Honest behavior of public service employees is an important quality of governance, affecting the efficiency of government institutions, the level of corruption, economic development and public trust. Yet empirical evidence on the causal effect of public sector culture on ethical behavior is lacking. This research addresses this question using a novel approach inspired by the theory of social identity, by estimating the causal effect of priming public sector identity on moral behavior. We validated an instrument for priming public sector identity, and employed it in five pre-registered experiments with monetary incentives among civil servants in Germany, Israel, Italy, Sweden and the UK (N=3,085). We find no evidence for the effect of public sector culture on honest behavior in both individual (four studies) and collaborative (one study) tasks. However, we do find a significant effect on reported public service motivation (PSM). The implications of these findings for the study of moral behavior in the public sector are discussed.

Recent scholarship has explored citizens’ assessments of performance information and their influence on forming perceptions about governments and public officials. For instance, individual traits of citizens and public officials affect these perceptions. Meanwhile, scholars often understand citizens’ perceptions of government as the result of two interrelated dimensions, namely process and outcomes. This approach espouses citizens may not only care about what governments deliver (the outcomes), but also how they function (fairness and honesty in the government process) when forming their perceptions. Yet, this distinction has been scarcely used to explore the mechanisms linking performance, public officials’ characteristics, and citizens’ trust.

To address this gap in the literature, this research proposes that citizens may report differentiated perceptions of incompetence (lack of capacity to deliver outcomes) and corruption (lack of ethical and fair behavior) when assessing government performance, and particularly government failure. More specifically, this study explores whether citizens associate characteristics of the public servant’s job and their perceived proficiency (credentials) to occupy such position with their competence and ethical behavior. To do so, we ran a factorial survey experiment presenting hypothetical situations of negative performance attributed to a clerical official to a sample of 2,000 Colombian residents. The experiment manipulates the public officials’ credentials (educational background and job experience) and hiring status (merit recruitment and career versus temporary appointment). Using a validated multi-dimensional scale of trust, individuals report their perceptions about the public official’s competence, integrity and benevolence.

We find experienced officials are perceived as more trustworthy across the three dimensions assessed. However, differences in hiring status or educational background do not report a significant association with any dimension of trust. This study provides evidence on the strong relationship between dimensions of trust, and the leverage that experience, but not other credentials, might have in citizens’ perceptions of government trustworthiness.

Most areas of public administration are subject to audits, and in recent decades, auditors increasingly carry out comprehensive performance assessments of organizations for both internal and external accountability purposes. To make these critical judgments, auditors need to use bureaucratic discretion, but surprisingly we know very little about bureaucratic discretion in regulatory settings—such as performance audits—with most research on discretion focusing on public service delivery at the frontline such as social services or education. In this study, we focus on the role of the individual auditor in performance assessments to shed light on how they use their bureaucratic discretion. We focus on the OFSTED school inspection regime in the United Kingdom, which produces highly publicized and consequential ratings of school quality on the basis of inspections carried out by individual bureaucrats. Through data scraping techniques, we amass a comprehensive dataset of more than 85,000 school inspections and leverage inspectors' dynamic rotations across schools over time. This enables us to decompose the sources of bureaucratic decisions into distinct components, namely school effects, temporal effects, and auditor effects.

Political science research questions the ability of citizens to form meaningful evaluations of government functioning and hold governments accountable due to “partisan bias.” Public administration studies suggest that partisan bias may also apply to citizens’ evaluations of public services. They theorize that partisan bias in this context is especially pronounced under conditions of high political polarization and under clarity of functional responsibility for political principals. Yet, empirical research is limited, and provides mixed findings. We use the case of Israel to investigate how partisan bias in citizens’ evaluations of public services is manifested in a hyper-polarized society with centralized public services (a most likely case). We leverage the two recent government changes in Israel in 2021 (Bennet-Lapid coalition) and 2022 (Netanyahu coalition), to test the effect of political change on citizens’ evaluations of four public services: education, healthcare, policing, and transportation. Our analysis relies on two repeated cross-sectional survey datasets: a large study with seven survey waves between 2020 and 2023, and an administrative survey dataset distributed by the Central Bureau of Statistics throughout 2021. The two datasets yield significant results across different services, yet with varying effect size, offering robust evidence for partisan bias across services.