Administrative Elite and a Diverse Society: Values, Knowledge, and Policy

Research Questions and Objectives

I examine to what extent the administrative elite mirrors the political attitudes and values held in an ethnically diverse society, to what extent these attitudes and values guide bureaucrats’ acquisition, selection, and utilization of knowledge in their decision-making, and to what extent society perceives these attitudes and values as being effectively reflected in administrative outputs.

In the first part of the project, I examine the degree of congruence between the administrative elite and society regarding their views on immigration, diversity in public administration, and morality. I then investigate which socio-demographic, psychological, and administrative contextual factors explain variation in this congruence and whether and to what extent it predicts bureaucrats’ individual role perceptions as representatives of specific societal groups. The second part of the project examines how these representative role perceptions structure individual bureaucrats’ acquisition, selection, and use of informational and relational knowledge in administrative decision-making, thereby enabling bureaucratic representation of pluralistic interests in a diverse society. In the third part of the project, I experimentally examine whether symbolic cues suggesting potential congruence in attitudes and values between society and administrative elites enhance public perceptions of the effectiveness, trustworthiness, and fairness of federal ministries and, consequently, the acceptance of their policies.

Background

Administrative elites typically possess either specialized expertise in specific policy areas or generalist expertise in legislative processes. As such, it exercises technical and legal supervision in the implementation of policy programs, conducts policy analyses, mediates between stakeholders, drafts legislation, evaluates policies, and advises elected politicians. These tasks require administrative elites to navigate competing political values, societal demands, and multiple sources of knowledge in diverse societies to ensure responsive, effective, and legitimate policymaking.

Methods

I will conduct an online survey to study the values and decision-making behaviors of the administrative elite. A parallel online survey of the general public allows me to examine the value coherence between the two groups. The focus is on ideas of morality and diversity. I will triangulate the survey data with qualitative interviews to comprehensively understand decision-making behaviors. Subsequently, I will examine public perceptions of the administrative elite's performance through two psychological experiments: an implicit association test and a visual world paradigm using eye-tracking. The target group comprises senior bureaucrats in the federal ministries and the general public in Germany.

Relevance

The project's results will contribute to basic research on bureaucratic policy-making, representative bureaucracy, and social cohesion. They will also benefit administrative practice by informing public personnel management and the management of public satisfaction with public policy and administrative action in diverse societies.