Bureaucratic Decision Research Articles

Uncivilian Power Germany: Why States Violate their Foreign Policy Master Roles

ABSTRACT This paper explores the reasons why states occasionally do not adhere to the behavioural expectations as prescribed by their foreign policy master roles. To that end, it proposes four potential drivers for such ‘role violations’, namely: exogenous pressure, political survival, lack of issue salience and ensuing bureaucratic decision-making, and unclear role demands in ambiguous decision contexts. Empirically, the paper examines the plausibility of those drivers for the case of Germany’s abstention in the United Nations Security Council vote on resolution 1973 on Libya. It suggests that in that particular case considerations of political survival made civilian power Germany act out of character.

Enhancing Community Participation in Local Development Projects: The Bangladesh Context

This paper focuses on developing an approach for effective community participation in local development projects. Researchers conducted a field study in Sunamganj district, one of the most vulnerable areas in Bangladesh, and collected information from 54 respondents, including Union Parishads (UP) chairpersons and members, secretaries, committee members, and local beneficiaries through interviews and FGDs using purposive sampling. Researchers also collected relevant documents from the Union Parishad (project plan, evaluation report, and annual progress report) to compare the information obtained from the participants in the field and analyzed them using the thematic analysis method. Study findings revealed that although UP is considered a close-knit community-based organization due to the nature of its development work and geographic location, inclusive decentralization and a democratic environment have not been established at the local level institutions to enhance meaningful community participation in development projects. This deficiency is attributed to outsider interferences, nepotism, lack of knowledge and information, top-down bureaucratic decisions, gender discrimination, and corruption. It is believed that the model of a meaningful decentralized participation system would help mobilize the comprehensive local development process.

Limiting bureaucratic discretion? Analyzing the design and exercise of administrative judicial review in the welfare sector

AbstractThis article develops a framework for understanding how the design of administrative judicial review can circumscribe the discretion of different bureaucratic actors. The framework proposes that bureaucratic discretion is limited to a great extent if courts can (i) overturn bureaucratic decisions on substantive grounds, (ii) review decisions associated with high economic costs, and (iii) issue detailed instructions for how rulings are to be implemented. Applying the framework to the Swedish case, we first show that the legislative design of the judicial review process allows administrative courts to greatly limit the discretion of senior officials and street‐level bureaucrats. Second, we show that Swedish courts defer to the expertise of bureaucratic actors in the welfare sector by sparingly overturning decisions. However, when courts actually overturn decisions, they frequently limit bureaucratic discretion by issuing detailed judgments in high‐cost cases, possibly undermining the conditions for good governance.

The consequences of the new European reclassification of non-invasive brain stimulation devices and the medical device regulations pose an existential threat to research and treatment: An invited opinion paper

A significant amount of European basic and clinical neuroscience research includes the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and low intensity transcranial electrical stimulation (tES), mainly transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Two recent changes in the EU regulations, the introduction of the Medical Device Regulation (MDR) (2017/745) and the Annex XVI have caused significant problems and confusions in the brain stimulation field. The negative consequences of the MDR for non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) have been largely overlooked and until today, have not been consequently addressed by National Competent Authorities, local ethical committees, politicians and by the scientific communities. In addition, a rushed bureaucratic decision led to seemingly wrong classification of NIBS products without an intended medical purpose into the same risk group III as invasive stimulators.Overregulation is detrimental for any research and for future developments, therefore researchers, clinicians, industry, patient representatives and an ethicist were invited to contribute to this document with the aim of starting a constructive dialogue and enacting positive changes in the regulatory environment.

A new measure of US public agency policy discretion

Abstract The US bureaucracy routinely issues major public policy decisions that affect Americans’ lives. Government agency leaders make those decisions based on a subjective understanding of their agency’s available policy discretion. Over time, discretion has become a prominent theoretical construct in the bureaucratic politics and public administration literature, but it is rarely measured directly. In this article, we create a new measure of agency policy discretion. We draw on research suggesting that discretion is derived from the bureaucracy’s key political principals: the elected executive, legislators, and interest groups. We use data from the American State Administrators Project and trigonometry to calculate the discretion area scores for 8,955 state agencies between 1978 and 2018. We then evaluate the measure through a series of construct validation assessments. The article offers an innovative and generalizable way to operationalize discretion that will advance future scholarship in organizational behavior, public administration, and bureaucratic decision-making.

