Open research questions in Public Policy and Administration Research

What the literature leaves open

• The paper notes the challenge of balancing centralized formal authority with the need for inclusive, evidence-based policy development and consultation.

  Organized Consultation Below the Collaborative-Governance Threshold: Differentiated Participation and Documentary Standardization in Albania’s Administrative-Territorial Reform 2.0 · 2026 · DOI

• There is a gap in understanding how participation is organized and contributions are transformed in administrative reforms. The paper identifies a lack of research on the constructs of asymmetric responsiveness and documentary standardization in the context of administrative reforms.

  Organized Consultation Below the Collaborative-Governance Threshold: Differentiated Participation and Documentary Standardization in Albania’s Administrative-Territorial Reform 2.0 · 2026 · DOI

• The study underscores that reforms rooted solely in technocratic models or quantitative performance measurement are insufficient for addressing the complex realities of governance in Indonesia.

  The politicization of public policy in Indonesia: A Global South perspective · 2026 · DOI

• This gap has impeded efforts to identify the causes and consequences of bureaucratic trust, resulting in mixed findings regarding its origins and influence on policy support and implementation.

  Trust in civil servants: A cross-national dataset for public policy research, 1986–2022 · 2026 · DOI

• The findings suggest paths for future research to follow to gain additional insights, address the design limitations of this study, and identify causal mechanisms.

  Agency Coordination on Complex Climate Policy Problems Within Cities · 2026 · DOI

• Fourth, the differences in the influence of trust in national and local government on compliance have not been examined.

  The trust in government gap: National trust, local trust, and compliance · 2026 · DOI

• Our findings indicate that current risk reporting practices are insufficient to enhance the resilience of governmental organizations.

  Risk Disclosure as a Resilience Tool in Central Governments: Assessing Current Practices in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands · 2026 · DOI

• Future research should examine how guidelines and ICT systems are perceived and translated into workers’ practices when conducting individual assessment within screen-level bureaucracy.

  Challenges for individual assessment in digitalised welfare administration: the case of social assistance · 2026 · DOI

• However, the mechanisms behind these improvements remain understudied theoretically and empirically.

  On mechanisms of meritocratic recruitment: competence and impartiality · 2025 · DOI

• While scholars as well as practitioners increasingly promote a responsive government, little is known about the actual responsiveness of civil servants and factors influencing their responsiveness.

  Civil servant’s responsivity to community-based initiatives—how enabling factors predominated the disabling · 2025 · DOI

• Future research should explore longitudinal dynamics and cross-community comparisons to further enhance the applicability of the model.

  Optimizing Governance Networks in Multi-Actor Collaboration: A Case Study of Community Service in China · 2025 · DOI

• However, little is known about whether different countries have addressed this issue in their regulatory strategies and how they have done so.

  Risk Management in the Public Sector: A Comparative Analysis of Central Government Settings in France, Germany, and Italy · 2024 · DOI

• The lack of a delivery-oriented reform framework for capital budget execution in the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education.

  From Compliance to Conversion: A Delivery-Oriented Budget Execution Framework for School Infrastructure in Zimbabwe · 2026 · DOI

• The study identifies the lack of genuine political will as a challenge in the implementation of OPRAS. The study highlights the prioritisation of visible infrastructure projects over administrative reforms like OPRAS as a challenge. The study identifies the inadequate budgetary allocation and ineffective monitoring and evaluation mechanisms as challenges.

  Political Will in Implementing Administrative Reforms in Selected Councils in Tanzania: An Analysis of the Shortcomings of the Open Performance Review and Appraisal System · 2026 · DOI

• The study highlights the lack of genuine political will as a decisive factor explaining both successes and persistent failures in the implementation of OPRAS.

  Political Will in Implementing Administrative Reforms in Selected Councils in Tanzania: An Analysis of the Shortcomings of the Open Performance Review and Appraisal System · 2026 · DOI

• This study confirms a persistent paradox in Uganda’s decentralised financial management system: policies are well designed and “wise in policy”, but implementation remains inconsistent and “weak in practice”. The recommendations therefore focus on closing this implementation gap by strengthening operational effectiveness, accountability, and institutional discipline.

  Wise in Policy-Making and Fragile in Practice: Financial Management and the Challenges of Value for Money in Uganda · 2026 · DOI

• Across cases, institutional support emerges as a critical condition, without it, PSM alone is insufficient to sustain long-term performance and engagement.

