The global experience of political polarization, and politicians’ attacks on democratic institutions, render individuals’ identification with the governing coalition, or with its opposition, a likely antecedent of their attraction to work for government organizations. This article examines to what extent individuals’ partisan alignment with the governing coalition, and perceptions of its actions as a threat to democracy, shape attraction to government jobs. Findings are based on a two-stage survey with 1,861 Israeli panel respondents, aged 21-30, carried out during the government’s attempt to undermine the legal system (hereafter: the Judicial Overhaul), and a follow-up survey experiment with 1,211 of the respondents. Against the politically neutral explanations of previous research, we show that partisan alignment affects the propensity to choose a job in a government ministry versus other sectors. We find mixed evidence in support of the proposition that perceptions of the Judicial Overhaul as a threat to democracy underlie this effect

Performance measures are argued to assist politicians and inform political decisions (Nielsen and Moynihan 2017). Yet, we know less about when politicians find performance information useful – or when they might question its validity. Petersen et al. (2019) found that public employees reject the validity of performance measures, when performing poorly. In contrast, politicians understood as principals tasked with holding bureaucratic agents accountable should respond to and use performance measures, particularly when agent performance is poor.

However, we argue that political considerations could trigger motivated reasoning responses. Politicians might reject the validity of data that shows poor agent performance because of a potential threat that the politicians themselves could be held accountable for poor performance. Additionally, we hypothesize that political ideology and political power will affect politicians’ perceptions.

We conducted a pre-registered survey experiment among political candidates for Danish regional councils (n=885). Respondents were randomly exposed to either no information or real performance information (high or low) about their own region’s health care system on three separate performance indicators (patient satisfaction, conforming to state-imposed diagnosis targets, and productivity growth). They were then asked to evaluate the validity, legitimacy, and usefulness of the information, as well as a semi-behavioral measure of seeking out additional information.

Consistent with the motivated reasoning rationale, results show that politicians become less (more) accepting of performance measures when the measures reveal their agents to be performing poorly (well). This is especially the case for patient satisfaction, which have more direct electoral consequences. Moreover, under poor performance politicians become less likely to seek out additional information.

These results have important practical implications concerning when political decision-makers are willing to trust and use performance information and policy evidence. Ultimately, the findings challenge the notion of performance measures as a means for political principals to hold their agents accountable.

In recent years, we have observed a surge of external threats to public institutions. Especially the increase of digital threats due to hacking attacks prove to be a substantial challenge to the public sector. Such attacks do not only threaten the working capacities of public administration, but also threaten the security of vital data of citizens. While such events are impossible to fully prevent, it is essential to understand how cope with such incidents in the public eye. This study focusses on the effects of communication strategies during public administrative crises. Building on situational crisis communication theory (SCCT), we use a pre-registered rank-based conjoint experiment, in which citizens are asked to rank their favored set of communication elements in order to identify the relative value of different approaches. The rank-based conjoint experiment is based on a fictitious scenario in which the description is given that personal information has been stolen from an official health database. We test our hypotheses in two different settings that differ in their timing of responses in order to increase robustness and generalizability: either pro-active crisis communication or reactive crisis communication by the institute (after the issue has been made public by a newspaper article). Furthermore, we test our hypotheses in three different countries, namely Denmark, New Zealand, and The Netherlands.

Our results emphasize the importance of acknowledging accountability, even in the face of low locus of control. Furthermore, we find that the call for corrective action is more favorably seen when aiming at the prevention of future events rather than the past event. All in all, our results are actionable findings that contribute to a broad field of study on political/administrative communication in the face of crises – thus solving real-world problems which we will encounter increasingly in the future.

Behavioral Public Administration research demonstrates that performance below aspiration levels prompts managers to actively search for information to address performance shortfalls. Yet, besides sequential search models that start locally and expand distantly when local solutions are unsatisfactory (Cyert & March, 1963; Greve, 2023), there are few insights on where decision-makers search. This study examines how performance below aspiration levels affects decision-makers’ search distance and the extent to which social and historical aspiration levels differ in directing search. It answers the research question: “How does performance below social and historical aspiration levels affect search distance?”.

We conceptualize information-search with three dimensions: space, time, and discipline. The main theoretical expectation is that performance below social and historical aspirations positively affects public managers’ search distance, but to a different extent. Historical aspiration levels direct search to the local collection of internal information on past organizational procedures, via experiential learning. Social aspiration levels direct search to the distant gathering of external information on peers’ actions, through vicarious learning.

We use a pre-registered between-subjects survey experiment among public managers in Belgian municipalities. Respondents are randomly allocated to control (no performance feedback) and treatment groups (performance below historical or social aspiration levels). For each search distance dimension, respondents are invited to select which information statements (from 1 to 8) are relevant to improve performance in a fictitious road safety issue. The statements come from local sources (four statements) or distant sources (four statements). Data will be collected in June 2024 and first results would be presented at the EGPA conference.

References

Cyert, R. M., & March, J. G. (1963). A behavioral theory of the firm. Pearson Education.

Greve, H. R. (2023). Structuring the situation: Organizational goals trigger and direct decision-making. Frontiers in Psychology, 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1140408