Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen

Utrecht University | UU · School of Governance (USG)

New algorithms based on Artificial Intelligence are slowly transforming street‐level bureaucracies, yet a lack of algorithmic transparency may jeopardize citizen trust. Based on procedural fairness theory, this article posits that two core elements of algorithmic transparency (accessibility and explainability) are crucial to strengthen perceived tr...

Algorithmic decision-making in government has emerged rapidly in recent years, leading to a surge in attention for this topic by scholars from various fields, including public administration. Recent studies provide crucial yet fragmented insights on how the use of algorithms to support or fully automate decisions is transforming government. This ar...

Objectives Providing detailed information about sentencing reduces punitive attitudes of laymen (the information effect). We assess whether this extends to modest information treatments and probe which specific informational types matter most. In addition to previous studies, we include affective measures and trust in judges. Methods In four surve...

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly used to support and improve street‐level decision‐making, but empirical evidence on how street‐level bureaucrats’ work is affected by AI technologies is scarce. We investigate how AI recommendations affect street‐level bureaucrats’ decision‐making and if explainable AI increases trust in such recommendations....

Background Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSSs) based on routine care data using artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly deployed. CDSSs, however, may affect patient-physician relationships (Figure 1) and potentially result in a decrease in treatment adherence. Communication about these systems has mostly focused on technical aspects and...

We present an inductive, citizen-driven approach to identify stereotypes of public sector workers across the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, and South Korea (Study 1: n=918; Study 2: n=3,042). Contrary to common negative portrayals, we identify two positive stereotypes across countries — having job security and serving society; and one neut...

https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muad010Targeted transparency has become an essential tool for regulation. Through information disclosure, regulatory agencies try to get regulated companies to improve their practices and comply with regulations. In the past, regulation was associated with distrust in regulated sectors. Recent research suggests that r...

What do citizens want? How do citizens think public servants should behave? Although such questions seem straightforward, little is known about the values citizens expect public servants to uphold. This paper therefore identifies such values through extensive coding of qualitative data from representative samples of United States (n = 395), Dutch (...

This Element argues that to understand why transparency “works” in one context, but fails in another, we have to take into account how institutional (macro), organizational (meso) contexts interact with individual behavior (micro). A review of research from each of these perspectives shows that the big promises thought to accompany greater transpar...

The popularity and use of Bayesian methods have increased across many research domains. The current article demonstrates how some less familiar Bayesian methods can be used. Specifically, we applied expert elicitation, testing for prior-data conflicts, the Bayesian Truth Serum, and testing for replication effects via Bayes Factors in a series of fo...

Nudging has become a well-known policy practice. Recently, ‘boosting’ has been suggested as an alternative to nudging. In contrast to nudges, boosts aim to empower individuals to exert their own agency to make decisions. This article is one of the first to compare a nudging and a boosting intervention, and it does so in a critical field setting: ha...

The link between transparency and accountability is an often discussed feature of good governance. Despite a great deal of attention, this relationship remains poorly understood. We argue that the adoption of a behavioral lens to evaluate the impact of transparency on accountability offers new opportunities to discover novel mechanisms that contrib...

Public sector actors are continuously being held accountable by a multitude of accountability forums. Responding to the forums’ demands often requires prioritizing between them. This study investigates how those prioritization choices are made. Drawing on two competing perspectives: the classical view of accountability as “answerability” which emph...

The editorial sets the stage for the special issue on algorithmic transparency in government. The papers in the issue bring together transparency challenges experienced across different levels of government, including macro-, meso-, and micro-levels. This highlights that transparency issues transcend different levels of government – from European r...

Van toezichthouders wordt steeds vaker verwacht dat ze informatie over hun toezicht en onder toezicht staande organisaties publiceren. Dat doen ze om burgers in staat te stellen keuzes te maken, om onder toezicht staande partijen te bewegen zich aan wet- en regelgeving te houden en om verantwoording af te leggen. Een veel gehoord argument voor tran...

This deliverable offers a systematic and comprehensive review of the literature on trust and regulation and their relations in three parts. Section 1 provides a brief overview of trust and distrust; their relationship; and antecedents (drivers) and positive and negative consequences. This second part of provides an overview of phases and processes...

