by Eva Thomann, James Maxia, & Jörn Ege
Conventional thought holds that policies are passed down from policymakers to street-level bureaucrats (i.e., police officers, public school teachers, social workers, etc.) who implement these policies as instructed. However, both anecdotal and empirical data reveal that these street-level bureaucrats can diverge from the formal rules of policies at their discretion. This policy divergence suggests that street-level bureaucrats can become informal policymakers because of their pivotal role in policy implementation. In our paper, we investigate this policy divergence and explore how informal accountability relations influence street-level bureaucrats.
Using the Accountability Regime Framework (ARF), we identify four mechanisms, which can influence the behavior of street-level bureaucrats: political-administrative, professional, participatory/societal, and market. We also suggest the inclusion of a new accountability regime in the ARF: political-ideological. These five accountability relations aim to describe the pressures street-level bureaucrats experience from the formal rules of policies, the norms of their professions, their role in society, their role as economic actors, and their political/ideological beliefs, respectively.
When two or more of these accountability relations create competing demands on a street-level bureaucrat, we call this an accountability dilemma. We argue that actors who experience accountability dilemmas are more likely to diverge from the formal rules of a policy. We also expect divergence to be more likely among actors who prioritize accountability relations inconsistent with the formal rules. We offer the following hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1a: Street-level bureaucrats with political attitudes that contradict with the policy (ideological distance) are likely to articulate a rule-political dilemma.
Hypothesis 1b: Street-level bureaucrats with political attitudes that contradict with the policy are likely to articulate a rule-political dilemma, but only if they also strongly refer to political-ideological pressure.
Hypothesis 2: Stronger reference to an accountability pressure other than rule pressure makes it more likely that the street-level bureaucrat experiences a dilemma of rule pressure with the respective action prescriptions.
Hypothesis 3: The stronger or more numerous the dilemmas expressed by the street-level bureaucrat, the more likely they are to diverge from the policy.
To test our hypotheses, we analyze a case of the UK’s “Prevent Duty” counterterrorism policy. This policy instructs university lecturers to identify and report students they suspect are becoming radicalized. The ambiguity of Prevent Duty’s instructions, its political saliency, and the high degree of discretion that university lecturers enjoy suggest that this case will be useful for our purposes.
For our analysis, we surveyed social science lecturers in British universities. The survey included measured feelings of accountability and the likelihood of compliance with Prevent Duty. We also conducted qualitative follow-up interviews with lecturers who had experience implementing Prevent Duty.
In line with H1a, we found that lecturers whose political views contrasted with Prevent Duty were more likely to identify a perceived rule-political dilemma. However, contrary to H1b, the importance one placed on political-ideological accountability did not seem to affect the likelihood of perceiving a rule-political dilemma. In other words, contrasting political beliefs seemed to interfere with the implementation of Prevent Day even among lecturers who separated their work from their political beliefs.
We also found that the higher priority lecturers placed on an accountability regime, the more likely they were to experience an accountability dilemma, except for market accountability. Perhaps most importantly, we found that stronger accountability dilemmas were associated with higher levels of policy divergence.
Our findings extend the ARF to include a new accountability regime, political-ideological, which we believe to be an important addition to understanding street-level bureaucrats as “political animals.” We also successfully show that informal accountability relations play an important role in policy implementation.
You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at
Thomann, Eva, James Maxia and Jörn Ege. 2023. “How street-level dilemmas and politics shape divergence: The accountability regimes framework.” Policy Studies Journal 51 (4): 793–816. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12504.
About the Authors
Eva Thomann is a full professor of Public Administration at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. She holds a master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Zurich and a Ph.D. in Public Administration from the University of Bern. She specializes in Public Policy and Public Administration; her research focuses on the patterns, reasons, and consequences of how policies are put into practice.
James Maxia is working in the private sector in London, UK. He graduated from the University of Oxford with an MPhil in Comparative Government after completing his undergraduate studies at the University of Exeter. He is interested in studying voting behavior, political violence, and public policy implementation.
Jörn Ege is a permanent lecturer in “Local & Regional Governance” at the ZHAW School of Management and Law in Winterthur, Switzerland. He studies administrative arrangements and their consequences for the governance of societal problems in international(ized), regional, and local contexts.
Find him online:
Website: https://www.zhaw.ch/en/about-us/person/egej/
X: https://twitter.com/EgeJorn
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jorn-ege/
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