Gregg G. Van Ryzin

That many public goods and services are coproduced jointly by government agencies (regular producers) together with clients and citizens (consumer producers) represents a fundamental insight, although it has proven a challenge to define coproduction clearly and to study it rigorously. This article argues that viewing coproduction as a causal process, using the device of causal diagrams, can help describe and diagnose coproduction processes more precisely across a variety of services and settings. The proposed approach is demonstrated by applying causal diagrams to some typical public goods and services, including roads, community gardens, traffic safety, education, and policing. A causal approach also helps shed light on the definition of coproduction and its relation to adjacent concepts such as volunteering, participation, co‐creation, and collaborative governance. At the conclusion, implications of viewing coproduction as a causal process, and specifically the use of causal diagrams for theory and practice, are outlined.

This article reviews the origins and use of the terms quasi-experiment and natural experiment. It demonstrates how the terms conflate whether variation in the independent variable of interest falls short of random with whether researchers find, rather than intervene to create, that variation. Using the lens of assignment—the process driving variation in the independent variable—we distinguish three dimensions: control of assignment by the researcher, rather than by a policy process or naturally occurring event; exogeneity of the assignment process; and directness of the link between assignment and the independent variable. These dimensions generate a typology of causal study designs that we illustrate with examples from the social and health sciences. Our framework can assist researchers and practitioners from diverse disciplines to better understand and communicate with one another and, importantly, to recognize opportunities in real-world settings to find or create variation that can be leveraged for valid impact estimates.

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The election of President Obama, the first African American president of the United States, was an historic and symbolically important event that may have influenced the workplace attitudes of minority federal workers, although this question has yet to be tested empirically. Using difference-in-differences analyses of data from the 2008 and 2010 Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys, this study explores the influence of Obama's election on minority employees' sense of inclusion and job satisfaction in the Department of Education (DoEd) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the two federal agencies with the largest proportion of African American employees. The findings suggest that minority employees in the DoEd and HUD experienced a net increase in their sense of inclusion and job satisfaction after the presidential election. The effect size is small, however, and we found little evidence of an Obama effect across other federal agencies.

This study compares surveys of user and community co-delivery of prevention activities internationally, exploring both the level of co-delivery, as revealed by citizens, and the characteristics of those citizens most likely to co-produce. It draws upon a baseline survey of five EU countries in 2008, more recent updates from two of these countries in 2012 and 2014, and a similar survey in Australia in 2014. Although there are many differences in detail, the results are quite consistent in relation to most key issues and provide a unique quantitative insight into the characteristics of co-delivery behaviour by citizens.

Representative bureaucracy has been investigated empirically and debated normatively, but there exists little evidence about how the general public views representative bureaucracy—especially the legitimacy of active representation. Using a survey experiment, this article explores people's fairness judgments of active representation in two important social and policy contexts: education and gender, and policing and race. Results from an online sample of U.S. adults show that, in the case of education, a female teacher helping a female student was judged to be unfair, with the negative effect mainly coming from the male respondents in the study. In the case of policing, a white officer acting favorably toward a white citizen was judged to be unfair, with the negative effect driven largely by black and Hispanic respondents in the study. Implications for representative bureaucracy theory and research, as well as policy and practice, are discussed.

Symbolic representation and bureaucratic reputation both refer to perceptions of government agencies, but few studies have examined how these concepts interact. We employed a survey experiment in a Brazilian favela, a unique audience of vulnerable citizens defined by the intersectionality race, class, and spatial segregation, to probe how citizens perceive agencies with differing reputations (police versus public schools) when the agency leader is more or less representative of the favelados. We find representation enhances procedural justice expectations of the less reputable local police. Our findings highlight the relevance of representation when detrimental citizen-state encounters produce negative reputations for vulnerable citizens.