Moshe Maor

Reichman University · Lauder School of Government Diplomacy and Strategy

What reputational dividends in the media, if any, do federal agencies reap from collaboration with a highly reputable agency, such as the FDA? Utilizing a dataset covering 30 U.S. federal agencies over a period of 34 years (1980–2013), we estimate the short and long‐term reputational effects of interagency collaboration. Collaboration is measured b...

Studies concerning nonlinear political dynamics, such as regime change, focus on macro-level structural factors and political agency. Tipping points are pitched mainly at these levels, and scholars therefore devote less attention to meso-level factors. To bridge this gap, this article develops a verbal model focusing on the collapse of mechanisms t...

Surprisingly, although the Israeli government adopted unregulated, unorganized, inefficient, uncoordinated, and uninformed governance arrangements during the first wave of COVID-19, the public health outcome was successful, a paradox that this theoretically informed article seeks to explain. Drawing on insights from blame avoidance literature, it d...

Policy scholars tend to view disproportionate policy and its two component concepts – policy over- and underreaction – as either unintentional errors of commission or omission, or nonintentional responses that political executives never intended to implement yet are not executed unknowingly, inadvertently or accidentally. This article highlights a...

Drawing on insights from economics, psychology, sociology, political science and policy sciences, this paper proposes a definition and measurement strategies for policy bubbles. A policy bubble is a real and/or perceived policy overreaction which is reinforced by positive feedback over an extended period of time. Positive feedback is here integrate...

What, if any, dividends do agencies reap from collaboration with a highly reputable agency, such as the FDA? Utilizing a dataset covering 30 U.S. federal agencies over a period of 34 years (1980–2013), we estimate the short and long-term reputational effects of interagency collaboration. Collaboration is measured by the number of memorandums of und...

This article focuses on governments’ attempts to intensify crises for political gain, and identifies a series of unnecessary crisis management responses that follow distinctive policy overreaction styles. It is based on the premise that political executives at times face incentives to shape voters’ perceptions regarding the timing and scope of a cr...

The fight to curb the spread of COVID-19 underscores the central role that governments play in many policy areas, including public health, and the need to understand the reasons for observed differences in governance responses to the pandemic in different countries and jurisdictions. Drawing on secondary sources and media interviews with prime mini...

This article seeks to improve our understanding of what policy over- and under-design mean; what are the consequences of these suboptimal designs; and how politics matters to these designs. Based on the review of the literature and a variety of examples that focus on the role of information quality in policy design, and drawing on two phenomena fro...

This paper explains the paradox of a successful public health outcome despite the consistently "bad" governance choices made by the Israeli government in response to the first wave of COVID-19. Drawing on insights concerning crisis exploitation and "emergency policy," and based on the premise that in situations of extreme uncertainty political cons...

This article describes the efforts made by the Israeli government to contain the spread of COVID-19, which were implemented amidst a constitutional crisis and a yearlong electoral impasse, under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was awaiting a trial for charges of fraud, bribery, and breach of trust. It thereafter draws on th...

Disproportionate policy response-which is comprised of two core concepts, namely policy over-and underreaction-is typically understood to be a lack of 'fit' or balance between the costs of a public policy and the benefits deriving from this policy and/or between a policy's ends and means. Drawing on the newly emergent disproportionate policy perspe...

This paper develops an analytical framework to explain the nonlinear political dynamics that occur when the collapse of a mythical institution triggers a political cascade, and when the deliberate dissolution of a mythical institution leads to a breakdown of authority. The breakdown or deliberate dissolution of such institutions constitute the firs...

Do certain issues or governments tend to reproduce consistently either policy under -or over-reactions? This paper elaborates on the psychological and institutional explanations that can account for unintentional policy over- and underreaction styles, and the strategic explanations that can account for their intentional counterparts. The arguments...

This paper seeks to improve our understanding of what policy over- and under-design mean; what are the consequences of these suboptimal designs; and how politics matters to these designs. Based on the review of the literature and a variety of examples that focus on the role of information quality in policy design, and drawing on two phenomena from...

Studies of policy bubbles have so far ignored the possibility that a policy bubble in a given policy domain or jurisdiction may constitute an information event for another policy bubble that has been inflated elsewhere. In addition, studies of policy diffusion have paid little attention to the transmission of imperfect and wrongful policy valuation...

