by Mariana Costa Silveira, Nissim Cohen, & Gabriela Lotta
Policy entrepreneurs – individuals who seek to shape policy outcomes that they could not otherwise achieve on their own – play a crucial role in the policymaking process. Typical examples of policy entrepreneurs include lobbyists, consultants, and even politicians. Bureaucrats, too, can also be policy entrepreneurs.
Our paper looks at the relationship between bureaucrats’ interactions with other policy actors – specifically politicians, peers, and non-state actors – and how confident the bureaucrats feel about engaging in policy entrepreneurship activities. At a broad level, we know that these interactions impact whether bureaucrats act as policy entrepreneurs, but we don’t have studies that have looked at how these interactions might be related to bureaucrats’ perceptions of their own policy entrepreneurship skills. We also assess how the reputation of a bureaucrat’s organization impacts their self-efficacy. The below research model outlines our hypotheses.
Figure 1. Research model.
To test our hypotheses, we used a survey of 2,000 bureaucrats in Brazil taken between October and December 2017 by the country’s National School of Public Administration, of whom approximately 30% completed the survey. The survey asked respondents about their levels of confidence performing different sorts of tasks, their frequency of interactions with actors from different groups (e.g., politicians, private companies, unions, etc.), and their motivations for doing their jobs.
In the course of analyzing the data, we found that the bureaucrats surveyed sorted into three profiles, based on their levels of interactions as well as with whom they interacted: brokers, who have high levels of interactions inside and outside of their organization with both state and non-state actors; insiders, who have high levels of interactions mainly inside their organization, with other state actors; and loners, who have low levels of interactions across all actor types.
We found that bureaucrats who interacted more regularly with peers and politicians displayed more confidence about their ability to engage in policy entrepreneurship. As far as non-state actors were concerned, we found positive – and statistically significant – relationships as regards interactions with the press and unions, but not statistically significant relationships with other non-state actors, such as private companies. Lastly, bureaucrats’ self-efficacy was also positively correlated with the reputation of their organization. We observed some variation across the three bureaucrat profiles: interactions with politicians were most strongly associated with feelings of self-efficacy among brokers than either insiders or loners. Regarding bureaucrats’ motivations to engage in policy entrepreneurship, we found that both the desire to advance the public good and their own careers were associated with greater policy entrepreneurship self-efficacy. This suggests that public- and self-interest motivations aren’t mutually exclusive, and that both can drive policy entrepreneurship.
We want to caution that, when it comes to bureaucratic self-efficacy about policy entrepreneurship, we have identified correlations rather than causations. The dataset used for this study does not allow us to conclude whether, for example, frequent interactions with politicians makes bureaucrats more confident about engaging in policy entrepreneurship, or whether those bureaucrats already confident in their abilities as policy entrepreneurs are more likely to seek out interactions with politicians.
Nevertheless, in identifying these correlations, we draw attention to those factors that likely impact whether – and to what extent – bureaucrats engage in policy entrepreneurship. Our findings suggest that expanding opportunities for bureaucrats to grow their networks and interact with different types of actors – such as politicians and those outside of the government – is important for cultivating policy entrepreneurship among bureaucrats. Ultimately, more research will need to be done to identify the precise causal mechanisms at play. Moreover, our study looked only at bureaucrats in Brazil, so additional case studies will confirm the extent to which our findings are generalizable.
You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at
Silveira, Mariana Costa, Nissim Cohen and Gabriela Lotta. 2024. “ Are Bureaucrats’ Interactions With Politicians Linked to the Bureaucrats’ Policy Entrepreneurship Tendencies?.” Policy Studies Journal 52 (3): 533–559. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12536.
About the Authors
Mariana Costa Silveira is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration (IDHEAP) at Lausanne University. Her research interests include behavioral public administration, organizational behavior, policy entrepreneurship, and collaborative governance.
Nissim (Nessi) Cohen is a professor of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Haifa. His research interests include interactions between politicians and bureaucrats, public administration reform, street level bureaucracy and policy entrepreneurship.
Gabriela Lotta is an Associate Professor of Public Administration at Fundação Getulio Vargas’s Sao Paulo School of Business Administration. Her current research interests include policy implementation, street-level bureaucracy and bureaucratic politics.
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