Browsing by Author "Cheng, Yuan (Daniel)"

Now showing 1 - 14 of 14
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    Administrative Reform to Overcome Institutional Racism: Exploring Government’s Trust Building Tactics to Renew Relationships with Community-based Organizations
    (2021-08) Cheng, Yuan (Daniel); Sandfort, Jodi
    Institutional racism embedded in the existing public management practices has systematically created distrust between community-based organizations serving Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC). However, little is known about how the government could reform public bureaucracies to renew their relationship with these important community-based organizations. Through a process-oriented inductive study of Minnesota’s 2-Generation Policy Network, we find that government’s intentional tactics both inside the bureaucracy and with BIPOC community-based organizations allowed them to create new collaborative infrastructure that both changed organizational routines and built power to address racial inequities in the existing human service system. This study documents the importance of public managers’ intentionality in addressing the historical legacy that is an outgrowth of conventional practice and assessing their own identities to assess and challenge the mechanism of traditional, bureaucratic authority. Trust between the government and BIPOC community-based organizations needs to be earned and rebuilt.
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    Dealing with Endogeneity to Understand the Societal Impact of the Third Sector: Why Should We Care and What Can We Do About It?
    (2021) Cheng, Yuan (Daniel); Choi, Jung Ho
    Endogeneity is often regarded as a key barrier in establishing the causal relationship between the third sector and its societal impact in empirical research. Through a systematic literature review of the quantitative studies on the third sector’s impact in the last two decades, we find that most quantitative studies of the third sector’s societal impact are published in journals outside main third sector journals. We also offer specific examples of how recent methodological advancements in addressing endogeneity help third sector researchers better solve this problem. Based on the analysis of this literature review, we recommend that third sector scholars should (1) refocus on the big question of the third sector’s impact on society, (2) catch up with the methodological advancement in addressing endogeneity, (3) be creative and transparent about addressing endogeneity, and (4) build better theories to link the third sector to broad societal outcomes.
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    Defining and Measuring Coproduction: Deriving Lessons from Practicing Local Government Managers
    (Public Administration Review, 2022) Brudney, Jeffrey; Cheng, Yuan (Daniel); Lucas, Meijs
    Following a lapse in scholarly attention, coproduction, the joint production of services by government officials and citizens, has re-emerged as an important topic. However, the field lacks information on broad parameters of coproduction implementation and how public managers view coproduction. To address the lacuna, this study examines patterns of implementation of coproduction in a national sample of municipalities and counties in the U.S. According to their chief administrators, nearly half these governments have implemented one or more stages of coproduction, although co-delivery of services occurs least often. Empirical analysis suggests that the implementation of coproduction, as perceived by local government managers, can be measured along a unidimensional scale and that this measurement scale is robust across different subgroups. We also find that local governments that have larger population, provide more services, have more professional forms of administration, and are located in the western U.S. more often implement elements of coproduction.
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    Do you want a state government official to support your policy idea? Bring good research (and expect better outcomes)
    (The Fulcrum, 2024-01-09) Carter, Patrick; Cheng, Yuan (Daniel); Merrick, Weston; Xu, Chengxin
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    Evidence-based Practices and U.S. State Government Civil Servants : Current Use, Challenges and Pathways Forward
    (Public Administratoin Review, 2024) Cheng, Yuan (Daniel); Thompson, Leslie; Wang, Shuping; Marzec, Jules; Xu, Chengxin; Merrick, Weston; Carter, Patrick
    Leveraging a three-state survey of 323 civil servants and 36 interviews, representing blue and red states, this university-government-nonprofit collaborative research project aims to better understand how civil servants access and use evidence in their decision-making process. Our findings show that 54% of respondents find evidence-based practices (EBPs) useful in making budget, policy, and contracting decisions, with 68% of civil servants anticipating future benefits from evidence use. Our hypothetical funding choice experiment indicates that civil servants prefer programs that are more recent and in their state, identify outcomes over outputs, demonstrate effectiveness for diverse demographic groups, and are evaluated by independent research entities. The main challenges in using EBPs include time constraints, resource limitations, decision-making fragmentation, and lack of evidence for certain communities. Qualitative interviews provide valuable strategies for overcoming these challenges. We conclude this article by offering practical insights for improving the integration of EBPs in state government decision-making processes.
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    Exploring the Moderators of the Relationship between Nonprofit Sector Size and Its Societal Impact: A Meta-Analysis
    (VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 2023) Cheng, Yuan (Daniel); Hung, Chiako
    Assessing the impact of the nonprofit sector on society has been one of the most fundamental yet challenging questions in public and nonprofit management scholarship. Built on a recent systematic literature review published in VOLUNTAS (Cheng & Choi, 2022), our meta-analysis synthesizes the existing literature from multiple disciplines and fills this critical knowledge gap. Using 357 effects from 29 studies, our moderation analysis shows that a larger nonprofit sector has a more positive impact on society especially when the impact is political and measured at the city/county level. Studies that used fixed effects models and quasi-experimental designs also found a more positive societal impact of the nonprofit sector. However, the choice of sector size measure, the selection of impact measure, the use of lagged explanatory variables, publication bias, and publication time seem not to matter.
