ABSTRACT Government attention is crucial to policy change and outcome. For local agents, their attention is explained by various factors, and a thorough understanding is needed to integrate diverse perspectives. Combining vertical, horizontal, local, and personal influences, we formulate a conditional embeddedness framework for local agents. The framework explains that agents' attention is primarily directed by principals, but this directed shift is horizontally and locally shaped by political and economic contexts, conditional on agents' traits. Empirically, we test attentional responses of 328 prefecture‐level governments to an environmental reform in China. Results corroborate our hypotheses, showing that local government attention generally increases following a reform, but the increases vary due to promotion competition and firm dominance and are further moderated by mayors' education and work experience. The findings demonstrate the importance of interactions between contextual and individual features in the shifts of local government attention and their responsiveness in a principal‐agent relationship.

ABSTRACT The intriguing paradox of wide public disdain for corruption alongside popular corrupt politicians exists globally. By speaking to public ethics theory and rational choice theory, this study examines the trade‐off in which citizens tolerate corrupt officials in exchange for their competence to deliver public benefits. Using a conjoint experiment embedded in a sample of 30,521 surveys across 60 cities from 33 nationalities (regions) in 2023, this study yields three findings. First, mayoral candidates' economic performance mitigates the negative impacts of corruption on citizens' support. Second, although citizens are more likely to tolerate corrupt yet competent politicians, they still value honesty considerably more than competence. Third, citizens in contexts with less corruption and lower‐income citizens are less inclined to support corrupt politicians and more resistant to exchanging integrity for competence. This study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the mechanisms underlying citizens' mixed attitudes toward political corruption and competence.

ABSTRACT Local governments offer untapped insights into public organizational change. Despite their large number and variety, internal departmental dynamics are poorly understood, with implications for information processing, service delivery, and democratic accessibility. Using data from 272 municipalities collected 5 years apart (2014–2019) analysis finds that 88% changed at least one department name and 69% experienced an increase or decrease in the total number of departments. To understand what contextual elements may lead to these changes, capacity and institutional triggers are explored. Findings indicate that turnover of executive leadership increases the likelihood of change, while population and employment change affect the scale of change. Other commonly discussed conditions such as changes in financial resources, the turnover in legislative bodies, and the independence of executives are not significantly associated. For public administration, the consequences of continuous change in organizational hierarchies could affect assumptions of bureaucratic stability, democratic responsiveness, administrative burden, and organizational legibility.

It was a pleasure to read INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR by Wendy Chen and David Audretsch. Within the pages of 10 well-written chapters, the authors take the reader from a historical overview of the role of the public sector in socially important innovation to a meaningful appreciation of decades of academic and policy thought about the manifestation of entrepreneurial behavior within an innovation process. Chapter 2 asks the question: Where did public innovation begin? The authors are meticulous in their trace that begins with the ancient powers in the Mesopotamian Region and with the establishment of the National Science Foundation in the United States. This is the most comprehensive such history that I have seen, and it offers appropriate context for the topics that follow. Chapter 3 addresses new frontiers in public innovation that have been brought about through digitization. All forms of electric information exchanges are described, in an evolutionary perspective, in a readable and understandable manner. Others will likely rely on this foundation to begin their own study of quantum technologies and the role of the public sector in its development. Hinting at the inevitable, namely policies to enhance entrepreneurial-based public innovation, collaboration is the topic of Chapter 4. It is touted as a mechanism for the exchange of information that is needed to develop entrepreneurial perceptions for potential government innovation. The authors make the case that government can advocate collaboration as well as facilitate collaborations in which it itself participates. The direction that public innovation should proceed to maximize the social impact of new innovative technology is the topic of Chapter 5. And the key takeaway from this chapter, again with an eye toward public policy, is that the role of government is to enhance bottom-up approaches for the creation of new innovations. This so-called democratic perspective eschews government picking winner and loser technologies. That perspective forms the scope of Chapter 6. In what might be called a forward looking perspective by the authors who come from different disciplines, an innovation ecosystem is set forth in Chapter 7. A hallmark of the strength of such an ecosystem will be for the government training of public entrepreneurs, which will require a culture change for the public domain. This view is set forth in a justifiable manner. Drawing on the demonstrated expertise of other notables who are introduced in Chapter 8, the authors offer a roadmap for how to increase an entrepreneurial ecosystem and environment that fosters public entrepreneurs. As expected, that roadmap begins with a change in governmental culture that would initiate incentives through organizational leadership. And, before a final summary chapter, the authors demonstrate their own insight by offering a detailed discussion of the challenges a government faces in managing an entrepreneurial innovation nexus. This objective approach to the arguments set forth in the earlier chapters is to be applauded, as is the entire book.

