Purpose

The Behavioural Public Administration Network is a network of academics and institutions that examine questions of public management from a behavioural perspective and implement experimental research designs. We are a community of scholars that offers mutual support to build capacity in this field. The network is organic, and is currently an informal organization.

Activities

1. Building capacity:

1a. Designs: BPAN offers a facility for members to share research designs and receive constructive feedback prior to implementation. We propose to start with informal sharing and meetings. Informal sharing will seek to give positive feedback on research designs by BPAN members. Sharing of designs will also take place at research conferences and workshops. For example, prior to PMRC, or any other conference, presentations will be made of experimental designs to group members to receive feedback. In later stages the group may establish more formalized ways of receiving feedback – including formal systems of pre-registration.

Groups members have agreed to the following code-of-conduct to honor individual researchers design ideas until they are published:

• The core principle of the network: Members support each other to design and run good studies and do not use each other’s ideas without consent.
• Membership involves the following privileges and obligations:
  • Giving constructive and timely feedback to other members on their draft designs, including whether treatments and outcomes fit each other, and whether they correspond to the intended theoretical concepts.
  • Sharing study procedures and data with each other, and citing each other when procedures or data get used by another member, directly or indirectly.
  • Following good practice in study design and implementation: ensuring validity and reliability of the experimental treatments.
  • Following the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines to the greatest extent feasible: https://cos.io/our-services/top-guidelines.

1b. Implementation: The network facilitates the conduct of cross-national experiments and replications. Members are committed to running experimental studies proposed by other members of the group. Experiments are run using students and subjects. A number of members of BPAN have subject panels that can also offer access to citizens and managers. Implementation operates on a reciprocal basis: members will be willing to implement others studies and in turn propose studies that can be implemented in other places. The idea behind this approach is to address concerns about external validity - by running studies in different geographical and culture locations members have a unique opportunity to explore how context influences behaviour in public organizations, and to test for these effects in their analysis.

2. Training future generations of scholars:

As BPAM evolves it plans to run summer schools on behavioural and experimental public administration to build capacity among the PA community. The model is an international one, where the summer school rotates between Asia, Europe and North America. In this way institutions would be burdened on a triennial basis, rather than annually. Students would be anticipated to come from each continent but not exclusively so. The summer school could be run independently or linked to existing conferences such as IRSPM or PMRC.

 

January 2017

 

Behavioural Insights Team (Singapore)
Center for Experimental and Behavioral Public Administration, Rutgers University
Department of Asian and Policy Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong
Department of Political Science, Aarhus University
Department of Political Science, Exeter University
Department of Public Administration, Yonsei University
Department of Public Administration and Policy, University of Georgia
Institute for Public Policy, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Laboratory for Public Management and Policy, City University of Hong Kong
Martin School of Public Policy and Administration, University of Kentucky
School of Governance, Utrecht University
School of Public Administration and Policy, Renmin University