From performance to morality: How politicians frame bureaucracy, its organizations, and public sector employees

Jessy Hendriks; Koen Damhuis; Sjors Overman

doi:10.1111/puar.13879

From performance to morality: How politicians frame bureaucracy, its organizations, and public sector employees

Jessy Hendriks, Koen Damhuis, Sjors Overman^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

Politicians frequently voice criticisms vis-à-vis bureaucracy, its organizations, and its employees. Previous studies point at the negative impact of this “bureaucratic bashing” on public sector morale, recruitment, retention, and citizen perceptions. Yet, systematic evidence on bashing remains sparse, with even less known about its counterpart: bureaucratic praising. This article aims to fill this gap by conceptualizing both phenomena as forms of framing, by distinguishing macro-, meso-, and micro-levels, and by innovatively using organizational reputation theory to develop a multidimensional framework for the systematic analysis of bureaucratic framing. Empirically, we apply this framework to a novel dataset of 70,853 hand-coded tweets posted by 33 Dutch politicians, covering a wide range of ideological viewpoints. We find that politicians do not so much frame the civil service performatively, in terms of being lazy (or hard working), but rather bash or praise bureaucratic organizations for their (im)morality, whereby four moral subdimensions can be identified.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	846-861
Journal	Public Administration Review
Volume	85
Issue number	3
Early online date	22 Sept 2024
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13879
Publication status	Published - Jun 2025

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 The Author(s). Public Administration Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Public Administration.

Funding

We would like to thank Barbara Vis for her elaborate feedback on this article. Previous versions of this article have also been presented at the \u2018Reputation and Regulation in Turbulent Times\u2019 panel at the Netherlands Institute of Governance 2023 conference, and the ECPR Summer School on Political Communication. We would like to thank all participants for sharing their thoughts and comments. Sjors Overman would like to acknowledge funding received for this project from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), as part of the NWO\u2010VENI project \u201CFrom Feared to Felt Accountability\u201D (Veni.201R.054).

Funders	Funder number
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research(NWO)	Veni.201R.054

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Public Administration Review - 2024 - Hendriks - From performance to morality How politicians frame bureaucracy itsFinal published version, 490 KBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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From performance to morality: How politicians frame bureaucracy, its organizations, and public sector employees

Abstract

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