Stimulating compliance or getting publicly shamed: A cross-national experiment on whether bureaucrats can achieve one and avoid the other

This article experimentally studies whether how street-level bureaucrats enforce (i.e. enforcement style) matters for citizens’ compliance and whether it can ‘backfire’ and result in getting publicly shamed by... [ view full abstract ]

This article experimentally studies whether how street-level bureaucrats enforce (i.e. enforcement style) matters for citizens’ compliance and whether it can ‘backfire’ and result in getting publicly shamed by citizens. There is surprisingly little research on the effect of street-level bureaucrats’ enforcement style on compliance and the results are not uniform. On top of that, the potential negative consequence for street-level bureaucrats by getting shamed by citizens is relevant to explore in light of the ever-growing visibility of the work of governments and its street-level agents. This visibility enables inward observability which empowers citizens to hold governments and their street-level agents accountable by publishing experiences on social media like Twitter about their (perceived) misbehavior. The way street-level bureaucrats interact with citizens, matters for the way citizens evaluate them and, in turn, behave. This article, therefore, investigates: To what extent does street-level bureaucrats’ enforcement style influence citizens’ compliance and their intentions to publicly shame bureaucrats online? 

Building on street-level enforcement and bureaucrat-citizen interaction literature, it is hypothesized that when street-level bureaucrats have a legal enforcement style in one-shot citizen-bureaucrat encounters, citizens will be stimulated to comply but will also set out to ‘save face’ and publicly shame them online. If street-level bureaucrats have a facilitation enforcement style, citizens will not be stimulated to comply but also not publicly shame online. A survey experiment pilot (n = 150) was conducted in March 2018 and the results will be presented at IRSPM 2018. Preliminary results indicate that enforcement style does not matter for citizens’ compliance. In other words, how street-level bureaucrats sanction does not matter for compliance of citizens. Enforcement style does matter for getting publicly shamed by citizens online. More specifically, a legal style increases public shaming of bureaucrats by citizens online while a facilitation style decreases public shaming. The full-fledged online experiment will be executed in (at least) two countries (i.e. The Netherlands and The United Kingdom) in April and May 2018.