about its origins continue to evade scholars: Is PSM driven by genetics, socialized through experiences, or both? If PSM is socialized, when does socialization occur? Answering these questions is critical for reconciling the state vs trait debate, and for assessing the validity of practical implications prescribed by PSM studies. Utilizing "nature's own experiment", we adopt a classical twin-design with 1,035 twin pairs to identify how genetic heritability, a common environment, or unique environment and experiences can explain variation in PSM. Resultsshow that PSM is heavily influenced by individuals' unique environments and experiences; not by genetics. This lends strong evidence to PSM's uniqueness as a motivational construct as related "other-regarding" concepts show sizeable genetic components. Finally, our results corroborate that PSM is a human resource with dynamic properties organizations can cultivate to enhance productivity in public service workforces.

No abstract

Behavioral public administration was coined as a term to describe a field focused on the psychologically based study of individual level behavior and attitudes with relevance for the public sector. Although it holds important insights on human behavior, the literature on behavioral genetics has so far largely been missing in this field. In this paper, I propose that behavioral genetics is concurrent with the scope of behavioral public administration and that it complements the popular theory of bounded rationality. Next, I outline the logics of the twin studies that underlie much of behavioral genetics, and synthesize relevant existing results both inside and outside public administration that relies on behavioral genetics. Functionally, I arrange these insights as they relate to citizens, employees, and managers and present examples of how gene-environment interactions allow for integration of behavioral public administration and behavioral genetics. I argue that insights from behavioral genetics are needed to maximize explanatory power and avoid biased estimates of the effects of socialization when examining these three groups. I conclude by presenting points for practitioners.

We make use of party press releases and Wikipedia page view data to study issue dynamics and its determinants of a relatively young right-wing populist party. By applying structural topic models, we analyse 2262 press releases of the ‘Alternative for Germany’ (AfD) from 2013 until 2019. The findings reveal, first, that European integration, EU economic policy, and migration are prevalent topics, but that a change occurs over time so that the focus on economic policy decreases as the focus on migration policy increases. In addition, we show – by using novel data that provides information on the number of daily hits of entries in the German Wikipedia – that the AfD took the attention into account that people attached to European integration and migration issues when preparing their press releases. The results support the findings of existing studies and imply that the content of press releases can be used for measuring changes in the policy profile of parties during a legislative period when normally no manifestos are published, and that the interest in Wikipedia articles can serve as a proxy for the dynamics of issue salience among the population. Furthermore, the findings indicate that a combination of these two data sources is a fruitful approach for studying the determinants of short-term issue dynamics.

No abstract