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A full and fair administrative and judicial capacity standard, to clarify the appropriateness of federal judicial intervention in the management and execution of public programs is presented.

ABSTRACTScholars have demonstrated that public service motivation (PSM) may be conditional and activated in certain contexts or by particular primes. However, to date researchers have focused on the impact of positiveexperiences or beneficial consequences of public serving activities on employee PSM. Altruism research suggests that PSM may also respond, somewhat counterintuitively, to negativeexperiences. We test this in an experimental study of 456 public employees in which treatment groups were asked to recall negative or positive interactions with citizens, before responding to questions from a widely used scale of PSM. Results suggest that expressed PSM is sensitive to, and in fact increases, in response to both positive and negative experiential primes. We conclude with a discussion of implications of conditionality for our broader understanding of PSM.

Many of the world’s most pressing issues lay at the intersection of law and public administration. However, many have long lamented the relatively weak and atomized state of law and public administration scholarship. In this article, we use bibliometric and content analyses to systematically assess the last 20 years of literature, exploring the extent to which law and public administration have developed as a coherent paradigm. In short, we provide a contemporary assessment of the past assertion that “public administration has largely abandoned or forgotten its roots in public law—in the Constitution, statutes, and case law.” While we conclude that little changed in the last two decades, we offer some insights on the theoretical integration of law and public administration identifying strengths, weaknesses, and future avenues to advance paradigm building. Many of these recommendations necessitate better cross- and inner-field integration of voices and ideas.

ABSTRACTWe test whether justices’ traits – race, gender, age, previous judicial experience, education, and tenure – are associated with opinion assignment patterns as suggested by status characteristics theory. Female justices were more likely to be asked to write the majority opinion, particularly if the case raised a “women’s issue.” In complex cases, however, both female and African American justices were less likely to be selected to write the majority opinion. Extending intersectionality perspectives, advances in age were associated with a decreased likelihood in women and African American justices receiving the assignment, though at distinct age ranges.

ABSTRACTIn this article, we identify key theoretical perspectives from the literature in social and organizational psychology on diversity and workgroups and apply these concepts to an analysis of decision making in the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Using data from twelve circuits over two decades, we leverage the diversification of the federal appellate bench to investigate the nature of the relationship between changes to a court’s gender and racial composition and levels of consensus. The results suggest that the impact of a diversified court depends on the size of the court.

Conventional wisdom in diversity research holds that biodemographic diversity is harmful to performance, whereas job-related diversity is beneficial to performance. Empirical evidence in this area, however, remains mixed and inconclusive. Due to this inconsistency, scholars have recently called for a search for moderators of the relationship between diversity and performance to expand the theoretical perspectives on organizational diversity. In this context, we examine how biodemographic (gender, race, and age) and job-related (function and tenure) diversity influence organizational performance and how diversity climate as a potential moderator shapes the relationships between the two dimensions of diversity and performance. Using panel data from the U.S. federal government, we find that racial and tenure diversity have positive relationships with organizational performance, whereas functional diversity has a negative relationship. Further analysis reveals that a diversity climate positively moderates the relationship between racial diversity, functional diversity, tenure diversity, and organizational performance. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

In today’s multisector configurations, there is little clarity about whether and how public and private subsidies influence social enterprises’ pursuit of financial stability. We address the strategic role of donors in the social-business life cycle whereby social enterprise start-ups rely on subsidies, while mature social enterprises strive for independence from donors. To address the “missing middle,” we develop a typology of subsidy instruments and an intermediary signaling model to clarify how subsidies shape the evolution of outcomes for social enterprises. We argue that source variation matters for certain instruments like corporate intangibles and governmentally subsidized credit guarantees, which trigger crowding-in effects and attract commercial partners, while preventing perverse crowding-out effects, such as soft budget constraints. To illustrate this commercialization story, we draw upon a microfinance case study, demonstrating how public and private donors can induce crowding-in and crowding-out effects. In short, our subsidy typology helps unpack the signals that public and private subsidies send to commercial funders of social enterprises and how they shape the path to future financial independence.

In this study, we explore whether sector distinguishes what we know about performance appraisals. We were particularly interested in two important aspects of the appraisal process: evaluation of inrole/task and extrarole/citizenship behaviors. We utilized a mixed experimental design with three within-subjects factors (task behavior and two types of extrarole behavior), each manipulated at two levels (high and low performance), and a between-subjects factor measuring sector of the respondent (private and public/nonprofit). We find that sector does matter in a common managerial task like performance appraisals. Public sector managers placed greater weight on task behaviors in making their appraisals than did private sector managers. Results regarding sector and extrarole behaviors were mixed. Implications and future research directions are discussed.

Nonprofit organizations have the potential to influence public health by filling voids not filled by government or private organizations. Here we investigate whether the presence of health-related nonprofit organizations at the local community level helps to improve community-level obesity. This study used a time-series design using a random effects model to determine whether the entrance or exits of health nonprofits at the county level was associated with lower obesity rates in the US one and two years following the entrance or departures of nonprofits. The effect was small but significant in urban areas, with a smaller effect in rural areas. Our findings suggest that the presence of health nonprofits is associated with positive health outcomes, in this case obesity. The plausibility may be explained through the increased role nonprofits play in fostering social capital and increased promotion of health-related issues.