Public Administration

PMR — pp. 1-25 2026-09-09 Original Unlocking the transformative potential of design: reflections from practice on navigating barriers to designing for societal transformation Geert Brinkman, Arwin van Buuren, Suzan Christiaanse, Irene Fierloos, Wiesje Korf

PAR — 2026-09-03 Original The Practice and Origins of Performance Measurement: Assessing the Sunnyvale Model, 1984–2023

PAR — 2026-09-01 Original The Role of Public Administrators in Building a Robust Liberal Democracy Eva Sørensen, Jacob Torfing

PMR — pp. 1-30 2026-08-26 Original Beyond monolithic state logic: how top-down accountability shapes policy implementation W. G. Will Zhao Abstract How does top-down accountability shape policy implementation? Drawing on institutional logics, this paper distinguishes two state sub-logics: ‘high-stakes context logic’ emphasizing centralized control during crises, and ‘routine governance logic’ allowing discretion during day-to-day administration. These sub-logics condition the perceived legitimacy of accountability demands, felt accountability, and behavioural responses. A survey experiment with over 800 public service respondents shows that, under high-stakes logic, intensified accountability progressively improve compliance, whereas under routine logic, moderate accountability produces optimal compliance, with high-intensity accountability yielding diminishing returns. These findings challenge binary views of accountability and reveal how within-logic variations may alter governance mechanisms.

PAR — 2026-08-19 Original Democratic Backsliding and Governance Outcomes: Measuring Administrative and Political Channels of Decline David Ibañez, Ricardo A. Bello‐Gómez

JPART — 2026-08-11 Original Institutional amnesia and public administration: does history repeat? Alastair Stark, Hridesh Gajural, Jack Corbett, Dennis C Grube, Heather Lovell, Rodney J Scott

PAR — 2026-07-31 Original Consolidating Liberal Democracy From Within A Theory of Public Institutional Leadership Sandra Groeneveld, Heidi Houlberg Salomonsen Abstract ABSTRACT Recent developments in also established democracies have made clear that public administration and management research alike have neglected giving scholarly attention to public organizations as institutions. Drawing upon research on leadership of institutions and leadership in public organizations we suggest a theory of public institutional leadership . Public institutional leadership reconnects public management with democracy by suggesting three central dimensions of leadership behaviors that instill and sustain liberal democratic values in public organizations. These behaviors include articulating and reaffirming democratic values through top‐down vision‐setting; building “character” bottom‐up through role modeling and fostering psychological safety to enable dialogue and deliberation around these values as well as demonstrating constrained responsiveness to political principals relative to those values enabled by the cultivation of bureaucratic autonomy. Although the necessity of such behaviors is made salient by rising populism and democratic backsliding, their relevance extends to public management situated in liberal democracies in general.

PMR — pp. 1-29 2026-07-30 Original Understanding red tape perceptions of street-level bureaucrats: a multilevel cross-country analysis Qianhui Li Abstract Despite extensive research on red tape’s negative consequences, its antecedents remain underexplored. Building on the psychological process model, this article investigates antecedents of street-level bureaucrats’ red tape perceptions across the micro, meso, and macro levels. Using a dataset of 90,480 teachers across 44 countries, results show that antecedents across all levels relate to teachers’ red tape perceptions. Specifically, red tape perceptions are weaker among teachers having a growth mindset, working in schools with a wide span of control, and living in low uncertainty avoidance and individualism cultures. Across these antecedents, the cultural contexts are particularly important.

PMR — pp. 1-35 2026-07-16 Original The cognitive fabric of collaborative governance: paradox mindset in transformation-oriented collaborations Noa A. Birman Abstract This theoretical article develops a micro-foundational perspective on how and under what conditions collaborative governance groups generate transformative outcomes. It integrates literature on collaboration, transformation, and paradox to advance three core propositions. First, collaborating for transformative outcomes constitutes a distinctive paradoxical context, in which the tensions of collaboration and the tensions of transformation are nested, reinforcing, and constitutive of the process itself. Second, diversity in collaborators’ cognitive-emotional capacity to perceive and navigate tensions (i.e. paradox mindset) shapes collaborative outcomes, with diversity in paradox mindset enhancing the likelihood of transformative outcomes. Third, the paradoxical leadership behaviours of designated leaders further increase the likelihood of transformative outcomes. By highlighting the dual challenge of transformation-oriented collaborations of eliciting tensions to stimulate change while containing them to sustain collaboration, the article links individual-level cognitive-emotional predisposition to group dynamics and system-level outcomes, offering a broader theorizing of collaborations in public administration.

JPART — 2026-07-08 Original The voice of the voiceless: refugees’ perceptions of participation under constraint