William G. Resh

Bureaucratic Discretion, Client Demographics, and Representative Bureaucracy

For passive representation to translate into active representation, bureaucrats must have discretion. Despite its importance to representative bureaucracy theory, though, discretion has received little empirical attention in public administration. We seek to address this shortcoming by examining the determinants of bureaucratic discretion, paying particular attention to how the demographic characteristics of clients and bureaucrats interact to influence the amount of discretion that individual bureaucrats possess. Specifically, we examine whether the amount of discretion that minority bureaucrats have is positively related to the percentage of an organization’s clients who are from the same minority group. We argue that there are three reasons to expect a positive relationship: client demand, managerial deference to bureaucratic expertise, and bureaucratic appropriation. Our findings suggest that a positive relationship exists for African American bureaucrats, but not for Hispanic bureaucrats.

Frictions in Polycentric Administration with Non-Congruent Borders: Evidence from Ohio School District Class Sizes

Public managers who operate within cross-jurisdictional governance regimes face substantial difficulties in facilitating network collaboration. Scholars have long suggested that non-congruence of geographic borders can create coordination problems among the political communities within polycentric administrative units. A frequently reoccurring example of such coordination problems arises in cases where municipalities and school districts have non-congruent borders, creating fiscal externalities in residential development land use decisions. Using GIS data from 611 Ohio school districts and 1,585 municipalities in 2000, we calculate the degree of non-congruence between school district and municipal territory to test for evidence that non-congruence of municipal-school district borders influences school district class size. The results indicate that schools with non-congruent borders do experience substantively larger class sizes. Furthermore, these effects seem to increase with the degree of non-congruence. Our findings are robust to model specification and consistent across OLS and treatment effects regression estimates. Policy implications for state-encouraged consolidation of school districts are discussed as well as theoretical and empirical implications of non-congruent jurisdictional borders for governance studies more generally.

Loopholes to Load-Shed: Contract Management Capacity, Representative Bureaucracy, and Goal Displacement in Federal Procurement Decisions

ABSTRACT Federal contracting is complicated by the conflict between system maintenance and the more intangible, normative goals of government. This study focuses on a federal procurement program that explicitly pursues equity as a normative goal in the contracting of services from small and disadvantaged businesses. For many federal agencies, low contract management capacity makes the pursuit of this goal difficult, prompting these agencies to focus on goals that are more proximate, easily achievable, and tangible. We argue that both behavioral and representative bureaucracy theories help explain how organizations can synthesize goals in this particular context, thereby reducing the propensity of federal agencies to displace equity for the more proximately achievable goal of system maintenance. Our findings indicate support for this argument. We discuss the contributions of this study to studies of goal displacement and, more generally, to theory integration in public management scholarship.

Faithful Infidelity: 'Political Time,' George W. Bush, and the Paradox of 'Big Government Conservatism'

George W. Bush assumed the presidency with the ill-fated political aim of creating a permanent electoral alignment favoring Reagan Republicanism in America by pursuing a “big government conservatism”, agenda with human resource management (HRM) strategies lying at its heart. In the process of setting the other HRM-focused contributions to this symposium in broader context, the authors define the logic of big government conservativism as a strategy for electoral realignment, discuss the place of HRM as a tactical means for advancing that agenda, and place Bush’s efforts in “political time.” In offering an integrative framework for assessing the critical role of the White House, the executive office of the president, and political appointees in redefining the career civil service as a key component of Bush’s big conservatism agenda, we portray Bush’s failed efforts at constructing a permanent Republican political majority as encountering similar dynamics and meeting a similar fate as other “orthodox innovators” in presidential history. At the same time, his place in political time was not destiny, because he achieved a mixed record of strategic, political, and tactical competence while operating within the constraints of his political time.