framework using the case of education. We find that passive representation of women in education leads to active representation and that the institutional context affects the extent to which this link between passive and active representation occurs.

The Politics of Gay and Lesbian Rights: Expanding the Scope of the Conflict

Morality politics theory predicts that gay rights policy will reflect the influence of religious groups, party competition, and partisanship while interest group theory suggests that these policies will correspond with interest group resources, elite values, and past policy actions. Using multiple regression on a 50-state data set and a county-level data set for gay rights initiatives in Oregon and Colorado, we found gay and lesbian politics are no different from those for other policy issues. When gay and lesbian rights are not salient, the pattern of politics resembles that of interest group politics. If individuals opposed to gay and lesbian rights are able to expand the scope of the conflict, the pattern of politics conforms to morality politics.

Representative Bureaucracy and Distributional Equity: Addressing the Hard Question

Research on representative bureaucracy has failed to deal with whether or not representative bureaucracies produce minority gains at the expense of nonminorities. Using a pooled time-series analysis of 350 school districts over six years, this study examines the relationship between representative bureaucracy and organizational outputs for minorities and nonminorities. Far from finding that representative bureaucracy produces minority gains at the expense of nonminorities, this study finds both minority and nonminority students perform better in the presence of a representative bureaucracy. This finding suggests an alternative hypothesis to guide research: that representative bureaucracies are more effective than their nonrepresentative counterparts.

I Seen My Opportunities and I Took 'Em: Political Corruption in the American States

This study is an empirical examination of political corruption in the American states. Using the number of public officials who are convicted of crimes involving corruption as the dependent variable, four explanations of corruption are examined--historical/cultural, political, structural, and bureaucratic. We find that corruption is associated with historical/cultural forces, political forces (especially turnout and party competition), and bureaucratic forces (government size and policies that increase bribe opportunities). Structural factors (e.g., campaign finance reporting requirements, centralization, direct democracy) are unrelated to the incidence of corruption. Finally, the study shows some evidence that prosecution of corrupt public officials was subject to partisan and racial targeting during the Reagan administration and racial targeting during the Carter administration.

Managing upward, downward and outward: Networks, hierarchical relationships and performance

It is particularly difficult, but also valuable, to try to estimate the relative contributions of different managerial functions to the outcomes of public programs. Building from a formal treatment of public management and performance, this study explores this research task with empirical analyses of several hundred public organizations and their top managers over a five-year period. Using Moores distinction among managing upward toward political principals, downward toward organizational agents and outward toward the networked environment, we examine managerial impacts on ten different performance criteria. Findings validate the points that these three functions are distinct, public management has performance-relevant impacts and managerial networking outward can be an important contributor to the achievement of public objectives.

Environmental Turbulence, Organizational Stability, and Public Service Performance

A turbulent external environment is widely believed to have damaging effects on public service performance. Much less consensus has been reached on whether the best response to turbulence is to retain or alter existing organizational structures. We provide the first comprehensive empirical analysis of these issues by testing the links between turbulence, structural stability, and performance in a large sample of public organizations. Our results show that turbulence has a negative effect on performance, and that this is compounded by internal organizational change. Thus public managers can mitigate the harmful effects of volatility in the external environment by maintaining structural stability.

Politics, Structure, and Public Policy: The Case of Higher Education

This article examines whether governance structures facilitate or impede political forces by testing two competing hypotheses concerning the ability of bureaucratic structures to insulate higher education policies from politics. Centralized structures both create autonomy and facilitate access by environmental forces. This study examines the structures of higher education boards to gain a better understanding of how they interact with politics to affect higher education policy. To the extent that variation in governance structures is correlated with bureaucratic autonomy, it should limit the ability of elected officials to influence education policies. The transaction costs of individuals seeking to influence overall agency policy are lowered, however, in more centralized organizations. Political actors can focus their attention on a single geographic site rather than multiple sites that are adapting to different sets of institutional arrangements and different local environments. These hypotheses are tested in a 47-state, 8-year analysis.

Black Representation and Educational Policy: Are They Related?

This study examines the impact of black school board members on educational policies that affect black students. Using data from 82 of the largest urban school districts in the United States, several measures of second-generation educational discrimination are analyzed. Black membership on the school board is associated with more equitable educational policies; this relationship remains in some cases even with controls for black political and economic resources. The implications of these findings for the study of representation are then discussed.

Hispanic Americans and Educational Policy: Limits to Equal Access

This research examines the relationship between Hispanic representation on school boards and public policy outputs that affect Hispanic students. Using a data set of 35 large urban school districts, several questions are examined. First, the level of Hispanic representation on school boards is measured and related to types of electoral structure. Second, Hispanic representation on school boards is found to be a significant determinant of Hispanic employment as teachers. Third, Hispanic teachers have a major impact on the educational environment of the Hispanic student. Districts with larger percentages of Hispanic teachers also have Hispanic students who are more likely to complete school and more likely to attend college. These findings contribute to the growing literature linking passive representation with active representation.