Romanticizing bureaucratic leadership? The politics of how elected officials attribute responsibility for performance

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Nielsen, Poul A.; Moynihan, Donald P.
• 署名单位: University of Southern Denmark; University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison
• 刊物名称: GOVERNANCE-AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF POLICY ADMINISTRATION AND INSTITUTIONS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0952-1895
• DOI: 10.1111/gove.12256
• 发表日期: 2017
• 关键词: blame avoidance; information use; management; FUTURE; ACCOUNTABILITY; partisanship; GOVERNMENT; CHARISMA; ROMANCE; schools

摘要

A core task for elected officials is to hold bureaucratic leaders responsible, but how do they determine if public managers actually influence outcomes? We propose that partisan and leadership heuristics affect how politicians apply a logic of individualized responsibility, that is, focus on individual bureaucrats rather than situational factors to explain organizational outcomes. We match survey data of local elected officials in Denmark with individual partisan variables and objective performance data about the schools they oversee. We provide evidence that partisan beliefs matter, with conservative elected officials more willing to pursue a logic of individualized responsibility. We also find that elected officials are more likely to assume that bureaucratic leaders determine organizational outcomes where performance is very high or low, a leadership attribution heuristic previously established in private sector studies. We argue that our findings have important implications for contemporary governance, given the growing reliance on performance metrics to assign responsibility.