Topics in Public Administration : Perspectives from Computational Social Sciences and Corpus Linguistics

This Element, an inductive examination of the topics in the public administration literature between 1991-2019 using computational social science and corpus linguistics to reveal a new landscape of public administration topics, changes in topics over time, and their distribution.

This inductive examination of the topics in the public administration literature using computational social science and corpus linguistics (17 journals, N=12,760 articles, 1991–2019) reveals a new landscape of public administration topics, changes in topics over time and their distribution: • Topic modelling of the stock of the whole corpus identifies 50 topics: the top ten topics included health care, federal government, performance management, environmental regulation, HRM and networks and accounted for just over a third of scholarship between 1991–2019. • Focal topics identified in individual journals identified similarities with popular topics in the whole corpus – networks, health care, HRM – and less frequently examined topics including gender and diversity and partnerships. • Analysis of topics over time shows a substantial flow in topics moving from a country and practice focus in the early stages of our study period to concepts such as governance, networks and citizens in the late stages (2015–2019).