SelectedWorks - N. Luke Fowler

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Selected Works of N. Luke Fowler

Professor, Department of Public Policy and Administration

Dr. Luke Fowler, a Professor in the Department of Public Policy and Administration, completed his Ph.D. at Mississippi State University in 2013. He has written articles for journals such as State and Local Government Review, Journal of Public Budgeting, and Accounting, & Financial Management, and has presented papers at numerous conferences including the annual meetings of the Southeastern Conference on Public Administration and the American Association of Public Administration. Dr. Fowler enjoys working in consultation with local governments. Some of his consultation work includes focus groups on fair housing for Valdosta, GA and a compensation and scheduling study of police and fire for Moultrie, GA.

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About N. Luke Fowler

Dr. Luke Fowler, a Professor in the Department of Public Policy and Administration, completed his Ph.D. at Mississippi State University in 2013. He has written articles for journals such as State and Local Government Review, Journal of Public Budgeting, and Accounting, & Financial Management, and has presented papers at numerous conferences including the annual meetings of the Southeastern Conference on Public Administration and the American Association of Public Administration. Dr. Fowler enjoys working in consultation with local governments. Some of his consultation work includes focus groups on fair housing for Valdosta, GA and a compensation and scheduling study of police and fire for Moultrie, GA.

Articles (38)

Strategies for Dealing with Policy Ambiguities (Luke Fowler) Public Administration (2023)

Ambiguities often weave through policies, leading to conflict and confusion over the intents and purpose of said policy and how it may manifest in any specific instance. Given that policy management is a core function ...

Creatively Interpreting Policy to Move Science Forward: Implementing Participatory Technology Assessment at NASA (Christopher Torres and Luke Fowler) Review of Policy Research (2023)

Entrepreneurial strategies and tactics are often subtle and indiscrete, adding to the mystery of how one goes about being an entrepreneur, particularly within bureaucratic agencies that are often set up to constrain such behaviors. The ...

Venue Shopping in Multiple Streams: Campus Free Speech Policy Adoption in Wisconsin (Brian Stelbotsky and Luke Fowler) Administration & Society (2023)

Wisconsin’s Campus Free Speech Act provides a distinctive case study to examine the intersection of venue shopping and the multiple streams framework. After some initial traction, entrepreneur ran into roadblocks in the state legislature; then, ...

Searching for Green Elephants and Other Mythical Creatures During the Trump Years: Partisanship and Congressional Voting on Environmental Legislation (Luke Fowler) Politics & Policy (2022)

Are there any environmentalists left in the Republican Party? Using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and data from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) for the 115th (2017–2018) and 116th (2019–2020) Congresses, the author finds that ...

Super-Human or Sub-Human?: Positive Dehumanization and Gender in Public Performance Evaluations (Stephen M. Utych and Luke Fowler) Administration & Society (2022)

Dehumanizing language, language that compares human beings to animals or machines, is typically thought of in problematic cases, where it is designed to denigrate individuals or entire groups in society. But, this language can also ...

Using the Multiple Streams Framework to Connect Policy Adoption to Implementation (Luke Fowler) Policy Studies Journal (2022)

The author furthers research on the multiple streams framework (MSF) by testing hypotheses related to the conditional nature of politics, policy, and problems streams in affecting policy outputs from both policymaking and policy implementation. The ...

Administration, Rhetoric, and Climate Policy in the Obama Presidency (Craig Jones and Luke Fowler) Review of Policy Research (2022)

Among the most well-known traits of the Obama presidency are his rhetorical skills and reliance on administrative action to push forward policy in the face of an unresponsive Congress. This is particularly notable for climate ...

Is It Us? Is It Them? Or is It This Place?: Predicting Civility in State Legislatures (Jaclyn J. Kettler, Luke Fowler and Stephanie L. Witt) State Politics & Policy Quarterly (2022)

While many scholars and analysts have observed a decline in civility in recent years, there have been few examinations of how political, economic, and institutional structures may partially explain inter-state differences in these trends. We ...

Political and Administrative Decentralization and Responses to COVID-19: Comparison of the United States and South Korea (Sanghee Park and Luke Fowler) International Journal of Organization Theory & Behavior (2021)

Purpose This study explains the variation of government responses to the pandemic by focusing on how centralization/decentralization in politics and administration creates conflicts and coordination problems. Specifically, the authors make comparisons between the U.S. and ...

How to Implement Policy: Coping with Ambiguity and Uncertainty (Luke Fowler) Public Administration (2021)

The author examines policy implementation as an exercise in coping with ambiguity (i.e., different ways of thinking about the same issues) on the one hand and uncertainty (i.e., lack of information) on the other. Functions ...

Are People Better Employees Than Machines?: Dehumanizing Language and Employee Performance Appraisals (Luke Fowler and Stephen Utych) Social Science Quarterly (2021)

Objective Although performance appraisals are based on objective procedures, cognitive biases from appraisers may create avenues for errors in judgment of employee performance. Dehumanizing language, or metaphors that characterize humans in nonhuman terms (e.g., cogs ...

