Engaging Citizens. Public managers’ attitudes toward public participation in administrative decision-making

The use of public participation in local government decision-making is increasingly popular. According to the public administration and public management literature, one of the most important determinants of public participation decisions and outcomes is the willingness of public managers to interact with the public (Ianniello et al., 2018; Yang, 2005; Yang & Callahan, 2007). Public managers play an important role in local-level public participation initiatives. They help determine the parameters of participation: who can participate, what the participation is about, and how public input is collected. Furthermore, they influence the extent to which public input gets incorporated into the administrative decision-making process. Without public managers willing to invite the public to participate, participation is unlikely to lead to actual engagement.However, despite the importance of public managers' positive attitudes toward public participation to participation decisions and outcomes, our knowledge about the determinants of these attitudes remains limited (e.g., Amirkhanyan & Lambright, 2018; Liao & Ma, 2019). Most studies explore public managers' attitudes toward public participation from two broadly overlapping perspectives. First, public participation from a democratic perspective is mainly motivated by normative, developmental and empowerment reasons (Nabatchi, 2010b, 2010c; Roberts, 2004). Second, public participation from an instrumental perspective is mainly motivated by pragmatic reasons and based on its contribution to managerial, organizational and policy objectives (Eckerd & Heidelberg, 2019; Moynihan, 2003). More recently, studies have focused on the attitudes and behaviors of public managers toward public participation (Eckerd & Heidelberg, 2019; Liao & Schachter, 2018; Yang & Callahan, 2007). In this dissertation, we combine insights from these studies with the objective to increase our understanding of determinants of public managers' attitudes toward public participation. Consequently, we formulated the following research question:What are the determinants of local public managers' attitudes toward public participation in administrative decision-making?In order to answer this question, we divided the research question into five sub-questions. These sub-questions were addressed in separate chapters, all using a different method and based on unique and purposefully developed data. In the chapter 2, we took stock of the existing literature and examined which determinants of public managers' favorable attitudes toward public participation have been published before. Based on this review, we examined the effects of two discrete antecedents of public managers' attitudes toward public participation (input legitimacy and red tape) in chapters 3 and 4. In chapter 5, we examined public managers' role perception in participatory budgeting in relation to their perceptions of residents and local politicians. Finally, in chapter 6, we examined public sector personnel's support for technocratic decision-making across 24 countries in Europe.In chapter 2, we systematically reviewed the public administration, political science, and urban studies literature for determinants of public managers' positive attitudes toward public participation. Based on a review of 99 relevant articles, we found that public managers' attitudes toward public participation are related to managers' individual characteristics and personality traits, the characteristics and design features of participatory processes, organizational structures and culture, and the features of the context in which public participation is expected to take place. The findings indicated that the literature on public managers' attitudes toward public participation has increased in the previous two decades. The findings also indicated that determinants of public managers' attitudes toward public participation extend beyond the dominant democratic and instrumental motives perspectives. In all, chapter 2 provided a first step toward a comprehensive framework of public managers' attitudes toward public participation and served as the theoretical starting point of this dissertation.In chapter 3, we built on the results of the systematic literature review and examined whether variation in citizen participants' representativeness and turnout affected public managers' willingness to use public participation, their assessment of the quality of policy outcomes, and their anticipation of popular support for policy outcomes. Based on democratic legitimacy theory (Scharpf, 1999, 2003) and procedural justice legitimacy (Tyler, 2006), we examined how the input legitimacy of participatory processes affected public managers' attitudes toward public participation. We tested these effects using a full-factorial online vignette experiment among grade A and B public officials from the Belgian municipality of Antwerp. The results showed that the input legitimacy of a participatory process was positively associated with public managers' willingness to use public participation in administrative decision-making, their expectation of outcome quality, and their anticipation of popular support for participatory decisions. In addition, the results indicated that public managers' willingness to use public participation was most strongly affected by public participants' representativeness, while public managers' anticipation of policy quality and popular support where most strongly affected by participants' turnout. Furthermore, the results of this chapter indicated that public managers' attitudes toward public participation were generally positive. It indicated that managers supported public participation in the abstract, without necessarily taking the implementation practicalities into account.In the fourth chapter, we examined the association between public managers' job-centered red tape perceptions and their attitudes toward public participation. Building on the red tape literature identified in chapter 2, we argued that red tape reduces public managers' favorable attitudes toward public participation by increasing the time, costs, and effort required to inform the public and coordinate participatory processes. We