Machine Learning for Public Administration Research, with Application to Organizational Reputation

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive guide for public administration scholars on applying machine learning methods, highlighting their benefits, potential pitfalls, and demonstrating their use in studying organizational reputation via federal agency tweets.

Contribution

It offers a foundational overview of machine learning for public administration, including practical guidance, pitfalls, and an illustrative case study on organizational reputation.

Findings

Machine learning enables new measures and data sources for public administration.

Proper use of machine learning requires awareness of pitfalls like unvalidated measures.

Machine learning can effectively analyze social media data to assess organizational reputation.

Abstract

Machine learning methods have gained a great deal of popularity in recent years among public administration scholars and practitioners. These techniques open the door to the analysis of text, image and other types of data that allow us to test foundational theories of public administration and to develop new theories. Despite the excitement surrounding machine learning methods, clarity regarding their proper use and potential pitfalls is lacking. This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature through providing a machine learning "guide to practice" for public administration scholars and practitioners. Here, we take a foundational view of machine learning and describe how these methods can enrich public administration research and practice through their ability develop new measures, tap into new sources of data and conduct statistical inference and causal inference in a principled manner. We then turn our attention to the pitfalls of using these methods such as unvalidated measures and lack of interpretability. Finally, we demonstrate how machine learning techniques can help us learn about organizational reputation in federal agencies through an illustrated example using tweets from 13 executive federal agencies.