Information and trust in political-administrative systems: How trust matters for how information is used

A strong civil service is vital in democracies. However, as acknowledged in the public administration literature (e.eg., Niskanen 1971) skill and knowledge leavebureaucrats with potential power to influence the political... [ view full abstract ]

A strong civil service is vital in democracies. However, as acknowledged in the public administration literature (e.eg., Niskanen 1971) skill and knowledge leave
bureaucrats with potential power to influence the political agenda. We argue
that this classic literature, however pessimistic it is, underestimates the
power potential of the bureaucracy. The bureaucrats’ exclusive access to
politicians can be used for more than agenda influence. It can also be used to influence political preferences. We make this argument by applying insights from
political psychology about the importance of information for preference
formation to the relationship between bureaucrats and politicians. To test the
argument, we study politicians in four different political systems: USA, Italy,
Belgium and Denmark. We use experiments embedded in surveys to (i) assess the
importance of Aberbach, Putnam & Rockman’s “intense dialogue” between
bureaucrats and politicians today; (ii) investigate the importance of the
bureaucracy as a provider of information; (iii) test whether bureaucrats can
influence their politicians’ preferences by manipulating the valence of
policy-relevant information (equivalence framing); (iv) by strategically
highlighting subsets of potentially policy-relevant information (issue framing);
and (v) by exploiting that politicians tend to prefer information sources which
they ideologically agree with (source cue effects).