Bureaucratic Responsiveness Research Articles

How the content of digital complaints shapes bureaucratic responsiveness in Mumbai

AbstractWhen do unelected officials respond to citizen complaints, and what are the implications for service delivery? In the formal complaint system for Mumbai's water sector, bureaucrats addressed 44% of the roughly 20,000 complaints lodged from 2016 to 2018. In line with literature on distributive politics, responsiveness to marginalized citizens is lower. Yet in interviews, officials emphasize that programmatic goals and capacity constraints lead to prioritization by what the complaint is about. In fact, once controlling for complaint content, the relationship between complainant identity and responsiveness disappears. Initial patterns of differential responsiveness by complainant identity arise from the fact that citizens from marginalized groups experience lower levels of service provision, which leads them to make complaints that are more difficult to address. The paper sheds light on the role of bureaucracy in e‐governance and service delivery, showing administrative priorities in responding to complaints may perpetuate inequalities in service provision.

Hierarchy-oriented Bureaucracy of South Korea : a type of Neo-Weberian State?

This paper explores the evolution and operational dynamics of South Korea’s bureaucracy through the lens of a Neo-Weberian State (NWS) model. It argues that South Korea’s bureaucratic system, deeply rooted in Confucian hierarchical principles, has uniquely adapted to modern administrative challenges and reforms influenced by New Public Management (NPM) ideologies. We trace the historical trajectory from the Confucian meritocracy of the Choson Dynasty through various significant reform periods up to the contemporary handling of the COVID-19 crisis with a focus on the variation of hierarchy, H1, H2, and H3. This analysis highlights how the Korean bureaucracy has managed to maintain efficiency and effectiveness while integrating market-driven and performance-oriented reforms. The paper also discusses the bureaucratic response to ‘wicked problems’?complex social issues requiring multi-faceted and innovative solutions?demonstrating adaptability in times of crisis. To illustrate this, we examine key case studies, including the rapid implementation of COVID-19 drive-through testing centers, showcasing the bureaucracy’s agility and effectiveness in crisis management.. This paper ultimately supports the view that despite global trends toward decentralization and deregulation, a strong hierarchical bureaucracy can still effectively meet contemporary governance challenges, reflecting a distinctive Neo-Weberian State approach

Curb EU enthusiasm: how politicisation shapes bureaucratic responsiveness

International institutions are often challenged for being detached from the citizens. Focusing on the European Union, this article studies whether this is the case and, if so, when the European Commission responds to public opinion when pursuing policy integration. It argues that the Commission has legitimacy incentives encouraging it to be responsive but politicisation can suppress responsiveness by transmitting competing demands on the Commission from the member states’ citizens. To test these arguments, the contribution applied automated text analysis to estimate the European Union (EU) authority expansion entailed in the Commission’s legislative proposals between 2009 and 2019 and analysed its correspondence with public preferences over EU policy action across the EU states, measured using the Eurobarometer. The results lend support to the hypotheses and suggest that politicisation can undermine the responsiveness of international institutions.

Skotovoz, pripiski and the “law of labour settlement”: Transportation planning and management in the USSR

Transport specialists in the USSR persistently called for mathematical expressions of fundamental laws in urban transportation, to assist the development of efficient transportation systems. However, the specificity of the planned economy meant that these appeals did not receive substantial financial support. In response to challenges such as falsified data and political interference, practitioners developed an “imaginative” approach based on intuition, tradition and experience. Analysis of academic literature written in Russian, archival sources and new data gained from interviews shows that the demand for quantitative methods was a bureaucratic response to the uncertainties of public transport administration, while planning documents functioned as leverage in political bargaining for resources. In practice, urban transport planners and transport company employees relied on their own creativity and innovation to compensate for pervasive resource and methodological deficits.

Mobilising international embeddedness to resist radical policy change and dismantling: the case of Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022)

Unpacking the ‘crisis of democracy’ and what is means and does to policy processes is a new and ever-growing agenda. This paper uses the case of Brazil to examine bureaucratic responses, and attempted resistance, to democratic backsliding and policy dismantling in times of autocratisation, notably under Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022). It does so by focusing on a less explored transnational lenses. It argues that the growing international embeddedness of Brazilian policies, including through policy transfer and technical cooperation initiatives mostly with other developing countries, has provided domestic sectoral bureaucracies and policy communities with additional strategic discursive and argumentative resources to mobilise, respond and try to resist policy dismantling at home.

