Recent studies have shown that public encounters can be venues of collaboration, where citizens exercise power over service delivery. How citizens engage in public encounters and their power in these interactions is increasingly studied. Yet, little research considers multi-episodic public encounters between one citizen and one civil servant. We focus on the “in-between” to account for citizens’ participation in multi-episodic public encounters. We rely on the literature on procedural (un)fairness and administrative burdens. Using an ethnographic approach that combines observations of public encounters and interviews with citizens and officials, we study a specific case of multi-episodic interactions: probation in Belgium. Preliminary findings from the first phase of our research suggest that multi-episodic encounters, characterized by procedural fairness and minimal burdens, contribute to the emergence of constructive citizen-bureaucrat relationships and, eventually, empower citizens. Conversely, when perceived as unfair, they may nourish burdens and consolidate the defiant stance of other citizens. Eventually, our study suggests that multi-episodic public encounters may not only empower some citizens, but they can reshape their relationship with state institutions, thereby contributing to pacify citizen-state relationships.

Public encounters are dyadic spaces where frontline professionals and citizen-clients purposefully interact to negotiate the allocation of resources and are characterised by the power asymmetry that comes with the actors’ specific roles (Goodsell, 1981; Silver, 2010). Although existing literature studies public encounters on a micro-level, their focus lies on the behaviours of either the citizens or the bureaucrats (i.e. Nielsen, Nielsen & Bisgaard, 2021; Zacka, 2017; Tummers, Bekkers, Vink & Musheno, 2015). These studies, thus, rarely emphasise the interactional dynamics between the two, which is problematic since successful public service delivery is affected by the behaviours of both participating parties simultaneously (Döring, Drathschmidt & Nielsen, 2024).

When we consider public service delivery as a co-production situated in the public encounter (Bartels, 2013), a successful outcome will depend upon the quality of interaction between frontline professionals and citizen-clients. A first challenge is that, so far, studies on the public encounter have omitted to introduce a conceptual framework for the study of the quality of the interaction between frontline professionals and citizen-clients. A second challenge is that academic inquiry of interaction quality must take into account that public encounters can differ with regards to, among others, who initiates the encounter, its purpose, the amount of control and constraint, the duration and scope, and the setting and medium (Goodsell, 1981, pp. 5-7). These characteristics may determine the suitability of concepts to assess interaction quality.

These research challenges lead to the following research question: To what extent can concepts from social psychology be used to study the quality of the interaction between frontline professionals and citizen-clients in the context of the public encounter?

To answer this question, this paper first identifies the characteristics of the public encounter and the dimensions on which they can vary to create a typology of public encounters Secondly, this paper aims to conceptualise the quality of interaction between frontline professionals and citizen-clients in the public encounter by identifying concepts from social-psychology that define the quality of social relationships in various settings. Based on existing theory on the quality of relationships in dyadic power asymmetric relations we expect to elaborate on the concepts of psychological safety (Edmondson, 1999), feeling heard (Roos, Postmes & Koudenburg, 2023), (mutual) trust (Yang, 2005), and rapport (English, Gott & Robinson, 2022). We then analyse the conceptual relationships between several elements of these concepts and the characteristics of the public encounter, so that the suitability of concepts for different types of pubic encounters can be assessed and we lay the conceptual foundations for an empirical investigation of interaction quality in the public encounter.

We present a novel approach for examining the democratic content of public encounters, or direct focused interactions between unelected public and private agents. While public encounters have inspired robust literatures (e.g., Bartels 2013), we contend that existing work has not congealed around questions of democracy. First, we build an analytic framework that relates the experience of public encounter to the belief systems of the individuals it involves. Second, building on recent normative arguments about democratically responsible public administration (Bertelli 2021; Bertelli and Schwartz 2023) we show how certain public encounters have important democratic content and the potential to reshape the belief systems of those involved. Third, to provide an initial test of these normative expectations in two ways. A pair of survey experiments examine how knowledge and explanations of administrative procedures influence respondents' perceptions of the importance of normative principles and perceptions of responsible action in general population samples from the UK and Italy (AsPredicted #153557). Adapting a recent methodological innovation in the political knowledge literature (Kraft 2023), a mixed methods study explores if and to what extent exposure to democracy-preserving encounters influences respondents' understandings of the administrative process and its underlying normative principles in a general population sample from the UK (AsPredicted #153552). All three surveys will be fielded in December 2023 with results analyzed in January 2024. Finally, we argue that our analytic framework provides insights that encourage the empirical program on public encounters to address explicitly democratic considerations.

This study investigates how international organizations are implicated in public policy from drafting to implementing in post-conflict countries. The purpose of this work is to present an outline of the process of public policy formulation while highlighting the influence of such entities when it comes to the substance, the design and orientation of service delivery in such environments. Literature from the available public sector body of knowledge specific to post-conflict countries that highlights international organizations’ implication was discussed. A Lebanese study spanning a network of thirty interviewees affiliated to various internationally implicated parties in the overall drafting of policy related to public sector remodeling and service provisions in this country. The study provides insights into the overall dynamic of the post-conflict public sector policy while considering contextual factors such as socio-economic affairs, political environment, and historical buildup as well as operational elements such as crisis management, public entrepreneurship, and more. Study results indicate that most post-conflict countries were subjected to a forced injection of public policy from international entities that did not consider the particularities of their own environment – which was even one of the major causes of their post-independence civil war. On another note, study results show that international organizations have gotten involved directly in the rebuilding of a hybrid public sector model in order to ensure the delivery of public services to attain a sustainable ‘’Liberal Peace’’ – based on the principles of the ’’Washington Consensus’’. Also, results highlight that each international organization had its own agenda when it comes to policy formulation which got into conflict with other entities that worked on other policies in the same post-conflict country. Ultimately, the research proposes a conceptual outline decrypting the public policy drafting process used by the implicated international organizations who embarked on these activities that saw no resistance from the concerned post-conflict society.