| dc.description.abstract | In this dissertation, I combine insights from public administration with those of political science, public policy, and social psychology to better understand how citizens think about and understand their governments. In each of three studies, I unpack a different decision-making process with relevance to public administration. The first explores how information about clients shapes citizens’ agreement with street-level bureaucrats’ rule compliance (or lack thereof). The second is similar, this time assessing how client information influences how citizens assign blame when clients experience negative outcomes. The third focuses on factors that drive bureaucrats to support other bureaucrats’ rule compliance decisions, this time paying special attention to the effects of respondents’ just-world beliefs.
While I expected that clients’ identities—and particularly their identity congruence with respondents—would significantly affect each of these processes, what I find is more interesting and complex. Though they did not express strong disagreement with bureaucrats’ prosocial rule-breaking decisions—or decisions to break the rules for the explicit purpose of better serving a client— citizens always preferred that bureaucrats followed agency rules, regardless of the client’s identity, deservingness, and outcome. When assigning blame for a client’s negative outcome, citizens overwhelmingly blamed the client, allocating over twice as much blame to the client than the serving bureaucrat or agency. While, this time, the client’s deservingness had large effects on citizens’ decisions, even deserving clients received more blame than any other category. Finally, respondents—both citizens and bureaucrats—with high just-world beliefs were much more likely to support bureaucrats’ rule decisions, irrespective of the actual decision. As I will argue, together, the findings provide room for optimism in some ways while painting a worrying picture for social equity in others. | en_US |
