Bureaucratic Polarization: Social Identities in Conflict in the Public Service

• In Event: Presidents and Executive Politics & Public Policy Virtual Poster Session
  In Virtual Poster Session: Public Policy Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

Bureaucrats, as other individuals, are likely to identify themselves with their workplace and professional group. Following the Intergroup Conflict Theory (ICT), this means that they may end up favoring their in-groups (e.g., work colleagues) and discriminating against out-groups (e.g., elected officials). Another feature of this phenomenon is that, whereas all civil servants share a certain degree of public service motivation, they also identify with different subgroups within the bureaucracy depending on, for instance, whether they are political appointees or career bureaucrats, and whether they work at the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Defense. Moving beyond traditional rational choice propositions, I argue that these more specific workplace social identities are behind many of the intra-government coordination problems we see in implementation processes. Following this rationale, I ask: When do bureaucrats antagonize against each other within the public service? After collecting survey and fieldwork data in Brazil, the United States, and the United Kingdom showing that workplace identity and social distance correlate to success rates in policy implementation, I run a set of survey experiments with bureaucrats from different countries to assess what is behind such identities. The findings of this still on-going project will contribute to our understanding of the politics of bureaucracy, organizational theory, behavioral public administration, and policy implementation.

Author

• João V. Guedes-Neto, University of Pittsburgh