Regulatory authorities play a pivotal role in the provision of public services. They monitor and sanction public service provisions, such as primary education. The relationship between regulators and public service providers has been extensively studied. But many studies in the field of regulation often emphasize formal structures and mechanisms, as well as behavioral and reputational perspectives to analyze the dynamics between regulator and regulatee. Yet, the affective and emotional aspect of this relationship remains largely unexplored.

Emotional responses of regulatees to regulatory interventions significantly influence the effectiveness of regulation and coordination. A large body of empirical evidence confirms that emotions play a crucial role in decision-making – including regulatory compliance. Therefore, understanding the affective dimension is essential for a comprehensive understanding of the regulatory process.

This study analyses emotional responses triggered by regulatory reports and the tendency to compliance among regulatees. The study is rooted in the theory of cognitive appraisal of emotions: regulatees evaluate the significance of regulatory interventions for their personal and professional well-being, including their personal and professional needs, goals, and values. This evaluation is part of an emotional process that results in emotional states of the regulatees.

To study this process, we analyze reports and measure reactions as well as behavioral tendencies of 780 Dutch school directors who received a report with a ‘good’, ‘unsatisfactory’, or ‘very weak’ conclusion. For the emotional reactions, we use the Geneva Appraisal Questionnare (GAQ). GAQ is a validated instrument designed to assess emotional responses to events. These data are compared with a document analysis of the accompanying regulatory intervention reports. These documents are analyzed using automated text analysis on content and tone.

This study contributes an understanding of the emotional dimensions of the regulator-regulatee relationship. Understanding how regulator intervention and reporting evoke affective responses has implications for regulatory design, intervention strategies, and overall regulatory effectiveness. The study also makes important headway for the study of affective en emotional responses to government interventions in general.

Stakeholder support is argued to be important for the authority of regulatory agencies. Support from key audiences enhances the reputation of agencies which means that principals have a harder time going against agencies’ wishes. We, however, lack systematic evidence of whether stakeholder support indeed contributes to agency authority and how stakeholder support is, in general, perceived by agencies’ principals.

In this paper, we go beyond principal-agent models and use bureaucratic reputation theory to explain how stakeholder support affects agency authority. A conjoint experiment with officials working for principals, Dutch ministries, is used to test our assumptions.

We assume that stakeholder support is a key driver of agency authority, but that it depends on the level of public attention. Agency output with support from a diverse group of stakeholders may be highly authoritative. On the other hand, due to their assumed level of expertise and role in complying with regulation, business' support may also be key for authority. With increased public attention, however, the principal may be concerned about accusations of regulatory capture and scrutinize agency output more for aligning with business interests. We, therefore, expect that public attention diminishes authority derived from (only) business support while it increases authority derived from diverse stakeholder support.

Empirically we focus on the case of agency head appointments in the Netherlands. While this is formally the responsibility of the minister overseeing the agency, agency employees may have a say in the appointment procedure via so-called support committees in addition to the selection committees consisting of employees from the ministry. In our experiment, we ask respondents from Dutch ministries what justification from the support committee, with varying levels and kinds of audience support and public attention as arguments, would cause them to prioritize the support committee’s advice. Prioritizing advice from the support committee over the selection committee is assumed to indicate higher levels of agency authority. We assess if this authority is affected by audience support and public attention.

Our study contributes significantly to the literature on agency authority and autonomy and on bureaucratic reputation theory. By showing how reputation contributes to authority in a concrete decision-making procedure, we aim to provide more empirical evidence for existing assumptions in this literature.

This paper explores human-centricity as a principle of institutional design in public management. Recently, various transnational and national governance strategies regard ‘human-centric AI’ as an organizational target for public management of ‘AI’. The problem in AI policy, from European Union to Google, is how to approach the management of technology in a more responsible way, employing human-centricity as a principle with which to improve the democratic accountability of information management in times of ‘trust deficit’ towards institutions. Human-centricity is framed as one of the most pressing issues in public administration as organizations are implementing legislation and producing operative frameworks for automating administrative structures with machine learning technologies, whilst encountering pressure for accountability, transparency, trustworthiness and measurement.

In the European Union, human-centric AI is seen as a competitive advantage of Europe in the global ‘AI race’, portraying European values and regulatory power. Human-centricity has also been the main design principle in Finnish AI policy. Empirically, I will study the governmental reorganization towards ‘human-centric AI’ hybridity in the information management of Finnish public administration, utilizing frameworks from institutional analysis and the methodological approach of ‘constitutive effects’ in performance management. The objective is to detect the connections and disconnections between empirical effects of human-centric design and institutional research on democratic governance.

In the Finnish national AI program AuroraAI (2020-2022), public administration aimed to produce a digital network with which to improve economic mobilization and national competiveness, while also being portrayed as an indicator of democratic responsiveness. Importantly, in Finland, the idea of human-centric governance was not merely incorporated from global AI policy discussions or European governance strategies. Notwithstanding the transnational character of human-centricity as a design principle, human-centricity acquired national characteristics in the process of reorganization and redesign of Finnish public governance, including institutional norms, politics, ideas, history, and doctrines. These findings suggests that despite the global ethos of AI policy, we can detect various institutional effects that occur in national governmental reorganization process through the operationalization of human-centric design.