Call for Papers: Behavioural and Experimental Public Administration

For the symposium on behavioural and experimental public administration researchers are invited to submit their papers until the 21. October 2016.

Behavioural public administration

has been defined as the analysis of public administration from the micro-perspective of individual behaviour and attitudes by drawing upon insights from psychology and other behavioural sciences. Experimental public administration entails researchers intervening in the world using different forms of intervention randomly allocated to experimental units and using comparison of outcomes to estimate their causal effects.

This journal symposium focuses

on the intersection of behavioural and experimental method which has not previously been the specific subject of a symposium of this kind. This is important because public administration theories often focus on macro- or meso-level conceptions that rest on implicit or seldom tested assumptions about the views and behaviours of individuals. Microfoundations are key to many processes and outcomes, for example underlying how citizens and public sector workers interpret information, make evaluative judgements and consequently behave. Yet, public management scholars have only recently begun to explicitly examine the behavioural micro-level assumptions by integrating psychological and behavioural insights. The use of experiments is similarly increasing in public administration research as their merits for estimating causal effects are increasingly recognised. However, experimental methods are still relatively uncommon in the discipline. Moreover, there is a growing emphasis in recent behavioural work on using experiments as a preferred method for testing theory and demonstrating causal processes. Hence the focus of this symposium on research that is both behavioural and experimental public administration.

Therefore we invite submissions

that are part of this emerging area of behavioural public administration. The symposium seeks to be inclusive of a wide range of theories and topics within work influenced by psychology and behavioural sciences that use experimental methods. It is open to a broad range of experimental methods that use randomised intervention, for example survey experiments, field experiments and laboratory experiments.

Deadline

Manuscripts should be submitted by Friday 21st Oct 2016 to the coordinating guest editors at sebastian.jilke@rutgers.edu. After a first round of screening completed immediately after this deadline, selected authors will be invited to submit their manuscript directly to Public Administration’s Editorial Manager System. All manuscripts will be double-blind reviewed via the Editorial Manager System and a final decision on papers will be made by the journal after full peer review. Authors should follow Public Administration’s style guidance.

The complete call can be seen here.