Measuring bureaucratic reputation: Scale development and validation

Abstract

Despite growing interest in bureaucratic reputation as a theoretical construct, the field lacks a standardized measure that can be used in surveys to capture individual‐level variation in the reputation judgments of citizens and other audiences. The aim of this article, therefore, is to develop a standardized, individual‐level measure of bureaucratic reputation based on the conceptual definition provided by Carpenter (). Employing feedback from experts and data from a survey of over 300 U.S. citizens, this article develops and tests a unidimensional scale of bureaucratic reputation, representing the content domains of performance, morality, procedural fairness, technical competence, and general reputation. Results suggest that our proposed bureaucratic reputation scale (BRS) has good internal reliability and that it is positively associated with support for autonomy, budget, and power, which provides evidence of criterion validity. Potential uses of the scale to study bureaucratic reputation are discussed.