Text

theses

ETD doctoral

Bureaucratic reputation has been defined as a set of beliefs about an organization’s capacities, intentions, history, and mission that are embedded in a network of multiple audiences (Carpenter, 2010, 45). An agency’s reputation is closely linked to its level of approval and support, allowing the agency to establish autonomy, accumulate power, and enhance legitimacy when it is effectively managed (Maor, 2016). Also, previous studies have shown that the reputational concerns of agencies shape their behaviors, such as accountability, collaboration, and communication strategies (Busuioc, 2016; Gilad, Maor, & Ben-Nun Bloom, 2013; Ingold & Leifeld, 2014).

While scholars have paid increasing attention to the consequences of bureaucratic reputation for the behavior and autonomy of public organizations, little is known about: 1) measuring bureaucratic reputation in the eyes of citizens and other audiences, 2) predictors of citizens’ reputation judgments of various agencies, and 3) strategies to shape audiences’ reputation judgments. All of these issues are key to understanding and thus managing bureaucratic reputation. Given that knowing how reputations are formed and cultivated remains “fundamental to understanding the role of public administration in a democracy” (Carpenter & Krause, 2012, 26), more research on bureaucratic reputation from the viewpoint of citizens is needed.

This dissertation probes three different research questions related to the construction of bureaucratic reputation in the eyes of citizens. The theoretical frameworks are grounded upon both the accountability and management literatures, particularly governance theory and New Public Management. Based on these perspectives, the first essay focuses on developing and validating reputation measurements through an empirically grounded scale development process. The second essay explores predictors of citizens’ reputation judgments of U.S. federal agencies using national survey data. The third essay examines reputation management, particularly the effect of communication strategies on citizens’ reputation judgments, utilizing a set of survey experiments.
The results provide empirically grounded tools and ideas that help better understand bureaucratic reputation at the individual level of the citizenry, perhaps the most important audience of any bureaucracy. First, the results provide a validated scale to measure bureaucratic reputation that can be used in surveys and other studies. Second, the results show how citizens’ characteristics shape their reputation judgments of federal agencies. Third, the results demonstrate how citizens’ reputation judgments can be managed through agency communication strategies after a policy or administrative failure. Taken together, these findings enhance the theoretical understanding of bureaucratic reputation and provide public agencies with empirical implications for managing their relations with the public.

ETD_10869

doi:10.7282/t3-86zq-sm85

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

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