This paper develops a strategic agenda concerning regulatory agencies’ strategic communication in light of the reputation literature. It highlights the main strands in this literature, presents the fundamental findings discovered so far, responds to the critiques that have recently surfaced, and offers guidance about where scholarship on strategic...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Policy overreaction is a policy that imposes objective and/or perceived social costs without producing offsetting objective and/or perceived benefits. It is therefore an objective fact and, at the same time, a matter of interpretation. Policy scholars tend to view this duality as a problematic ontological issue and to categorize such policies as er...

Since the U.S. response to 9/11 and the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, there has been increasing interest in the concept of disproportionate policy response and its two component concepts—policy over- and underreaction. Traditional policy theory views these concepts as unintentional errors of commission or omission. This paper highlights a...

Policy overreaction is defined as "policy that imposes objective and/or perceived social costs without producing offsetting objective and/or perceived benefits." It is therefore an objective fact and, at the same time, a matter of interpretation. Scholars operating in the strongly normative subfields of policy analysis and evaluation, which place e...

The socio-psychological phenomenon of the policy bubble occurs when policy overinvestment or overproduction, itself the result of distorted policy valuation, is sustained by positive feedback processes and contagion over an extended period of time. Studies of policy bubbles have so far focused on the policy domain as the unit of analysis, thus allo...

This article distinguishes between disproportionate policy response by error (bounded rationality) and disproportionate response by choice, and advances a further distinction of such choices between two disproportionate policy options, namely, rhetoric and doctrine. Probing the 'plausibility' of these terms, the article presents pertinent illustrat...

This paper articulates the disproportionate policy perspective and uses it to mount four challenges for the new policy design orientation. First, in contrast to the new policy design thinking, disproportionate policy options may be systematically designed, and at times, successfully implemented. Second, in contrast to the new policy design thinking...

Policy problems and solutions are frequently loaded with moral, emotional and cost-effectiveness components as well as with other ideational and symbolic elements in order to provide them with, or deprive them of, significance. Skillful policy entrepreneurs are key actors in this valuation process which results in policy problems and solutions beco...

A fresh perspective on policy-making and planning has emerged which views disproportionate policy as an intentional policy response. A disproportionate policy response is understood to be a lack of ‘fit’ or balance between the costs of a public policy and the benefits that are derived from this policy, and between policy ends and means. This paper...

Drawing on insights from social networks, social cognition and the study of emotions, this conceptual article offers a set of ideas and a series of predictions on how systematic variation in two sets of relationships may bear on agency behav-ior. The first is the agency-audience relationship which revolves around how and what multiple audiences thi...

How do reputational threats affect agency outputs? We undertake quantitative and qualitative analyses of reputation and outputs data regarding the fight against welfare fraud by the main service delivery agency for the Australian government in the field of social policy. We find that an agency’s response to reputational threats is endogenously diff...

To what extent and how do agencies manage their reputations through the strategic use of communication? Under what conditions are regulators inclined to respond to external judgments of their performance, and when are they disposed to keep silent? Based on a comprehensive data set and quantitative content analysis of the Israeli banking regulator’s...

Despite robust evidence that emotions can have a powerful impact on public opinion, political behavior, and foreign policy, few studies have directly addressed the possibility that emotions may be strategically regulated by politicians, policymakers, and other actors. To systematically examine the role of emotion regulation in domestic and global p...

Policy problems and solutions are frequently loaded with moral, emotional and cost-effectiveness components as well as with other ideational and symbolic elements in order to provide them with significance. Skillful policy entrepreneurs are key actors in this valuation process which results in policy problems and solutions becoming valued, overvalu...

Existing explanations of systematic undersupply of policy (e.g., institutional frictions, policy drift and loss aversion) highlight the role of institutional and cognitive factors in the policy process while paying little attention to the role of emotions and emotional sentiments. To bridge this gap, this paper conceptualizes the role of negative e...

A favorable reputation is an asset of importance that no public sector entity can afford to neglect because it gives power, autonomy, and access to critical resources. However, reputations must be built, maintained, and protected. As a result, public sector organizations in most OECD countries have increased their capacity for managing reputation....

In recent years, there has been remarkable progress in our understanding of policy persistence, on the one hand, and of the psychological phenomenon of underreaction, on the other. Surprisingly, there has been no attempt to use robust findings, derived from these efforts, in order to understand the nuances of policy underreaction. Policy underreact...

