Bureaucratic Bashing and Praising: What Effect Does it Have on the Performance Citizens Assign Agencies?
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Bureaucratic Bashing and Praising: What Effect Does it Have on the Performance Citizens Assign Agencies? James Gerard Caillier 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract An online experimental survey was conducted to examine the impact of bureaucracy framing on respondents’ views regarding the performance of a local government entity. Several important findings emerged. First, bureaucracy bashing and bureaucracy praising were not found to have an effect on the performance respondents assigned to the entity. Second, political ideology was found to negatively influence the ratings assigned by respondents, with liberals more likely to give high ratings and conservatives more likely to give low ratings. Finally, political ideology was not found to influence the impact of either bureaucracy bashing or bureaucracy praising on perceived performance. Keywords Bashing and praise
Perhaps the most impactful governmental reforms instituted in recent history were New Public Management (NPM) and Reinventing Government (REGO), which began in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. Although instituted separately in different countries, NPM and REGO had similar tenets: (1) relying on private sector ideas rather than bureaucratic processes, (2) empowering employees, (3) steering instead of rowing, (4) innovation and entrepreneurialism, (5) meeting the needs of citizens (Frederickson, 1996). Although most of these tenets have not always been well-received (Frederickson 1996), the tenet “meeting the needs of citizens” is widely accepted, with citizen attitudes often being the outcome measure of choice (Overman 2017). This is so because meeting the needs of citizens can only prosper if citizens have a positive attitude towards government (Rölle 2017). These attitudes are also vital because they are likely to influence citizen compliance with laws and support for programs (Brinkerhoff, Wetterberg, & Wibbels 2018; Levi, Sacks, and Tyler 2009; Weatherford, 1992).
* James Gerard Caillier [email protected]
1
University of Alabama, Department of Political Science, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA
Caillier J.
So what affects citizen attitudes towards government? Naturally, actual productivity or effectiveness of government agencies is an important predictor (e.g., Mason, Hillenbrand, and Money 2014). However, these performance measures are insufficient by themselves, as they do not account for all the variation in citizen attitudes (Kelly 2003; Van de Walle and Bouckaert, 2007). This is because citizens do not always know the outputs/outcomes of agencies and because other factors are important to them as well. Hence, non-performance factors have a critical impact on attitudes about government. These factors include corruption, familiarity and contact with government, expectations, socioeconomic status (Caillier 2018; Chingos, Henderson, and West 2012; Porumbescu 2017; Van Ryzin 2004, 2015). A non-performance factor that has received far less attention than the aforementioned ones in citizen attitudinal research is t
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