Editorial Public Administration Quarterly

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/07349149241301755

Howard Frank1, Pablo Sanabria-Pulido2, Christopher Douglas3, Gina Scutelnicu Todoran4, Evelyn Rodriguez-Plesa5, Serena Hoermann6, and Shaoming Cheng1

1Florida International University, Miami, USA

2Universidad EAFIT, Colombia

3University of Michigan–Flint, Flint, USA

4Pace University, New York, NY, USA

5North Carolina Central University, Durham, USA

6Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, USA

Corresponding author(s):

Howard Frank, Florida International University, 1930 SW 145th Avenue, Room 310, Miramar, Florida 33027, USA. Email: howardf@fiu.edu

My colleagues and I welcome your interest in Public Administration Quarterly (PAQ). As many of you know, PAQ commenced in 1978 as the Southern Journal of Public Administration, making it one of the discipline’s oldest continuously published generalist venues. The new editorial team looks forward to shepherding PAQ to its 50th volume in 2025 and beyond. We are fortunate to inherit a strong and nationally reputed journal from the former Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Aaron Wachhaus at the University of Baltimore. Aaron’s foundation, coupled to our affiliation with Sage Publishing, will propel us to prominence within the discipline. Our expectation is that the journal will rise in reputation and commence application for the Clarivate/Web of Science Impact Factor process by 2027.

Public Administration is a crowded public space. What would commend publishing in PAQ over other venues? We offer a compelling five-pillar rationale, operationalized with the acronym IDEAL+:

1. I as in INTERNATIONAL: PAQ will be strongly committed to international scholarship. Public administration gives considerable lip service to international representation in its scholarship, but the reality is that international content, particularly from the Great South, is less than 20% of most journals in the discipline. We will walk the walk on international and broaden intellectual discourse accordingly. This will also deepen our discipline’s readership and influence in the social sciences.

2. D as in DEVELOPMENTAL: Developing the next generation of Public Administration scholars is a high priority. Dr. Evelyn Rodriguez-Plesa of North Carolina Central University is our Associate Editor tasked with developing young scholars. Professor Rodriguez-Plesa will provide tutelage to newcomers learning the ropes of the peer review process. This developmental approach will help newcomers while growing the journal and its reputation. This dovetails with our INTERNATIONAL pillar by encouraging young scholars outside of North America to grow their reputation along with us.

3. E as in EXPEDITED: We are Strongly Committed to Expedited Review and “Online First” Publication. Sixteen-to-twenty-four-month publication cycles render journal findings stale. We hope for 30- to 45-day review on the first round of review. Sage will facilitate immediate online-first publication of all accepted articles. These rapid turnarounds will incentivize submission of top-tier scholarship, particularly that of younger scholars facing the tenure clock.

4. A as in ALTERNATIVE: We take our generalist status seriously and welcome submissions from public administration’s traditional and emerging sub-specialties such as budgeting, personnel, organizational development, information technology, and economic development. Our approach is big tent under the assumption that the intellectual whole will be worth more than the sum of the parts. Budgeting, personnel, IT, or “other,” should not be siloed into specialty journals.

Another component of the ALTERNATIVE pillar is methodological eclecticism. Academic truth is not confined to a regression coefficient. Sound, theoretically informed case studies and incisive, integrative thought-pieces are valued components of building the discipline’s knowledge base. Methods—hard and soft—are means to an intellectual end, that being the cumulation of content that builds theory and informs practice.

Form will also follow function. PAQ encourages alternatives to the refereed article. Special issues and symposia devoted to a particular topic are enormously valuable as cumulation tools. So too are practitioner-academic exchanges. Book reviews—particularly those which compare, and contrast works devoted to a particular topic or space (e.g., introductory public administration texts, public budgeting texts) are invaluable to instruction.

5. L as in LARGE FORCES: We encourage “out of the organizational box” scholarship that links public organizations to their social and economic environment. As Alisdair Roberts notes in Large Forces: What’s Missing in Public Administration (2013), there was a time our discipline and its scholars thought big picture and designed policies that guided the U.S. through the Depression and World War II. In recent decades, the discipline has become increasingly intra-organizational in focus, eschewing social drivers and embracing ideology-free guidance on implementation. We welcome scholarship that places public organizations and implementation within the socioeconomic parameters in which they operate. For example, we argue that our discipline’s view of “social equity,” predicated on hiring practices, should investigate larger drivers of opportunity (e.g., affordable daycare, tax structure, educational access). Implementation does not take place in a social vacuum, and our discipline’s scholarship must reflect that reality.

+: PAQ will add intellectual value by welcoming alternative scholarly paths. In his 1862 Annual Message to Congress at the beginning of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln admonished his countrymen by stating that “As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew.” Lincoln’s guidance resonates. We are not beholden to a particular intellectual paradigm (or its adherents) in public administration. The editorial team wants PAQ to be an intellectual wellspring for emerging paradigms in the 2020s and beyond.

While recognizing that that “Rome was not built in a day,” the editorial team is strongly committed to making PAQ a venue of choice for young and established scholars from around the world. We encourage you to join us on that journey.