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Data from telephone interviews conducted with Fla residents (N = 1,264) in 1985 indicate that three basic factors affect fiscal policy attitudes: economic self-interest, sociopolitical opinions, & race. The three are tested jointly via LISREL analysis to determine their relative importance. The findings indicate that sociopolitical views & economic interests are the most important factors; race plays only a minor role. External economic conditions must be considered in conjunction with citizen attitudes to understand the dichotomy between sociopolitical & economic influences affecting fiscal policy. 3 Figures, 1 Appendix. J. W. Stanton

AbstractThis article presents a conceptual perspective on the distinctive characteristics of public organizations and their personnel. This perspective leads to hypotheses that public organizations deliver distinctive goods and services that influence the motives and rewards for their employees. These hypotheses are tested with evidence from the International Social Survey Programme in order to compare public and private employees in 30 nations. Public employees in 28 of the 30 nations expressed higher levels of public‐service‐oriented motives. In all of the countries, public employees were more likely to say they receive rewards in the form of perceived social impact. In most of the countries, public employees placed less importance on high income as a reward and expressed higher levels of organizational commitment.Practitioner PointsThe findings presented here add to previous evidence that public employees seek and attain more altruistic and public‐service‐oriented rewards than private sector employees. In particular, we add evidence that these differences hold in many different nations and cultural contexts.Compensation and incentive system reforms in many governments have often concentrated on financial incentives and streamlining procedures for discipline and removal. Such matters are important but should not drive out concerns with showing public employees the impact of their work on the well‐being of others and on the community and society. Leaders and managers should invest in incentive systems that emphasize such motives and rewards.Leaders and managers should invest in the use of altruistic and socially beneficial motives and rewards in recruiting systems.

Prominent scholars have observed that public organizations and policies tend to have ambiguous goals, but research on these assertions is scarce. This analysis adds to a recent set of studies that developed measures of organizational goal ambiguity and found that federal agencies vary on these measures due to differences in funding patterns and other variables. This study adds variables representing the nature of the agencies' work—the routineness and complexity of their technologies and tasks. As hypothesized, complexity relates positively to one dimension of goal ambiguity, "directive goal ambiguity." Routineness of tasks relates negatively to "evaluative goal ambiguity," whereas complexity relates positively to it. These results further evince the value of the measures of goal ambiguity and their potential contribution to analysis of variations among government agencies, and to such issues as the applicability of various managerial reforms to different agencies. The results also contribute indicators of organizational task complexity and routineness that researchers can use to take into account the type of work that an agency does, in analyzing government agencies and differences among them.

As scholars have observed, government agencies have ambiguous goals. Very few large sample empirical studies, however, have tested such assertions and analysed variations among organizations in the characteristics of their goals. Researchers have developed concepts of organizational goal ambiguity, including 'evaluative goal ambiguity', and 'priority goal ambiguity', and found that these goal ambiguity variables related meaningfully to financial publicness (the degree of government funding versus prices or user charges), regulatory responsibility, and other variables. This study analyses the influence of the external political environment (external political authorities and processes) on goal ambiguity in government agencies; many researchers have analysed external influences on government bureaucracies, but very few have examined the effects on the characteristics of the organizations, such as their goals. This analysis of 115 US federal agencies indicates that higher 'political salience' to Congress, the president, and the media, relates to higher levels of goal ambiguity. A newly developed analytical framework for the analysis includes components for external environmental influences, organizational characteristics, and managerial influences, with new variables that represent components of the framework. Higher levels of political salience relate to higher levels of both types of goal ambiguity; components of the framework, however, relate differently to evaluative goal ambiguity than to priority goal ambiguity. The results contribute evidence of the viability of the goal ambiguity variables and the political environment variables. The results also show the value of bringing together concepts from organization theory and political science to study the effects of political environments on characteristics of government agencies.