Do professional associations make a difference?: linking municipal managers’ association participation and attitudes toward citizen participation

ABSTRACT

There has been a lingering debate on the relationship between public managers’ professional socialization and their acceptance of citizen participation. In this paper, it is empirically confirmed that association participation strengthens municipal managers’ predispositions toward engaging citizens. It is found that municipal managers that are active in generalist-oriented professional associations will be more likely to realize successful practices for citizen engagement in peer municipalities, which boosts their perceived sense of citizen contribution, and reduces their perceptions on the costliness of engaging citizens. These relationships are found to be mediated by municipal managers’ technocratic orientation and engagement self-efficacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Professional association
• municipal manager
• citizen participation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We would like to thank the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71774164, 1633004) and the Key Project of the Ministry of Education of China (18JZD048) for the financial support for presenting our study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. It is important to clarify the term professional association to avoid any misunderstandings. The presence of a professional association is no guarantee that a specific occupation will be recognized as a profession. It is not uncommon for an occupation with a debatable profession status to organize its own associations (Millerson 1998).

2. Typically, state-based local government management associations maintain close ties with the ICMA. Currently, most U.S. states have a state-based association for local government professionals. The exceptions are Louisiana and Mississippi (Retrieved from http://icma.org/en/icma/members/state_associations on 11 October 2017).

3. It should be noted that these two concerns are not mutually exclusive. A manager who believes strongly in the contribution that citizens can make can well deem citizen participation costly at the same time.

4. At the time of our survey (2012), the total population of New Jersey was about 8.88 million (Source: U.S. Census, retrieved from https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2017/demo/popest/state-total.html on 3 September 2018).

5. Retrieved from http://njmma.org on 11 September 2017.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yuguo Liao

Yuguo Liao is an assistant professor of political science and public policy administration at the University of Missouri, St. Loui, USA. His research interests include public participation in administrative decision-making, organizational theory and behavior, government performance management.

Liang Ma

Liang Ma is an associate professor at the School of Public Administration and Policy, Renmin University of China, China. His research interests include public organizational innovation, government performance measurement and management, and urban management and governance.