Center for Public Administrators
A civil society organization, strengthening democratic checks and balances .
I presented a teaching case on Independent Demonstration Projects at the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) Social Equity Leadership Conference on June 10, 2022. NAPA will post a video of the presentation, but in the meantime my slides are at social-equity-leadership-conference-.pdf
Public sector workers are part of the web of checks and balances in democracy. Public administration schools are already teaching the ethics of whether and when public sector workers should act as checks and balances, but very little about how to fulfill this role. Case studies and several streams of public administration research provide a basis for teaching future public sector workers how to be effective as democratic checks and balances.
Our new working paper about this is on SocArXiv at https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/hy32x/
I have developed a teaching case about Independent Demonstration Projects, which is a successful strategy to implement innovations in government without prior approval of agency officials. The case is currently pending peer review for publication. I would be pleased to send a copy of the draft case materials to any faculty member who wants to examine it for possible use in their teaching. I can be reached at David.Reed@PubAdmin.org
I am honored to be appointed to the Editorial Board of the journal Public Integrity. I look forward to helping to continue the high quality of that journal. https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=editorialBoard&journalCode=mpin20
Officials pay attention to how their agencies are ranked. Think of the influence of the U.S. News college rankings. Bearfield, Maranto and Wolf ranked cities by an index that includes both homicides and police-related civilian deaths. But my new paper shows that how high a city ranks depends on the mathematical function used to combine the individual variables into a single score. Functions that are equally plausible can make the rankings more or less sensitive to police-related civilian deaths.
The publisher allows me to give away some free downloads, so you can get the paper at https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/HGTQKSQXDRZR5IAUMGWW/full?target=10.1080/10999922.2021.1886439
David S. Reed (2021) Police Performance Rankings Depend on the Functional Form of the Index: A Comment on Bearfield, Maranto, and Wolf, Public Integrity, DOI: 10.1080/10999922.2021.1886439
Bearfield, Maranto and Wolf (2020) advise policy-makers to measure policing outcomes using a metric that includes rates of homicide, police-related civilian deaths (PRCD) , and poverty. They present such an index, which they call the Police Performance Index (PPI). But alternative functional forms that are equally plausible can lead to different rankings of police departments, and therefore different policy conclusions. My comment presents one such alternative index, under which changes in police-related civilian deaths have a greater potential effect on a city’s ranking: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/r8yst
The ASPA Section on Democracy and Social Justice webinar on Promoting Ethical Conduct in Organizations is now on YouTube. It was great serving as a panelist. https://youtu.be/1U4lYwL0p5Q
My how-to on Public Administration Practitioners at Academic Conferences hit SSRN’s top 10 download list for PSN Educator: Public Administration. I hope it encourages more of us practitioners to engage with research. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2765800
I’m excited to be on the panel for the webinar on Promoting Ethical Conduct in Organizations, organized by the ASPA Section on Democracy and Social Justice. It will be Tuesday, Sept. 22 at 1:00 PM EDT. Zoom in and join us! https://lu.ma/7jrra194
David Reed’s paper, Technology: Increasing Citizen Engagement and Access to Information, has been downloaded from SocArXiv over 600 times, and has been cited in two works listed in Google Scholar. The paper’s recommendations are:
The paper is at https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/hws4f/
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