Abstract
Bureaucratic reputation has been defined as a set of beliefs about a public organization’s capacities, roles, and obligations that are embedded in a network of multiple audiences (Carpenter, 2010). Although one of the most important audiences in a democracy is the citizenry, very little empirical investigation has looked at citizens’ beliefs about specific government agencies and what individual or contextual factors influence these beliefs. To examine this question, this study analyzes data from a unique 2013 Pew Political Survey that represents the responses of 1500 US citizens on the reputations of 12 federal agencies. Results demonstrate that citizens view the reputations of some agencies (such as the CDC and NASA) much more favorably than other agencies (such as the IRS and the Department of Education). In regression analyses, findings suggest that the reputation of federal agencies varies according to citizens’ general level of trust in government and their political ideology, but that demographic, socioeconomic and regional differences also shape reputation judgments. These findings provide some preliminary empirical understanding of the reputation of government agencies in the eyes of the citizenry and may have implications for agencies seeking to manage their relationship with the public.
Points for practitioners
Bureaucratic reputation has important implications for public administrators because of its influence on a government agency’s autonomy, power, and legitimacy. Our study examines the reputations of 12 US federal government agencies and identifies individual and contextual determinants of citizens’ reputation ratings. We demonstrate that reputations differ between agencies and that certain factors – especially political ideology and trust in government – shape how the public views an agency’s reputation. These findings can help practitioners understand better how to strategically manage their agency’s reputation given an increasingly critical citizenry.
Introduction
Bureaucratic reputation has been defined as a set of beliefs about a public organization’s capacities, roles, and obligations that are embedded in a network of multiple audiences, including citizens (Carpenter, 2001, 2010). Bureaucratic reputation has received growing scholarly attention in the field of public administration, with a body of studies showing the significant role reputation plays in guiding the behavior of public organizations and shaping their power and effectiveness (Carpenter, 2001, 2010; Maor, 2011; Maor and Sulitzeanu-Kenan, 2013). These studies suggest that government agencies attempt to avoid being viewed negatively by the public and thus engage in strategies that enhance their reputations, such as blame shifting (Gilad et al., 2013). Although researchers have written extensively about the relationship between public organizations and reputation at a macro level, little work has been done on the formation of reputation judgments by citizens and other audiences at the micro level. Previous studies have tended to rely on proxy data to measure reputation, such as the coverage of agencies in newspapers or websites, assuming that these sources reflect the views of the public and other audiences. However, studying bureaucratic reputation as viewed directly by citizens at the individual level remains important, especially in the context of the US with its large population and wide variety of cultural backgrounds, ideological views, and geographical settings. It is especially interesting to focus on US federal agencies, as their functions often concentrate on particular segments of the population or regions of the country and thus their reputations may be dependent on associated interests or beliefs (Meier, 1987; Morgeson and Petrescu, 2011).
This study, therefore, provides an exploratory investigation of the reputation of US federal agencies in the eyes of citizens using data from a 2013 Pew Political Survey. This survey is unique in that, rather than asking about the federal government in general, it taps into citizens’ favorability judgments of 12 specifically named federal agencies. Capturing reputation with a survey question has its limitations because public agencies are viewed within a complex network of multiple audiences having pluralistic interests. As Carpenter and Krause (2012: 27) observe, ‘[c]omplex public organizations are seen “through a glass but dimly’ by their manifold audiences”. The Pew survey does a good job, we would argue, of capturing this ‘dim’ view of bureaucratic reputation as seen by citizens. Results demonstrate that citizens view the reputations of some federal agencies (such as the CDC and NASA) much more favorably than other organizations (such as the IRS and the Department of Education (DOE)). In regression analyses, findings suggest that the reputation of federal agencies varies according to citizens’ general level of trust in government and their political ideology, but that demographic, socioeconomic and regional differences also shape reputation judgments. The following sections provide the theoretical background, data, and results of our study.
Background
Reputations are either positive or negative, meaning that they have direction or valence (Walker, 2010). Also, according to Fombrun (2012: 100), reputation can be understood as ‘a collective assessment’ of an organization’s ‘attractiveness’ in the eyes of a particular group of stakeholders. Our study relies on this definition in part, as it focuses on the ‘favorability’ of federal agencies in the eyes of citizens. In the field of public administration, bureaucratic reputation has been defined by Carpenter (2010: 45) as ‘a set of symbolic beliefs about the unique or separable capacities, roles, and obligations of organizations, where these beliefs are embedded in audience networks’. Indeed, Carpenter’s work has inspired a growing body of research on the importance of reputation in the public sector, initially focused on the relationship between administration and politics (Carpenter, 2001, 2010; Maor, 2011; Roberts, 2006). These scholars argue in particular that favorable reputations give legitimacy to agencies and thus become a source of bureaucratic autonomy and power in a system of democratic governance (Carpenter, 2001).
