US Public Agencies Research Articles

A new measure of US public agency policy discretion

Abstract The US bureaucracy routinely issues major public policy decisions that affect Americans’ lives. Government agency leaders make those decisions based on a subjective understanding of their agency’s available policy discretion. Over time, discretion has become a prominent theoretical construct in the bureaucratic politics and public administration literature, but it is rarely measured directly. In this article, we create a new measure of agency policy discretion. We draw on research suggesting that discretion is derived from the bureaucracy’s key political principals: the elected executive, legislators, and interest groups. We use data from the American State Administrators Project and trigonometry to calculate the discretion area scores for 8,955 state agencies between 1978 and 2018. We then evaluate the measure through a series of construct validation assessments. The article offers an innovative and generalizable way to operationalize discretion that will advance future scholarship in organizational behavior, public administration, and bureaucratic decision-making.

Procurement maturity and IT failures in the public sector

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate disastrous failures in high-value, high-risk IT procurement among US public agencies. The goal is to understand the cause of the failures and explore the role of procurement in IT public investments.Design/methodology/approachThe establishment of the maturity model is based on the relevant literature review and IT procurement failures at four different US public agencies. The data is gathered through multiple sources, including documents, archival records and interviews.FindingsThe findings add to the public procurement literature and highlight the catalyst role of procurement maturity in the success of IT public procurement. They also call for public agencies to grow procurement maturity and increase procurement impact throughout the procurement process.Research limitations/implicationsThe proposed model was primarily based on four Information Technology (IT) procurement failures. Investigations on IT procurement successes and on a larger scale are necessary to further validate and expand the model.Practical implicationsThe proposed model can help public agencies identify where they are in their IT procurement journey and formulate plans to reduce the likelihood of IT procurement failure.Social implicationsThe proposed model helps public agencies achieve IT procurement success, which leads to timely policy implementation, huge federal savings and better use of taxpayer money.Originality/valueThis paper provides an effective framework for public agencies seeking to overcome high-value high-risk IT procurement challenges and achieve IT procurement success.

Institutionalizing sustainability: A structural equation model of sustainable procurement in US public agencies

The rapidly growing interest in sustainable operations in practice has been mirrored by an equivalent expanding attention within the academic community. Yet, as encouraging and significant as the recent growth in the area has been – there is still much that needs to be done. For instance, there is surprisingly little empirical research on public sector management and on factors that might lead an organization to become more likely to adopt sustainable practices. The scope of this research therefore is to explore the conditions under which a given organization is more likely to engage and prioritize sustainable procurement practices and to determine the extent to which the leadership style of the organization's top leader can explain the degree to which sustainability is promoted within a specific organization. Data collected with the help of a self-administered survey from a random sample of US public agencies is analyzed using structural equation modeling. Among others, the results of the empirical analysis confirm that the leadership style of an organization's top executive is positively associated with the probability that an agency will engage in sustainable procurement practices. This research is among the first to attempt to provide an actionable model of adoption of sustainable procurement at an organizational level. It contributes to the diffusion of research on sustainability by studying sustainable procurement practices adoption and by developing a model that draws simultaneously on systems theory, stakeholder theory, transformational leadership theory and institutional theory.

Liberating data for public value: The case of Data.gov

Public agencies around the globe are liberating their data. Drawing on a case of Data.gov, we outline the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for the liberation of public data. Data.gov is an online portal that provides open access to datasets generated by US public agencies and countries around the world in a machine-readable format. By discussing the challenges and opportunities faced by Data.gov, we provide several lessons that can inform research and practice. We suggest that providing access to open data in itself does not spur innovation. Specifically, we claim that public agencies need to spend resources to improve the capacities of their organizations to move toward ‘open data by default’; develop capacities of community to use data to solve problems; and think critically about the unintended consequences of providing access to public data. We also suggest that public agencies need better metrics to evaluate the success of open-data efforts in achieving its goals.

Using process mining to identify coordination patterns in IT service management

We empirically analyze the database used in the help desk process between a national US public agency and its global outsourcing provider. We considered the question of whether the database might reveal a deeper level of knowledge than was apparent from direct inspection. Our results reveal that four constructs underlie this process. Three are confirmed through covariance-based structural equation modeling and a fourth is implied through existing data. Our results suggest refinement in service level agreements to create a different type of governance coordination to assist in aligning the outsourcing provider's execution more closely with the client's needs.

USAID, Population Control, and NGO-Led Democratization in Egypt: The Fate of the ICPD Programme of Action

Critics of US democracy-promotion strategies of the last 20 years ask: what kind of democracy is promoted by US public agencies and associated nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), how is it promoted, and for what purpose(s)? This paper draws on interviews with NGO, USAID, and UN representatives, gathered in Egypt in 2001, to describe the fate of Egyptian women's advocacy NGOs seeking to implement the pro-democracy platform of action of the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). It offers some support for critics' contentions both that external (here USAID) pro-democracy interventions may actually obstruct democratization, and that the instrumental nature of US democracy promotion may mean that such activities are quickly eliminated or downgraded when they conflict with more primary US policy goals.

Public procurement and contracting in bangladesh: An analysys of the perceptions of civil servants

This paper analyzes the perceptions of Bangladeshi civil servants towards public procurement and contracting practices in Bangladesh. The interview method was used in the study to analyze the perceptions of the Bangladeshi civil servants towards public procurement and contract-related issues in Bangladesh. The study reveals that civil servants of Bangladesh have diverse and varying perceptions towards public procurement and contracting practices in Bangladesh, even though they share some commonalities. The results of the survey demonstrate that a majority of the civil servants are in general familiar with public purchasing in Bangladesh. While earlier research depicted that almost all the civil servants in the US public agencies were found quite familiar with contracting and outsourcing, this study shows that less than a moderate percentage of the civil servants of Bangladesh is quite or pretty familiar with contracting and/or outsourcing.