Does governing board involvement impact strategy implementation effectiveness? The role of information sharing in the politics-administration interface

Information use in public administration and policy decision‐making: A research synthesis

“…As for the cross tabulation of studies by research design and by decade of publication (Table 5), about 28 percent of the primary studies adopt a quantitative cross‐sectional approach (among the most recent Bel et al, 2021; Meyfroodt & Desmidt, 2021, 2022; Wagner et al, 2021), 25 percent experimental designs with randomization procedures to assign participants to groups (among the most recent Christensen & James, 2022; Grimmelikhuijsen, 2023; Hansen & Nielsen, 2022; Lindermüller et al, 2022), 20 percent qualitative analysis (among the most recent Jungblut & Jungblut, 2022; Phillips et al, 2023; Solorio et al, 2023; Zhu et al, 2022), 11 percent use a normative approach (e.g., Esmark, 2019; Isett & Hicks, 2018), 7 percent employs quantitative longitudinal analyses (e.g., Shafran, 2022; Wu et al, 2022), and 5 percent espouses mixed methods (e.g., DeLeo & Duarte, 2022; Head, 2016; Linos et al, 2022). Quantitative studies with a panel design (Hondula et al, 2018; Hong et al, 2020), research syntheses (Ruijer et al, 2023; Somers, 2018), and quantitative analyses based on administrative data (Hong & Kim, 2019) account for 1 percent each and appear for the first time in the last decade.…”

Reconceptualizing the Politics-Administration Dichotomy to Better Understand Public Leadership in the Twenty-First Century: A Multilateral Actors Model

“…In addition, while very much an American-focused discussion, the politics-administration dichotomy raises important public leadership questions beyond American borders. Internationally, the current relevancy of understanding the politics-administration dichotomy can be found in examples of empirical research across a wide range of nations and levels of government-for example, in Brazil (Story et al, 2023) in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand (Alford et al, 2017), at the local level in Sweden (Brorstrom & Norback, 2020) and in regional government in Belgium (Meyfroodt & Desmidt, 2022). The dichotomy can provide an analytic framework to study constitutional (Overeem, 2012), political (Sager & Rosser, 2022), and leadership complexity (Svara, 2020) and to advance public leadership research (Hartley, 2018).…”

“…One recent study describes the persistence of these characterizations of the inferior, subordinate role of administrative officials: “Public servants, it is assumed, only make small administrative decisions, leaving the big political decisions based on ideology, interests, and visions to elected politicians, special advisors, and lobbyists” (Peters et al, 2022, p. 962). Another study describes the dichotomy of a typical government organization in Western democracies as information sharing in “…a dual governance structure whereby a governing board populated by politicians and an administrative management team led by a CAO share the responsibility for organizational success” (Meyfroodt & Desmidt, 2022 p. 1), in the context of “… the politics-administration relationship considered central to the study of public management” (p. 44). Empirical research on city managers continues to stress “the relationship between politicians and administration, is navigated by managers in collaborative settings [and] is therefore of particular interest” (Brorstrom & Norback, 2020, p. 660).…”

“…The interplay between elected officials in Congress with oversight roles recognizing the capacity of senior administrators to shape policy and strategic decision-making is implicitly acknowledged in the dynamic that “the precarious nature of majority rule creates incentives for the current majority to insulate newly formed agencies from subsequent politics, limiting their responsiveness to future majorities” (McCubbins, Noll & Weingast, 1989, p. 443). The research on the design of new federal agencies recognizes that the political stakes are high because, once designed, the administrators have a structure for significant influence and decision-making that elected officials would prefer to retain control over and that administrators can potentially insulate themselves from effective political control (Moe, 1990).…”

“…A tension exists in explaining political and administrative leadership between an emphasis on structure, for example, Moe's (1990) politics of structural choice, to the personal, as exemplified by Caro's (2012) description of President Johnson's relationships with senators as the key to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At the national level, Allison (1971) recognizes the strengths and limits of any one frames in shifting from the structural (bureaucratic) to the personal (political) frame for developing a deeper understanding of decision-making at the intersection of elected and appointed officials’ relationships.…”