Theories of bureaucratic reputation have been largely neglected despite major contributions from Carpenter and others, and despite novel empirical results. In the aggregate, and in sync with recent developments in social networks and social cognition, this paper offers a set of ideas for developing the study of bureaucratic reputation. It suggests...

How do reputational threats affect the performance of public agencies? Based on a quantitative and qualitative analyses of reputation and outputs data related to the main service delivery agency for the Australian Government in the field of social policy and administration, we find that the effect of negative media coverage on agency performance is...

This paper develops both the concept of policy anti-bubble and the analytical contours of its life-cycle dynamics by building on the behavioral theories of human choice and organization, as well as on robust findings in psychology, indicating that pessimism and negative affects exert a great deal of influence on decision making and risk-taking. A p...

This chapter addresses two lines of criticism regarding Carpenter’s approach to bureaucratic reputation. First, Carpenter puts too much emphasis on the exogenous threats while underestimating their endogenous processing, given agencies’ understanding of their distinct reputations. Second, Carpenter too greatly emphasizes the institutional persisten...

How do reputational threats affect the performance of public agencies? Based on a quantitative and qualitative analyses of reputation and outputs data related to the main service delivery agency for the Australian Government in the field of social policy and administration, we find that the effect of negative media coverage on agency performance is...

I would like to thank Sharon Gilad and participants in the panel "Reputation Management in the Public Sector" for very insightful comments. Any remaining errors are my own.

Current literature on policy failure largely ignores the emotional and cognitive factors affecting policy makers. It also fails to offer productive empirical differentiation because the concept of policy failure can be applied to a wide range of cases — including “too little” and “too late” patterns of policy which come under the umbrella concept o...

How does the content of public allegations impact regulatory communication strategies? Employing a multinomial logistic regression analysis and an original data set, this article analyzes the Israeli banking regulator’s nuanced responses to public expressions of opinion between 1996 and 2012. We demonstrate this agency’s greater propensity to ackno...

This article examines the implications of bureaucratic reputation to public administration. It addresses two lines of criticism regarding Carpenter’s approach to bureaucratic reputation which revolves around the underestimation of the internal shaping of administrative organizations’ uneven responsiveness to — and their management of — their multip...

Do reputational concerns affect the duration of enforcement decisions? We analyze “time to decision” in warning letter processes by two enforcement divisions within the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. We find that nearly all criticism of these divisions revolves around the FDA's primary consumer protect...

The literature on policy success and failure does not capture policies that may be too successful, as well as ‘‘too much’’ and/or ‘‘too soon’’ patterns of policy. To bridge this gap, this conceptual article relies on one of the most robust findings in the psychology of judgement, namely that many people are overconfident, prone to place too much fa...

Across the industrial democracies, public agencies operating in similar policy areas and performing similar functions often vary in their levels of independence. While this variation has long interested political scientists, little attention has been devoted to the fact that in complex policy areas, the sheer quantity, diversity and complexity of e...

How does a regulator's reputation affect the public observability of its regulatory errors? I present a verbal model in the policy domain of drug safety that suggests that media coverage of the regulator's errors is a function of the regulator's predominant basis of reputation. Media coverage will be lowest when the regulator has a reputation for s...

There is very little research by policy scholars about public policy pathologies and virtually no research that delves into the nuances of policy overreaction. To bridge this gap, this conceptual article links overconfident behavior by policy makers and groupthink over positive and negative events to modes of policy overreaction, and gauges the mec...

This study evaluates the effectiveness of the Municipal Emergency Consultation project in eight Israeli local authorities. The initiative centres on the appointment of independent emergency preparedness consultants entrusted with tailoring an emergency preparedness package to suit the specific needs of each locality. Regarding emergency preparednes...

This article highlights an interesting and often unduly neglected aspect of comparative public policy and administration: local government training. The argument advanced is that local government training based on the centrally focused model may tend to be: (i) skill-oriented and competence-framed; (ii) comprehensive; and (iii) quality-controlled i...

What impact do interventions by central/federal or local levels of government in local emergency preparedness training have on the focus of training, comprehensiveness, and quality control? An analysis of two cases of intervention by central/federal levels of government reveals that training is likely to be (a) skill oriented and competence framed,...

