Publications
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When Do City Governance Structures Prevent Corruption? A Review of Municipal Corruption: From Policies to People
Book Review 2026
International Public Management Journal
with Elizabeth Kane
The impact of this book lies in how the authors conceptualize corruption risks through the actionable options of restructuring governance, implementing oversight, and engaging in ethical codes. The case studies are particularly helpful by providing accessible and relevant examples of municipal corruption, demonstrating that no form of government is immune to corruption and oversight is the best course for prevention. In the concluding chapter, the authors synthesize the book’s central themes by articulating a set of best practices for effective state oversight of local governments. They contextualize these recommendations within contemporary governance frameworks and illustrate their application to current oversight practices. Additionally, the authors include representative documents and procedural materials, which serve to substantiate abstract principles and offer readers practical insight in operationalizing oversight mechanisms (pp. 170198). This section of the book would be well suited to the public administration practitioner classroom. Scholars and researchers will find the authors’ quantitative analysis chapters especially valuable as assigned readings in research-oriented settings. The authors’ use of rare events logit regression and propensity score matching offers advanced undergraduate and graduate students a clear introduction to the underlying logic of these methods, as well as guidance on assessing the conditions under which each approach is most appropriate. Overall, Municipal Corruption: From Policies to People provides value to multiple audiences and makes important strides in understanding managerial solutions to municipal corruption.
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Hanging in the Balance: Assessing Goal Prioritization Among Street-Level Bureaucrats
Peer Reviewed Article 2025
Public Performance & Management Review
with Amanda Rutherford
Research on the ordering and updating of goals in bureaucratic settings focuses on individuals in managerial roles despite recognition that street-level bureaucrats shape organizations in meaningful ways. In coupling survey data with interviews of school-based law-enforcement officers, we explore the factors that are associated with the ways in which street-level bureaucrats prioritize rule enforcement and whether more focus on this goal comes at the cost of other goals. Our results indicate that professional training and experience are not associated with the prioritization of rule enforcement. Instead, characteristics of an officer's environment, including the composition of clientele and degree of task complexity, appear to shape street-level bureaucrats' focus on rule enforcement in substantive ways.
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Cross-Sector Dynamics of Administrative Burden
Dissertation 2025
Indiana University
This dissertation examines how nonprofit organizations influence individuals' experiences of administrative burden in their interactions with governments, with a focus on issues in transgender health. I examine the validity of the theoretical assumption that nonprofits reduce burdens in citizen-state interactions, using transgender legal name changes and hormone replacement therapy access as test cases. The practical value of such a project is a deeper understanding of how nonprofits generally help vulnerable populations navigate policy implementation and specifically help with the possible identity development milestones of the US transgender community. In the first chapter, I argue that nonprofit help is indirect and that it can produce a quantifiable effect. Using an instrumental variables strategy, I demonstrate that nonprofit help is associated with an increase in reported respectful treatment during transgender legal name change proceedings. This result suggests that having a nonprofit ally helping an individual through an administrative process can reduce administrative burdens. The second chapter explores how "know your rights" information from nonprofits affects burden perception among groups with varying levels of anticipated stigma. An original survey experiment compares the perceptions of women and transgender people's anticipated burden in a hypothetical legal name change hearing. Results show that educational nonprofit assistance produces a significant reduction in perceived administrative burden for those anticipating high levels of stigma, which indicates that nonprofit information targeted at vulnerable populations may be an effective communication strategy. In the third chapter, I develop a typology distinguishing nonprofits from guardians and other institutions that directly control administrative burdens. I apply the typology in a qualitative analysis of interviews and explore how parents make consent decisions for transgender healthcare, inclusive of the influence of nonprofit-run and informal parent peer programs. The analysis suggests that these peer settings provide normative value and community validation, which help parents process the psychological costs of uncertainty. Overall, the chapters demonstrate that nonprofits play complex and activity-specific roles in mediating administrative burdens, with their effectiveness varying based on the level of local involvement, clients' anticipation of stigma, and community-building capacity.
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The Yoke of Objectivity in Public Administration (and Beyond)
Peer Reviewed Article 2024
Perspectives on Public Management and Governance
with Erynn E Beaton, Jos CN Raadschelders, Gregory D Wilson, and Nicole Rodriguez Leach
Objective research has become an institution, one born out of the Enlightenment, and one that continues to burden public administration scholarship (and, we suspect, much scholarship in the social sciences). As we show, objectivity is a complex, multi-dimensional concept that commands its normative status through dominant philosophies of science. We problematize objectivity, focusing on the dimension of objectivity that suggests research can and should be value-free. Many scholars have contested this notion of objectivity, especially those arguing that research claiming to be value-neutral has done real harm to marginalized groups and undermined social equity. From this basis, we invite public administration scholars to remove the yoke of objectivity for a more honest, conscientious, and forthright field where scholars incorporate greater reflexivity into and take greater responsibility for the social impact of their work.
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A systematic review of the link between public service motivation and ethical outcomes
Peer Reviewed Article 2023
Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration
with Euipyo Lee, Tinganxu Lewis-Liu, and Ming Lu
Preventing unethical behaviour is a concern across cultures and is important for sustaining integrity and stakeholder trust in governance regimes. Encouraging self-regulation of ethical behaviour and accountability of public sector personnel has attracted multidisciplinary attention. A large body of literature has examined the link between public service motivation (PSM) and public personnel's enactments of various ethics-related behaviours. Scholars disagree, however, about whether PSM is significantly associated with ethics-related outcomes. Following the Preferred Peer Reviewed Articleing Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, we conducted a systematic literature review of 59 articles focusing on the PSM-ethics linkage to provide an integrated summary of how PSM affects ethical outcomes. We conclude that the empirical evidence addressing the PSM-ethics linkage is growing, but the mechanisms by which PSM influences ethical behaviour are not yet clear. In this article, we use prosocial organisational behaviour (POB) model to explain how PSM can influence ethical outcomes for public sector employees based upon our systematic literature review.
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The Transition to Electric Vehicles from the Perspective of Auto Workers and Communities
White Paper 2022
MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, Tech. Rep
with Sanya Carley, David Konisky, Jennifer M. Silva, and Naomi Freel
The Industrial Heartland case study conducts focus groups and interviews of autoworkers, management, community stakeholders, environmental justice advocates, and public health experts in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio to evaluate past transitions and dislocations in the motor vehicle industry. Based on these findings, we identify challenges and recommend best practices to promote equitable solutions to the anticipated dislocations caused by motor vehicle electrification and other impending clean energy trends in the region.