Understanding street-level bureaucrats’ attitude towards clients: Towards a measurement instrument
| Published date | 01 January 2020 |
| Date | 01 January 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0952076718789749 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Understanding
street-level bureaucrats’
attitude towards clients:
Towards a measurement
instrument
Shelena Keulemans
Department of Public Administration and Sociology, Erasmus
University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Steven Van de Walle
Public Governance Institute, KU Leuven Faculteit Sociale
Wetenschappen, Leuven, Belgium
Abstract
The attitude of street-level bureaucrats towards their clients has an impact on the
decisions they take. Still, such attitudes have not received much scholarly attention,
nor are they generally studied in much detail. This article uses Breckler’s psychological
multicomponent model of attitude to develop a scale to measure street-level bureau-
crats’ general attitude towards their clients. By means of a test study (N¼218) and a
replication study (N¼879), the article shows that street-level bureaucrats’ attitude
towards clients consists of four different components: a cognitive attitude component,
a positive affective attitude component, a negative affective attitude component and a
behavioural attitude component. It also establishes a conceptual and empirical distinc-
tion from related attitudes, such as prosocial motivation, work engagement, bureau-
crats’ rule-following identities and self-efficacy, and suggests avenues for application and
further validation among different groups of street-level bureaucrats. This instrument
opens up opportunities for theory testing and causality testing that surpasses case-
specific considerations.
Keywords
Bureaucratic attitudes, clients, multicomponent model, scale development, street-level
bureaucracy
Public Policy and Administration
2020, Vol. 35(1) 84–113
!The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0952076718789749
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Corresponding author:
Steven Van de Walle, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Faculteit Sociale Wetenschappen, Parkstraat 45, Box
3609, Leuven 3000, Belgium.
Email: steven.vandewalle@kuleuven.be
Introduction
The Weberian model portrays bureaucratic encounters as characterized by imper-
sonality and affective neutrality to prevent bureaucrats’ personal attitudes from
permeating these encounters (Katz and Danet, 1973a; Merton, 1940). In reality,
however, it is impossible to separate street-level bureaucrats’ attitudinal dispos-
itions and their interactions with clients (Baviskar and Winter, 2017; Lipsky, 1980;
Oberfield, 2014). Bureaucrats rely on their attitudinal dispositions to process clients
to cope with complex cases, ambiguous rules and resource strain (Lipsky, 1980). By
means of these attitudinal dispositions, psychological simplifications of clients
emerge that ‘redefine [...] the nature of the clientele to be served’ (Lipsky, 1980:
141). As a result, street-level bureaucrats’ attitude towards clients introduces bias
to the bureaucratic encounter and its outcomes (e.g. Baviskar and Winter, 2017;
Kroeger, 1975; Oberfield, 2014; Prottas, 1979; Stone, 1981), making this attitude
key to understanding bureaucratic decision-making, street-level performance and
official-client relations.
Attitudes are among the most studied phenomena in survey research in the field
of public administration (PA) (Lee et al., 2012) and current developments in this
field, such as the emergence of the behavioural PA movement (e.g.
Grimmelikhuijsen et al., 2017), triggered a revived interest in this phenomenon.
Despite renewed attention for the study of attitudes, the concept of street-level
bureaucrats’ attitude towards clients is still plagued by conceptual unclarity and
unsound measurement efforts (e.g. see Lee et al., 2012). Poor measurement bears a
risk of generating faulty data (DeVellis, 2003) and, subsequently, reaching errone-
ous conclusions (Lee et al., 2012). Despite multiple calls to improve measurement
quality in our field (e.g. Perry, 2012), scale development is still scarce in PA
(Grimmelikhuijsen et al., 2017; for examples, see Perry, 1996; Tummers, 2012;
Tummers and Musheno, 2015).
The aim of this article is to develop a measurement instrument for street-level
bureaucrats’ attitude towards clients, based on material collected among one spe-
cific type of bureaucrat. Grounded in psychological attitude theory, such a scale
will allow for a multidimensional measurement of attitudes towards clients, at a
sufficiently abstract level as to exclude case-specific considerations. The instrument
also allows to conceptually distinguish bureaucrats’ attitude towards clients
from other related attitudes. More in particular, we consider street-level bureau-
crats’ prosocial motivation, work engagement, rule-following identities and self-
efficacy – all attitudes that have been studied in a public work context but that
are theoretically different. The use of the psychological multicomponent model of
attitudes (see Breckler, 1984) furthermore allows to move beyond current practice
to rely on one-dimensional scales when measuring bureaucrats’ attitudes towards
clients.
Developing a measurement instrument for street-level bureaucrats’ general atti-
tude towards clients has merit for multiple reasons. First, it opens up opportunities
for the quantification of bureaucrats’ general assessment of clients, aiding
scholars to draw inferences that surpass study and context specificities
Keulemans and Van de Walle 85
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