Public Administration Research and Practice: A Methodological Manifesto

Abstract

Public administration research has fallen notably behind research in related fields in terms of methodological sophistication. This hinders the development of empirical investigations into substantive questions of interest to practitioners and academics. The widespread practice of importing methodological tools from closely related but theoretically divergent fields leads to poor research designs for questions of measurement and estimation unique to public administration. We argue that the discipline needs to invest heavily in developing its own methodological path and recommend the use of time series, likelihood, Bayesian, SWAT, and GLM approaches. In addition, authors of public administration scholarship need to avoid the deeply flawed and clearly damaging social science paradigm for theory confirmation: the null hypothesis significance test. We also note that public administration as a distinct discipline needs to pay considerably more attention to developing its own inventory of data sets.