Dr. Casey Fleming has a forthcoming article in Public Integrity that examines citizen reaction to rulebreaking among local government administrative officers, paying special attention to the identities and underlying motivations of the accused violators. A key punchline of this experimental evidence suggests citizens are significantly less outraged when city administrators skirt bureaucratic rules in order to advance some social benefit or the “public good” versus more self-interested ends. This is consistent with corruption studies that show the public is surprisingly unwilling to punish harshly certain politicians (notably, those on their “team”) when mired in scandal.
Abstract: 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 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.