Suchergebnisse

For decades the public sector seems incapable to not incur new debt or even save money to overcome the omnipresent stressed financial situation. This grievance is pervasive over several levels of public sector entities including municipalities, the federal states as well as central/national tier. On the local level, bailouts in form of loan repayment are understood as measures to deliver a sustainable solution to and thus overcome the stressed financial situations of municipalities. This study presents empirical evidence for a positive correlation of debt and cost inefficiency of municipalities' service provision. Furthermore, interest payments have a minor impact on this cohesion. These findings show that repayments of municipalities' debts are not a sustainable solution to overcome the stressed financial situation on the local government level. Highly indebted municipalities are inefficient in their service provision anyway.

Literaturangaben

Abstract
Analyses of comparative survey data can contribute to a more thorough understanding of citizens' perceptions of and attitudes toward government. Thus, especially in public administration research, survey data can be a valuable research resource. This research note aims at providing an inventory of comprehensive, open-access survey data to advance quantitative public administration research about citizens' attitudes. Applying a systematic dataset research, we found a total of 23 surveys useful for advancing public administration research, especially research on citizen–state interaction. As major contributions, first, the note sheds light on current survey status quo by capturing both data origin and usage in research. Second, it outlines an agenda for future research to draw scholarly attention to research opportunities in public administration research that could be addressed by the data.

AbstractUnder freedom of information (FOI) regulations, public officials are pressured to grant citizens access to public information by responding to citizen information requests. However, despite FOI regulations, information requests are treated with varying bureaucratic attention, resulting in a high number of ignored or overdue requests by public organizations. Focusing on this bureaucratic discrimination, this study aims to explain the determinants of varying bureaucratic responsiveness to citizen information requests. Responsiveness in this case is therefore either a successful response to the request, a refusal to respond to the request, or no response at all (i.e., the request is ignored). By drawing on public accountability, and thus a citizen‐driven model of bureaucratic responsiveness, we shed light on the human aspect behind responsiveness to information requests. This research argues that the request's topic as an accountability‐seeking indicator and the communication tone as an indicator for underlying emotions influence responsiveness. The results from applying text mining and text analysis techniques, such as topic modeling and sentiment analysis, on over 100,000 citizen information requests filed via a German online FOI platform support these assumptions.