Highly Cited Articles
The Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory seeks to advance public administration scholarship by publishing the highest quality theoretical and empirical work in the field. The journal is multidisciplinary and includes within its scope organizational, administrative, managerial, and policy-based research that improves our understanding of the public sector. JPART is committed to developing diverse and rigorous research that extends and builds public administration theory. JPART is an official publication of the Public Management Research Association.
OUP has granted free access to a selection of five highly cited articles from recent years. These articles are just a sample of the impressive body of research from the journal.
Scholars have examined how administrative burden creates barriers to accessing public benefits but have primarily focused on the challenges of claiming benefits. Less is known about the difficulties beneficiaries face when using public benefits, especially voucher-based public assistance programs. I argue that the costs of learning how to redeem benefits can discourage program use and undermine policy goals.
Street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) nowadays provide services under conditions of increased demand for public services coupled with scarcer financial resources. The literature that focuses on how workers adapt to this situation mainly examines their provision of formal resources as part of their job. What researchers have not systematically examined is the delivery of informal personal resources (IFRs) by street-level workers to clients.
Administrative burden research has highlighted the multiple costs imposed by public policies and their impact on citizens. However, the empirical understanding of citizens’ responses to such burdens remains limited. Using ethnographic data of doctors applying for maternity leave in Pakistan, this article documents strategies used by citizens to navigate the administrative burden faced by them.
While scholarship on public leadership has recently gained momentum in public administration, it is unclear how researchers should account for the “public” in public leadership. We shed new light on this issue by introducing the approach of Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs) to the field of public administration.
Coproduction where citizens collaborate with public employees in producing and delivering public services is often argued to be associated with benefits for either participating citizens, their relatives, friends, or society at large. Less is known about the potential downsides associated with citizen participation in coproduction of public services.