The Adoption of Artificial Intelligence in Bureaucratic Decision-making: A Weberian Perspective

This work questions AI´s role in bureaucratic decision-making. The Weberian conception of bureaucracy, based around the concept of an ideal bureaucracy in which authority is distributed, delegated, clearly delimited and hierarchical and that enshrines the following of formal rules, task specialization through division of labor, legal certainty and a predilection for efficiency in recordable and accountable decisions can serve as a framework to orient how governments should approach the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) given the many problems associated with its careless deployment. Using theoretical analysis, this work explains Weberian ideas of bureaucracy and contrasts them with real-life cases of implementation of AI in bureaucratic decision-making, often with detrimental results for society. After identifying and framing issues related to AI, e.g., lack of transparency, attempts to shift accountability from humans to technology, the exacerbation of bias and potential for systemic discrimination, the paper proposes Weberian prescriptions that should help public administration make careful decisions about the adoption of AI and the consequences of its implementation. The article also engages with Weber critically, rejecting the notion that public administrators do not engage in politics and asserting that AI decision-making is necessarily political as well, as it entails exercising power over citizens.

Introduction to the Issue on Artificial Intelligence in the Public Sector: Risks and Benefits of AI for Governments

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly adopted by public sector organizations to provide better public services and to transform their internal processes. AI is now considered a key enabler for digital innovation and transformation in the public sector. However, AI is still relatively a new research area in the field of digital government. The term, AI, captures a wide range of technologies, techniques, and tools such as machine/deep learning, natural language processing, robotics, computer vision, and more recently Generative AI. While these AI technologies afford different applications and benefits in the government context, they also create social, ethical, and legal challenges. These challenges require solutions combining both technical (e.g., data and algorithmic solutions to minimize bias) and institutional (e.g., governance structures and processes) mechanisms. The special issue is a collection of articles that contribute to a better understanding of the issues associated with AI deployment in different areas of government operations. They cover AI applications in the areas of emergency response, policy analysis, public bids, and citizen participation. The contributions also address the challenge of realizing a legal transparency regime for AI in government and the effect of AI in bureaucratic decision-making.

The New Public Integrity Management and the Protection of the Impartiality of Bureaucratic Decision-Making

The article argues that government organizations and the discipline of public administration should embrace a New Public Integrity Management (NPIM) to bridge the gap between advocates of external and internal public integrity controls on the behavior of public employees and contract government employees. The article argues that external and internal controls are important in maintaining public trust in government. This includes the management of the acceptance of gifts and private hospitality by government and contract government employees. The article traces the evolution of federal executive branch public integrity management and argues that the discipline of public administration has demonstrated a long-standing hostility towards external ethics controls due to early 20th-century divorce between law and administration. Of particular importance, the NPIM requires the adoption of a much broader definition of public corruption, which includes the conduct of private sector partners of government agencies responsible for the delivery of public goods and services paid for with public funds. Finally, the article argues that government ethics programs need to integrate moral reasoning education into their public integrity training programs and discuss criminal and administrative rules of conduct directed at protecting public confidence in the impartiality of bureaucratic decision-making.

The immigrant versus the state: The marginal contribution of tribunal judges to administrative justice

AbstractAdministrative tribunal judges determine rights and entitlements regarding bureaucratic decisions. In immigration appeal cases, they review negative decisions of permanent residency acquisition and family reunification. Based on an analysis of all immigration appeal decisions in Canada’s Quebec province over a period of twenty-three years, we find that tribunal judges confirm the bureaucratic decision in the vast majority of cases, noting the migrants’ inability to meet the annual income requirements, and rarely reverse the decision in favour of migrants. Documenting the marginal contribution of tribunal judges to promoting administrative justice, this article contributes to the debate on whether and how courts can advance immigrants’ rights.

AI and Bureaucratic Decision-Making: A New Layer of Opacity

AI and Bureaucratic Decision-Making: A New Layer of Opacity

Security knowledges: circulation, control, and responsible research and innovation in EU border management

ABSTRACT The knowledge emerging from research funded by the European Union (EU) through its Framework Programmes for Research and Innovation and other funding streams is significantly shaped by different forms of epistemic control exerted by the EU itself. Through the promotion of industry-research-policy cooperation in EU-funded research, and in light of the growing importance attached to ‘impact,’ this knowledge will often contribute to bureaucratic decisions taken by the European Commission, Frontex, the EU Agency for the Operational Management of Large-Scale IT Systems (eu-LISA), and other agencies tasked with border security and control. The circular dynamics surrounding knowledge production, from the calls for proposals to the results of the research, are intrinsically political and contribute to exposing the limits of the EU-promoted principle of Responsible Research and Innovation. Additionally, and due to the centrality of EU funding in the research outlook in contemporary Europe, these processes raise wider questions about the sociology of the academic fields that this article relates to: critical border studies, critical security studies, and science and technology studies. How can we interpret the interplays between the EU’s policies fostering development and integration of border security technologies, on the one hand, and the Union’s broader principles for free and open research and innovation? Through the use of autoethnographic vignettes, and mediated by an expanded Foucauldian understanding of circulation as a technology of control with performative effects, the article sheds light on the dynamics surrounding knowledge production in the field of border technologies in an EU context.

