Norma M. Riccucci

As artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly transforms public administration, understanding its impact on perceived legitimacy becomes paramount, particularly, in high‐stakes areas such as policing. While existing research offers mixed evidence on whether government AI use enhances or undermines citizens' perceptions of fairness and trust, the conditions moderating these effects remain underexplored. Drawing on representative bureaucracy theory, this study uses a survey experiment to investigate how gender representation moderates the effect of AI use on citizens' perceived fairness and trust in domestic violence units (DVUs). Results show that female representation positively moderates the legitimacy impact of a DVU's AI use; whereas AI use decreases female respondents' perceived fairness and trust in male‐dominated DVUs, these negative effects disappear in female‐dominated DVUs. Our findings identify representation as a key context shaping citizens' responses to government AI use, extending representative bureaucracy theory by demonstrating its indirect symbolic effects.

The complex nature of top public managerial work is widely acknowledged in theory but rarely examined empirically. Existing research has mostly analyzed bivariate relationships among core components of top managerial work in government, including managers' attributes, practices, outcomes, and contexts. Drawing on a systems‐based framework, we investigate how effective top managerial work unfolds as a complex relational practice. We analyze seven cases of long‐serving, distinguished Chilean senior executives through a comprehensive and process‐oriented lens, based on 27 semi‐structured interviews with the managers and members of their personal and professional networks. Our findings indicate how the relational dynamics in which senior public executives engage shape their managerial attributes and practices. Specifically, strategizing, motivation building, and technical expertise are best understood as emerging primarily through interactions within agencies and with external sociopolitical environments. These results qualify perspectives that explain senior public management effectiveness by overemphasizing executives' individual attributes and views, and underscore the need for personnel policies and governance environments that equip managers with the capacities called for by a systems approach to top public management.

This commentary centers on Trump’s efforts to destroy diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Among these is Executive Order 14173, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” The commentary refutes Trump’s assertion that DEI programs prioritize diversity or equity at the expense of merit.

Publishing is a source of capital and power in academia, and coauthoring is a common way to publish. However, studies in public administration have not yet examined the structure of coauthorship patterns, how these patterns have evolved over time, or the extent to which these patterns are gendered. We use bibliometric data to examine coauthorship in public administration scholarship over four decades with a particular focus on gendered patterns. Descriptive statistics, regression, and social network analysis suggest that when women are first authors, the research team is more likely to contain other women and while women are increasingly represented in coauthorship structures, men‐only groups of coauthors continue to persist. These findings have implications for the coauthoring practices of individual scholars, perceptions of coauthorship in hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions, and efforts in the field to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.

There has been a good deal of research on sexual harassment in public sector workforces. One facet of this body of research that has not been fully explored is the potential impact of gender representativeness on sexual harassment in the workplace. In the context of representative bureaucracy, we examine if increased representation of women in the upper levels of the federal workforce is associated with active bureaucratic outcomes, such as decreased incidents of sexual harassment at the lower levels of bureaucracy. We also examine the effect of gender representation of the team or workgroup of the employees. We find that as the proportion of women supervisors increases, the likelihood of female employees experiencing sexual harassment significantly decreases. We also find that women’s representation in workgroups and the perceived effectiveness of sexual harassment policies are negatively associated with both the likelihood and frequency of sexual harassment.

Teaching has always been an integral part of being an academic. The author’s approach to teaching depends on whether the author is working with MPA or PhD students. The author’s classes’ focus, format, and goals differ, as do the requirements. The author’s adage has always been that there is no one best way to teach, mentor, practice, or study (i.e., to conduct research) in public administration. Thus, each individual will develop their own unique approach and identity. The author believes that the field of public administration will continue to move forward in a progressive manner, leading, reforming, and innovating to ensure our persistent relevancy in teaching and research.

This chapter addresses the relationship between representative bureaucracy and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and illustrates that the two concepts overlap to a certain extent, particularly around inclusiveness. That is, representative bureaucracy in the active sense suggests that bureaucrats who are actively representing their counterparts in society possess the skills and knowledge to access the information and resources necessary to represent their counterparts; moreover, they are able to affect the policies and decisions that result in the desired outcomes. However, some have raised the concern of goal misalignment; that is, where bureaucrats’ efforts to advance the interests of their counterparts in the general society may be incompatible with the goals of the organization. These issues are addressed in this chapter.

Understanding attitudes toward affirmative action (AA) is important because it plays a critical role in the successful implementation of AA and hence diversity in organizations. The field of public sector human resource management (HRM) places a good deal of attention on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA). The legal tool of affirmative action remains an important tool for achieving DEIA. This study examines gender, race, and sector differences as predictors of gender- and race-based support for AA in the workplace. Using data from the 2000 to 2018 General Social Survey (GSS), this article finds that Blacks and other persons of color offer more support than White men for race-based and gender-based AA. In addition, women offer more support than men for gender-based affirmative action, but only in the private sector. Overall, public sector employees do not support race- or gender-based AA programs more than their private sector counterparts.

Public sector labor unions and their commitment to collective bargaining are central to the study of public sector human resource management. This study explores collective bargaining scholarship in the United States as exemplified in the public administration literature. Systematically coding 220 articles from the top fifteen (mainstream) peer-reviewed public administration journals over a period of 50 years (1970–2020), this study examines how public sector collective bargaining is framed and conceptualized in public administration research, identifying, and studying the dimensions of public sector collective bargaining research in the United States. The primary purpose of this article is to map trends and gaps in local, state, and federal public sector collective bargaining scholarship, which is an essential public personnel function in need of further academic attention. It is also hoped that this study could stimulate future research into public sector collective bargaining.