The global experience of political polarization, and politicians' attacks on democratic institutions, render individuals' identification with the governing coalition, or with its opposition, a likely antecedent of their attraction to work in government. This article examines to what extent individuals' partisan alignment with the governing coalition, and perceptions of its actions as a threat to democracy, shapes attraction to government jobs. Findings are based on a two-stage survey with 1861 Israeli panel respondents, aged 21–30, carried out during the government's attempt to undermine the legal system (hereafter: the Judicial Overhaul), and a follow-up survey experiment with 1211 of the respondents. Against the politically neutral explanations of previous research, we show that partisan alignment affects the propensity to choose a job in a government ministry versus other sectors. We find mixed evidence in support of the proposition that perceptions of the Judicial Overhaul as a threat to democracy underlie this effect.

Establishing and maintaining citizen trust is vital for the effectiveness and long-term viability of regulatory agencies. However, limited empirical research has been conducted on the relationship between regulatory action and citizen trust. This article addresses this gap by investigating the influence of various regulatory enforcement styles on citizen trust. We conducted a pre-registered and representative survey experiment in six countries (n=5765): Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, and Norway. Our study focuses on three key dimensions of enforcement style: formalism, coerciveness, and accommodation. We hypothesize that a strict and punitive enforcement style with minimal accommodation will enhance citizen trust. Surprisingly, we found no overall effect of enforcement on trust. However, specifically high levels of formalism (strictness) and coerciveness (punitiveness) exhibited a small positive effect on trust. Furthermore, we observed no discernible impact of an accommodative enforcement style. Additional analyses revealed that the effects of enforcement style were not consistent across country and regulatory domains. This suggests we need to reconsider assumptions underlying enforcement theory, as our findings imply that public trust seems less conditional on heavy-handed enforcement than initially anticipated.

Extant research has identified individual, organizational, and environmental level attributes that shape the variation in public managers’ external networking behavior. It theorized that public managers’ networking behavior is instrumentally motivated by resource deficiencies. We postulate that beyond motivation, managers’ and civil servants’ networking behavior is shaped by the structuring of opportunities for interaction ensuing from HRM policies and the spatial design of government offices. Employing a mixed-method blend of survey and focus groups with low- and mid-level Israeli civil servants in the first eight years of employment, we analyze whether and how opportunities, ensuing from their mode of recruitment and training, mobility between departments, and work at geographically central government offices enable their exchange with colleagues from other departments. We further show that underlying the association between opportunities for interaction and external networking behavior is civil servants’ sense of shared language and outlook and trust-based relations.

Current studies of citizens’ coping behaviors in public encounters lack a direct examination of what citizens say and how they say it. Moreover, despite the ubiquity of citizens’ written communications with the state, such interactions are seldom studied. This article contributes a relational approach to studies of citizens’ coping behaviors by developing a taxonomy and detailed operationalization of citizens’ communication styles in written public encounters. This taxonomy is based on an abductive content analysis of over 1,000 citizen web contacts to an Israeli welfare agency, mostly during coronavirus disease 2019. We show that citizens’ written communications differ in their inclination to espouse demanding, pleading, civil, or neutral styles. Additionally, we tentatively show that citizens’ subjective experiences of administrative burdens and trust in government are correlated with the variation in their communication styles. The taxonomy, its operationalization, and preliminary findings open up new avenues for studying citizens’ coping behaviors in written encounters.

The global experience of political polarization, and politicians’ attacks on democratic institutions, render individuals’ identification with the governing coalition, or with its opposition, a likely antecedent of their attraction to work for government organizations. This article examines to what extent individuals’ partisan alignmentwith the governing coalition, and perceptions of its actions as a threat to democracy, shape attraction to government jobs. Findings are based on a two-stage survey with 1,861 Israeli panel respondents, aged 21-30, carried out during the government’s attempt to undermine the legal system (hereafter: the Judicial Overhaul), and a follow-up survey experiment with 1,211of the respondents. Against the politically neutralexplanations of previous research, we showthat partisan alignment affects the propensity to choose a job in a government ministry versus other sectors. We find mixed evidence in support of the proposition that perceptions of the Judicial Overhaul as a threat to democracy underlie thiseffect.