Another stream of research in this area has focused on the impact of reputation on the behaviors of public agencies. These studies have found that reputation influences bureaucratic performance, administrative choices, and cooperation within networks (Busuioc, 2016; Christensen and Lodge, 2018; Gilad et al., 2013; Ingold and Leifeld, 2014; Krause and Douglas, 2005; Maor et al., 2012; Maor and Sulitzeanu-Kenan, 2013; Moynihan, 2012). Findings from these studies suggest that public organizations try to avoid being negatively perceived by improving their performance as well as by choosing strategic responses to reduce blame. In addition, findings indicate that agencies attempt to manipulate their reputation as a way to increase their power in policy networks. However, as Moore (2015) showed with the example of the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), it is sometimes possible for organizations to have good performance even when they suffer from a poor reputation because of high-profile scandals.
The fact that bureaucratic reputation is characterized by externally formed subjectivity (Carpenter, 2010) implies that factors outside of the actions or performance of a public organization could affect its reputation. These factors include characteristics of the audience members themselves and the contexts in which they experience or perceive an agency. While reputation is seen as the aggregated perceptions of multiple audiences, it could possibly cover the opinion of particular subgroups of the public (Page and Shapiro, 1992). Citizens have fragmentary and conflicting attitudes based on different values, expectations or interests that can lead them to perceive the same objective circumstances in various ways and thus lead to diverse policy preferences (Chong and Druckman, 2007; Page and Shapiro, 1992). Moreover, citizens’ attitudes towards a federal agency tend to be shaped by how they value that agency’s functions and responsibilities (Meier, 1987). These considerations imply that even if an agency performs well, some people could still perceive the agency in less favorable terms because of ideological or other attributive factors. Indeed, previous studies have found that general attitudes toward government tend to be associated in predictable ways with various demographic, socioeconomic, geographic and ideological characteristics, which can reflect self-interest as well as cultural and other differences (Page and Shapiro, 1992; Rudolph and Evans, 2005; Sanders, 1988). These relationships, which form the main focus of our empirical analysis, are summarized in Figure 1 and discussed in the remainder of this section.
Conceptual model of citizen characteristics as determinants of agency reputations.
We first include demographic factors, such as gender, race, and age because studies of policy preference and public opinion have found evidence that these factors influence people’s perceptions of government in general as well as specific public policy issues. For example, gender has been shown to influence judgments of policy issues such as social welfare, environmental protection, public safety and education (Cook, 1979; Page and Shapiro, 1992; Rudolph and Evans, 2005; Shapiro and Mahajan, 1986). Building on these findings, we might expect that women would be more inclined to view the reputations of related agencies in more favorable terms – the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the DOE. Race and ethnicity have also been found to influence policy preferences, particularly for African Americans to be relatively more supportive of medical care, welfare, educational opportunity, and environment because of their historical experiences of institutional racism and social and economic disadvantage (Eismeier, 1982; Page and Shapiro, 1992). Based on these findings, this study assumes that African Americans may be more likely to perceive agencies like the HHS, DOE, and EPA as having good reputations. The role of age in public opinion has also been emphasized, in part because of cohort effects (historical differences in policy contexts over the lifespan) as well as differences in the needs of older people due to their economic, social, and physical conditions. Many studies have suggested that older people care more about Social Security, Medicare, and law enforcement (Fraile and Ferrer, 2005; Matheson and Wearing, 1999; Page and Shapiro, 1992). Younger citizens, in turn, tend to favor policy areas such as education, the environment, and science and technology (Eismeier, 1982; Rudolph and Evans, 2005; Sanders, 1988). Correspondingly, we might expect older people to view the HHS (which administers Medicare) and the Social Security Administration (although this agency is not included in the Pew survey) as having higher reputations, while younger people might be expected to give more reputational weight to the EPA, DOE and NASA.
The level of socioeconomic status (SES), which includes the characteristics of income and education, is also likely to influence reputation judgments. Previously, studies have shown that SES is associated with access to services, social and professional networks, and other resources that shape political attitudes and policy preferences (Bradeley and Corwyn, 2002). Some researchers have suggested that higher SES is associated with support for the arts, science, human and social rights, and the environment, while lower SES is associated with a preference for social welfare programs, including healthcare, education, and welfare (Busemeyer et al., 2009; Page and Shapiro, 1992). Based on this prior research, we expect higher SES citizens to judge the reputations of agencies such as the Department of Justice (DOJ) NASA and EPA in favorable terms, while lower SES people would be more likely view the DOE and HHS as having good reputations.
