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Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
One hundred and one American counties were selected randomly within predetermined strata and used to study the extent of use of e-government technologies. The study design was cross-sectional and the time period of the study was a single...
Vast, but disparate, literatures study hospice care, but none explains how government policy affects the dying experience of terminally ill patients and their families. This topic is of the utmost significance as there are important...
In this dissertation I use an institutional framework to examine the contributions of George Washington to public administration theory and practice. The best way to understand current public administration theory is to examine its...
Competing Perspectives on Accountability, Authority and Autonomy as Sources of Organizational Change: The Case of Florida's State University System, 1998-2009
This dissertation research is a study of the dynamics of continuous change in Florida's public higher education system between 1998 and 2009. There are three subsidiary questions used to explore these events in greater detail: What is...
Throughout the course of this decade, the Sunshine State has emerged as one of America’s fastest growing states. As cities compete for opportunities to expand their tax base and achieve other municipally-centered goals, cities are faced...
This dissertation empirically tests theoretical arguments that contracting out municipal services results in lower service expenditures. Two research questions are investigated; what accounts for local government service provision and...
The rapid growth of magnet schools in the 1980s introduced the first widely adopted form of public school choice in the United States. Magnet-based choice was supported as a way to expand school choice options for parents, to bring...
With the approach of the 2008 presidential election, there is both hopeful anticipation and trepidation over how electoral processes will fare on Election Day. Yet the conversation, to this point, has been limited. Most discussion...
Budget Growth, Property Tax Relief, or Risk Reduction?: Empirical Analyses of Factors Affecting Changes in Revenue Structures and Fiscal Impacts on Florida Counties
This dissertation examines the factors affecting changes of revenue structures in Florida's 67 counties during 30 years. It investigates the fiscal impacts of changes in revenue structures in Florida counties, with a particular focus on...
This dissertation examines the dynamic of metropolitan governance in terms of interlocal contractual arrangements that govern the delivery of collective goods by local government. It views a metropolitan area as buzzing with contractual...
This dissertation represents a comprehensive study of human prosperity. It consists of two main components separated into two essays. The first essay provides a theoretical definition and a measurement of prosperity. The second essay...
Fragmented jurisdictions in a metropolitan area have pursued individual economic benefits through competition with others. Intense development competition has produced negative economic externalities. Therefore, local governments have...
This study was undertaken to examine the extent to which web-based transaction technology has diffused in small North Florida nonprofit organizations and to study what, if any, relationship exists between the adoption of web-based...
Disaster Shelter Planning: Using a Social Domain Heuristic to Examine Organizational Behaviors of Policy Implementation during the 2004 Hurricane Season in Florida
Following Hilhorst (2004), this study posits that, as communities become more populous they also become more complex. As they become more complex, communities develop institutions and social structures to help coordinate social...
Just as collective action problems are an unavoidable feature of individual decision-making in social settings, regional problems, such as common pool resources and scale and externality problems in service provision, are unavoidable for...
Public sector organizations currently operate in an environment of change and choice (Berry, 2007). In particular, the complex governance and unpredictable nature of the contemporary public sector environment have challenged governments'...
Since the welfare reform in 1996, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) research has been centered on the debate with respect to whether states given more independence to make their own choices after 1996, have engaged in a...
The purpose of this research was to identify factors related to citizens' levels of risk acceptability and examine how these factors influenced each other during the policy making process of selecting a site for a nuclear facility in the...
Anticipatory Socialization and University Retention: An Analysis of the Effect of Enrollment at a Faith-Based Secondary School on the Progression of Students Through a Faith-Based University
The retention and graduation of students is at the core of postsecondary education. This topic becomes increasingly relevant as tight budgets force state legislatures to seek increased accountability, and soaring tuition costs force...
This dissertation extends research in local governance constitutional change in a new direction and integrates several models of institutions to explain patterns of municipal charter change. This approach presents a new understanding of...
This study examines the impact of 1998 Revision 7 to Article V of the Florida Constitution (hereafter referred to as Revision 7) in shaping governance of Florida's courts system. Revision 7 shifted the major costs of funding the courts...
Education Policy Adoption at the Local Governance Level: An Empirical Analysis of Factors Influencing the Adoption of Reading First in Florida School Districts
This research examines Florida school districts' adoption of Reading First legislation passed into law as part of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. This research attempts to answer the fundamental question pertinent to the...
The Influence of Actor Attributes and Social Relations on Game Transition: Formal Model and Empirical Analysis of Collective Action and Collaborative Economic Development Policy
Economic development policy in jurisdictionally fragmented metropolitan areas is often characterized as a competitive environment in which local governments compete for jobs and growth. However, the positive and negative...
Network structure is one explanatory variable to explain network performance, but its effect may be uncertain. Much research, however, has not attempted to combine network structures with other characteristics of networks – e.g., network...
