Dr. Maayan Davidovitz is a postdoctoral fellow in the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University and a public administration and policy scholar. She received her Ph.D. in Public Administration and Policy from the University of Haifa, Israel in 2021. Dr. Davidovitz focuses on exploring the relationships between public servants and citizens and how they shape the dynamic between the state and society. Her research interests include public policy, public administration, policy implementation, street-level bureaucracy, trust in public administration, educational policy, and social policy.

During her studies she has won several awards and fellowships for her academic excellence including the 2022 Planning and Budgeting Committee (Vatat) Scholarship for Outstanding Israeli Postdoctoral Researchers, the Dr. Nadir Tzur Award for 2021-2022 from the Israeli Political Science Association (ISPSA) for an outstanding doctoral thesis, and the 2020 American Public Administration Association (ASPA) Founders Scholarship for outstanding students in the field of public service and public administration. Dr. Davidovitz’s works have been published in journals such as Public Management Review (2020; 2022), Public Administration Review (2022), Regulation & Governance (2021), Public Administration (2021; 2022), International Public Management Journal (2021), and Public Policy and Administration (2021;2022). E-mail:maayandavidovitz@gmail.com.Website: link

Shiran Victoria Shen is a senior research scholar and visiting assistant professor at the Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford University. She researches the comparative study of political economy, regulation, and environmental governance, with a regional focus on China. Leveraging her multidisciplinary background, she employs a wide range of data, techniques, and research designs in her work, including large-scale, satellite-derived datasets, statistical and spatial models, surveys, file experiments, field interviews, and online ethnography to generate new data, reveal new patterns, and offer new insights for core social science questions. Her primary research pipeline investigates how local politics shape the climate and environmental governance in China.

Her first book is "The Political Regulation Wave: A Case of How Local Incentives Systematically Shape Air Quality in China" (Cambridge University Press, 2022). It arguably offers the first comprehensive theorization of how local political incentives can systematically affect bureaucratic regulation. Making use of new observational data, remote sensing, box modeling, official policies and internal documents, field interviews, and online ethnography, she finds that top prefectural leaders in China were incentivized to cater to their superiors’ preference for gradual improvement in key areas, giving rise to systematically varying levels of regulatory stringency, and by extension, pollution levels during the leaders’ tenures.

She compares the case of sulfur dioxide control to fine particulate matter control to show that when ambiguity dilutes regulatory effectiveness, having the right incentives and monitoring is insufficient for successful policy implementation. Instead, understanding the nature of a policy–in this case, a pollutant’s particular characteristics–is just as important. She also shows the theory’s applicability beyond autocratic China by examining air pollution trends in municipalities in democratic Mexico. She received her B.A. with high honors and Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore College and holds an M.S. in civil and environmental engineering and a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University. You can learn more about her works at this link.