Scott E. Robinson

The Core and Periphery of Emergency Management Networks

Emergency planning and response increasingly involve close interactions between a diverse array of actors across fields (emergency management, public health, law enforcement, etc.); sectors (government, non-profit and for-profit); and levels of government (local, state and federal). This article assesses the temporal dynamics of emergency management networks in two moderately sized communities that have served as large-scale disaster evacuation hosting sites in the past decade. The paper uses two strategies for tracking the evolution of these networks across time. First, we develop a network roster using newspaper and newswire data sources across a decade. Second, we develop a view of the evolution of the networks by analysing emergency operations plans for each community. Analysis of data reveals a contrast between a core set of consistent (mostly governmental) actors and a peripheral set of rapidly turning over (mostly non-governmental) actors – though the account depends on the mode of data on which one focuses. The article concludes with a discussion of the advantage presented by having a two-tier network for evacuation hosting that mixes core and periphery across multiple sectors.

Local Government Performance and the Challenges of Regional Preparedness for Disasters

As is well known, most emergency incidents are managed by local governments. However, when an incident of disaster-scale occurs, the traditional model of emergency management has certain limitations. Emergency response systems are primarily designed to manage incidents locally, not to facilitate coordination across multiple jurisdictional boundaries. As a result, the threat of a catastrophic terrorist attack and of other regional-scale natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina has led to a policy demand for actual regional coordination in emergency response. In this article, we discuss the local development of regionalism in emergency management and present an approach to assessing the effectiveness of such efforts (i.e., we examine local government conditions conducive to regionalization). We discuss various strategies for assessing the push for regionalism in emergency management, including providing several regional integration performance indicators and an outline of the importance of combining assessment strategies in this area. Our results suggest that local capacity for regionalization, just as in other areas of emergency management, is largely determined by unique local characteristics, thus presenting a challenge to new policy doctrine.

Path Dependence and Organizational Behavior: Bureaucracy and Social Promotion

A long tradition in public administration describes administrative decision making as incremental. Despite the dominance of incremental models of decision making, few quantitative studies of administrative behavior take the implications of incrementalism seriously. This article introduces two concepts (path dependence and path contingency) to facilitate quantitative models investigating incrementalism in public agencies. The article illustrates the utility of these concepts in model building by analyzing school district promotion policies. The results show that path contingency and path dependence reveal interesting dynamics of promotion standards that traditional analyses would overlook.

Punctuated Equilibrium and Congressional Budgeting

Recent research has suggested that punctuated equilibrium models best describe the outputs of policymakers. While this literature has convincingly demonstrated that the distributions of policy outputs conform to the expectations of punctuated equilibrium theory, little attention has been paid to testing hypotheses related to the causes of punctuated equilibrium distributions. This research note illustrates a method for testing hypotheses related to punctuated equilibrium theory with a test of the effects of congressional reorganization. The results suggest that congressional reorganization has made the budgetary outputs of Congress less consistent with punctuated equilibrium theory.

LEADERSHIP STRATEGIES AT THE MESO LEVEL OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT NETWORKS

Leadership theory has focused on interpersonal dynamics (such as motivation) and broad social leadership (such as national leaders during crises). Analyzing data from emergency response incidents, we describe a role for leadership between these micro-social and macro-social contexts. At the meso level, emergency managers both design and react to interorganizational structures; a process we call meso-leadership. We explore these leadership strategies, including efforts to engage diverse actors (brokerage) and reinforce group norms (closure). The task of meso-leadership is to balance these strategies, which we illustrate using examples that suggest a pattern of shifting strategies at different phases of emergency events.

School District Partner Choice in Emergency Management Collaboration

Successful emergency planning and response requires the cooperation of a broad array of partners. The literature on collaboration and social networks provides conflicting predictions about how organizations choose partners. One tradition focuses on the powerful role of similarity (or homophily) as predicting partner choices. A contrasting tradition argues that rational organizations will choose partners both unlike themselves and unlike their other partners to ensure that each collaboration provides access to unique resources. This article starts with the question of how an organization whose primary responsibilities are not focused on emergency management chooses partners when they respond to and prepare for emergencies. Using a survey of school districts in Texas immediately following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, the article assesses the priority of partner choice. The results indicate that school districts choose partners largely on the basis of strategic difference, though there is some evidence of homophily.

A Bayesian Approach to Measurement Bias in Networking Studies

The study of managerial networking has been growing in the field of public administration; a field that analyzes how managers in open system organizations interact with different external actors and organizations. Coincident with this interest in managerial networking is the use of self-reported survey data to measure managerial behavior in building and maintaining networks. One predominant approach is to generate factor indices of networking activity from ordinal scales. However, when public managers answer survey questions with ordinal scales to describe their networking activities, the answers may be subject to various response biases. Consequently, the use of factor indices may lead to biased measurements that misrepresent managerial networking. As an alternative, we build on studies that apply the item response theory (IRT) as a measurement strategy and propose a Bayesian alternative. To tap managers’ latent effort put in networking activity, the Bayesian Generalized Partial Credit Model allows us to select a one-dimensional networking scale from multiple ordinal survey items. Using 12 such items in a mail survey of nearly 1,000 American hospital managers, we demonstrate the advantage of using the Bayesian IRT model over factor-analytic models in a substantive test of how managerial networking affects organizational performance.

Public Support for the Department of Homeland Security

The creation of the Department of Homeland Security was a landmark in the history of the U.S. federal government. With the largest reorganization of the federal executive branch in decades, policymakers sought to group agencies with missions related to homeland security under one cabinet level official. It is natural to ask whether this reorganization has succeeded. One measure of that success would be public confidence in the competency of the department. In this paper, we report the results of a national poll which asked a variety of questions related to individuals’ perceptions of the Department of Homeland Security. The results illustrate that the level of confidence in the competency of the Department of Homeland Security is generally high—though there are divisions among people’s evaluations based on party, religiosity, attention to terrorism, and education level.

Varieties of Homeland Security: An Assessment of US State-level Definitions

Abstract Homeland Security continues to struggle to define itself as a field of practice and scholarship. The difficulty in defining the field has led to a variety of conflicts over membership, content, and focus. This article reviews some of the prominent debates over the meaning of homeland security as a field of study and practice. It then defines a simple schema for definitions of homeland security inspired by the academic and legislative debates over the issue. A frequency cataloging of definitions from US state agencies illustrates the continued relevance of a “partial membership” approach to defining the field. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the diversity of homeland security definitions for the development of the field.

Resilience of Post-Disaster Emergency Response Networks: Evacuation Response and Texas School Districts

Studies of collaborative public management have relied on a number of concepts that are time-bound. Collaborative networks rely on trust and stable expectations – both elements that have strong temporal elements. Despite this attention, there has been less research into the evolution of collaborative relationships than one would expect – especially using large-N quantitative methodologies. This is due in part to the methodological difficulties of studying relationships across time using survey methodologies. This paper reports results from two surveys of school districts immediately following Hurricane Katrina that asked about their collaborative relationships – including whether they continued collaboration more than a year after the hurricanes. The results suggest that organizational structure plays the largest role in determining whether organizations maintain collaborative relationships.