Transparency is popularly believed to enhance the public's trust in government, yet experimental studies have found mixed results. One explanation is that public trust may respond more positively to a kind of “latent transparency” in which citizens highly value the mere potential for open access to government information, even if they may have more...

Open Data work : understanding Open Data usage from a practice lens During recent years, the amount of data released on platforms by public administrations around the world have exploded. Open government data platforms are aimed at enhancing transparency and participation. Even though the promises of these platforms are high, their full potential h...

The effectiveness of formal public sector accountability mechanisms is largely predicated on the individual perception of accountability. In particular, the individual’s experienced relationship to account holders is key in understanding the effects of formal accountability mechanisms. This article develops a measurement instrument for felt relatio...

Decision transparency is often proposed as a way to maintain or even increase citizen trust, yet this assumption is still untested in the context of regulatory agencies. We test the effect of transparency of a typical decision tradeoff in regulatory enforcement: granting forbearance or imposing a sanction. We employed a representative survey experi...

The study of accountability in public administration has developed largely in parallel to the study of accountability in the behavioral sciences. In an effort to bridge this divide, we present a systematic review of the experimental literature on accountability in the behavioral sciences and draw lessons for public administration. We summarize the...

Transparency and responsiveness are core values of democratic governments, yet do Freedom of Information Laws - one of the legal basis for such values - actually help to increase these values? This paper reports a replication of a field experiment testing for the responsiveness of public authorities by Worthy et al (2016) in the United Kingdom. We...

During recent years, the amount of data released on platforms by public administrations around the world have exploded. Open government data platforms are aimed at enhancing transparency and participation. Even though the promises of these platforms are high, their full potential has not yet been reached. Scholars have identified technical and qual...

Can a government agency mitigate the negative effect of “bad news” on public trust? To answer this question, we carried out a baseline survey to measure public trust five days before a major press release involving bad news about an error committed by an independent regulatory agency in the Netherlands. Two days after the agency’s press release, we...

This article applies different marketing concepts to released government information and analyzes the effect on citizens’ attitudes. It looks at how the presentation of a message affects citizens’ attitudes when the content remains the same. It investigates the effects of an informational strategy (presenting facts and figures) and a transformation...

Well-known public administration scholars have stressed the importance of psychological research for the study of public administration. Neighboring disciplines such as economics and political science have witnessed the emergence of the psychology-informed subfields of behavioral economics and political psychology. Along the same lines, an emerging...

Government decision-making procedures and transparency ensure responsive governance. Yet, there are few attempts to assess how these two factors shape citizens’ intentions to voice opposition to government decisions. We predict that the effect of decision-making procedures on voice is contingent upon the fairness of government decision-making proce...

Citizen trust in government at the macro level has been studied by public administration scholars for many years. To further our understanding, assessing trust at the meso level of government organizations is important to more precisely determine effects and antecedents of trust at the organizational level. The organizational trust literature has s...

Governments around the world make their data available through platforms but, disappointingly, the use of this data is lagging behind. This problem has been recognized in the literature and to facilitate use of open datasets, scholars have focused on identifying general user requirements for open data platform design. This approach however fails to...

Interest in experimental research in public management is on the rise, yet the field still lacks a broad understanding of its role in producing substantive findings and theoretical advances. Written by a team of leading international researchers, this book sets out the advantages of experiments in public management and showcases their rapidly devel...

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the literature on the types, effects, conditions and user of Open Government Data (OGD). The review analyses 101 academic studies about OGD which discuss at least one of the four factors of OGD utilization: the different types of utilization, the effects of utilization, the key conditions, and the dif...

The expectancy disconfirmation model (EDM) posits that disconfirmation (the difference between expectations and perceived performance) affects citizen satisfaction. Van Ryzin experimentally manipulated expectations and performance and found a direct effect of performance, but no disconfirmation. We performed: an exact replication; a conceptual repl...

Open data platforms are hoped to foster democratic processes, yet recent empirical research shows that so far they have failed to do so. We argue that current open data platforms do not take into account the complexity of democratic processes which results in overly simplistic approaches to open data platform design. Democratic processes are multif...

