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The ongoing underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities in most levels of office continues to warrant our attention. However, scholars have only focused on what factors contribute to the electoral success of minorities, without attention to a vital precursor—the supply of minority candidates. Using data from the Local Elections in America Project, this study provides one of the first glimpses into the supply side of minority representation, detailing how demographic, electoral, and political factors affect the likelihood a black candidate is on the ballot, and the subsequent impact on the likelihood of a black candidate winning.

A new public administration movement is emerging to move beyond traditional public administration and New Public Management. The new movement is a response to the challenges of a networked, multisector, no‐one‐wholly‐in‐charge world and to the shortcomings of previous public administration approaches. In the new approach, values beyond efficiency and effectiveness—and especially democratic values—are prominent. Government has a special role to play as a guarantor of public values, but citizens as well as businesses and nonprofit organizations are also important as active public problem solvers. The article highlights value‐related issues in the new approach and presents an agenda for research and action to be pursued if the new approach is to fulfill its promise. Bryson, Crosby, and Bloomberg Podcast Episode

Anyone observing the recent scandals in the United Kingdom could not fail to understand the political importance of the rewards of high public office. The British experience has been extreme but by no means unique, and many countries have experienced political over the pay and perquisites of public officials. This book addresses an important element of public governance, and does so in longitudinal and comparative manner. The approach enables the contributors to make a number of key statements not only about the development of political systems but also about the differences among those systems. It provides a unique and systematic investigation of both formal and informal rewards for working in high-level positions in the public sector, and seeks to determine the impacts of the choices of reward structures. Covering 14 countries and drawing on a wide range of data sources, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of comparative public administration, international politics and government.

How do public opinion signals affect political representatives' opinion formation? To date, we have only limited knowledge about this essential representative process. In this article, we theorize and examine the signaling strength of one type of societal signal: protest. We do so by means of an innovative experiment conducted among Belgian national and regional politicians. Elected officials were exposed to manipulated television news items covering a protest demonstration. Following Tilly's previously untested WUNC claim, four features of the event were manipulated: the demonstrators' worthiness, unity, numerical strength, and commitment. We argue that these protest features present elected officials with useful cues about what (a segment of) the public wants. We find that these cues affect elected officials' beliefs. The salience they attach to the protest issue, the position they take, and their intended actions all change as a consequence of exposure. The size of a protest event (numbers) and whether the protesters agree among themselves (unity) are the most persuasive protest factors. The effects of the protest signals come on top of strong receiver effects. We find no evidence that elected officials' predispositions moderate the effects of the protest features.

We argue that politicians systematically discount the opinions of constituents with whom they disagree and that this \"disagreement discounting\" is a contributing factor to ideological incongruence. A pair of survey experiments where state and local politicians are the subjects of interest show that public officials rationalize this behavior by assuming that constituents with opposing views are less informed about the issue. This finding applies both to well-established issues that divide the parties as well as to nonpartisan ones. Further, it cannot be explained by politicians' desires to favor the opinions of either copartisans or likely voters. A third survey experiment using a sample of voters shows that the bias is exacerbated by an activity central to representative governance—taking and explaining one's policy positions. This suggests that the job of being a representative exacerbates this bias.

While concerns about the public's receptivity to factual information are widespread, much less attention has been paid to the factual receptivity, or lack thereof, of elected officials. Recent survey research has made clear that US legislators and legislative staff systematically misperceive their constituents' opinions on salient public policies. This study reports the results from two field experiments designed to correct misperceptions of sitting US legislators. The legislators (n = 2,346) were invited to access a dashboard of constituent opinion generated using the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Despite extensive outreach efforts, only 11 per cent accessed the information in Study 1 and only 2.3 per cent did so in Study 2. More troubling for democratic norms, legislators who accessed constituent opinion data were no more accurate at perceiving their constituents' opinions. The findings underscore the challenges confronting efforts to improve the accuracy of elected officials' perceptions and suggest that elected officials may indeed resist factual information.

Sharpening the Sword of State explores the various ways in which 10 jurisdictions in the Asia-Pacific enhance their administrative capabilities through training and executive development. It traces how modern governments across this region look to develop their public services and public sector organisations in the face of rapid global change. For many governments there is a delicate balance between the public interest in promoting change and capacity enhancement across the public service, and the temptation to micro-manage agencies and be complacent about challenging the status quo. There is a recognition in the countries studied that training and executive development is a crucial investment in human capital but is also couched in a much wider context of public service recruitment, patterns of entry and retention, promotion, executive appointment and career development. This empirical volume, authored by academics and practitioners, is one of the first to chart these comparative differences and provide fresh perspectives to enable learning from international experiences

Privilege and Prejudiceis a stereotype-defying autobiography. It reveals a Black man whose good fortune in birth and heritage and opportunity of time and place helped him to forge breakthroughs in four separate careers. Clifton R. Wharton Jr. entered Harvard at age 16. The first Black student accepted to the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, he went on to receive a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago-another first. For twenty-two years he promoted agricultural development in Latin America and Southeast Asia, earning a post as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation. He again pioneered higher education firsts as president of Michigan State University and chancellor of the sixty-four-campus State University of New York system. As chairman and CEO of TIAA-CREF, he was the first Black CEO of a Fortune 500 company. His commitment to excellence culminated in his appointment as deputy secretary of state during the Clinton administration. A remarkable story of persistence and courage,Privilege and Prejudicealso documents the challenges of competing in a society where obstacles, negative expectations, and stereotypical thinking remained stubbornly in place. An absorbing and candid narrative, it describes a most unusual childhood, a remarkable family, and a historic career.

One of the most important demonstrations of power in Washington is the ability to recruit sitting government officials to become active proponents of one’s position. Many have suggested money is the key: Campaign contributions buy friends, access, and perhaps even policy activism. We provide an alternative view based on a deceptively simple observation: Lobbyists rarely lobby alone. We show empirically that government policymakers respond to the overall structure of conflict, not the resources of individual lobbying groups. Our project is based on in-depth interviews with over 300 policy advocates and systematic information on each of more than 2,000 advocates playing a significant role in a random sample of 98 policy issues in the United States federal government from 1999 to 2002.