How Bureaucracies Address “Public Bads”

• In Event: Frontiers of Research on Bureaucratic Politics and Management Mini-Conference: Internal Decision-making and Management

Abstract

While there is a vast literature on how governments deliver “local public goods,” far less scholarship examines how public institutions address “public bads.” Examples facing public infrastructure providers include potentially catastrophic events that occur irregularly and with generally low probability, including natural hazards like earthquakes and wildfires, or manmade risks like cyberattacks. Typically, taking preventative measures helps reduce the impact of such an event if it does occur, but efforts to preemptively address “public bads” can be stymied by variation in risks perceptions. Specifically, different stakeholders in bureaucracies tend to perceive the probability and magnitude of threats differently, and sometimes incorrectly. Organizational sociology highlights the importance of silos and hierarchies within public agencies (e.g., Diamond, Stein, & Allcorn, 2002). We extend this literature by systematically examining how organizational roles affect different types of risk perception, and especially how roles affect decisions about how to address competing risks faced by organizations. Because organizational roles expose bureaucrats to particular types of information, training, and political pressures, we hypothesize that one’s silo and place in vertical hierarchies will affect how strongly particular risks are perceived, and how competing risks are weighted vis a vis one another. We test empirical support for these propositions through interviews and risk-ranking exercises conducted with bureaucrats across different organizational units and places in the hierarchy within the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD), a large water and sanitation provider in the Bay Area in California. We then show that these different baseline perceptions of risk mean that strategies to correct perceptions should be tailored to one’s organizational role and hierarchical position through a set of lab-in-the-field experiments.

Authors

• Alison E. Post, University of California, Berkeley

• Tim Marple, University of California, Berkeley