Public administration as a science of the artificial: A methodology for prescription
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How can academic research be made more relevant to practitioners? The authors argue that the dominant quantitative technique in public administration, regression, and recent improvements in that technique, focus on the average cases rather than the high-performing cases. This focus may serve academics well, but it serves practitioners poorly. They introduce a new quantitative technique that better fits public administration's need for prescription. Their approach, substantively weighted least squares, stresses how high-performance agencies differ from the average agency. The technique in combination with more traditional methods can address both how things are as well as how they might be.
