Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Editorial: A journal update and note of appreciation

2024; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/puar.13914

1540-6210

Katherine Willoughby, Jos C. N. Raadschelders, Hongtao Yi, Preston Philips,

Public Policy and Administration Research

How fast a year passes. In this second editorial, we thank those who rotate out of the editorial board after 3 or 6 years of service, welcome those who have agreed to come on the editorial board and express our appreciation to those who serve as members of one of our four PAR award committees. Next, we report to you some journal statistics that illustrate how much Public Administration Review (PAR) has become the go-to journal for PA scholars from all over the globe. You can expect much more detail at the PAR editorial board meeting at the annual ASPA conference in Washington, DC (March 28, 2025 – April 1, 2025). We also inform you about changes in PAR's system of submissions and other activities we have undertaken and expand upon (On PAR, PAR Talk) as well as our efforts connecting the practitioner and academic worlds. Finally, we offer some substantive comments about the position and role of PAR in the study of public administration. What would any journal do without reviewers whose labor of love propels emerging and established scholars into the limelight. The number of submissions the various PA journals receive has grown exponentially in the past 10 years. By way of illustration, when Richard Stillman and Jos Raadschelders started their two terms in 2006 as Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor, respectively, there were about 250 submissions per year; by the end of 2011 this had climbed to about 300 annually. When we were ready to take on the work for the journal, the previous Editor-in-Chief informed us that the number of submissions was anywhere between 800 to 1000. This is a volume of submissions that cannot be managed by us alone. We are very fortunate to have 14 associate editors who at any point in time manage from 4 to 6 submissions each. We each take on a load that ranges from 6 to 12 submissions. We extend special thanks to those who are leaving PAR's editorial board after 3 or more years of wonderful service: Sebawit Bishu (University of Washington), Erin Borry (University of Alabama at Birmingham), Jerrell Coggburn (North Carolina State University), Jason Coupet (Georgia State University), Daniel Feldman (City University of New York), Ulrich Jensen (Arizona State University), Bruce McDonald III (Old Dominion University), Dana Patton (University of Alabama), Alasdair Roberts (University of Massachusetts), Kohei Suzuki (University of Leiden), and James Wright (Arizona State University). We also welcome 16 new editorial board members appointed for 2025–2027, who are a representative sample of experienced, rising, and emerging scholars, practitioners and pracademics: Daniel Scheller (Texas Tech University), Simon Andrew (University of North Texas), Gwen Arnold (University of California Davis), Rachel Krause (University of Kansas), Gary Schwarz (Queen Mary University of London), Xufeng Zhu (Tsinghua University), Jinming Yan (Renmin University of China), Anders Villadsen (Aarhus University), Hyun Jun Park (Sungkyunkwan University), Johan Christensen (University of Leiden), Shahjahan Bhuiyan (American University, Cairo), Steven van de Walle (Catholic University of Leuven), Gabriela Lotta (Fundação Getulio Vargas, Brazil), Angela Nicholas Paez (Tennessee State University), Tatyana Guzman (Cleveland State University), and Ronald Sanders (University of South Florida). We also invited 17 existing editorial board members to remain on the board for another term. They are: Simon Calmar Andersen (Aarhus University, Denmark), Erynn E. Beaton (The Ohio State University), Rachel A. Breslin (U.S. Department of Defense), Yu-Che Chen (University of Nebraska Omaha), Thomas Elston (University of Oxford, UK), Pamela Herd (University of Michigan), Alex Ingrams (Leiden University, Netherlands), Mirae Kim (George Mason University), Erik Hans Klijn (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Eva Knies (Utrecht University, Netherlands), David Lewis (Vanderbilt University), Alex Marland (Acadia University, Canada), Sean A. McCandless (University of Texas Dallas), Jaclyn Piatak (University of North Carolina Charlotte), Gregory Porumbescu (University of Georgia), Kathy Quick (University of Minnesota), Eunju Rho (Northern Illinois University), and Diego Barria Traverso (University of Valparaiso, Chile). Last, but not least, we are very grateful for the time that some of our editorial board members have spent on determining PAR award winners to be honored in the 2025 ASPA annual conference. Sean McCandless (chair), George Krause, and Temirlan Moldogaziev selected the winner of the Mosher & Mosher Award for best article by an academic. Bert George (chair), Joann Carman, and Andrew Podger selected the winner of the Brownlow Award for the best article by a practitioner. Daneen Hatmaker (chair), Don Kettl, and Eva Knies selected the winner of the Newland Award for the Best Practically Speaking article. Finally, Sharon Gilad (chair), Alexander Kroll, and Aisha Azhar selected the winner of the Burchfield Award for the best book review. Submissions to PAR have remained high. We project to receive well over 1000 submissions by the end of 2024, a 25% increase from 2023. Between July 2023 and August 2024, the top 10 countries we received submissions include: United States (285), China (214), United Kingdom (38), South Korea (30), India (27), Denmark (25), Netherlands (24), Brazil (23), Italy (21), and Indonesia (20). We are actively seeking submissions from the global south. Co-Editor-in-Chief Katherine Willoughby joined a SICA (Section on International and Comparative Administration) webinar on Latin American Scholarship in the Global Discussions of