Geographical characteristics, such as region (the South, Northeast, West, Midwest) and community type (urban, suburban, rural) could also be expected to influence citizens’ judgments of agency reputations. One reason for this is that, in the US, federal policies impact regions and communities differently. For example, the West contains an abundance of national forests, parklands, and natural resources. As a result, the citizens of the West might be expected to have a greater interest in the policies of agencies like the EPA. The West is also home to much of the aerospace industry, so it is possible that NASA has a more positive reputation in the region. The Northeast is more urban and densely populated and thus more affected by agencies such as the Department of Transportation and Department of Housing and Urban Development (although neither of these agencies is included in the Pew survey). The South contains many military bases; thus, citizens there may be more strongly supportive of defense agencies (Page and Shapiro, 1992; Rice et al., 2002). Although there are clear data limitations, and many of these hypotheses remain exploratory, we nevertheless believe that region, in the US context, has the potential to shape agency reputations as viewed by citizens.
With respect to community type, urban areas often benefit more from federal mass transit and housing programs, so it is likely that agencies like the DOT and HUD may be seen as more reputable by people living in urban areas. Another factor is the disadvantages of service availability and accessibility in rural areas compared to urban areas (Allard and Cigna, 2008). For example, healthcare service delivery in the US is highly skewed toward urban areas by the imbalanced distribution of resources and facilities (Ricketts, 2000). Also, there has been a long discussion about urban–rural differences in the impacts of environmental policies, although the results are mixed (Althoff and Greign, 1977; Lowe and Pinhey, 1982). This might suggest that people who live in rural areas would be less likely to prefer the HHS and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
In addition, we hypothesize that citizens’ views of agency reputations depend a great deal on political ideology, which has been referred to as an ‘underlying principle’ of much of the variation in public opinion about government and public policy (Feldman, 1988: 416). For example, previous studies have demonstrated that liberals tend to prefer the involvement of government in solving social problems, including welfare, environmental protection, and education, while conservatives prefer policies that promote less government involvement and regulation, except for national defense (Lavertu and Moynihan, 2013; Rudolph and Evans, 2005). Thus, this study assumes that people who are liberal would form more favorable judgments of the reputations of agencies such as the EPA, HHS, DOE, and CDC, while conservatives would consider the DOD and NSA as having good reputations. Trust in government has been considered another important measure of political ideology that is often associated with policy preferences. According to sacrifice-based theory, political trust is related to people’s support for programs involving widely distributed cost with narrowly concentrated benefits (welfare, healthcare, public schools) but not programs having universal distribution of benefits (crime prevention, environmental protection, and national defense) (Hetherington, 2005; Rudolph and Evans, 2005). This leads us to expect that people who trust government would be more likely to assign reputational value to the HHS and DOE, while the reputations of the DOJ, EPA, DHS, NSA and DOD would be less affected by the level of trust.
Data and measures
As mentioned, we use the Political Survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in October 2013. Adults 18 years of age or older from all 50 states were interviewed by both landline and cellular telephones (http://www.people-press.org). Telephone calls were made by random digit dialing (RDD), a probability sampling method that gives all phone numbers in the US a known chance of being included and thus helps ensure coverage and representativeness. There were 1500 respondents of which 750 were called on landlines, and 750 were called on cell phones. The final sample size is 1273, after excluding responses with missing values. 1
Outcome variable: overall reputation of federal agencies
In organizational theory literature, there are generally two approaches to measuring reputation: an overall measure and an attribute-specific measure (Dowling and Gardberg, 2012). We follow the former approach and use an overall measure of reputation that represents ‘a collective assessment’ of an organization’s ‘attractiveness’ (Fombrun, 2012: 109). This overall measure is also consistent with some definitions of reputation that emphasize attractiveness, likeability, and admiration (Wæraas and Byrkjeflot, 2012). Thus, we employ the following question from the Pew survey: ‘Now I would like to ask you about some parts of the government. Is your overall opinion of [INSERT AGENCY] very favorable, mostly favorable, mostly unfavorable, or very unfavorable?’ To facilitate multivariate modeling, as explained more fully in the next section, we recoded this into a dichotomous variable where 1 = very/mostly favorable and 0 = very/mostly unfavorable.
In the Pew survey, this overall reputation measure was asked for 12 federal agencies: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Department of Education (DOE), the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the National Security Agency (NSA). Other federal agencies are of theoretical interest, as the above discussion suggests, but our empirical analysis of necessity is limited to these 12 agencies. Still, this Pew survey is one of only a few national surveys that has asked about specific federal agencies in such detail.