ABSTRACT Governments in advanced democracies often implement self‐binding mechanisms like regulatory offsetting schemes to counteract short‐term political incentives. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of Germany's offsetting scheme by analyzing over 3000 legal acts for restrictive clauses and passages related to replacing or repealing existing regulations. Despite Germany being a “least likely” case for failure, our analysis indicates that the scheme has not reduced regulatory burdens. These findings suggest that self‐binding measures struggle to override political incentives for rule production, especially with inadequate monitoring. We contribute to the literature by systematically assessing governmental self‐binding effectiveness, introducing a novel methodological approach based on large language models, and employing a robust difference‐in‐differences design to estimate counterfactual effects. Our study highlights the challenges of implementing effective self‐binding mechanisms in democratic governance.

ABSTRACT Financial disclosure through tax returns is the primary regulatory mechanism for holding nonprofits accountable to donors in the USA. The assumption that donors will make rational decisions using disclosed information when giving to nonprofits is central to this regulation. But what if they rely on mental shortcuts instead? This study examines how donors respond to a third‐party nonprofit rating that is simple, unverified, and based on self‐reported data. Using a five‐year panel dataset covering over a million nonprofit‐year records, we find that even these basic ratings have a significant impact on donation behavior. Donors use ratings via two mental shortcuts. First, ratings increase a nonprofit's salience, boosting donations by 7%. Second, donors process higher ratings as a mental accounting shortcut, giving up to 34% more to the top‐rated nonprofits. The findings suggest the limits of information disclosure alone in making nonprofits accountable to donors.

ABSTRACT Over the past seven decades, South Korea has developed a distinctive trajectory in its public administration (PA) through balancing the domains of research, education, and engagement with government. Our analysis shows that it embodies a connected yet distinct character, closely linked to Western administrative science and global PA scholarship, yet continually reshaped by Korea's bureaucratic culture, Confucian legacies, and pragmatic governance needs. To map this evolution systematically, we examine the entire Korean PA ecosystem by (1) analyzing 4447 scholarly articles published in four leading domestic and international journals over the past two decades, (2) reviewing PA curricula across Korean universities, and (3) tracing government‐funded research projects and faculty appointments to senior public positions over the same period. The findings suggest that the strong institutional linkages between research, education, and government have enhanced Korea's administrative capacity and responsiveness, while also highlighting the need for greater intellectual independence and theoretical inquiry.

ABSTRACT This study examines whether street‐level bureaucrats' preferences toward algorithmic decision support (ADS) induce a unilateral shift of technology‐related risks onto clients of the public employment service. Expanding on public value theory and research on moral agency in public service work, we argue that case managers' choices of ADS designs are shaped by a plurality of professional, service, and efficiency values. To test this argument, we conducted a conjoint experiment on a representative sample of German Federal Employment Agency case managers. Respondents compared pairs of hypothetical ADS systems that differed in their design features, reflecting varying degrees of the realization of public values. The empirical results indicate that case managers' choices do not result in biased design. Instead, case managers balance design features reflecting professional and service values while maintaining administrative efficiency. Case managers appreciate ADS support but firmly reject the mandatory use of such advice.

ABSTRACT Prior research on public organizations' strategic responses to performance feedback has focused solely on the intensity of performance feedback while neglecting its temporal dimensions. This study aims to fill this gap by incorporating the lens of time and investigating how performance feedback duration affects performance improvements in the public sector. Drawing on various theoretical perspectives, we theorize an inverted U‐shaped relationship between underperformance (negative performance feedback) duration and public organizations' subsequent performance improvements, and a U‐shaped relationship for overperformance (positive performance feedback) duration. Empirical analyses using the case of China's official city air quality ranking provide evidence supporting our theory. Our findings reveal that “time” (duration) can shape public organizations' responses to performance feedback in nonlinear ways and help reconcile inconsistencies in the existing literature, highlighting the importance of incorporating temporal dimensions of performance to advance performance feedback theory in the public sector.