Open government is an important innovation to foster trustworthy and inclusive governments. The authors develop and test an integrative theoretical framework drawing from theories on policy diffusion and innovation adoption. Based on this, they investigate how structural, cultural, and environmental variables explain three dimensions of open govern...

This article synthesizes the cross-disciplinary literature on government transparency. It systematically reviews research addressing the topic of government transparency published between 1990 and 2015. The review used 187 studies to assess three questions: (1) what forms of transparency has the literature identified?; (2) what outcomes does the li...

Integrity violations often generate political scandals, but what conditions determine whether this eventually leads to the improvement of integrity measures and policies? This article analyzes integrity scandals of 17 Dutch municipalities in the period 2006–2010 using qualitative comparative analysis. Three conditions are taken into consideration:...

In this article we show that theories and methods from psychology are valuable for public administration scholars and practitioners. We advocate the development of an interdisciplinary approach entitled ‘Behavioral Public Administration’. It is not the intention that Behavioral Public Administration replaces traditional public administration resear...

Behavioral public administration is the analysis of public administration from the micro-perspective of individual behavior and attitudes by drawing upon insights from psychology on behavior of individuals and groups. We discuss how scholars in public administration currently draw on theories and methods from psychology, and related fields, and poi...

The field of public management is methodologically underdeveloped as compared to other disciplines. In order to derive the fullest benefits of methodological advancements, the field needs to invest in discussing and deliberating over the state-of-the-art in methodological advances. Using state-of-the-art methods helps to produce knowledge that is u...

Purpose – Based on previous inventories, the purpose of this paper is to extend the knowledge on public administration experiments by focusing on their experimental type, design, sample type and realism levels and external validity. The aim is to provide an overview of experimental public administration and formulate potential ways forward. Design...

Purpose Based on previous inventories, this article extends our knowledge on public administration experiments by focusing on their experimental type, design, sample type and realism levels and external validity. Our aim is to provide an overview of experimental public administration and formulate potential ways forward. Design/methodology/approac...

For public administration scholars, psychological theories and methods can be extremely helpful, especially when studying attitudes or behaviors of (groups of) citizens, public professionals or public managers. Behavioral public administration explicitly connect public administration and psychology. For this Virtual Issue, we analyzed the articles...

Trust in judges is needed for voluntary acceptance of judicial decisions, and judicial transparency is thought to strengthen trust. It exposes the public to symbols that embrace a ‘myth of legality’ which is expected to have a positive effect on trust. We assess a specific understanding of transparency and trust by looking at the moderating effect...

Government transparency has become a widespread value of democratic governance, yet theory suggests that various forces shape transparency differently in consensual and majoritarian regimes. As a result, transparency may achieve different goals in different democratic regimes. Presented here are the results of a study comparing the Netherlands and...

Citizen trust in government at the macro level has been studied by public administration scholars for many years. To further our understanding, assessing trust at the meso level of government organizations is important to more precisely determine effects and antecedents of trust at the organizational level. The organizational trust literature has s...

Red tape is one of the most often-mentioned nuisances of citizens about government. However, there is a dearth in red tape research focusing on citizens. Therefore, the primary goal of this article is to analyze the effect of red tape on citizen satisfaction. The secondary goal is to go beyond testing a linear relationship between red tape and citi...

Social media use has become increasingly popular among police forces. The literature suggests that social media use can increase perceived police legitimacy by enabling transparency and participation. Employing data from a large and representative survey of Dutch citizens (N = 4,492), this article tests whether and how social media use affects perc...

Scholars' criticism of transparency in public–private partnerships (PPPs) often focuses on ‘external’ transparency, that is, the extent to which internal information is visible to the outside world. However, to achieve external transparency, internal transparency – the availability and inferability of information for the public procurer and the pri...

Disclosure of information is an increasingly popular policy instrument. While the use of disclosed information by consumers has been studied, little is known the disclosure practices of organizations. The central question in this paper is: how do organizations translate the trade-off between legal and communicative quality into an organizational ar...

Although the effect of government transparency on trust is heavily debated, our theoretical and empirical understanding of this relationship is still limited. The basic assumption tested in this article is whether transparency leads to higher levels of perceived trustworthiness. This article uses theories from social psychology to advance our under...