This dissertation empirically tests existing theories that have been used to explain the capacity of nonprofit sectors within and across nations. Firstly, this study briefly reviews each theory and discusses how each can usefully be...
This dissertation contributes to the public policy literature by examining energy policy in the U.S. In a three paper format, this dissertation investigates different dimensions of energy policy. First, it covers both policy process and...
Open space preservation is a critical issue responding to undesirable sprawl. Over the past decades, responding to such trends of expansion and sprawl, open space protection has become more intense. Thus, local, regional, state...
Examining the Determinants of Charter School Expansion and the Relationship of Charter Schools and District Performance Using Event History Analysis and Cross Sectional Modeling
Charter schools represent one of many choice options available to Florida school districts. While public choice theory may provide insight as to why choice should impact student performance, using two research stages, this paper examines...
Procurement is a vital activity of all levels of government. Technological innovations in public procurement such as purchasing cards (P-cards) and e-technology have made public procurement more efficient and have been oft-studied....
Current educational reform efforts are focused on enhancing school and teacher accountability as a means of improving student learning. One policy initiative resulting from these efforts is the inclusion of outcome-based teacher...
Political fragmentation is often considered superior for advancing allocation efficiency in the provision of public services. On the other hand, the multiplicity of local governments in a metropolitan area, acting alone, can produce...
Competing Paradigms for Analyzing Policy Development in Everglades Restoration: Case Study Using Advocacy Coalition Framework and Habermas' Critical Theory
Using a constructionist approach, this study applies the critical theory of Jürgen Habermas to analyze public policies surrounding the Florida Everglades. Habermas argues that policymakers in advanced industrial democracies are caught...
Despite a long-running debate about the existence and nature of the nonprofit sector, scholars rarely make clear how organizations constitute the sector, nor do they describe how this sector evolves. Scholars have typically focused on...
Public sector leadership calls on public administrators to possess skills to resolve complex policy problems/crises and balance political interests and values through negotiation and conflict resolution. However, current leadership...
This is a study to critically explain how Korean street-level fire service officials make sense of problematic working situations in which they find themselves. The study wanted to three interrelated questions. First, how do Korean...
Recent studies on emotional labor address how worker emotional behavior is influenced by and influences organizational routines. To build upon existing theories, this dissertation investigates the determinants and consequences of...
The field of Emergency Management is in a period of dramatic knowledge expansion. Practitioners from diverse public and private organizations and all levels of government are enjoying increased visibility and resources in combating a...
This dissertation provides an analysis and evaluation of factors influencing states to enact inpatient health care transparency laws between 1971 and 2006 inclusive, using event history analysis. The primary research question...
The Case of the Commercial Fisheries Constitutional Net Ban Amendment in Florida: An Illustration of the Impact of Special Interest Associations on Institutional Change
The research question is how does institutional change take place? The question is answered in part by the case of the impact of special interest associations on the net ban in Florida. The constitutional ban on the use of most types of...
What are the causes of administrative reform? Even though the question is critical in understanding administrative reform efforts and their impacts on administration and society, much remains to be understood about this process. In this...
A policy phenomenon sometimes has multi-facets like a polyhedron because many stakeholders with different preferences or goals are involved in the policy process. The case of tax competition in the Seoul Metropolitan Area (SMA) is also a...
The literature on decision-making in public organizations is replete with debate on how they pursue expenditure reductions in conditions of fiscal strain. Typically, their strategies are described as being either "across-the-board" or ...
The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the import of the policy network for policy conflict resolution. Emergent networks, or self-organizing informal relationships that appear below the surface of formal networks or...
What is green governance? Governance is generally defined as steering rather than rowing the changing processes of policy decisions and actions across the boundaries of the private, public and civic sectors (O'Leary, Gerard, and Bingham...
The policy of the State of Florida recognizes high-level public administration as a profession and expects administrators to be competent and to practice managerial, political, and ethical roles. Conceptual frameworks of high-level...
This dissertation proposes a new theoretical approach to the study of coproduction; it does so by providing a refined definition of the phenomenon, and responds to two of the largest criticisms of the literature, and incorporating the...
This dissertation is about policy decision making in transportation infrastructure. With this dissertation an attempt is made to understand factors which affect policy decisions in state governments or within the public sector. The...
Fragmented local governmental units will cooperate to address needs that span across regional boundaries while retaining local autonomy. These efforts, referred to as institutional collective action (ICA), come forth when local...
As state governments grapple with reconciling budgets, administrative changes, political upheaval and technological advancements public employees are confronted with years without raises, wavering objectives, heavy workloads, and the...
This dissertation is composed of three essays dealing with renewable energy generation and the demand-side management (DSM) of electric utilities. The first two essays tackle small-scale and large-scale supply of electricity from...
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
