Carla Flink

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to examine how partisanship shapes views on the performance of core functions of K-12 school districts. Design/methodology/approach: We use a survey experiment with 2,400 US respondents to see how partisanship shapes public evaluations of a K-12 school district on overall performance and financial management performance based on student standardized test achievement, deficit blame attribution and cutback management strategies. Findings: Regression results show that overall performance is influenced by partisanship for deficit blame attribution; however, there is common agreement on the effects of student achievement and cutback strategies. Partisanship identifications lead to more varied results on evaluations of financial management. Originality/value: The study bridges literature on citizen evaluation of government, cutback management and partisan motivated reasoning to highlight how partisanship shapes perceptions of core functions of public K-12 education.

Through a behavioral approach, citizen evaluations of government performance have been an area of study in public administration. Research has explored how different factors influence citizens’ perceptions of public organizations, such as public sector bias and reference points. Understudied in this literature is how citizens evaluate government based on their use of financial management strategies. The Pandemic and other economic challenges have forced governments to engage in cutback management strategies to balance the budget. How do citizens evaluate governments based on their cutback strategies? To answer this theoretical question, we employ a survey experiment design with over 1600 respondents from the U.S. to explore how four cutback management strategies can influence citizen evaluations of government. Our findings suggest that cutback management strategies do influence citizens’ evaluation of government in trust, satisfaction, performance, and fairness. Citizens are more favorable to infrastructure or materials and contractor cuts than increasing taxes or reducing personnel. Further analysis by respondent partisanship indicates Democrats are more accepting of tax increases. Republicans rate governments lower when they cut capital and infrastructure and rate governments higher when they decrease personnel expenditures.

The literature on representative bureaucracy posits that increased representation at the managerial level leads to improved outcomes for minority clients. These managers, however, must work within organizational constraints and during times of environmental turbulence to sustain organizational performance. We forward the theory that contextual factors, such as environmental turbulence, could moderate the effects of representation on organizational performance. Utilizing a Texas school-level dataset of K-12 education from 2011, we examine how the race of the school principal influences student standardized test performance in a time of widespread financial resource cuts. Our findings suggest that same-race school principal representation improves the academic performance of both African American and Latino students, but the positive effects diminish as budgetary cuts become more widespread in the school. This means that environmental turbulence can decrease the impact of representation.

Diffusion models explore the reasons policies transfer across governments. In this study, we focus on U.S. state level efforts in affordable housing. Drawing predominately from policy diffusion literature, our research examines the determinants of the creation of state Housing Trust Funds (HTFs). We utilize event history analysis with logit regressions and survival modeling to examine how problem severity, neighbor adoption, economic standing, elected leadership, housing investment, and demographics predict state HTF adoption. Results indicate that both problem severity and elected leadership predict the adoption of HTFs. This work improves our understanding of state policy diffusion and efforts in housing affordability.

Scholars have shown the importance of financial resources to organizational performance. More money should enhance performance. However, this predicted link between funding and performance is often unrealized—more resources do not automatically improve the production of public organizations. We contend the skillset of management in charge of that money matters in the funding-to-performance link. We test how managerial capacity moderates how financial resources shape organizational performance. We hypothesize that a higher managerial capacity can lead to a stronger relationship between financial resources and organizational performance in the public sector. This is empirically tested in the context of road infrastructure development with data from all 50 U.S. state transportation agencies from 1995 to 2013. We find that the relationship between improvements in road quality (organizational performance) and capital and physical maintenance expenditures (financial resources) is stronger with high scores on the Government Performance Project quality of capital and infrastructure management (managerial capacity).

Punctuated equilibrium theory seeks to explain policy volatility and stability in government attention. In previous research into the temporal dynamics of punctuations, scholars found that punctuations occur in clusters – a recent budgetary punctuation increases the likelihood of a subsequent punctuation. This article examines the direction, positive or negative, of budgetary punctuations over time. Are budgetary punctuations corrective, grouping positive and negative changes? Or, do budgetary punctuations occur in cumulative trends of positive or negative changes? These questions address the heart of the theoretical metaphor for punctuated equilibrium. In an analysis of over 1,000 Texas school districts for nearly a 20-year-period, results support the notion of reactive patterns of budgetary punctuations – positive and negative budgetary punctuations pair up at a rate much higher than expected by chance. The findings demonstrate that even though it is likely to see consecutive positive and negative punctuations, they are not always fully corrective.

Literature on punctuated equilibrium theory has aimed to explain the causes of policy punctuations. What remain unknown are the consequences of those punctuations (and other size changes) for organizations. Specifically, this study analyzes how budgetary changes affect organizational performance. While the connection between financial resources and organization outcomes has been examined before, the analyses here expand upon previous work by considering the full spectrum of budgetary changes from negative punctuations to positive punctuations. This topic is important given today’s fiscal uncertainty. For managers and bureaucrats, they are expected to stabilize organization outputs no matter what policy inputs are established in the organization. At times, inputs can be erratic and unstable—successful organizations can find a way to maintain performance despite these obstacles. In the context of school districts, this study examines the performance consequences (measured by annual changes in the statewide standardized test pass rate) of different size alterations in instructional expenditures. Results indicate that, generally, organizations are able to dampen the impact of negative financial changes and improve upon budgetary increases in the translation to outcomes.