Projects

Horizontal Legitimacy Spillover in Complex Organizational Settings

We apply pre-registered survey experiments to examine whether contextual validity cues affect evaluators’ propriety beliefs. The findings suggest that propriety judgments incorporate available validity cues and are the result of horizontal legitimacy spillover effects across organizations. The empirical analysis reveals detailed patterns of propriety formation when evaluators face a complex setting (such as a public-private partnership).

Individual judgments of organizational legitimacy: Experimental evidence regarding the effects of prototype alignment, validity, and consensus on evaluators’ propriety beliefs

This study examines the construction of individual legitimacy judgments and analyzes how organizational categories, validity, and consensus affect propriety beliefs. We conducted two vignette experiments. The results suggest that deviation from organizational prototype reduces propriety beliefs. However, positive validity cues (i.e., authorization) overlay this adverse effect. 

Corporate Social Responsibility Activities as a Basis of Assessment for Individual Legitimacy Judgments

This research investigates micro-level interactions between legitimacy seeker (company) and legitimacy conferrer (individual evaluator). We use a preregistered survey experiment to examine the construction of individual propriety beliefs of companies and their CSR activities. 

Strategic legitimization of administrative burdens: A prospect for bureaucratic politics

Administrative burden has been understood as a form of hidden politics in its burgeoning literature. An underlying assumption is that since administrative burdens are opaque, they can be imposed quietly without attracting much attention from the public. We challenge this assumption, with an argument that the opaque nature of administrative burdens may also facilitate their explicit use for political purposes. Administrative burdens in citizen-state interactions are justified based on subjectively assessed legitimacy rather than objective evidence. In this study, we test a theoretical model of three framing cues that legitimize administrative burdens of welfare programs.

Gendered Language in Job Advertisements Relates to Gender Sorting in Public Labor Markets: A Multi-Source Analysis

The lack of diversity in many public sector professions aggravates the difficulties recruiters face. Hence, actively addressing the lack of diversity through recruitment practice is relevant from two distinct perspectives. This study examines whether gendered language affects recruitment success. We derive insights from a unique dataset. We combine a text-based corpus of job advertisements with matched survey data from recruiters. 

The Legitimacy of Algorithmic Decision-Making in Public E-Services

The emerging application of algorithmic decision-making systems in public administrations bears a wide array of challenges regarding fairness, opaqueness, and societal values. We are left asking how algorithmic decision-making impacts the perceived legitimacy of public organizations. This study investigates citizens’ individual preferences when using public e-services. We examine citizens’ corresponding legitimacy judgments related to an organization implementing a public service using either human or algorithmic decision-making.

Policy formulation and external consultants: A discrete-choice experiment on politicians’ make-or-buy decisions

Public organizations widely use external consultants in response to turbulence, complexity, and crises. Involving external consultants arguably provides government with additional resources, expertise, and experience, but their involvement may erode organizational capacity, accountability, and democracy. We aim to inform which policy issues are most prone to the involvement of external consultants. We examine the research question through a discrete choice experiment (DCE) among Dutch local government representatives. 

Perceived administrative burden: A cross-national scale development and validation

This study presents a validated scale for measuring perceived administrative burden. Based on expert feedback, we developed a multi-item scale covering the domains of perceived learning costs, compliance costs, psychological costs, and generic burdens. We tested the scale using large-scale, cross-national samples from the US and South Korea (n = 3,000). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, performed on randomly split samples with three imputed datasets, confirmed the scale’s construct validity. Correlational analyses further affirmed convergent and discriminant validity. 

Trickle-Down Effect of Top Management Representativeness

This study applies data from the Italian public sector workforce, harnessing  extensive information on the employment structure of around 8,000 Italian municipalities. We study the share of female employees in non-managerial and lower managerial levels, predicted by gender representation at the top managerial level.