In 1995, Robert Behn introduced American public administration to the need for common "big questions" to become a significant academic discipline, similar to the physical sciences. Chinese civil service laws were just being promulgated then, and so the discussion that ensued in Public Administration Review and elsewhere was not particularly salient for China. The largely U.S. literature did not take an international or comparative turn, yet it later became an active conversation in the Chinese literature, which is struggling to deal with its own identity crisis and the value of its research. Developing the big questions of Chinese public management research is extremely relevant in today's environment because China is the world's second largest economy, and their civil service has had significant time to mature. Chinese researchers have recently called for the development of domestically embedded (i.e., Sinicized) big questions. This article discusses the relevance of Behn's questions on micromanagement, motivation, and measurement in the Chinese context and proposes alternate wordings of Behn's questions to make them meaningful within the Chinese cultural and institutional context (while avoiding suggestions of replacing the basic Chinese political structure). Our hope is this discussion will spark a lively debate among the relevant Chinese research community.

This article is an effort to isolate and estimate the impact of political party control of state government on the length of time it took U.S. states to issue shelter-in-place orders (SIPOs) in an effort to control the spread of COVID-19. We adopt a two-step process to isolate the effect of politics. First, we measure the number of days between the date that state-level cases first exceeded one case per 100,000 population and state issuance of a SIPO. This permits us to compare governor's choices in similar contextswhen the disease is known to be present in the community. Second, we use a statistical toolsurvival analysisto differentiate between state characteristics that might be associated with higher risks of uncontrolled spread and the impact of political party control. We find that the timing of disease progression was remarkably similar across states, suggesting that many states reached the 1:100,000 benchmark at about the same time. By contrast, we find that, even after controlling for a variety of factors, a Republican governor coupled with a Republican majority in the state senate predicts delays in the implementation of SIPOs delays on the order of two days for Republican states that did act, but no action by more than one-third of those states after more than two months above 1:100,000. In contrast, potentially important decision-making factors such as urbanization, elderly population, hospital beds, extent of chronic diseases, and budget capacity of the state government serve, at best, as poor predictors of SIPO timing.

No abstract

No abstract