Bringing “Behavioral” Fully into Behavioral Public Administration

Behavioral economics is an increasingly influential field across the social sciences, including public administration. But while some behavioral economics ideas have spread rapidly in public administration research, we argue that a broader range of behavioral economics concepts can and should be applied. We begin by outlining some central models and concepts from behavioral economics to fix ideas, including the rational model and the “behavioral” response. We then discuss how a variety of heretofore underutilized behavioral economics concepts can be applied to a specific area of work in public administration – bureaucratic decision making. Our aim in doing so is two-fold. First, we hope to provide fresh food for thought for researchers and practitioners working in the broader behavioral public administration space. Second, we hope to demonstrate that there is substantial scope for expanding behavioral economics’ influence on public administration research.

What are the Priorities of Bureaucrats? Evidence from Conjoint Experiments with Procurement Officials

A well-functioning bureaucracy is a precondition for efficient public goods provision. However, bureaucratic decision-making is still largely seen as a black box. We provide novel insights into the preferences of bureaucrats regarding their work outcomes. We focus on a major public sector activity and survey more than 900 real-life procurement officials in Finland and Germany. The questionnaire includes hypothetical choice experiments to study the relative importance of multiple features in tender outcomes. First, bureaucrats state to have substantial discretion at work but no important incentives. Second, our experimental results show that procurers are particularly worried about avoiding negative risks concerning prices and supplier reputation. Third, an avoidance of bidders with prior bad performance appears to be an extremely important factor. Fourth, procurers value a certain degree of competition, while litigation concerns and regional favoritism play only a small role. The striking lack of heterogeneous effects points towards the role of intrinsic motivation among public buyers in countries with high public sector capacity.

관료 기관의 의사결정이 선출직 공무원의 선거 사이클에 의해 영향을 받는가?

Although there is vast literature on whether and how bureaucratic decision-making is changed according to the policy preference of elected officials, we know little about whether bureaucratic decision-making is also influenced by the electoral incentive of elected officials. To understand the effect of electoral incentives on bureaucratic behavior, this study uses the case of the city mayor election and its effect on local governments’ crackdown rates on illegal parking. Specifically, this study evaluates whether and how local governments’ crackdown rates on illegal parking changes before and after the reelection of incumbent mayors and whether changes in those rates are more prominent with competitive reelections. Analyses show no evidence that mayors’ electoral cycles and competitiveness significantly influence crackdown rates on illegal parking. This finding is evidence that bureaucrats’ decision-making is not influenced by their elected superiors if that influence is to enhance their elected superior’s chance of winning at reelection, which implies that political influence on bureaucratic behavior can be shown differently according to the reason behind politicians’ influence.

Bureaucratic discretion, legitimacy, and substantive justice

ABSTRACT Chiara Cordelli’s book The Privatized State makes an important contribution to debates over the morality of public administration and widespread privatization. Cordelli argues that widespread privatization is a problem of legitimacy, as private actors impose their will unilaterally on others. Bureaucratic decision-making, by contrast, can be legitimate, within the correct institutional context and in accordance with a bureaucratic ethos. In this review, I argue that bureaucratic policymaking faces similar changes from the value of legitimacy that Cordelli raises against widespread privatization. First, I argue that for a polity subject to bureaucratic policymaking to be self-ruling, bureaucracies must incorporate more democracy; but, so doing goes against the rationale of their institutional form. Second, I argue that bureaucrats and private actors acting on behalf of the state do not have starkly different levels of free purposiveness, and that it is morally desirable for bureaucrats to have more free purposiveness than Cordelli allows, and private actors less.

The Importance of Community Partnerships in Nonprofit and Business Responsiveness to COVID-19; Success Stories From the Field

Since 2019, the global health crisis created by the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus disease has had widespread human, economic, and social impacts. This crisis has heightened our awareness of preexisting health disparities, the slow pace of bureaucratic decision-making, and the increased demands on our health care systems to access, mobilize, and successfully utilize resources. LiveWell, a nonprofit aging services provider, and Bird’s Eye Medical, a for-profit health care organization, were both adept in their ability to leverage community partnerships to meet critical health care needs in their local communities, demonstrating foresight, creativity, and expandable key practice measures. Bird’s Eye Medical and LiveWell developed innovative, community-based approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic, based on purpose and service to their communities, and took quick action in scientific-based practices while prioritizing the needs of vulnerable populations. Two case studies are examined to answer the question, “What can we learn from the successes of the COVID-19 pandemic, and what shifts could we implement to encourage increased cross-sector collaborations?”

