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.

Studies of the ramifications of client race and ethnicity for bureaucrats’ judgments treat minority status as homogenous. Yet, individual identity does not boil down to race or ethnicity. Members of racial and ethnic minority groups likely vary in their experiences and capacity to overcome the negative sentiments and stereotypes that burden their inherited group. To transcend unidimensional explanations, we combine Van Oorschot's deservingness framework and a gendered lens to study how the intersection of group identity and gender, as well as individuals' work history, co-shape bureaucrats' categorization of clients. Empirically, we analyze Israeli doctors' categorization of applicants for state incapacity benefits, comparing their medical assessments of men and women of three social groups: the Jewish majority, Ultra-orthodox Jews, and Muslims. Interpreting the empirical findings, we offer that underlying the effect of applicants' group demographics are perceived cultural affinity to the majority and social contributions that vary with gender.

This article is an edited version of the roundtable that took place at the Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas (CIDE) in Mexico City, June 6th, 2018. Based on a set of key questions about regulation as a field of studies with implications for public administration, public management and public policies, as well as a fundamental activity of multiple organizations and numerous public servants, Sharon Gilad, Andrea Mennicken, Salvador Parrado, Bruno Queiroz Cunha and Martin Lodge participated in a free flowing conversation hosted by Mauricio I. Dussauge-Laguna. Their commentaries and points of view about theoretical and empirical developments of regulation around the world provide some interesting insights into the state of this field, its essential debates and its future implications (both theoretical and practical).

Studies of the Israeli public sector point to the vast influence of the Ministry of Finance (MOF) across multiple policy domains. This chapter combines bureaucratic politics research and the notion of veto players to theorize a two-tiered power game between bureaucratic and political players. It argues that the policy influence of bureaucracies is shaped by stable institutional factors and by the extent to which powerful politicians are inclined to intervene. In Israel, legal provisions vest the MOF with an institutional advantage over other bureaus and their ministers. Yet the MOF’s ability to exploit its advantaged position is contingent upon the joint propensity of the prime minister (PM) and the finance minister (FM) to forgo intervention. The chapter associates the PM’s and FM’s inclination to support the MOF with their political motivation to maintain their grip on the agenda of an increasingly fragmented coalition government. Thus, the MOF’s supremacy is reliant upon, and underpins, political power.

Studies of gender in entrepreneurship acknowledge that gender norms are at the root of women’s disadvantage in resource-acquisition but provide limited guidance on how societal (macro-level) norms and their gendering influence entrepreneurs’ micro-level behaviours and stakeholders’ decisions within local contexts. To address this lacuna, we draw on gender theory and French Pragmatist Sociology (FPS) to offer G-FPS: an analytical and methodological framework of resource-claiming as a process of justifying, engaging and testing, embedded in normative context that constructs gender roles and social worth. Through analysis of a historical case of business resource-acquisition in pre-state Israel, we theorize and demonstrate how local gendered norms steered men and women to diverge in their justifications and self-presentation when making their claims, and how stakeholders evaluated those claims according to their fit with situated gender expectations. We thus illustrate how macro-level gender norms infiltrate and operate within micro-level processing, persistently favouring men over women.