Nanyang Centre for Public Administration

Governments across many countries are adopting new social media (e.g. twitter), and police departments are engaging in the bandwagon too. We empirically examine the spread of police microblogging in Chinese municipal police departments from the perspective of organizational innovation diffusion. The results show that government size, internet penetration rate, regional diffusion effects and upper-tier pressure are positively and significantly associated with the adoption and earliness of police microblogging, whereas fiscal revenue, economic development and openness, E-government and public safety have no significant effects. We also find that police microblogging diffusion is contingent on different variables at different phases.

Governments across many countries are adopting new social media (e.g. twitter), and police departments are engaging in the bandwagon too. We empirically examine the spread of police microblogging in Chinese municipal police departments from the perspective of organizational innovation diffusion. The results show that government size, internet penetration rate, regional diffusion effects and upper-tier pressure are positively and significantly associated with the adoption and earliness of police microblogging, whereas fiscal revenue, economic development and openness, E-government and public safety have no significant effects. We also find that police microblogging diffusion is contingent on different variables at different phases.

Echoing the global public management reform movement, China?s authorities advocated ?super-department? reform (SDR) to curb interdepartmental conflict and administrative inefficiency. However, the related performance consequences have not been empirically investigated. We test the reform?s effects on citizen satisfaction with public services through a natural experiment involving twenty-five counties in Guangdong province (2009?2012) and the difference-in-differences method. The results show that the reform has improved public service performance, but its effects are marginal and unsustainable. We discuss the theoretical contributions and policy implications of the findings and identify future research avenues.

Do performance or personal ties (guanxi) matter more in the promotion of local public employees in China? In this paper, we examine public employees’ perceptions of the roles played by merit and guanxi in promotion. We adopt a configurational approach to classify public employees’ perceptions of the reasons for their promotion into four groups: merit-based, guanxi-orientated, ambidextrous (both), and fatalistic (neither). A recent survey of 886 public employees shows that around 40% see promotion as merit-based and 20% as guanxi-orientated, with 10% perceiving promotion to be ambidextrous and 30% fatalistic. Younger employees with higher rank are more likely to perceive promotion to be merit-based, whilst highly educated and highly ranked employees with strong public service motivation are more prone to see promotion as ambidextrous. Those who perceive promotion to be ambidextrous are more satisfied with promotion fairness, suggesting that a subtle balance needs to be maintained between merit-based and guanxi-orientated promotion channels, rather than rejection of any guanxi element.

Microblogging has been increasingly used in the public sector across the world, and it is pivotal to understand the drivers of their diffusion. This chapter adapts innovation adoption and diffusion theories and uses panel data of China’s 31 provinces (2010–2012) to empirically examine the diffusion of microblogging among government agencies and officials. The results suggest that the drivers of agency and individual microblogging are subtly distinct, implying their adoption may follow different routines. The findings also show that agencies and officials in jurisdictions with larger population, higher level of citizen demand, under advocating leadership, and bordering on pioneering peers are more likely to use microblogging.

Social media applications (SMAs) have been increasingly used by the public sector to interactively communicate with citizens, businesses, and other stakeholders, but we know little about what drives their adoption and usage. In this paper we hypothesize that SMA adoption is jointly shaped by top management characteristics, organizational attributes, and interorganizational and environmental factors. Drawing on a national survey of the U.S. local health departments (LHDs), our empirical findings suggest that the age and career background of top executives, organizational size, jurisdictional coverage, quality improvement initiatives, contracting-out experience, and emergency presence are key predictors of SMA adoption. We also find that the adoption and number of SMAs are affected by two different groups of antecedents. The results contribute to our understanding of SMA adoption and generate meaningful policy implications for LHDs and other public sectors.

Organizational goals shape performance feedback and have salient influences on strategic behaviours and outcomes. I develop a model of goal-setting by combining performance gap and bureaucratic control theories. I predict that governments set goal levels historically in line with their past goal levels and attainment discrepancies, horizontally targeting the comparable peers' goal levels and performance gaps, and vertically aligning with the upper-tier authorities' mandates. Using the data on annual economic growth of 31 Chinese provinces from 2000 to 2012, the within-between random-effects model substantially supports these hypotheses.

Since the early 2000s, external government performance evaluation (EGPE) activities have been burgeoning in China as an important venue to enhance government?s external accountability, but there have been few studies of this important phenomenon. We bridge the gap by examining the emergence and development of EGPE in China and evaluating its performance. We find that EGPE in China is generally of satisfactory quality but has some serious problems. It needs to improve its independence, validity, and reliability. One way to enhance its quality, credibility, and functionality would be by releasing raw data to the public for verification and duplication. Although EGPE is a necessary and promising tool to promote external government accountability, systematic political and administrative reforms will be required to ensure an effective performance management system that does not only serve hierarchical control and internal accountability but also external and democratic accountability.