The Behavioral Foundations of Representative Bureaucracy

AbstractRepresentative bureaucracy is a values-based theory of bureaucratic decision making. Its key assumption is that a bureaucrat’s demography shapes her pre-organizational socialization, values, and ultimately her decisions, in a way that can advance the interests of a represented client or group (i.e., active representation). However, scholars have not critically examined the presumed links among these four factors. We review the literature and make an argument for representative bureaucracy scholars to incorporate a psychological perspective to better understand the behavioral mechanisms that influence active representation. We discuss the tripartite classification of the mind, dual-process theories of decision making, identity theory and the deservingness heuristic as theoretical perspectives scholars can use to investigate the behavioral foundations of representative bureaucracy.

Resistance to reform property: A ‘resilient property’ perspective

A wicked problem is identified in South African property law as the inaccessibility of secure land/housing rights for the vulnerable. This problem is contextualised as largely unsolvable when working with reductionist frames, after which the core and extent of the problem is unpacked with reference to two interconnecting regimes, that of land reform and housing. Various aspects of the problem are alluded to in both regimes, not to solve the problem, or aspects thereof, but to focus on underlying forms of state resistance; that is, large-scale governmental resistance to conform to constitutional directives. Such resistance is unpacked by relying on ‘resilient property’, as recently developed by Lorna Fox O’Mahony and Marc Roark, which offers a novel, insightful account of the role of the state’s own need for resilience in determining state responses to complex property problems. Two preliminary signs of resistance – property as sovereignty and economic policy choices – are further analysed to ‘rationalise’ misdirected policy choices, incoherence between policies and laws and what the courts have described as absurd bureaucratic decision-making.

Aantekeninge: Environmental judgments in the last year – a barometer of the state of environmental democracy?

It is not uncommon for environmental judgments to be dominated by a particular theme at certain periods of time. Sometimes there are clear reasons. For example, after an understandable lag between the trigger for litigation and the litigation itself, between 2005 to 2008 many judgments related to the implementation of the Environmental Impact Assessment Regulations, 1998, as lengthy application processes were finalised. However, sometimes clusters of judgments occur which do not seem to be capable of being traced to a single trigger and suggest either more symptomatic dynamics at play or a coincidental congruence. This is the case for environmental judgments that were handed down between June 2021 and May 2022. The judgments cover a variety of issues ranging from law-making to bureaucratic decision-making and implementation responses. Nevertheless, one has a sense when reading them that many of the judgments are characterised by discontent with government’s approach to environmental management. Apart from the odd private dispute, one cannot help but gain the impression that a thread running through many of the judgments is a frustration at the purported failure of government to take the views and needs of ordinary people into account when they make decisions that impact on the environment – and a willingness to take such grievances to court. The theme of the judgments in the last year might well be described as “the year of pushing back”. When viewed as a cluster the judgments may be disconcerting in one respect and raise questions as to whether the environmental justice project is alive and well, or not. However, it is precisely these types of challenges that test the robustness of the transformative approach envisaged by the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996; provide an opportunity for jurisprudential development; and shed light on the extent to which the courts are willing to safeguard the realisation of the environmental right. In the overview of key environmental judgments which were handed down in the last year below, whether public or private, the disputes may accordingly also be reframed as having another common denominator – and that is that they all bear some importance for the realisation of the democratic environmental rule of law.

Global Capitalism, Racism, and Social Triage during COVID-19

The theory of global capitalism offers useful tools for understanding the socio-structural determinations that result in enduring global health inequities. The theory’s conceptual framework highlights the role of transnational corporations, financialization, consumerism, transnational social classes, and the transnational state in affecting the production and distribution of economic resources, spread of cultural ideologies, and exercise of political power. To understand the health consequences and economic disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the theory of global capitalism offers a holistic approach for understanding the current geopolitical order as well as its inherently contested nature. However, the approach often elides questions of race and gender while privileging class analysis. To understand the intersectionality in the reproduction of capitalist globalization, the concept of social triage offers an organizational level of analysis to interrogate how bureaucratic decision-making leads to racial and gender health inequalities at the global and national levels. The examples of essential workers, immigration detention, and disparate access to medical technologies reveal the necropolitical reality of an anti-Black pandemic, contributing to current debates about racial capitalism.