How Trust in Bureaucracy Matters for How Politicians Use Information

• In Event: Experiments in Elite Behavior

Abstract

The concept of information is central in many theories of the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats. For instance, the principal-agent literature focuses on information asymmetry in its account of how the bureaucracy has considerable leeway in preparing, presenting, and implementing policy and agents sometimes have an incentive to utilize this information asymmetry to misrepresent information. The bureaucracy can also affect the preferences of politicians by framing how they present information. This may in turn affect political decisions.

However, the concept of trust is missing in this discussion. An essential part of evaluating information is to judge its credibility. In this paper, we develop hypotheses about when elected politicians trust information from the bureaucracy and how trust matters for the effect of information. We argue that trust depends on whether a) the bureaucracy has an incentive to misrepresent the specific piece of information and b) whether the piece of information is easily verifiable. We furthermore hypothesize that c) information is less likely to affect the preferences and behavior of politicians if they have low trust in the bureaucracy. We test these hypotheses in vignette and priming survey experiments with local politicians in Belgium, Denmark, Italy, and the USA. The cross-country nature of our study allows us to explore the importance of trust across settings with very different levels of trust in local bureaucracy.

Authors

• Martin Baekgaard, Aarhus University

• Soren Serritzlew, Aarhus University