Government shutdowns and administrative capacity
How shutdown exposure changes recruitment, voluntary and involuntary separations, employee behavior, agency operations, and policy implementation.
Research portfolio
How public institutions gain, use, and lose capacity.
CLEAR studies the workforce, institutional, behavioral, technological, and political foundations of effective and accountable government.
Research areas
One portfolio, multiple levels of analysis.
Projects can be filtered by topic. The program deliberately connects individual experiences, organizational systems, political institutions, and labor-market outcomes.
Remote work and federal recruitment
Whether remote eligibility changes the size, geography, composition, and quality of applicant pools—and how workplace flexibility functions as a labor-market amenity.
Contracts, appointments, and multi-principal governance
How presidents, Congress, agencies, and markets shape federal appointments, vacancies, procurement, contractor relationships, and implementation capacity.
Motivation, burnout, and organizational experience
How emotional labor, workplace messages, crisis conditions, leadership, and institutional procedures shape public employee attitudes and behavior.
Intersectional experience in public organizations
How race, gender, generation, representation, inclusion, and organizational justice influence burnout, extra-role work, voice, and public-service careers.
Executive power and the administrative state
How presidents centralize control, politicize expertise, reorganize administration, use contractors, and alter the institutional counterweights that sustain democratic accountability.
Complementarity, augmentation, and substitutivity
A retrieval-augmented modeling framework for evaluating how generative AI may change tasks, skills, and occupational resilience in government.
Explore the AI programThe stability premium in public employment
Estimating the value workers place on federal job stability by connecting shutdown exposure, wage differentials, and applicant behavior across public and private labor markets.
Collaborative infrastructure
Accountability and Reform Research Consortium
ARRC is a multi-institutional research network designed to document and explain rapid changes in public administration while building durable data and communities of practice.
Government capacity
Changes in agency capability, implementation, service delivery, and organizational performance.
Workforce & expertise
Recruitment, exits, skills, professional knowledge, and the institutions that sustain public service.
Structural & societal impacts
How administrative change affects sectors, communities, regions, and democratic governance.
Data & analytical infrastructure
Shared data, documentation, methods, and access systems for cumulative public-interest research.
Selected publications
Recent scholarship connected to CLEAR.
This selected list foregrounds the themes carried forward from the legacy site. A complete and continuously updated record is available through the director’s scholarly profile.
2025
Employee Turnover Effects of the 2018–2019 United States Federal Government Shutdown
Resh, Ahn, Wang & Lee · Public Administration Review 85(6): 1682–1696
2024
Populism and Administrative Dysfunction: The Impact of U.S. Government Shutdowns on Personnel and Policy Implementation
Resh, Ahn & Moynihan · Governance
2024
Applying an Intersectional Understanding of Extra-Work Behavior and Emotional Burnout in Local Public Service
Brian An, Cynthia Barboza-Wilkes & William G. Resh · Public Administration
2023
Deconstructing Burnout at the Intersections of Race, Gender, and Generation in Local Government
Barboza-Wilkes, Le & Resh · Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 33(1): 186–201
2022
Anticipated Adjudication: An Analysis of the Judicialization of the U.S. Administrative State
Limbocker, Selin & Resh · Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory
2021
Procedural Environment of Public Engagement: An Induced Recall Experiment of Local Government Employees
Resh, Barboza-Wilkes & Marvel · Public Management Review
Methods and collaboration
Partner with CLEARBring data, theory, and public problems together.
CLEAR projects use administrative records, job postings, surveys, experiments, qualitative evidence, text analysis, machine learning, network analysis, and quasi-experimental designs.