Hello! Welcome to my website. My name is Austin McCrea and I am an Assistant Professor of Public Administration in the Department of Political Science at Texas Tech University. My research interests span social equity, public management, street-level bureaucracy, and, increasingly, experimental approaches to public perceptions of bureaucracy. Most of my published work addresses questions of bureaucratic representation, diversity, and health outcomes. A common thread through much of my work is a substantive focus on high-risk, time critical public service contexts such as emergency departments, nursing homes, and the opioid crisis. It is my view that these contexts emphasize factors such as endemic resource shortages, highly vulnerable client populations, and high task difficulty that test the boundary conditions for existing theory.
I recently fielded two survey experiments which test ideas on the public's perceptions towards bureaucrat bashing, bureaucratic selection, and symbolic representation. How the public perceives bureaucracy is a fundamental challenge to modern governments and has downstream consequences for virtually all indicators of effective democratic governance. Like others, the salience of these processes inspires me as a scholar and informs my budding research agenda within this domain.
My work appears in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Public Administration Review, and other outlets.
Email: austin.mccrea@ttu.edu
Texas Tech Faculty Profile: https://www.depts.ttu.edu/politicalscience/Faculty/McCreaAustin.php
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=uNjxGccAAAAJ&hl=en