Public Administration, to meet scholars from Latin America and discuss how to navigate the publication process with PAR. We will continue to actively reach out to scholars from all continents worldwide. Finally, our invitation to submit country studies where authors share information about the state of the study of public administration in their country and how it contributes to governance has resulted in submissions from various countries (thus far, Brazil, Chile, Kazakhstan, and The Netherlands). Despite the high volume of submissions, our efficiency and effectiveness in editorial flow have shown outstanding improvement since we took over the journal. The average first decision (desk reject) time is 8 days in 2024, when compared to 63 days in 2022. It took us 14 days to assign reviewers in 2024, as compared to 28 days in 2022. After reviews are completed, it took us 9 days to reach a final decision in 2024, when compared to 65 days in 2022. Our efforts to more strongly link academics and practitioners to articulate and understand modern public administration problems, study them, and develop solutions have borne fruit as well. In the first issue of Volume 84, we presented our vision for Practically Speaking, explaining the need to advance research collaborations among scholars and those in practice to better support solving the challenging, complex problems of government and governing. Ron Sanders was introduced as PAR Associate Editor for this section of the journal and together with Michael Rogers, they provided an introduction to our first Practically Speaking article. Sanders and Rogers explained the necessity for level heads and learned, objective counsel to political leaders throughout a public service career to ensure accountable, responsible, efficient, effective, and equitable governance. Then, Andrew Podger and Donald Kettl followed with an assessment of the case of Australia, where a politicized public service exacerbated the havoc wrought from implementation of a cost-cutting initiative to the delivery of social welfare programs in that country (Podger et al., 2024). Our second issue of PAR included research about how discretion is authorized and applied regarding requests for proposals (RFPs) with a focus on a Minnesota case. The authors recognize RFPs as "powerful tools to advance public values" especially given the amounts of money involved today and the complexities of drawing up and administering them. This research finds that stronger collaboration of academics and practitioners in studying RFPs can improve the administration of RFPs and open the floodgates to "help civil servants to improve outcomes for the public" (Merrick et al., 2024). Another Practically Speaking piece in this issue regards return on investment (ROI), a key tool for determining government capital investments that is becoming more so for operations. The paper explains the "hard and soft benefits of investments in resiliency" using examples from law enforcement and airports. The authors stress the importance of quantifying soft benefits given the criticality of ROI as a primary criterion when making decisions on public investment (Smith, 2024). Two articles are included in the third issue of PAR: "Crisis coordination in complex intergovernmental systems: the Case of Australia" and "Adaptive organizational network response in a crisis: The case of five European airports during the COVID-19 pandemic". Authors of the first study point to collaborative leadership, organizational capacity, and a culture of collaboration as vital to advance disaster management effectiveness in a complex intergovernmental system. They discuss the National Cabinet established by the federal government in Australia to combat the pandemic as a successful innovation that can serve as a model for responding to disastrous events in the future (Kapucu et al., 2024). The second Practically Speaking article in this issue studies five European airports and organizational response during the pandemic. The authors received responses from 66 of 87 different airport partners regarding hypothetical scenarios related to public health practice. They conduct a network analysis and find how problems of organizing were solved by the airports, these include problems related to task distribution and allocation, rewards, and information provision. The authors make the case that solving difficult problems by complex organizations requires broad, though flexible public management networks (de Rooij et al., 2024). Finally, the fifth issue of PAR brought examination of guaranteed income programs in the United States and a focus on the realities of need for highly collaborative intergovernmental relationships, substantial data integration within and across levels of government, and the development of new forms of funding for sustainability (Berman et al., 2024). As you can tell, the issues tackled by collaborators in Practically Speaking this past year regard relatively recent events and circumstances as well as providing strong attention to how findings can benefit practitioners now and into the future. Ron Sanders put together our first webinar, PAR Talk, in November 2023 (sponsored by PAR and ASPA's International Chapter and available from ASPA online at 2023 Webinar Archives). "Speaking Truth to Power: Lessons in Administrative Courage," the panel included Susan Gordon, U.S. Intelligence Officer, Andrew Podger, former Commissioner in the Australian Public Service, and Zoe Rouwhorst, Policy Officer for the Government of the Netherlands. Don Kettl and Ron Sanders moderated. Each panelist discussed specific crisis events in their respective governments that rendered it critical for public servants to exhibit courage when speaking truth to power. These experts discussed in detail "what it looks like to have administrative courage" and the outcomes each experienced when providing "frank and fearless advice" to political