  How Has Public Service Motivation Been Studied? A Scientometric and In-Depth Analysis · 2026 · DOI

• The gap is that institutions lack practical methods for observing how meaning shifts inside real decision systems. The gap is that traditional governance mechanisms are insufficient to detect translation drift early.

  Why Strong Governance Still Drifts: How Institutions Quietly Lose Alignment · 2026 · DOI

• The research gap is the lack of consideration of the structural pattern of translation drift in complex decision systems.

  The Green Dashboard Trap: Why Institutions Lose Sight of Their Own Intent · 2026 · DOI

• IIGOs' varying institutional features are often overlooked. IIGOs' capacity for informal governance is not well understood. There is a need to develop a typology of IIGO types.

  Varieties of informal intergovernmental organisations: how differences in design matter for informal governance · 2026 · DOI

• The problem lies not in differing time horizons per se, but in the fact that if mechanisms for interconnection and review among plans with different horizons are insufficiently designed, long-term infrastructure plans may become detached from medium-term fiscal and administrative decisions, creating documentary and institutional conditions under which an ‘implementation gap’—in the sense used by Ryan and Gao…

  Temporal Misalignment of Planning Horizons and the Relative Positioning of Demographic Assumptions in Japan’s Ordinance-Designated Cities: Implications for Public Facility Management · 2026 · DOI

• Moreover, this investigation serves as an application of the understudied external perspective of networks…

  Investigating Environmental Features and Network Interdependencies in Network Formation: A Study of Collaborative, Community-Based Watershed Restoration · 2026 · DOI

• Several key recommendations emerged from the study to enhance the effectiveness of centralised SMS recruitment in the South African public sector.

  Centralised recruitment for senior management in South Africa's public sector: Implications for service delivery · 2026 · DOI

• The difficulty in articulating and transmitting tacit evaluative expertise - The risk of subtle influence effects that arise when interpretive assistance blends imperceptibly into recommendation - The need for clean empirical evaluation of AI's…

  The Margin of Purpose: How Institutions Lose What They Claim to Value · 2026 · DOI

• The evaluation of the effectiveness of AI-Augmented Impact Frames - The development of new methods for articulating and transmitting tacit evaluative expertise - The exploration of the application of AI-Augmented Impact Frames in different…

  The Margin of Purpose: How Institutions Lose What They Claim to Value · 2026 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Public Policy and Administration Research

• Strategic Responses to Institutional Processes · Academy of Management Review · 1991 · 25,824 citations
• A PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR ALL SEASONS? · Public Administration · 1991 · 5,978 citations
• Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics · American Political Science Review · 2000 · 4,669 citations
• Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms · Political Studies · 1996 · 3,294 citations
• The “new public management” in the 1980s: Variations on a theme · Accounting Organizations and Society · 1995 · 2,412 citations
• The New Governance: Governing without Government · Political Studies · 1996 · 2,371 citations
• The Motivational Bases of Public Service · Public Administration Review · 1990 · 2,285 citations
• Institutional Sources of Change in the Formal Structure of Organizations: The Diffusion of Civil Service Reform, 1880-1935 · Administrative Science Quarterly · 1983 · 1,854 citations
• The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life · American Political Science Review · 1983 · 1,817 citations
• Institutionalization and Structuration: Studying the Links between Action and Institution · Organization Studies · 1997 · 1,680 citations

Most recent work

• IAGD Conceptual Vocabulary and Construct Boundaries: Public Edition v1.2 · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
• Institutional Authority and Governance Dynamics (IAGD 2.2): Revised Visual Framework · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
• Interpretive Public Governance versus the curse of ‘presentism’: Narratives on the future study of public administration, 1945–2025 · Public Money & Management · 2026
• Open innovation in the public sector: managing knowledge assets for public value creation through dynamic performance management · International Journal of Public Sector Management · 2026
• Organizational Citizenship Behavior Model in Improving Public Service Management Mediated by Integrity · Public Integrity · 2026
• The Organizational Dynamics of Bureaucratic Resistance to Undemocratic Pressures: A Conjoint Experiment in Brazil · Public Administration Review · 2026
• Governance paradigms and public sector innovation: A comparative study · International Review of Administrative Sciences · 2026
• How Have the Transformations of Supreme Audit Institutions Shaped Contemporary Public Auditing? A Professional, Process, and Stakeholder Perspective · Financial Accountability and Management · 2026
• A Chequered History but Positive Future for British Public Administration · Public Administration Review · 2026
• Intrapreneurship in public institutions: determinants and relationship with public value orientation · Review of Managerial Science · 2026

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