Transparency is considered a key value for trustworthy governments. However, the effect of transparency on citizens’ trust across national cultures is overlooked in current research. This article compares the effect of transparency on trust in government in the Netherlands and South Korea. The effect is investigated in two similar series of three e...

Computer-mediated transparency is seen as a powerful tool to attain policy goals and to transform government. This is based on the idea that transparency is something good in itself, which can be attained by using ICTs eventually improving government and citizen relations. This article claims that although transparency of government is necessary, s...

This article contributes to the emerging literature on transparency by developing and empirically testing a theoretical framework that explains the determinants of local government Web site transparency. It aims to answer the following central question: What institutional factors determine the different dimensions of government transparency? The fr...

Computer-mediated transparency is seen as a powerful tool to attain policy goals and to transform government. This is based on the idea that transparency is something good in itself, which can be attained by using ICTs eventually improving government and citizen relations. This article claims that although transparency of government is necessary, s...

Declining citizen trust in government is an important driver for NPM-style reforms. Increasing people’s knowledge by providing factual knowledge about government performance outcomes is seen as an important way of increasing citizen trust in government. Does this promise hold or is knowledge about performance outcomes not that important? Two rivall...

New Public Management and bureaucratic models fail to acknowledge the value of peer-to-peer cooperation between citizens as a resource for public service support. Social media enable citizens to create environments for sharing information about public services in Communities of Public Service Support. The success of this model for public service su...

Transparency has been trumpeted by many as the key to trust in government. The assumption is that if government organisations open up and show the public what decisions are made, how they are made and what the results are, people will automatically have more trust in government. But does transparency really lead to more trust? Or will it only provi...

Computer-mediated transparency is widely acknowledged to be a powerful instrument to strengthen citizen trust in government. However, government websites are often used as a convenient way to spread 'spinned' policy messages with highly positive interpretations of government policies. This paper focuses on this particular element of transparency: t...

Burgernet is ontwikkeld als een systeem om via voice en text mail berichten burgers te betrekken bij het opsporen van personen en goederen (zie: www.burgernet.nl). In toenemende mate gebruiken politiekorpsen ook Twitterberichten om burgers te bereiken en te betrekken bij de opsporing. Wat levert dit op?

Online minutes of local councils offer the opportunity to look behind the scenes of local government decision-making. Will this transparency, as promised, lead to higher levels of trust? This issue was investigated by conducting an experiment comparing participants who did not access the available information, people who were only allowed restricte...

Trust in government has been shown to be volatile in recent years and Internet transparency is seen as a solution to strengthen trust. However, critics argue that transparency will only lead to less trust, and sceptics say that it has no effect at all. This debate on transparency is lacking empirical information, and therefore central to this artic...

Deze rapportage is het resultaat van het eerste onderdeel van het onderzoek van de USBO (Universiteit Utrecht) naar e-participatie van expats. In dit deelonderzoek is het aanbod van e-participatie initiatieven in kaart gebracht. In totaal zijn 139 websites geanalyseerd en beoordeeld op diverse criteria. E-participatie van expats is grofweg in te de...

Het doel van dit document is om de relaties tussen verschillende vormen van participatie en overheidsdienstverlening te verkennen om zo gericht keuzen te kunnen maken over de bijdrage van e-participatie aan geïntegreerde, persoonsgerichte dienstverlening. Achtereenvolgens wordt ingegaan op de volgende vragen: • Welke vormen van participatie in de o...

Grote beschikkingsverlenende instanties raken meer en meer geautomatiseerd. Dit roept de vraag op of er nog wel ruimte is voor rechtvaardigheid voor het individuele geval. Bij drie geautomatiseerde uitvoeringsinstanties is onderzocht of hardheidsclausules een passende aanvulling vormen op de geautomatiseerde verlening van beschikkingen. Hoewel niet...

The link between transparency and trust is often oversimplified by both supporters and critics of transparency laws. Optimists believe that transparency can bring increased public trust in government by reducing secrecy and increasing understanding. Pessimists argue that ‘abuse’ or ‘distrustful’ use of FOI, combined with the negative headlines and...