When do bureaucrats respond to external demands? A theoretical framework and empirical test of bureaucratic responsiveness

AbstractBureaucrats must balance neutral competence with responsiveness to external demands. As external demands are simultaneous and multidimensional, this study analyzes bureaucratic responsiveness according to bureaucratic actors' prioritization decisions. Using a discrete choice experiment followed by qualitative interviews in the context of EU agencies, we investigate to what extent bureaucratic responsiveness depends upon the stakeholder that expresses an external demand (source), the aspect of bureaucratic conduct that is addressed (content), and the presence of adverse media attention (salience). In addition to corroborating prior empirical findings, we provide a novel understanding of bureaucratic responsiveness by showing the way demands' source and content affect responsiveness jointly. Across the range of technical, performative, legal‐procedural, and moral demands, we identify which stakeholders can impose demands most authoritatively. We also extend previous research by demonstrating that adverse media attention strengthens responsiveness to technical and moral demands, but not to performative and legal‐procedural demands.

Coping with the unforeseen: bounded rationality and bureaucratic responses to the COVID-19 crisis

AbstractThe outbreak of COVID-19 unleashed a severe crisis in society. The suddenness and speed with which the disease spread into a global pandemic makes it an outstanding case for showing how bureaucracy acts in response to a crisis marked by uncertainty and urgency. This article focuses on the role played by the central government bureaucracy in preparing and enacting the Danish government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. It is based on full access to internal government files related to crisis management during the winter and spring of 2020. These files include memos, e-mails, decision notes, and draft decisions from key civil servants. The article demonstrates the strength of the theory of bounded rationality when it comes to analyzing the interaction between top civil servants and political executives. Moreover, it shows how administrative and political executives can mold a governmental organization to overcome the inertia inherent in bureaucratic organization and procedures.

Are the answers all out there? Investigating citizen information requests in the haze of bureaucratic responsiveness

AbstractUnder freedom of information (FOI) regulations, public officials are pressured to grant citizens access to public information by responding to citizen information requests. However, despite FOI regulations, information requests are treated with varying bureaucratic attention, resulting in a high number of ignored or overdue requests by public organizations. Focusing on this bureaucratic discrimination, this study aims to explain the determinants of varying bureaucratic responsiveness to citizen information requests. Responsiveness in this case is therefore either a successful response to the request, a refusal to respond to the request, or no response at all (i.e., the request is ignored). By drawing on public accountability, and thus a citizen‐driven model of bureaucratic responsiveness, we shed light on the human aspect behind responsiveness to information requests. This research argues that the request's topic as an accountability‐seeking indicator and the communication tone as an indicator for underlying emotions influence responsiveness. The results from applying text mining and text analysis techniques, such as topic modeling and sentiment analysis, on over 100,000 citizen information requests filed via a German online FOI platform support these assumptions.

Bureaucratic Responsiveness under Dynamic Political Settings: Experimental Evidence from Local Governments

How do bureaucrats respond to legislators' demands for change in policy implementation? We distinguish between unified and divided government, where the degree of legislative oversight over bureaucratic autonomy is likely to differ, and we argue that how bureaucrats actually respond in varying executive‐legislative relations depends on their incentives shaped by greater autonomy in implementation (unified government) versus closer monitoring by legislators (divided government). Analyzing two sets of original data from list and endorsement experiments with local bureaucrats in Korea (n = 4064)—one from the period of legislative auditing and the other from the nonauditing period—we find that bureaucrats are more likely to incorporate legislators' views into their decision‐making under unified than under divided government. Furthermore, bureaucrats are more responsive to legislatures when their political ideology is congruent with that of a legislative majority than when it is incongruent, regardless of unified or divided government. Our findings have a clear implication: the importance of bureaucratic autonomy and preferences rather than monitoring as an effective tool to increase bureaucratic responsiveness.

