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

This inductive examination of the topics in the public administration literature using computational social science and corpus linguistics (N = 12,760 articles) reveals a new landscape of public administration topics, changes in topics over time and their distribution. The top ten topics include healthcare, federal government, performance management, environmental regulation, and HRM accounting for just over a third of scholarship between 1991 and 2019. The 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 to concepts such as governance, networks and citizens. Analysis of the World Bank Governance Indicators indicated that lower scoring countries placed a greater emphasis on structures, while research in countries with higher scores emphasised management and governance.