Is Responsibility Intuitive in a Public Encounter?

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Bertelli, Anthony M.; Cannas, Silvia
• 署名单位: Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); Pennsylvania State University; Pennsylvania State University - University Park
• 刊物名称: GOVERNANCE-AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF POLICY ADMINISTRATION AND INSTITUTIONS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0952-1895
• DOI: 10.1111/gove.70059
• 发表日期: 2025
• 关键词: representative bureaucracy; welfare; coproduction; VALUES; POLICY

摘要

A public encounter is a direct, focused interaction between unelected public officials and private individuals with the goal of enacting a distribution of benefits or obligations. Administrative responsibility concerns an official's normative obligations for acting within a legally defined role. Does the public perceive notionally responsible action in a public encounter as actually responsible? Our mixed-method approach to this question begins by theoretically connecting two practical problems with specific principles of good public administration. We transform these problems into hypothetical scenarios supported by theory and local law, and then present them as vignettes in a randomized online survey experiment to 1100 respondents in the United Kingdom. We find that responsibility is clearly intuitive to participants, and that their arguments about the principles underlying responsibility seem to be clarified, rather than made more sophisticated or complex, by the public encounters they observe.