Increased Costs or an Incentive for Change? Red tape and Public Officials’ Attitudes toward Public Participation

EasyChair Preprint 1100

Abstract

Public officials often see public participation as burdensome. In this paper we study how job-centered red tape perceptions affect public officials’ attitudes toward public participation.

There is increasing evidence that public officials´ participatory attitudes are affected by the perceived burdensomeness and lack of effectiveness of rules surrounding public participation (Ianniello, Iacuzzi, Fedele, & Brusati, 2018; Liao & Schachter, 2018; Yang & Pandey, 2011). Previous studies argued that red tape increases participation-related procedural costs (Moynihan, 2003), induce risk avoiding behavior among public officials (Liao & Schachter, 2018; Yang & Pandey, 2011), and threaten officials’ sense of security (Feeney, 2012; Liao & Schachter, 2018). In sum, these studies demonstrate that red tape has negative effects on participatory outcomes and administrators’ attitudes toward participation (Liao & Schachter, 2018; Yang & Pandey, 2011).

Research on the effects of red tape on public officials’ attitudes toward public participation has thus far remained inconclusive. Shifting the focus to rules and their characteristics, this study examines how rules’ lack of functionality and rules’ compliance burden affect public officials’ attitudes toward public participation, and validates the job-centered red tape measurement instrument. Based on a sample of n = 879 municipal public officials, this study reports the results of a structural equations model in which rules’ lack of functionality were positively associated, and rules’ compliance burden were negatively associated with respondents’ public participation attitudes. These results indicate that red tape is too complex a construct to be captured by a one-dimensional instrument, especially in relation to attitudes toward public participation. 

Keyphrases: Public Officials, Structural Equation Modeling, attitudes, public participation, red tape

@booklet{EasyChair:1100,
  author    = {Koen Migchelbrink},
  title     = {Increased Costs or an Incentive for Change? Red tape and Public Officials’ Attitudes toward Public Participation},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 1100},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2019}}