Recent studies analyse bureaucrats’ responses to politicians’ engagement in unprincipled and illiberal policies, which are integral to democratic backsliding. Yet, in polarized societies, bureaucrats, due to their dual identities as government professionals and as citizens, are likely to hold divergent perceptions of the threat that politicians’ policies and actions pose to democracy. This, in turn, likely shapes their response, and thereby the extent to which they are likely to hinder or facilitate democratic backsliding. We examine this proposition in the context of Israel’s extreme right-wing coalition government’s attempt to curtail the powers and independence of the Supreme Court and replace government legal advisors selected on merit with political appointees (hereafter: the Legal Overhaul). We employ a mixed-methods design, combining a survey, interviews, and a focus group with civil servants in the Israeli central government. We find that civil servants who perceive the Legal Overhaul as a threat to Israel’s democracy report a higher inclination to exit government, and lower intentions to exercise their voice and to exert effort at work. Underlying these findings are respondents’ association of the Legal Overhaul with future politicization, and the threat posed to their conception of their role as civil servants.

This article examines whether, why and how inter-departmental networking behaviour enhances employees’ voice behaviour. Current literature suggests that employees’ willingness to voice ideas for improvement is contingent on managers creating an empowering and safe environment, yet external networking can also play a role by broadening employees’ horizons, alerting them to overlooked problems and providing them with access to alternative policy solutions and to strategic information regarding the position of other departments. Using a mixed-method of survey and focus groups, we show the association, and unpack the underlying mechanisms, between the intensity of public-sector employees’ networking with colleagues in other departments and their inclination to engage in voice behaviour

Public-administration research analyzes the variation in citizens’ experiences of administrative burdens, yet it is almost silent regarding their propensity to challenge bureaucratic hurdles. This article analyzes welfare applicants’ inclination to provide a bureaucracy with critical feedback regarding their experience of administrative burdens. We demonstrate that citizens’ minority identity and its intersection with gender, and prior reliance on means-tested benefits reduce their inclination to convey criticism, whereas academic education enhances it. The concrete research setting indicates that citizens’ objective knowledge and skills cannot account for the variation that we find. Drawing on supplementary analysis, we suggest that citizens’ internal self-efficacy, as well as their internalization of their social standing vis-à-vis bureaucracy, shape their voice behavior. These findings imply that the feedback that bureaucracies receive, and the problems that they are therefore more likely to rectify, pertain to those of citizens who are objectively and subjectively less burdened than others.

Housing affordability is an acute problem in many developed economies. It is rooted, inter alia, in a conflict of interests across levels of government. Policies that seek to increase the supply of housing and lower their purchase price are popular among the general electorate, yet local governments deploy urban planning regulations to restrict densification and development of affordable housing within their jurisdictions. Moves to address this conflict would benefit from unpacking city officials' policy preferences and their variation. This paper compares the positions of local-government politicians vs. those of unelected bureaucrats in Israeli cities, drawing on survey and interview data. Our findings confirm the conflicts of interest between levels of government even within Israel's unitary, centralized context. However, we show that career bureaucrats, given their relative freedom from electoral pressures and commitment to professional values, are more amenable to citizens' and central government's shared interest in densification and affordable housing. We also highlight city officials' place of residence—within vs. outside the city—and their social identification with citizens and residents as antecedents of their urban-planning preferences. We draw on these findings to delineate directions for more effective central–local government collaboration in seeking affordable housing solutions.

Exploiting rare access to doctors’ real-world judgments of incapacity benefits applications to an Israeli governmental program (2015–17), we examine the prevalence and underlying mechanisms of discrimination against Muslims versus Jews. To mitigate confounding explanations for unequal treatment, we restrict the analysis to claimants whose applications passed a strict medical-disability threshold so that their medical condition was undisputed. Theoretically, we offer a comprehensive theoretical framework for possible micro-mechanisms underlying bureaucratic discrimination of minorities, the decision-environment conditions that instigate them, and observational implications for their decoding. Findings indicate that despite organizational commitment to equality Jewish doctors were more likely to reject applications by Muslims and to recommend partial compensation for Jews. We find no differences with regard to full compensation. Further, we empirically illustrate how our proposed theoretical framework can be employed to analyze which micro-mechanism is most likely to underlie discrimination and to empirically decipher among alternative explanations, demonstrating that bureaucratic discrimination, in this case, is best explained by implicit prejudice triggered under conditions of complexity and ambiguity that undermined doctors’ systematic processing of information.