Suchergebnisse

For three decades, the "politics matters" literature has found that political ideology is an important explanation of public policy. However, this literature systematically fails to include the influence of the bureaucracy. In fact, it is almost impossible to identify a single study in this literature that controls for the influence of the permanent bureaucracy. In this article, we investigate whether politics still matters when bureaucratic preferences are taken into account. We do this in a simultaneous test of political and bureaucratic influences on public budgets, a policy measure often studied in the "politics matters" literature. We find that political preferences trump bureaucratic ones in policy areas salient to the public but not in less salient areas. This might be comforting news from a democratic perspective. However, as public budgets represent an easy case for political influence, it is food for thought that political preferences do not always prevail.

The literature on tax and expenditure limitations (TELs) shows how limiting the freedom of local governments to levy taxes may have considerable unexpected effects. Entities subjected to such limitations may, as their proponents hope, react by cutting expenditures and revenue, but they may also strategically change their revenue structure and increase reliance on income sources not subjected to limitations. However, these findings are overwhelmingly based on studies of state and local governments in the United States. Their relevance outside this empirical setting remains unclear. A study of Denmark, where the central government imposed tax limitations on municipalities in 2009, makes two contributions. First, it probes the empirical domain of the U.S. findings. Second, it constitutes an empirical testing ground where endogeneity is not a pressing concern. In the United States, TELs are often self‐imposed either by local legislatures or by citizens through voter initiatives, which may bias the correlation between TELs and tax rates. We analyze a dataset of all Danish municipalities from 2007 to 2011 and demonstrate that TELs do indeed stop taxes from increasing but also confirm the findings from the TEL literature that entities subjected to tax limitations employ revenue‐shifting strategies. In Denmark, however, these strategies are contingent on the specifics of the Danish intergovernmental system, which render central government grants an attractive object of revenue‐shifting strategies. Our analysis thus helps identify the scope conditions of core findings within the literature.

AbstractResearch on street‐level bureaucracy argues that factors such as stress and burnout affect the behaviors of street‐level bureaucrats toward clients. At the same time, the literature on administrative burdens argues that citizens face a series of costs when they experience policy implementation as onerous. We draw on both literatures to theorize ways in which street‐level bureaucrats' behavioral responses to stress states may influence client experiences of administrative burden. Using a multilevel dataset of unemployment counselors and unemployment benefit recipients from 53 departments of a Danish unemployment insurance fund, we find that stress states among counselors are positively associated with benefit recipients' experiences of both learning costs, compliance costs, and experiences of autonomy loss. We conclude by discussing limitations and practical implications. In particular, we call for research into how street‐level bureaucrat characteristics influence client experiences of administrative burden.

AbstractAdministrative burdens affect peoples' experience of public administration but there is, to date, limited evidence to as why policymakers are willing to accept and impose burdens. To address this gap, we draw from the policy design and administrative burden literatures to develop the concept of burden tolerance—the willingness of policymakers and people more generally to passively allow or actively impose state actions that result in others experiencing administrative burdens. Drawing on a survey experiment and observational data with Danish local politicians in a social welfare setting, we find that more right-wing politicians are more tolerant of burdens, but politicians are less willing to impose burdens on a welfare claimant perceived as being more deserving. Politicians with a personal experience of receiving welfare benefits themselves are less tolerant of burdens, while information about the psychological costs experienced by claimants did not reduce burden tolerance.

Abstract
Coproduction where citizens collaborate with public employees in producing and delivering public services is often argued to be associated with benefits for either participating citizens, their relatives, friends, or society at large. Less is known about the potential downsides associated with citizen participation in coproduction of public services. We argue that psychological costs, such as experiences of stigma, stress, and loss of autonomy may arise among citizens in response to coproduction initiatives stimulated or directly imposed by public organizations. We test our propositions in two randomized vignette experiments on a representative sample of Danish citizens. First, we manipulate whether citizens are encouraged to coproduce public services yielding private or collective benefits. Second, we induce perceived self-efficacy among a subsample of citizens. We find that citizens are more likely to experience psychological costs when they are encouraged to coproduce public services resulting in private benefits for relatives or friends in contrast to collective benefits for a larger group of people. Furthermore, these psychological costs are felt to a greater extent among citizens with low self-efficacy. Fusing insights from multiple perspectives, our study pushes the theoretical frontiers of coproduction literature by illustrating how complex emotional responses is an overlooked, but integral part of a more comprehensive theory on the manifestations and effects of citizen coproduction.

AbstractPublic performance regimes are bedeviled by a paradox: they must engage the specialized knowledge of professionals who often perceive those very regimes as a threat to their autonomy. The authors use a mixed‐method analysis of performance management in Danish hospitals, with separate data for managers and frontline professionals, to offer two insights into this challenge. First, the study shows that managerial behavior—in the form of performance information use—matters to the way frontline professionals engage in goal‐based learning. Second, it shows that the way managers use performance data matters. When managers use data in ways that reinforce the perception of performance management as an externally imposed tool of control, professionals withdraw effort. However, when managers use data in ways that solve organizational problems, professionals engage in goal‐based learning. The threat to professional values that performance regimes pose can therefore be mitigated by managers using data in ways that complements those values.

More than 50 years of policy research has provided evidence of negative feedback where self‐correcting mechanisms reinforce stability in public policies over time. While such mechanisms are at the heart of understanding change and stability in public policies, little attention has been given to the responses of individual policy‐makers to public policies as a potential driver of negative feedback. Based on a unique survey dataset of spending preferences of local government politicians covering more than 90 Danish municipalities, three years, seven policy issues, and around 3,000 entries, we find that the expressed spending preferences of politicians are indeed negatively affected by previous spending levels. Moreover, such negative feedback effects are stronger, the less the political attention to the issue and even disappear at high levels of attention. Our analysis thus provides important evidence on the micro foundations and conditions of negative feedback in public policy.

AbstractWhile related fields have turned to personality to understand human behavior, we know relatively little about its role and impact in public administration. We review how personality has been studied in public administration and offer an empirical test of how it relates to policymaker attitudes about administrative arrangements. Using the "Big Five" framework and a sample of elected politicians, we conduct two studies showing how personality is associated with policymaker tolerance of the administrative burdens that social welfare recipients experience. Politicians with high conscientiousness are more tolerant of burdens, suggesting that they expect similar attention to detail from others. Conversely, politicians who score higher on the trait of openness to experience are less tolerant of burdens, implying that greater empathy toward the experience of others reduces burden tolerance. These relationships hold even after controlling for political ideology, the standard explanation for burden tolerance in welfare programs.

AbstractAs evidence mounts about the positive effects of autonomous motivation such as public service motivation, there is a growing case for public organizations to design reforms to better support public employees' inherent desire to help others. But how feasible is this in reality? Most experimental evidence on autonomous motivation stems from interventions at the individual level, possibly exaggerating what government reforms can achieve in reality. We present a longitudinal study that analyses a three‐year trial in Danish hospitals in which incentives and autonomy were changed to encourage autonomous motivation. This set‐up offers a rare opportunity to observe the potential malleability of intrinsic, public service, user and external motivation. The results show little observable change in motivation due to the reform. We explore the practical difficulties of translating evidence about motivation into reforms given implementation challenges, contextual factors and a recognition that motivation might be less malleable than implied by research.