Transnational policy transfer through cross-border government-to-government collaboration projects has been widely adopted as a tool to facilitate economic growth, especially by developing countries. Why did some transnational projects of policy transfer succeed while others fail? What are the facilitating and constraining factors in shaping their fates? What are their theoretical and policy implications for public administration and economic development in a globalizing world? This article examines the case of the China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park which has been in operation since its establishment in 1994. Challenging the previous studies and adopting a mixed research method utilizing a wide range of quantitative and qualitative data, we identify three major factors affecting the results of policy transfer: (1) a systemic combination of "hardware" and "software" in the conceptualization of transnational policy transfer; (2) localization of transnational policy and its enforcement; and mostly importantly, (3) institutionalization of key processes in both ends of policy exchanges and implementation.

Knowledge transfer across borders is not a new phenomenon. Along with globalization and the development of multinational enterprises, there has been knowhow transfer about business management from one country to another. However, most of the existing scholarship on transnational knowledge transfer is limited to the private sector, while neglecting knowledge exchange in public governance. In fact, the transfer of governance knowledge across borders has been thriving for decades. After World War II, the breadth and depth of transnational knowledge transfer in public the sector expanded as industrialization and modernization became a consensus globally. Transnational knowledge transfer refers to the process in which the tested policies, administrative arrangements, institutions, best practices or expertise are transferred and applied across countries (Duan et al. 2010). It has become increasingly prevalent in the Global South since the turn of the century. The longstanding learning relationship between China and Singapore over the past decades represents a typical example of the thriving knowledge transfer in the Global South (Liu and Wang 2018). Since the early 1990s, over 50,000 Chinese public officials have been trained or enrolled in executive training or degree programmes in Singapore, 1 and four national-level government-to-government cooperation programmes have been established in China, namely the China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park, the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco City, the Guangzhou Knowledge City, and the China-Singapore (Chongqing) Demonstration Initiative on Strategic Connectivity. In this chapter, we focus on the Chinese "Mayors' Class" offered by the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the flagship G2G programme between China and Singapore-the China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP hereafter) in Jiangsu province, China. These two cases represent the two major channels through which knowledge about governance, public administration and economic development are being transferred from one country to another. Based on these two cases, we will analyze the origins, mechanisms and outcomes of the knowledge transfer relation between China and Singapore and its implications for transnational knowledge transfer occurring among other countries 15033-2032d-1pass-r01.indd 113 2/4/2020 9:37:41 PM

中國共產黨歷來重視幹部培訓，並為此建立了完備的幹部教育培訓體系。改革開放以來，大批中、高級官員被選派到海外接受培訓，以服務中國從計劃經濟向市場經濟的轉型。在眾多海外培訓項目中，新加坡南洋理工大學的中國「市長班」是引人注目的個案，顯示出中國對「新加坡模式」的興趣。目前學界還缺乏對中國幹部海外培訓的研究。本文在仔細分析南大「市長班」數據庫和後續問卷調查與訪談資料的基礎上，有兩個主要發現：第一，這些官員的優異背景、畢業後的晉升，以及對項目正面的反饋，直接、間接反映了「市長班」對中國改革開放和地方發展產生的積極影響，幹部海外培訓因而成為傳統幹部培訓體系的有效補充；第二，對於中、高級官員來說，「新加坡模式」中最具吸引力的部分是實用的治理經驗及其對中國的借鑒意義，而非意識形態。

The city-state of Singapore is proactive in harnessing policy
experimentation to incubate innovations, transfer knowledge and
facilitate collaborations across different public sectors. Given the
country’s strong knack for pragmatism, international practices and
lessons are usually first tested and adapted in policy experiments
before scaling up to nationwide policies. Singapore’s practice
of policy experimentation, however, has also demonstrated
evolution over time. This article reviews the evolving role of
experimentation in Singapore’s policy decision-making and
implementation, and analyses pilot programmes in public housing
to elicit the key attributes and commonalities of its policy
experiments. It finds that policy experiments have been
increasingly used after the 2011 general election, which witnessed
a radical political rebalancing in Singapore’s governance history.
Pilot projects have thus transformed from a utilitarian to citizencentric,
design-thinking approach after 2011. Pilot programmes
are used for multiple purposes in policy innovations, among
which civil service mentoring, knowledge transfer and crossboundary
collaboration are the values primarily pursued. The
article discusses the contributions of the findings to the literature
and policy implications for practitioners.

This empirical qualitative study based on two inter-organizational
networks in the Singapore public sector contributes to the network
management and public sector leadership literatures by examining
leadership of the coordinating units through the studying of structures
and processes within the four cases. Paying attention to how network
leaders engage in inward work ‘in the spirit of collaboration’ to build
network community and at the same engage in outward work
‘towards collaborative thuggery’ that build legitimacy with external
institutions by addressing paradox of control and autonomy towards
building the understanding of network leadership in the public sector.