Frontline information disclosure and street-level bureaucrats’ willingness to follow the rules: evidence from local regulatory agencies in China

Abstract

Frontline information disclosure refers to the endeavor to make the information of interactions between frontline officials and their clients available to policy stakeholders. This study proposes two sets of competing hypotheses to examine the relationship between frontline information disclosure and the willingness of street-level bureaucrats to follow the rules: facilitation effect and inhibition effect hypotheses. The facilitation effect assumes that frontline information disclosure may increase street-level bureaucrats’ willingness to follow the rules, while the inhibition effect expects bureaucrats will be reluctant to follow the rules under circumstances where more frontline information can be disclosed. These hypotheses are tested using data from a survey of 133 managers and 1,610 Chengguan officials in local regulatory agencies from 24 cities in China. Our statistical analyses consistently show that street-level bureaucrats who are exposed to a higher level of objective information disclosure or perceive a higher level of subjective information disclosure are more willing to follow the rules during regulatory enforcement. This finding supports facilitation effect hypotheses. The key implications of our research are discussed in the conclusion.