officials. Highly germane, it is well worth checking out this thoughtful discussion from those in the trenches. We have begun our podcast, On PAR, with two episodes accessible from the Wiley Online Library and through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. The first episode discusses work by early career scholars Karen Sweeting (University of Rhode Island, USA) and Brittany "Brie" Haupt (Virginia Commonwealth University, USA). In this podcast, the two discuss their research about the negative implications of neutrality in bureaucratic systems and public service. They propose an action-oriented, learning-focused approach to raise the consciousness of those in public service. A second podcast regards work by senior scholars, Kutsal Yesilkagit (Leiden University, The Netherlands), Michael Bauer (European University Institute, Italy), Guy Peters (University of Pittsburgh, USA), and Jon Pierre (University of Gothenburg, Sweden). In this podcast, Peters, Pierre, and Yesilkagit discuss modern liberal democracy, its vulnerabilities, and the gradual erosion of democratic institutions. To protect liberal democracy, they propose a Guardian State that embraces liberal principles while defending against illiberal tendencies. The scholars perhaps were prescient in arguing that bureaucracy plays a critical role in preserving the core principles of democracy. PAR's publisher, Wiley, has used Editorial Manager as the manuscript submission management system. In the fall of 2024, we were informed about Wiley's change to a new system: Research Exchange. The outlines of this system, as well as various ideas about advancing the journal's visibility, were discussed with the ASPA leadership Patria de Lancer-Julnes (ASPA President), Bill Shields (ASPA Executive Director), the Wiley team (Hannah Lindert, Elizabeth Flaherty, Eric Kun), and your PAR editorial team during a meeting at the Wiley office in Hoboken, New Jersey on October 14, 2024. We thank the Wiley team for their help with this transition, and we would also like to thank Ariston Dumlao, Wiley's production manager, who steers each PAR table of contents in the right direction. The study of public administration emerged in the 17th century, and the focus then and during the next century was very much on the position and role of government in society. More specifically, authors such as Antonio Serra, Veit Ludvig von Zeckendorf, Nicolas dela Mare, Adam Smith, and Condorcet advocated a government whose policies would advance the welfare and well-being of all citizens. The contemporary study of public administration has come into its own in the past four to five decades. It has strengthened its visibility in the academy and has established citing and cited relationships with many other social sciences (the following based on Wagner & Raadschelders, 2025). The study of PA as we know it started in the late nineteenth century as a study that "borrowed" theories and concepts from, for example, political science and other studies. It was thus interdisciplinary by nature. It was also a study that focused on addressing the many challenges that especially local governments faced given rapid industrialization, urbanization, and population growth. It was a study for practice, and a study where students could develop the skills needed in and for a society that was undergoing rapid change. After the Second World War PA turned inward, developing its disciplinary identity. This prompted various scholars in the 1980s to assert that the study had little identity of its own, that its theoretical quality was limited, and that it therefore did not contribute to academe at large. However, and looking at the past 40 years, and especially the previous 20 years, it appears that the study has become very interdisciplinary again, but now with an acknowledged standing in the university. The position of PAR in the universe of PA journals is strong, that is, it is the prime journal in the study. As noticed above, we receive submissions from all over the globe, we have reviewers and editorial members from across the globe, and thus we do claim that PAR is a global journal. It started (1940) as the journal of the American Society for Public Administration, but it now is a journal with an international audience and reach. With your help as readers, reviewers, and authors, we hope to strengthen PAR's position and role in the practice of governing and the study of public administration. We hope to do so through country studies (see our editorial in the first issue of 2024), by strengthening relations and links between practice and academe through Practically Speaking, via podcasts (On PAR) and webinars (PAR Talk), and via social media presence. Regarding the latter, we are very grateful for the work our social media editor, Dr. Chengxin Xu (Seattle University), has been doing. Next to this, we will continue to publish research articles with a special section devoted to early career scholars. Finally, we have a section titled Conceptualizing Public Administration and we hope to receive submissions that consider the position and role of government in modern society (in a manner that was standard in the 17th and 18th centuries), submissions that reflect upon the role and position of the career civil service in democracies and autocracies, and submissions that probe big questions concerning accountability; democracy; representativeness; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and critical race theory, LGTBQ+ and feminist perspectives. In that section we would also very much welcome pieces that focus on epistemology (i.e., how can we know government?) and social ontology (what is government?). We will roll out Virtual Issues on various important topics to facilitate knowledge dissemination. We want to hear from you and would love to receive your suggestions on topics that are important to our academic and practitioner communities.