Procedural environment of public engagement: an induced recall experiment of local government employees

ABSTRACT

This research (1) examines how employees’ recollections of public engagement are associated with their willingness for future engagement (WFE), (2) assesses whether employees’ discrete recollections are driven by their procedural environments, and (3) tests whether employees’ recollections interact with their perceptions of red tape in affecting WFE. We find that one’s procedural environment parameterizes the effect of episodic recall on a subject’s WFE. Qualitative evidence reveals the prominence of one’s procedural environment across groups, but in terms of helping the public navigate administrative burdens in the positive treatment group and rules that hinder the employees in the negative treatment group.

Video Abstract

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KEYWORDS:

• Red tape
• administrative burden
• procedural embeddedness
• public engagement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Please note that we use the term ‘citizen’ generically. We intend that this term refers generally to any member of the public, regardless of whether that person meets the legal definition of citizenship. We were careful to word these experiences appropriately in our instrument.

2. The original WFE item on a 7-point intensity scale from 1 = ‘dislike a great deal’ to 7 = ‘like a great deal’ has a mean of 5.04 with a standard deviation of 1.68 among those who participated in either the treatment or control questions.

3. Much empirical red tape research has used the self-assessed General Red Tape (GRT) scale, which asks respondents to rate the level of red tape in their role on a scale of 0 to 10 under the assumption that they understand the terms to which they are responding (Rainey, Pandey, and Bozeman 1995). Because ‘‘popular usage of the term “red tape’ requires no precision”’ (Bozeman and Feeney 2011, 3), it is theoretically disadvantageous to measure self-reports of a concept that is imprecisely understood by respondents (Borry 2016). The term red tape itself has ‘strong connotative meanings’ (Bozeman and Scott 1996, 1), which might skew the responses.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation.

Notes on contributors

William G. Resh

William G. Resh is the CC Crawford Associate Professor of Management and Performance and Director of the Civic Leadership Education and Research (CLEAR) Initiative at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy. His research focuses on executive politics and organizational behaviour.

Cynthia J. Barboza-Wilkes

Cynthia J. Barboza-Wilkes is a Ph.D. candidate in the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on organizational behaviour, representative bureaucracy, and diversity, equity, and inclusion in public management.

John D. Marvel

John D. Marvel is an associate professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and a former Fellow at the federal government’s Office of Evaluation Sciences. His research focuses on public management, work motivation, and the public opinion of government performance.