Assistant professor Miyeon Song recently published an article titled “Social Class, Ingroup-Outgroup Comparison, and Citizen Evaluations: Is User Satisfaction Linked to Outcome Disparities?” (co-authored with Minjung Kim and Nathan Favero) in the American Review of Public Administration. This article investigates how disparities in policy outcomes between disadvantaged and advantaged groups affect citizens’ evaluations of government performance. Using individual-level data, they find that citizens are concerned about not just their outcomes but also the relative positioning of outcomes for those of their own social group compared to other groups.

She has another article forthcoming in Administration & Society, “Bureaucracy and the Failure of Politics: Challenges to Democratic Governance” (co-authored with Kenneth J. Meier, Mallory Compton, John Polga-Hecimovich, and Cameron Wimpy). Bureaucratic reforms worldwide seek to improve the quality of governance, but many of these efforts have been unsuccessful. Using illustrations from throughout the world, this article argues that the major governance failures are political, not bureaucratic, and the first step to better governance is to recognize the underlying political causes.