The Status of Employment Discrimination Suits in Police and Fire Departments Across the United States

Research indicates that women and people of color have made progress in gaining entry-level jobs in government, particularly at the federal level, but still lag behind in gaining positions at the upper levels. But, can the same be said for police and fire departments which have had perhaps the worst history of employment discrimination against women and people of color? This study seeks to answer this question by examining the extent to which race, gender or ethnic discrimination suits are being filed against city fire and police departments across the country, and at what level-entry or senior. The U.S. Supreme Court\u27s recent decision in Ricci v. DeStefano has renewed interest in this issue.Interestingly enough, while this study expected to find that lawsuits against police and fire departments are being filed by women and people of color in order to improve their representation in the uniformed services, it found just the opposite-the preponderance of the lawsuits filed against police and fire departments are reverse discrimination suits, filed by White men. © The Author(s) 2012

What is behavioral public administration good for?

Public administration has seen an influx of work addressing something that has been called “behavioral public administration (BPA)”; A hallmark of BPA is the examination of public administration from a micro‐level perspective with attention to the psychological aspects of human behavior. However, scholars of public administration have long applied a micro‐level lens to their research, even from a psychological standpoint. We argue here that the call for BPA is mainly an appeal for greater reliance on an analytical lens or research method, namely experimental designs. As argued here, however, little attention has been given to major drawbacks: experiments tend not to be theory driven, they overstate their importance to policy and management, and they fail to capture the significance of politics and institutions. If BPA is to be more than a passing fancy, the limits of experimentation must be reevaluated for public administration

sj-docx-1-rop-10.1177_0734371X231226380 – Supplemental material for Support for Affirmative Action in the Workplace: Gender, Race, and Sector Differences

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-rop-10.1177_0734371X231226380 for Support for Affirmative Action in the Workplace: Gender, Race, and Sector Differences by Hung-Yi Hsu and Norma M. Riccucci in Review of Public Personnel Administration</p