Conditional Nature of Policy as a Stabilizing Force: Erin’s Law and Teacher Child Abuse Reporting Practices (Luke Fowler and Joel Vallett) Administration & Society (2021)

This article uses Erin’s Law, a law establishing consistent teacher reporting practices for child abuse, to test the multiple streams framework (MSF) implementation hypothesis in a policy area where inconsistent state-level policies have been the ...

Are Republicans Bad for the Environment? (Luke Fowler and Jaclyn J. Kettler) State Politics & Policy Quarterly (2021)

Does the partisanship of officeholders affect environmental outcomes? The popular perception is that Republicans are bad for the environment, but complicating factors like federalism may limit this outcome. Using a dataset that tracks toxic releases ...

Is It Still a Mandate If We Don’t Enforce It?: The Politics of COVID-Related Mask Mandates in Conservative States (Jeffrey Lyons and Luke Fowler) State and Local Government Review (2021)

Questions of whether to enforce COVID-related mask mandates are complex. While enforced mandates are more effective at controlling community spread, government imposed behavioral controls have met significant opposition in conservative states, where a political bloc ...

More Human Than Human: The Consequences of Positive Dehumanization (Stephen Utych and Luke Fowler) Administrative Theory & Praxis (2021)

While dehumanizing language, or comparison of humans to animals or machines, is commonplace in administrative rhetoric, there is little evidence of its consequences, particularly when used in its positive form, with intent to praise, rather ...

Does the Primacy System Work?: State versus Federal Implementation of the Clean Water Act (Luke Fowler and Chris Birdsall) Publius: The Journal of Federalism (2021)

In the United States, environmental federalism largely relies on a system for policy implementation that allows the federal government to delegate primary program authority (or primacy) to state agencies. Although it is an ingrained feature ...

Institutional Collective Action on Drugs: Functional and Vertical Dilemmas of Unused Pharmaceuticals (Monica Hubbard and Luke Fowler) Review of Policy Research (2021)

The authors use the Institutional Collective Action Framework to analyze the barriers, opposition, and opportunities for residential pharmaceutical disposal programs in the United States via a case study on a series of take-back programs pioneered ...

Pandemics and Partisanship: Following Old Paths into Uncharted Territory (Luke Fowler, Jaclyn J. Kettler and Stephanie L. Witt) American Politics Research (2021)

Although partisan politics tend be set aside during crisis, the timing of gubernatorial actions in response to COVID-19 is telling about how partisanship is shaping the way elected officials are reacting to this pandemic. Using ...

Are the Best and Brightest Joining the Public Service? (Luke Fowler and Chris Birdsall) Review of Public Personnel Administration (2020)

The changing nature of public service has blurred the lines between economic sectors by intermingling public, private, and nonprofit missions, and made it easier for employees to balance extrinsic and intrinsic motivators by seeking employers ...

Governance, Federalism and Organizing Institutions to Manage Complex Problems (Luke Fowler) Public Administration (2020)

In managing complex policy problems in the federal system, state and local governments are organized into different arrangements for translating policy goals into policy outcomes. Air quality management is used as a test case to ...

Best Practices for Implementing Federal Environmental Policies: A Principal-Agent Perspective (Luke Fowler) Journal of Environmental Planning and Management (2020)

In the US, federal environmental policies tend to be implemented by subnational agencies through intergovernmental management systems, which results in state governments serving as agents of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Therefore, principal-agent dynamics create ...

Democratic Governors are Quicker in Responding to the Coronavirus Than Republicans (Luke Fowler, Jaclyn Kettler and Stephanie Witt) The Conversation (2020)

While the coronavirus pandemic is a national and international concern, state and local officials find themselves on the front lines of the public health battle. Governors, in particular, have been in the spotlight in recent ...

Balancing Multi-Level Politics in Local Environmental Policy Choices (Luke Fowler and Geoffrey Rabinowitz) Public Works Management & Policy (2020)

Although local governments are well poised to address complex environmental policy problems, balancing local and supra-local politics is a key obstacle to overcome. The authors argue that when making policy choices, local policymakers balance local ...

Second‐Order Devolution or Local Activism?: Local Air Agencies Revisited (Luke Fowler and Bryant Jones) Review of Policy Research (2019)

In response to calls from previous scholarship for further bottom-up examination of local government roles in environmental policy, the authors revisit local air agencies to examine two separate phenomena occurring in environmental federalism: one from ...

Problems, Politics, and Policy Streams in Policy Implementation (Luke Fowler) Governance (2019)

We apply Kingdon's multiple streams framework (MSF) to policy implementation to reflect a nested process separate from but interdependent with policymaking. Then, we generate a hypothesis concerning the conditional nature of problems, policies, and politics ...