Bureaucratic response to performance information: how mandatory information disclosure affects environmental inspections

AbstractInformation disclosure has become a ubiquitous component of contemporary governance. This study examines how disclosure of information about the performance of regulated entities, which also implicates the performance of relevant government agencies, affects bureaucratic behaviors. In the context of the Clean Air Act (CAA)—the primary law that regulates air pollution in the United States—this study shows that regulators significantly increased CAA regulatory inspections on facilities that started to disclose relevant performance information to the public following the requirements of the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), which is a major environmental information disclosure program in the United States. Additional analyses suggest the increase was because of the disclosure providing new information to regulators instead of mobilizing citizen actions. The findings suggest that performance information about regulated entities can alleviate information asymmetry between bureaucrats and regulated entities and increase the accountability of regulated entities as well as relevant government agencies.

Street-level responsiveness of city governments in China, Germany, and the United States

This paper presents evidence from parallel field experiments in China, Germany, and the United States. We contacted the mayor's office in over 6,000 cities asking for information about starting a new business. Chinese and German cities responded to 36–37 percent of requests while American cities responded only to 22 percent of requests. American and German cities were more responsive to requests from citizens than foreigners; Chinese cities were more responsive to requests from men than women. Chinese cities were more responsive to requests about starting a construction than a green business, and when the mayor was up for promotion. These results shed light on bureaucratic responsiveness in autocracies and democracies and for top-down versus bottom-up policy making.

Bureaucratic Responses to Conflicting Mandates: The Case of the Elliott State Forest

Bureaucratic Responses to Conflicting Mandates: The Case of the Elliott State Forest

Bureaucratic responses to democratic backsliding: an analysis of the agency of federal civil servants during the Bolsonaro government

Resumo: A ascensão de lideranças autoritárias de extrema direita nas democracias contemporâneas catalisou processos de retrocesso democrático com profundas e diversas implicações políticas. Uma das dimensões menos exploradas desse fenômeno é o impacto das ações desses líderes políticos no funcionamento das burocracias públicas. Nesse sentido, a questão que orienta nossa análise é: como se dá a dinâmica entre controle político e reações burocráticas em contextos de retrocesso democrático? A análise se baseia em 165 entrevistas com burocratas de médio escalão entre dezembro de 2020 e julho de 2021 em 15 organizações diferentes das áreas social, econômica, ambiental e de planejamento do governo federal brasileiro durante o governo Bolsonaro. Os achados sugerem que o controle político e a reação burocrática estabelecem uma dinâmica que envolve interações e um processo de aprendizagem ao longo do tempo.

How to make causal inferences using texts.

Text as data techniques offer a great promise: the ability to inductively discover measures that are useful for testing social science theories with large collections of text. Nearly all text-based causal inferences depend on a latent representation of the text, but we show that estimating this latent representation from the data creates underacknowledged risks: we may introduce an identification problem or overfit. To address these risks, we introduce a split-sample workflow for making rigorous causal inferences with discovered measures as treatments or outcomes. We then apply it to estimate causal effects from an experiment on immigration attitudes and a study on bureaucratic responsiveness.

As the Question, So the Answer? Explaining Bureaucratic Responsiveness to Citizen Requests

Worldwide, increasing public pleas for freedom of information led more and more countries into committing to access-to-information (ATI) laws. These regulations oblige public officials to provide answers to citizen requests and thus grant citizens with the right to demand public information and gain insight into government data and processes. Yet, even though authorities are obliged to disclose upon request, not all citizen information requests are treated with equal bureaucratic attention. This study focuses on this sort of administrative discrimination and aims at examining potential determinants for varieties of bureaucratic responsiveness to citizen information requests. By drawing on a citizen-driven model of public responsiveness, we want to shed light on the exchange of information in the frame of citi-zen-state interaction and the human aspect behind these processes. Particularly, we argue that the topic citizens ask for as well as the way in which they communicate their requests may influence the corresponding authority’s response. Results from applying text mining and regression techniques to over 150,000 citizen information requests from a German online ATI-platform support our hypotheses. Bureaucratic responsiveness is associated with the specific topic asked for and the way in which the communication tone of the request is for-mulated.

