SPA Professor Jocelyn Johnston

After SPA Professor Jocelyn Johnston’s election to the PMRA Board of Directors last June, she joined a task force making plans for a new journal: a companion to the Public Management Research Association’s (PMRA) highly regarded Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (JPART). The new journal, Perspectives on Public Management and Governance (PPMG), is scheduled to launch in September. While JPART will continue to publish articles based largely on empirical, data-driven research, PPMG will welcome articles with a conceptual focus, using case studies, qualitative research, and other methods.

Johnston has a long involvement in PMRA; she attended the first organizational meeting a doctoral student at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School in the early 1990s. One of the participants in that first meeting was Barbara Romzek, then serving on the faculty of the University of Kansas. Johnston served on the editorial board and numerous PMRA committees in the past. Her current term on the Board of Directors is for three years. Professor Anna Amirkhanyan, Johnston’s colleague in the Department of Public Administration and Policy, just completed a term on the board, so Johnston’s election continues the presence of American University faculty in PMRA’s leadership. Johnston earned both her MPA and PhD from the Maxwell School, then joined the SPA faculty in 2004. Her current research focuses on government contracting, public management, and intergovernmental programs and policy. She has conducted studies of social welfare reform funded by the Rockefeller Institute of Government (through the Kellogg Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and others), and the states of Kansas and Pennsylvania. Her current projects include studies of state contracting and navigation/outreach for the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), federal devolution of food safety policy, and contracting/staff demography in corrections facilities.

Johnston was a recipient of the Kaufman Award for the best paper in public administration presented at the 2001 American Political Science Association conference, and she has served on executive committees and editorial boards for several leading professional organizations and journals. She was recently selected to serve as an advisory member of the National Academy of Public Administration’s Transition 2016 initiative—“Collaboration Across Boundaries"—to advise the incoming Presidential Administration. She received SPA’s Outstanding Faculty Service Award in 2013.