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    From recovery resilience to transformative resilience: How digital platforms reshape public service provision during and post COVID-19
    (Public Management Review, 2022-01) Shen, Yongdong; Cheng, Yuan (Daniel); Yu, Jianxing
    This paper investigates how government-sponsored digital platforms facilitated the transition from recovery resilience during COVID-19 to transformative resilience of city-level service provision post COVID-19. Using an in-depth case study of the Weijiayuan platform implemented in the Jiaxing City of China, we found that digital platforms played critical roles in both stages of COVID-19 and helped facilitate the transition from recovery resilience to transformative resilience. This transition was made possible by four conditions: adopting and experimenting digital platforms with public entrepreneurship, achieving a critical mass of usership, incentivizing the coproduction of public services, and generating accountability mechanisms for government responsiveness.
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    Government-nonprofit Partnerships outside the Contracting Relationship and Public Funding Allocation: Evidence from New York City’s Park System
    (Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 2022) Cheng, Yuan (Daniel); Li, Zhengyan
    Government-nonprofit partnerships outside the contracting relationship have become an increasingly important mechanism in financing and supporting public service provision. However, the relationship between these partnerships and public funding allocation remains unclear. We articulate two competing mechanisms—the substitution mechanism and the exchange mechanism—and empirically test them with a unique geocoded dataset of public park capital projects allocation in New York City. Our findings indicate that parks units supported by government-nonprofit partnerships are likely to receive more public capital project funding, which supports the exchange mechanism. In addition, larger parks with a more populous community surrounding them get more public capital funding allocation. As governments at all levels are seeking new ways to finance and manage public service provision, many more empirical studies in other service subsectors, time periods, and geographical contexts are required to draw more general conclusions about how government-nonprofit partnerships may influence public funding allocation and how such dynamics may compromise or promote equitable public service provision.
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    Introduction to the Virtual Issue: Advancing Public Policy Research through the Lens of Public Administration
    (Public Administration Review, 2022) Cheng, Yuan (Daniel); Pandey, Sanjay; Hall, Jeremy
    We select and include 16 articles published at PAR in the last two years (2021 and 2022) in this virtual issue, representing key insights public administration scholarship can contribute to public policy research. We group these insights into four major themes and provide a brief summary of each article. In particular, we focus on public administration scholarship’s contributions in challenging the policy/politics and administration dichotomy, developing a deep understanding of bureaucracy, accounting for the human agency across different levels of management, and embracing different methodological approaches (particularly qualitative and mixed-methods research). We hope these articles’ methodological approaches, theoretical underpinnings, and analytical focus provide insights into a deeper understanding of how public policy is formulated, implemented, and evaluated.
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    Nonprofit Density and Distributional Equity in Public Service Provision: Exploring Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Public Park Access across U.S. Cities
    (Public Administration Review, 2021) Cheng, Yuan (Daniel); Yang, Lang (Kate); Shuyi, Deng
    Existing research on the distributional impacts of nonprofits and philanthropy focuses on how different groups directly benefit from nonprofit service providers. Given the increasing roles nonprofits play in public service provision and urban governance, it is critical to examine how the nonprofit sector may influence the distribution of public services. Combining the literature from urban affairs and nonprofit studies, we propose a theoretical framework to articulate various pathways through which communities with a larger nonprofit sector may create favorable conditions for public services to be distributed to certain racial/ethnic groups. We further test this framework using a unique geospatial dataset of public park access by different racial/ethnic groups in 2,392 U.S. cities. Our findings indicate that communities with a higher density of park-supporting nonprofits generate better park access for all racial/ethnic groups. However, more benefits accrue to whites than to other racial/ethnic groups.
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    Retrenchment Strategies
    (Forthcoming at The Encyclopedia of Nonprofit Management, Leadership and Governance edited by Kevin Kearns and Wen Jiun Wang, 2022) Cheng, Yuan (Daniel); Deng, Shuyi
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    System Shock: Nonlocal Grassroots Response to COVID-19 at Ground Zero, Wuhan
    (Nonprofit Quarterly, 2022) Cheng, Yuan (Daniel); Wang, Xiaoyun; Zhang, Xueshan
    China’s policies and regulations vis-à-vis the nonprofit sector meant that very limited grassroots action took place during COVID-19’s first stages, and most came from those social organizations heavily managed and coordinated by local government . . . or by citizen self-help groups. These local GONGO chapters and local nonprofit organizations indeed played an instrumental role in Wuhan’s response to the crisis. But it was a collection of nonlocal nonprofit organizations and volunteer groups, with little professional experience in disaster relief and insufficient resources and local networks, that in the end emerged and managed to deliver aid.
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    Understanding the Use of Evidence-based Practices by State Leaders and Staff: Current State, Challenges and Outlook
    (2023) Cheng, Yuan (Daniel); Wang, Shuping; Xu, Chengxin; Merrick, Weston; Carter, Patrick; Thompson, Leslie