What Motivates Bureaucrats?

Agents of Change: The Role of Public Managers in Public Policy

“…One might be tempted to theorize that different bureaucrats prioritize different outcomes due to disparate preferences and motivations. The literature on bureaucratic motivation, however, offers the following answer when asked what motivates bureaucrats under different conditions-"it depends" (Golden, 2000; but see Moe, 1990). This offers little to policy scholars who seek a systematic way to include individual decision making into their models.…”

Do Presidents Control Bureaucracy? The Federal Housing Administration During the Truman-Eisenhower Era

“…Scholars have concluded that presidents can significantly influence public policy through their appointments and that bureaucratic responsiveness has characterized some periods of American politics. 95 But we show how the leadership of an executive branch agency can in fact resist presidential influence and persist on an old policy trajectory when a new administration ascends to power, even after Supreme Court decisions suggest that the old policy was of questionable legality. Bureaucracies are not necessarily responsive to presidential influence, and whether a principal's preferences are implemented-and how-is critical to the substantive content of policy.…”

Public Agency Leadership: The Impact of Informal Understandings With Political Appointees on Perceived Agency Innovation in Taiwan

“…92–111; Rosenbloom 2008). Resulting studies often have different foci than that discussed here, and they often examine appointees' efforts to implement political agendas (Biggart and Hamilton 1984; Ingraham 1987; Michaels 1995; Anderson 2000), bureaucratic efforts to resist politicization and exert professional norms (for example, Peters 1987, 2009; Hammond 1996; Waterman et al 1998), appointee selection and appointment processes (Kim 2004; Bertelli and Feldman 2006; Lewis 2008), the length of appointees' tenure and their discretion (Chang et al 2001; Wood and Marchbanks 2008), discretion by appointees (Olshfski and Cunningham 2008; Knott and Miller 2008), and general studies of appointee and bureaucrats' motivations and political views (Golden 2000, Aberbach and Rockman 2000; Huang et al 2005, Jacobsenk 2005; Jensen et al 2009). Few studies extend these concerns to matters of bureaucratic performance (Stehr 1997; Dolan 2000; Meier and O'Toole 2006a, b).…”