LIST OF PANELS

Bureaucratic dysfunctions—such as red tape, goal subversions, capacity deficits or implementation gaps—have centre stage in the debate about the performance of public administrations.

Bureaucratic discretion—the freedom of public officials to choose between courses of action—can be a fundamental resource for public performance. In fact, part of the literature on discretion highlights the importance of individualised judgement, accommodation to citizens’ needs, effective use of local knowledge, and avoidance of formalism. However, organisational theory also recognises that bureaucrats are people with values, feelings, and emotions, which may bind their rationality in decision-making processes, contributes to significant biases, and produce unwanted effects. Further, the literature highlights several negative sides in the discretion granted to bureaucrats: subversion of policy goals, favouritism, abuse of power, tokenism, gatekeeping, omissions, prejudice, blame-avoidance, bureau-shaping attitudes and others. 

Kahneman, Sibony, & Sunstein (2021) have recently popularised noise as a type of error that produces unwanted variability in the judgment of similar cases (Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein 2021). Noise happens when public officials examine the same case but take different decisions. Inconsistency in administrative action is a problem for equal treatment and policy effectiveness. On the one hand, citizens are treated differently, notwithstanding similar conditions and requests, undermining a fundamental principle of the administrative legitimacy of democratic regimes. On the other, especially in the case of professional judgements, noisy administrations will systematically deliver wrong solutions. If similar cases are dealt with differently, some of these decisions will be mistaken, threatening the delivery of effective solutions to public problems. 

Most studies of the downsides of discretion look for the variability of decisions at the individual level, whereas noise regards systemic administrative inconsistency, which is often hard to detect. Noise has been measured in sectors as diverse as sentencing (Anderson, Kling, Stith 1999), refugee asylum (Ramji-Nogales, Schoenholtz, and Schrag 2007), decisions to grant patents (Lemley, Sampat 2012), fingerprints recognition, diagnostic readings, medical prescriptions and anti-seismic regulation (Busetti, Righettini, Sbalchiero 2022). However, in the family of bureaucratic dysfunctions, the recognition of administrative inconsistency and the design and implementation of tools and programs to measure and deal with it are still in their infancy.

The panel aims to explore the benefits and dysfunctions of bureaucratic discretion, investigating the border between its positive and negative sides. Contributions will cover the causes of discretionary decisions, their impacts, and the relevant programs and tools. The central hypothesis is that there is a trade-off between constraints to discretion and policy effectiveness, whereas dysfunctions may be reduced together with policy effectiveness.

The panel will be onsite. 

This panel accepts theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions dealing with bureaucratic dysfunctions related to public officials’ discretion. We welcome papers with any geographic scope, focusing on local, national or international settings. Single or multiple cases using qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods are accepted. Particular interest regards papers investigating the inconsistency of decisions by bureaucracies, with both an individual and systemic focus.  

Papers may inquire about the causes of bureaucratic dysfunctions and variability of decisions. Policy issues in which multiple domains occupy a single problem space run the risk of miscommunication and lack of learning due to diverse professional and methodological backgrounds, each having specific technical languages and metrics for success (Schmidt 2021). In addition, job characteristics may affect the variability in policy and administrative decisions (Hupe and Hill 2015). Finally, clients’ demeanor and characteristics have also been recognised as affecting street-level bureaucrats’ decision-making practices (Jensen, 2019).  

Another topic for inquiry regards the consequences of dysfunctions, especially inconsistency and unequal treatment. Topics such as discrimination, prejudice, and errors are well-known in the literature. Other topics worth exploring include analyses of how unwanted variability affects learning capacity and democratic legitimacy (Bertelli, 2021). 

Methodological and empirical papers presenting results and tools for diagnosing, assessing and measuring bureaucratic dysfunctions and inconsistency are also welcome. 

Finally, we invite theoretical and empirical papers analysing tools, programs, and procedures dealing with dysfunction and discretion. Papers may explore new technologies, algorithms, big data and behavioural tools, and more traditional solutions such as training, guidelines, focus groups, regulations, incentives and constraints. Two strands of inquiry may be particularly relevant in this respect. On the one hand, we are especially interested in analysing multi-actor decisions. Applying a strategic systems lens to the study of bureaucratic dysfunctions may be particularly fruitful given the sprawling nature of policy solutions, which frequently require the cooperation and investment of multiple complex organisations to develop and implement interventions (Buchanan and Badham, 2020). On the other, behavioural tools are another topic of inquiry. They are normally used for the ‘last mile’ of behavioural challenges for correcting behaviours in which preferable options are known. Their use for public officials and preventing unwanted decision methods can be a field worth of greater exploration.