Determinants of Collaborative Leadership: Civic Engagement, Gender or Organizational Norms?

This analysis attempts to unravel competing explanations of collaborative leadership styles of state legislative committee chairs. Specifically, the paper considers the influence of community or volunteer experience, gender, and institutional variables. The data show that women chairs are more likely than their male peers to cite as valuable the leadership skills and experiences that they gain through community and volunteer experience. Compared to their male colleagues, women committee chairs on average also report a greater reliance on collaborative strategies in the management of their committees. Prior community or volunteer experience has little or no direct effect on collaborative styles. In contrast, institutional factors have a much stronger and countervailing influence. Legislative professionalization produces a strong negative effect on collaborative style. Results suggest that conformity to institutional norms may be a more compelling influence than prior community experience. The analysis also points to the gendered nature of organizational leadership with men's and women's styles showing different associations to style depending on the number and power of women in a legislature.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Conundrums of government: the outer limits of policy analysis

Conundrums have no solution. They are ambiguous, multifaceted, and do not lend themselves to quantitative assessment of their components. They produce shortfalls in policy accomplishments, and frustration among those charged with policymaking. To recognize the generality of conundrums is to prepare to cope with them. The use of the term coping is significant. The term implies something less than finding solutions to problems. Words like adaptation, managing, and dealing with appear in discussions of coping. It is inherent in the nature of coping strategies that they provide only partial and imperfect solutions to problems that are insoluble. Some of the strategies outlined here may actually make some aspects of a conundrum worse, even while they offer solutions to other aspects. The strategies include redefining a problem to put the focus on its soluble elements; entrepreneurialism; deviousness; breaking the rules; indirection; reform; and redundancy. In the final analysis, the quality of policy analysis and governmental performance is limited by conundrums. No matter how good the elected officials and civil servants, conundrums keep policymakers from knowing exactly what they are doing, force a certain amount of conjecture into their decisions, and encourage posturing and exaggeration as techniques of persuasion

Politics and Polimaking in Search of Simplicity

x + 211 hlm., 23.5 cm