Comparative Public Administration in a Globalized World: Moving Beyond Standard Assumptions Toward Increased Understanding

Abstract

Today's globalized world calls for a deeper understanding of how and why administrative practices differ across regions and what that means for theory and practice. However, empirical comparative studies in public administration incorporating local and regional particularities in their design, constructs, and interpretation of results are scarce, with the exception of studies on specific constructs such as public service motivation, professional values, and emerging approaches to non‐Western public administration. Consistently, scholars engaged in comparative studies highlight theoretical, methodological, and empirical difficulties in comparing public agencies, employees, and practices as the research instruments and assumptions used often originate from Western countries. Thus, there is a serious need today for adopting more context‐sensitive and balanced approaches to advance our scholarly understanding of systems and practices in different regions. This symposium aims to advance comparative public administration by bringing together novel empirical comparative contributions from scholars from different parts of the world.

Policy Design for COVID‐19: Worldwide Evidence on the Efficacies of Early Mask Mandates and Other Policy Interventions

“…Fukuyama 2020), the model includes an electoral democracy score (Lindberg et al 2014). Lastly, a growing body of research underscores the critical role of culture in shaping the quality of government and public management (An and Tang 2020; Persson, Parker, and Widmalm 2017; Porcher 2021; Stivers 2021; Van der Wal, van den Berg, and Haque 2021; also see Johansen 2019, for social equity context) and how the cultural orientation captured by the “collectivism–individualism” continuum (Hofstede 1980) influences governments’ overall COVID‐19 policy intervention speed (Chen et al 2021) and individuals' receptivity to the mask mandate, in particular (Lu, Jin, and English 2021). The model, therefore, includes each country’s collectivism–individualism orientation score, which may be the most relevant cultural factor in the mask‐wearing context.…”

Core values for ideal civil servants: Service‐oriented, responsive and dedicated

“…The philosophy of governance in East Asian countries such as China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore is influenced by Confucianism (van der Wal et al, 2021). Contrary to Western ideas of good administration developed in the context of the notion of the rule of law or managerialism, Confucian ideals show a strong reliance on personal moral development, captured by the label of “rule of morality” (Yang, 2020).…”

Building global public administration knowledge: Leveraging the power of collaboration

“…In the last decade, others have elaborated about some of the geographic, methodological, and other boundaries that impede a global public administration. With respect to variations attributable to geography, scholars (Haque, 2022; Perry, 2016; van der Wal et al, 2021) have written about the need to contextualize research to better understand a large range of factors—history, politico‐ideological, and sociocultural—that affect administrative systems and practices. Many have written about various forms of parochialism, among them American, Anglophone, and epistemic parochialism (Candler et al, 2010) and Eurocentric and Western parochialism (Haque, 2022; Nisar & Masood, 2023).…”