Behavioural & Experimental Public Management
We are a community of scholars developing and implementing behavioural and experimental approaches to public management research and practice
Purpose and objectives:
The Behavioural & Experimental Public Management Special Interest Group provides a forum for emerging and established scholars who employ a behavioural perspective on public management research. This sub-field is growing in importance and there are now literatures using the perspective across a range of core topic areas in public management, such as performance information, administrative burden, public leadership, and citizen-state interactions.
Behavioural public management research employs various methodologies including experimentation, observational studies, computational text analysis, qualitative methods, or mixed methods. However, a core theme of the subfield is the importance of understanding individual beliefs, motives, attitudes, and actions that occur within institutional structures (including public organisations) and the need to move beyond models of homo economicus.
The group particularly aims to help promote practices that enable researchers to develop behavioural theories in public management and their empirical assessment. As part of this, the group promotes research designs that enable the identification of causal effects, including experiments as a research design.
Specific topics of interests extend, among others:
The SIG provides a space to discuss and innovate relevant topics associated with behavioural and experimental public management (and public administration) research, focusing in particular on:
- Enhancing the depth and breadth of public management research using a behavioural perspective through discussion and research collaboration.
- Further developing and institutionalizing an IRSPM-focused community of scholars that conduct public management research from a behavioural perspective, broadly defined as theoretical or empirical contributions that integrate psychological and behavioural science insights into this research.
- Promoting the use of behavioural public management research to address questions of importance to progressing theory and informing practice.
- Promoting the use of research designs, including experimental designs, to advance our understanding of behavioural and psychological, micro-level factors in meso- and macro-level contexts of public organizations.
- Enhancing the quality and sustainability of public management research by promoting open science principles, such as: pre-registration of research hypotheses and analysis plans; open data and materials (including instruments, code, and conditions of analysis); and efforts to replicate analyses and findings.
- Harnessing the latest innovations in theory and method in the sub-field, including the use of different forms of experimental method for addressing research questions.
- Broadening and diversifying the community of scholars and enhance equity of participation in the sub-field including early career scholars and doctoral students, promoting inclusion, and strengthening international collaboration.
A way to join our group
Everybody is welcome to join the SIG on behavioural & experimental public management. If you are interested in joining the SIG and its broad research community, please contact any of the co-chairs. We have a mailing list and disseminate all SIG-related information through this channel. It also serves as a forum to announce information about upcoming events, collaboration and publication opportunities. Please send an email to any of the co-chairs and present your request or idea to us so that we can share it with the research community. To become a mailing list member, please write an e-mail to Nick Petrovsky.
A list of planned activities and events:
- The SIG organizes an annual panel at the annual IRSPM conference. The panel encourages (although not exclusively) research designs that employ experimental methods, including lab, field, or survey experiments. This offers an opportunity to present developed research designs as a presentation format (along with conventional papers) to receive peer-feedback prior to raising the data. The group is inclusive, and researchers using non-experimental methods in this area of behavioural and experimental PA/PM will be encouraged. Join us, e.g., at IRSPM 2024: https://www.irspm.org/list-of-panels-2024/conference-2024/conferences/p15-behavioural-and-experimental-public-management
- We plan to develop a special issue of a journal on a topic within the area of behavioural public management drawing on research presented to the group at panels during the IRSPM annual conference. Potential topic areas include responses to performance information, environmental public management, and integrity and compliance behaviour in the public sector.
- We plan to develop an edited volume on public integrity and corruption from a behavioural perspective.
- The organisers of the group run events at their own institutions that will be made open to participants in the SIG (we anticipate between 1 and 2 of these per year between the main annual conference). These SIG activities will help build a strong network of researchers, foster research collaboration, and increase outreach. These meetings and materials will be particularly useful for early career scholars and doctoral students to develop their skills and to have the opportunity to make contact with others undertaking similar research.
SIG Co-Chairs
Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Oliver James, University of Exeter, United Kingdom
Libby Maman, Institut Barcelona D'Estudis Internacional (IBEI), Spain
Nick Petrovsky, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R.