Intense Monitoring and Bureaucratic Support for an Anti-poverty Campaign in China

In China, major policy initiatives are often implemented through campaign-style mobilisation which seeks to increase bureaucratic responsiveness through intensified monitoring activities. Little is known about the views of street-level bureaucrats regarding the mobilisation approach. This article argues that draconian monitoring measures have placed bureaucrats in a highly stressful working environment and lowered their morale. Through these mechanisms, intense monitoring can undermine bureaucratic support for central policy campaigns. Data from a national survey of rural officials responsible for implementing the targeted poverty alleviation (TPA) programme support the argument. The findings imply that while campaign mobilisation can deliver immediate policy results, its negative impact on bureaucratic morale and capacity should not be ignored.

Non-compliant Managers, Judging Citizens: An Experiment of Motives, Identities, and Public Reaction to Bureaucratic Rule Breaking

Despite the serious demands for public organizations to maintain political accountability and bureaucratic responsiveness, rule breaking persists among employees across all levels. Unlike our deeper understanding of corruption of elected officials, myriad questions remain regarding the nature of the public response to policy violations of government bureaucrats working in politically neutral administrative positions. This study uses a survey experiment to investigate factors influencing the intensity of citizens’ recommended punishments for rule-breaking local government managers, specifically testing the effects of managers’ demographic attributes of age, race, and gender as well as their motivations for the violations. Findings strongly suggest that motive matters to citizens in this context, with prosocial rule-breaking managers incurring significantly less harsh penalties than destructive rule-breakers for all age-race-gender profiles. However, an absence of demographic information nullifies penalty differences between prosocial and destructive rule-breaking managers. Among the demographic attributes, only the managers’ race predicted the severity of punishments favored by citizens. No interaction effects between manager attributes were present. Results suggest public communications emphasizing person and purpose are particularly important for local government managers in this context.

Examining and Expanding the Expectancy Disconfirmation Model: Evidence from Rural China

In public management research, the Expectancy Disconfirmation Model (EDM) is increasingly used to measure citizen satisfaction. However, current EDM research in the public sector has been applied primarily in the United States and sets of the city, state, federal, or local government services. It leaves the validity of EDM for other levels and countries of government services to be verified. This study tests and extends the EDM by comparing it with previous studies and adding additional expectation priors to the model. Analysis of survey data from 313 citizens in 6 rural communities in China indicates that the basic model functions well in rural public services. In addition, the study of the extended EDM shows significant relationships between trust, service awareness, bureaucratic responsiveness, and expectations, which suggests new directions for future research using the model.

The Poverty of Socio-Economic Explanation

Measures of absolute and relative poverty are usually constructed around levels of deprivation, destitution and distress experienced by people with respect to money, goods or means of subsistence. These measures rely, almost exclusively, upon cognitive bias and limited life experience to legitimise discrimination and disadvantage. As (Treloar, in Henwood, 2021) has observed, in spite of widespread interest in the relationship between socio-economics and poverty reduction, confusion reigns as to what exactly predisposes politicians and bureaucrats to consider the implications of the ways in which they think about people in poverty. This paper explores different habits of mind determining the range of socio-economic models impacting Australian Government approaches to Age Pensions and Jobkeeper policy since the onset of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Progressing beyond quantitative analytics to extend our understanding of socio-economic definitions of poverty, insights into alternative ways of thinking are considered in view of innovative applications of financial independence in response to poverty management. Recognising the contrast between traditional political and bureaucratic responses to poverty across the Australian population and more recent recognition of the centrality of the recipients of social welfare, in whatever form it is delivered, the paper provides an analysis of the differences in background and thinking patterns of policy developers and welfare recipients. In consequence of this analysis, the paper identifies a significant, albeit largely unconscious, cognitive bias among policy developers and proposes the need for a substantial change in the way social welfare is conceptualised at a political level.

Policy and communication for equity – joyful levelling up during and beyond the pandemic

ABSTRACT We take a health promotion frame of reference to address the origins of and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2020s. In doing so, we combine biomedical, political, and social science heuristics to address four assumed ‘causes', and their foundations in, as well as consequences for, local and global health inequities. Pandemic origins can be attributed to populist politics and to creative interpretations of evidence; to inadequate political and bureaucratic responses; and to an unjustifiable pattern of ‘blaming the victim' - disadvantaged communities. The synergies in new packages of responses (between policy, politics, communication and activist engagement) would yield new and better responses that are integral to achieving equity. This is the core mission of the 2022 world conference of IUHPE.