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Experimental Methods A: Survey Experiments in Public Administration

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... The logic behind this approach is that, after reading a list of items, subjects are asked to state the number of items they would pick in response to a question (Peters & Guedes-Neto 2020). The experimental design regards randomizing participants into two conditions: the control group, which reads only four items; and the treatment group, which reads these four items plus an additional item-the one the researcher is interested in. ...
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Bureaucrats must cooperate to implement public policies. This means working with colleagues from different public organizations, lawyers and accountants from oversight agencies, political appointees, elected officials, etc. Each of these actors holds different, oftentimes conflicting, organizational identities. These attachments go beyond their rational interests and, as I demonstrate in this dissertation, become comparable to other social identities, like race, partisanship, and gender. This means that while bureaucrats see their colleagues as in-groups who share similar values, those working at different organizations are their out-groups who will most likely see the world through different lenses. Relying on a measurement that is well-established in social psychology, I demonstrate that the social distance between different public sector actors helps to understand conflict and cooperation in implementation processes. I refer to this phenomenon as bureaucratic polarization and show that it can change public policies and organizations. The empirical evidence combines face-to-face interviews conducted in two Brazilian states and multiple surveys and experiments fielded in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. These multiple pieces of research validate the generalizability of bureaucratic polarization as a theoretical framework and an estimation strategy to better understand coordination in public administration and the politics of policy implementation.
... This study uses a survey experiment to test the question of whether the gender-race-age profiles and behavioral motivations of fictional rule breaking city managers shape public judgment of those bureaucrats engaging in controversial behavior. Survey experiments are useful tools for understanding how citizens respond to government and exploring the effects of racial, class, gender, and other social differences on behaviors and attitudes (Peters & Guedes-Neto, 2020). In this study, participants were randomly assigned to one of 18 possible groups, including 16 treatment groups and two control groups, after a brief introduction and set of questions related to trust in local government (see Figure 1). ...
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Despite the serious demands for public organizations to maintain political accountability and bureaucratic responsiveness, rule breaking persists among employees across all levels. Unlike our deeper understanding of corruption of elected officials, myriad questions remain regarding the nature of the public response to policy violations of government bureaucrats working in politically neutral administrative positions. This study uses a survey experiment to investigate factors influencing the intensity of citizens’ recommended punishments for rule-breaking local government managers, specifically testing the effects of managers’ demographic attributes of age, race, and gender as well as their motivations for the violations. Findings strongly suggest that motive matters to citizens in this context, with prosocial rule-breaking managers incurring significantly less harsh penalties than destructive rule-breakers for all age-race-gender profiles. However, an absence of demographic information nullifies penalty differences between prosocial and destructive rule-breaking managers. Among the demographic attributes, only the managers’ race predicted the severity of punishments favored by citizens. No interaction effects between manager attributes were present. Results suggest public communications emphasizing person and purpose are particularly important for local government managers in this context.
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Patronage appointments in government are a continuing issue in many administrative systems. Especially for countries in Latin America and Africa patronage is considered a major impediment to developing more effective administrative systems. A great deal has been written describing patronage and discussing the causes for patronage, but much less research has addressed the dynamics of moving away from patronage to more merit-based systems. This paper reviews the patronage literature and then develops a dynamic feedback model for movement away from patronage. The model links the quality of the services provided by the government, the nature of the political party system, and levels of trust to patronage. The model uses several reinforcing and balancing feedback loops to demonstrate the possible dynamics of change in administrative appointments.
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