Gregg Van Ryzin, Rutgers University, USA
Kristina S. Weißmüller, Vrije University Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Purpose and objectives:
The Behavioural & Experimental Public Management Special Interest Group provides a forum for emerging and established scholars who employ a behavioural perspective on public management research. This sub-field is growing in importance and there are now literatures using the perspective across a range of core topic areas in public management, such as performance information, administrative burden, public leadership, and citizen-state interactions.
Behavioural public management research employs various methodologies including experimentation, observational studies, computational text analysis, qualitative methods, or mixed methods. However, a core theme of the subfield is the importance of understanding individual beliefs, motives, attitudes, and actions that occur within institutional structures (including public organisations) and the need to move beyond models of homo economicus.
The group particularly aims to help promote practices that enable researchers to develop behavioural theories in public management and their empirical assessment. As part of this, the group promotes research designs that enable the identification of causal effects, including experiments as a research design.
Specific topics of interests extend, among others:
The SIG provides a space to discuss and innovate relevant topics associated with behavioural and experimental public management (and public administration) research, focusing in particular on:
- Enhancing the depth and breadth of public management research using a behavioural perspective through discussion and research collaboration.
- Further developing and institutionalizing an IRSPM-focused community of scholars that conduct public management research from a behavioural perspective, broadly defined as theoretical or empirical contributions that integrate psychological and behavioural science insights into this research.
- Promoting the use of behavioural public management research to address questions of importance to progressing theory and informing practice.
- Promoting the use of research designs, including experimental designs, to advance our understanding of behavioural and psychological, micro-level factors in meso- and macro-level contexts of public organizations.
- Enhancing the quality and sustainability of public management research by promoting open science principles, such as: pre-registration of research hypotheses and analysis plans; open data and materials (including instruments, code, and conditions of analysis); and efforts to replicate analyses and findings.
- Harnessing the latest innovations in theory and method in the sub-field, including the use of different forms of experimental method for addressing research questions.
- Broadening and diversifying the community of scholars and enhance equity of participation in the sub-field including early career scholars and doctoral students, promoting inclusion, and strengthening international collaboration.
A way to join our group
Everybody is welcome to join the SIG on behavioural & experimental public management. If you are interested in joining the SIG and its broad research community, please contact any of the co-chairs. We have a mailing list and disseminate all SIG-related information through this channel. It also serves as a forum to announce information about upcoming events, collaboration and publication opportunities. Please send an email to any of the co-chairs and present your request or idea to us so that we can share it with the research community. To become a mailing list member, please write an e-mail to Nick Petrovsky.
A list of planned activities and events:
The SIG organizes an annual panel at the annual IRSPM conference. The panel encourages (although not exclusively) research designs that employ experimental methods, including lab, field, or survey experiments. This offers an opportunity to present developed research designs as a presentation format (along with conventional papers) to receive peer-feedback prior to raising the data. The group is inclusive, and researchers using non-experimental methods in this area of behavioural and experimental PA/PM will be encouraged. Join us, e.g., at IRSPM 2024: https://www.irspm.org/list-of-panels-2024/conference-2024/conferences/p15-behavioural-and-experimental-public-management
We plan to develop a special issue of a journal on a topic within the area of behavioural public management drawing on research presented to the group at panels during the IRSPM annual conference. Potential topic areas include responses to performance information, environmental public management, and integrity and compliance behaviour in the public sector.
We plan to develop an edited volume on public integrity and corruption from a behavioural perspective.
The organisers of the group run events at their own institutions that will be made open to participants in the SIG (we anticipate between 1 and 2 of these per year between the main annual conference). These SIG activities will help build a strong network of researchers, foster research collaboration, and increase outreach. These meetings and materials will be particularly useful for early career scholars and doctoral students to develop their skills and to have the opportunity to make contact with others undertaking similar research.
SIG Co-Chairs
Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Oliver James, University of Exeter, United Kingdom
Libby Maman, Institut Barcelona D'Estudis Internacional (IBEI), Spain
Nick Petrovsky, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R.
Gregg Van Ryzin, Rutgers University, USA
Kristina S. Weißmüller, Vrije University Amsterdam, The Netherlands