When do regulatory agencies expand, following the emergence of novel technologies? This article presents a verbal model that suggests that a regulator is most likely to announce that it has statutory authority to regulate a novel technology when its reputation is at stake. This is most likely to occur when (1) new information becomes available to t...

This article presents a model that introduces a scientific ‘gold’ standard as a reputation protection mechanism operating alongside an agency’s legal independence. It tries to gauge which of the two is less susceptible to political moves. The model suggests that the scientific ‘gold’ standard for agency decisions is less susceptible to political mo...

The purpose of this article is to analyse the impact of intra-party conflicts on the coalitional behaviour of highly institutionalized parties in Denmark and Norway. The focus is on how highly institutionalized parties either prevent or cope with internal conflicts. The account proposed is based on the idea that organizational rigidity, that is the...

When do regulatory agencies expand, following the emergence of controversial novel technologies? I present a model which suggests that a regulator is most likely to announce that it has statutory authority to regulate a controversial novel technology, when its political legitimacy is at stake. This, in turn, is most likely to occur when (i) new inf...

This article addresses the implications of political executives losing control over corruption investigations of senior officeholders following the creation of anticorruption mechanisms (e.g., commissions, special prosecutors, independent counsels, investigating judges). When investigations hit close to home, the ensuing political fallout makes pol...

This article investigates the impact which the institutional development of the European Union (EU) and the new public management (NPM) have had on the process of recruitment and training of senior public officials in the United Kingdom between 1970 and 1995. Information provided by directors of personnel and training has enabled the extent of chan...

Senior officials in public organizations have a variety of training needs. Yet, the reduction in training budget is often a primary means of improving budget balance. This contradiction calls for a comparative investigation into executive development. Focusing on eleven European administrative systems, the paper investigates (i) whether bureaucraci...

Reuven Y. Hazan and Moshe Maor (eds). London: Frank Cass, 2000. 216 pp., tables, index, pbk, ISBN 0 7146 5076 5

The aim of this paper is to explore the possible varieties of convergence in the public administrations of members of the European Union, as well as the framework for analysing aspects of convergence. It assists students of comparative public administration who attempt to understand “puzzles” triggered by NPM and EU pressures. These pressures seem...

The central question addressed by this article is whether the absence of active competition changes the forces that shape the institutional landscape at the parliamentary level, and thereby the landscape itself. Based on a transaction cost approach, the study investigates whether the bolstering of parliamentary oversight procedures occurs in situat...

This article faddresses the implications of political executives losing control over the implementation of their policy following managerial reforms put in place under the auspices of the new public management. Such loss, in turn, makes them hunger for more control over the bureaucracy. The striking outcome of this process is that the senior servan...

The numerous studies of parliamentary oversight and institutional design have largely ignored the ability of parliamentary opposition to strengthen and utilize mechanisms of parliamentary oversight by which they can challenge incumbents. This article explores the evolution of oversight mechanisms in Norway during 1970–96, and the ways new mechanism...

This article analyses modes of interaction between government and opposition in the German Bundestag and the British House of Commons in the run‐up to the Maastricht Treaty, and the implications of co‐operation or a lack thereof for the parties involved. The article is based on the premise that the government—opposition relationship is not derived...

This article proposes a methodology for testing whether the administrative systems of the EU and its member states are converging as a consequence of the institutional development of the EU. The aims are twofold: (1) to discover how far the institutional development of the EU is bringing about common recruitment and training practices within the ad...

Analyses of the impact of intra-party conflicts on coalition bargaining have generally concluded that, when intra-party conflicts occur, the more centralized the party structure, the more effective is the party as a coalition actor. This paper argues a concrete alternative which challenges the traditional view. It suggests that, when intra-party co...

This article examines the post‐electoral conditions under which minority governments operate. It is argued that a minority government will remain in office for so long as it enjoys the support of either a commitment to relations, to behaviour, or to outcomes. If no such commitments are forthcoming, then it will only continue to survive if there is...

The aim of this study is to provide a theoretical and empirical explanation of the question: How do conflicts within a party affect its coalitional behaviour insofar as such conflicts may influence the bargaining power of party elites in the parliamentary arena. There are three major themes around which the theoretical explanation is organized. The...

The article develops a theoretical framework for the analysis of the conditions which affect the creation of barriers to entry into political systems. Its main argument is that parties in power increase structural barriers to enhance their interests when they perceive a threat to their own power. Perceived threat is influenced by changes in two dim...