Abstract
Abstract Previous studies have identified institutional, organizational, and individual factors that promote innovation in public organizations. Yet they have overlooked how the type of public administration—and the type of administrators—is associated with innovative attitudes. Using two large, unique comparative data sets on public bureaucracies and public managers, this article examines how bureaucratic politicization and legalistic features are associated with senior public managers’ attitudes toward innovation in 19 European countries. Results of multilevel analysis indicate that the bureaucratic politicization of an administration and the law background of public managers matter. Public managers working in politicized administrations and those whose education includes a law degree exhibit lower pro‐innovation attitudes (i.e., receptiveness to new ideas and creative solutions and change orientation).
Highlights
Previous studies have identified institutional, organizational, and individual factors that promote innovation in public organizations
Senior managers working in more politicized bureaucracies and those with a legal education background show lower tolerance for new ideas and creative solutions, and they are less willing to take actions that might upset the status quo
We focus on a previous stage in the chain of innovation: senior public managers’ pro-innovation attitudes, operationalized by three distinctive indicators: (1) receptiveness to new ideas and creative solutions, (2) change orientation, and (3) attitudes toward risk
Summary
Previous studies have identified institutional, organizational, and individual factors that promote innovation in public organizations. Previous cross-national and subnational empirical research shows that certain macro characteristics of public bureaucracy (known as “Weberian bureaucracy”)—a meritocratically recruited and impartial public administration—are strong predictors of positive macro outcomes such as economic growth (Evans and Rauch 1999), improved health outcomes (Cingolani, Thomsson, and de Crombrugghe 2015), lower levels of corruption (Dahlström, Lapuente, and Teorell 2012a; Rauch and Evans 2000), innovative outputs and scientific productivity (Fernández-Carro and Lapuente-Giné 2016; Suzuki and Demircioglu 2019), and government effectiveness (Dahlström and Lapuente 2017) This literature focuses on the aggregate level, examining how institutional factors influence country-level outcomes, overlooking the association between individual civil servants’ attitudes and the characteristics of bureaucracy. We combine these two separate streams of the literature, exploring the effects of the characteristics of the bureaucratic personnel systems on attitudes toward innovation among public managers
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