found that the compliance burden of rules was negatively associated with public officials' attitudes toward public participation but found no support for our hypothesis that the lack of effectiveness of rules was also negatively associated with managers' attitudes toward public participation. Instead, we found a statistically significant positive association between the lack of functionality of rules and managers' attitudes toward public participation. These results indicated that public managers who perceived the rules with which they had to comply as burdensome would be less likely to let the public participate in administrative decision-making, and that those who perceived those rules to be ineffective in achieving their original objective would be more likely to use public participation. Furthermore, these results showed that the constituent components of red tape could affect managers' attitudes about public participation differently.In chapter 5, we moved away from testing discrete determinants of public managers' attitudes and explored a typology of public managers' role perceptions in participatory budgeting in relation to residents and local politicians. We conceptualized participatory budgeting as a specific form of public participation in which non-elected citizens participate in the conception and/or allocation of public finances (Marlowe & Portillo, 2006; Sintomer et al., 2008). Using an online Q-methodological analysis with 22 public managers responsible for organizing and managing participatory budgeting projects in seven Belgian municipalities, we found evidence for four distinct perspectives. Public managers with a managerial perspective assessed the input of residents, local politicians, and their fellow public managers equally, and supported participatory budgeting under certain (instrumental) conditions. Public managers with a citizen-centered perspective supported participatory budgeting on democratic grounds, prioritized residents' input, and saw it as their responsibility to help residents formulate spending proposals. Public managers with a technocratic perspective prioritized administrative norms and expertise over residents' and local politicians' input, were suspicious about local politicians' motives, and supported participatory budgeting on instrumental grounds. Public managers with a skeptical perspective doubted the practical value of participatory budgeting, were distrustful of the motives of local politicians, and believed public managers should not get involved in drafting residents' spending proposals. Respondents from all four perspectives agreed that most of the important decisions are taken without the direct involvement of residents, and that local politicians found it difficult to hand over power. The results of this chapter indicated that public managers' perceptions about their tasks in participatory budgeting differed depending on their views of residents and local politicians. None of the perspectives denied that residents should have a say in participatory budgeting, but most perspectives were skeptical about the role of local politicians.In the final empirical chapter, we examined public sector employees' support for technocratic decision-making. Research into country-based differences in public sector personnel's attitudes toward public participation is hampered by a lack of large-n comparative data. Instead, we built on the political philosophy literature presenting technocracy as the antithesis to (direct) democracy (Bertsou & Pastorella, 2017; Esmark, 2017; Fischer, 1990) and the public administration literature linking public managers' technocratic orientation to their attitudes toward public participation (Liao, 2018b; Liao & Ma, 2019) to examine differences in, and determinants of, public sector employees' support for technocratic decision-making. Using a generalized linear mixed-effects analysis of data on 48,458 respondents from 24 countries in Europe, we found that support for technocratic decision-making differed significantly across countries. The results indicated a negative association between respondents' satisfaction with government, trust in representative institutions, and government openness to the public and their support for technocratic decision-making. Interestingly, the chapter indicated that despite similarities between bureaucracy and technocracy, government employees were less likely to support technocratic decision-making than individuals not working for the public sector. Which appeared especially true for employees from long-established democracies from north and northwestern Europe. The strong negative association between government openness to the public and public sector employees' support for technocratic decision-making supports research showing an antagonistic relation between public managers' support for technocratic decision-making and their attitudes toward public participation.The findings of this dissertation give rise to 3 conclusions about public managers' attitudes toward public participation that go beyond our main research question. First of all, public managers are generally positive about public participation. Contrary to the largely pessimistic view on public managers' attitudes toward public participation in much of the traditional public administration and public management literature, we found that public managers were mostly positive about the organization and implementation of participatory processes. Second, determinants of public managers' attitudes toward public participation go beyond democratic and instrumental motives alone. Even though individual-level democratic and instrumental determinants remain important, this dissertation demonstrated that the determinants of public managers' attitudes toward public participation are related to the organizational and institutional context in which participation is expected to take place, as well as previous participatory experiences. Third, whereas traditional administrative norms of professionalism and expertise reject the concept of direct public participation in administrative decision-making, public managers now appear to accept the need to seek, understand, and respond to community priorities as part of local level administrative decision-making.

Publication year:2021

Accessibility:Open