Why Are Some Civil Servants More Committed to Professional Norms than Others?

• In Event: Why They Do What They Do? Influences on Bureaucratic Leadership and Management

Abstract

Why are some civil servants more committed to professional norms and public service values - such as impartiality, equity, efficiency, and innovation - than others. The existing good governance studies have identified an empirical link between macro-level bureaucratic factors such as the type of recruitment system of public servants (i.e. meritocratic) or salary levels and favorable outcomes. Several scholars have noted that certain types of civil service, such as a politically autonomous or “Weberian” bureaucracy, leads to low corruption (Dahlström & Lapuente, 2017), regulatory quality and entrepreneurship (Nistotskaya & Cingolani, 2016), scientific productivity and innovation (Fernández-Carro & Lapuente, 2016; Lapuente & Suzuki, 2020), among other good outcomes. However, despite the increasing number of cross-national empirical studies, we still know little about the determinants of bureaucratic behavior (Oliveros and Schuster 2017) and what explains bureaucrats’ commitment to traditional Weberian values as well as other “new” values such as innovativeness and representative bureaucracy for social equity at the individual level. When and under what conditions do civil servants value neutrality over political responsiveness? How do civil servants balance the impartiality value and the value of representative bureaucracy? How do personal attributes of public servants such as gender, education, and place of birth influence such commitment to these values?

We aim to advance the previous studies on the quality of government and good governance by conducting a survey experiment to senior local civil servants in the 290 Swedish municipalities, the 100 largest Spanish municipalities, and 791 city-level Japanese municipalities. Survey experiments-vignette and conjoint experiments- will allow us to conduct analyses with a more careful attention to the causal mechanism than observational data in order to understand what motivates civil servants’ behavior. In our survey experiments, we will confront public managers with hypothetical real-life decision-making situations, where they must weigh the demand of their political superiors (e.g. interested in having a positive report on a particular policy they have promoted) against civil servants’ professional norms (e.g. offering a balanced policy report). We will also examine how what types of bureaucrats are likely to be hired and promoted within bureaucracy by asking a hypothetical question, following and modifying questions from pioneering experimental studies conducted in other developed or developing country settings including Jankowski et al. (2020), Oliveros and Schuster (2018), and Baekgaard and George (2018). Results of this study will reveal organizational and demographic conditions which determine civil servants’ attitudes toward core values of the traditional Weberian bureaucracy and other values and attitudes such as innovativeness and representativeness.

Authors

• Kohei Suzuki, Leiden University

• Victor Lapuente, Goteburg University