Figure 2 shows the 12 federal agencies in rank order of reputation, from highest to lowest, as measured by the favorability percentage. As can be seen, the reputations of these agencies vary quite a bit, from a high of nearly 90 percent for the CDC to a low of less than 50 percent for the IRS. It is interesting that science and health agencies (the CDC, NASA, and FDA) have generally good reputations overall, as do military agencies (the DOD and VA). The IRS is the lowest rated agency, as mentioned, no doubt because of the unpopularity of its main function of tax collection and enforcement. Interestingly, the other relative lower reputation agencies, the NSA and DOE, have been associated with politically contentious issues in the US, namely surveillance of communications (NSA) and education reform (DOE). More broadly, what Figure 2 shows is that federal agencies vary in their overall reputations in the eyes of the public. What individual and contextual characteristics of citizens explain this variation is the aim of our multivariate analysis, which we turn to next.
Reputations (favorability ratings) of 12 federal agencies (in rank order).
Predictor variables: individual and contextual characteristics
Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics of the sample in terms of demographics, SES, geographic characteristics, and ideology. The sample is about evenly divided between females (47 percent) and males (53 percent), with an average age of 53 (SD = 17.4). Blacks were 10 percent of the sample, while whites were 79 percent and Hispanics, Asians and other categories were relatively small. For this reason, we use a dichotomous measure of race (1 = black, 0 = other). Concerning socioeconomic status (SES), education was scored on an 8-point scale ranging from 1 (less than high school) to 8 (postgraduate or professional degree). Income was measured by a 9-point scale ranging from less than $10,000 to $150,000 or more. For geographic characteristics, we include regional dummy variables representing the West, Northeast, South, and Midwest, with the latter excluded for purposes of the regression analyses. We also included community type, with dummy variables representing rural (17 percent of respondents), urban (33 percent) or suburban (49 percent). In the regressions, suburban was excluded as the reference category.
Question wording and descriptive statistics for independent variables (n = 1273).
To measure ideology, we included both political ideology and overall trust in government. Political ideology was measured on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 = ‘very conservative’ to 5 = ‘very liberal’. We recoded this into dummy variables for conservative (40 percent) and liberal (23 percent), with moderate (37 percent) as the excluded category. Also, the survey asked respondents whether they trusted the government in Washington to do what was right, using a 4-point scale ranging from ‘never’ to ‘just about always’. The mean score of 2.08, which is below the midpoint, suggests that respondents in general had somewhat low levels of trust in government.
Analysis and results
Because we dichotomized the measures of reputation for each agency, as our dependent variables we employ binary logistic regressions in our analyses. We considered maintaining the 4-point ordinal scales and using an ordered logit model but found evidence in our data of violations of the proportional odds assumption. With respect to regression diagnostics, bivariate correlation results show that the variables have only modest intercorrelations (below .5), and tests revealed that there is no problem of multicollinearity. The results of our logistic regression analyses are presented in Table 2, which shows logit coefficients and pseudo R-squares. Note that, overall, the models explain a relatively modest proportion of variance in bureaucratic reputation, ranging from a low of 4 percent (for the VA and FDA) to a high of 17 percent (for the HHS and EPA). Nevertheless, there are some clear patterns of significant predictors of bureaucratic reputation for each of the 12 agencies.
Logit regression analyses of federal agency reputations.
Note: Table shows logistic regression coefficients; ***p<.01; **p<.05; *p<0.1 (two-tailed tests).
Beginning with demographic factors, the two variables associated most consistently with perceived bureaucratic reputation are gender and race-ethnicity. Specifically, women are more likely to view the DHS and the EPA as having good reputations, as we expected from prior research. Women also view the reputation of the NSA in more favorable terms, which was unexpected although perhaps similar to the DHS in its focus on security issues. Clearly, contrary to our expectations, women are less likely to rate the DOE as having a good reputation. We speculate that this may be explained in part by the greater involvement of women in local schools, which in the US have tended to be critical of recent DOE policies promoting more rigorous Common Core Standards and related testing. With respect to race-ethnicity, African Americans perceive the reputations of the FDA, HHS, and the EPA more positively, which is in line with our assumptions based on prior research. Curiously, African Americans judge the IRS as having a more positive reputation, relative to other race-ethnic groups, which may reflect a greater concern about redistributive policies. Finally, in contrast to our initial assumption, age was not a factor influencing the reputations of federal agencies it the eyes of citizens. This finding is somewhat surprising, given our expectation that cohort influences and age effects would shape the views of federal agency reputations in various ways.
Socioeconomic status appears as a significant predictor of the reputations of federal agencies, although not entirely in line with our expectations. As education level increases, people tend to view NASA more positively, which does fit our expectations. This result could possibly be explained by representative bureaucracy theory, which emphasizes the shared attitudes and values between administrators and certain segments of the public (Meier and Nigro, 1976). As NASA is associated with advances in science and technology, it may be that more educated people identify with the organization and its mission and thus view it more favorably. As expected, education is negatively related to the perceived reputations of the DHS, HHS and the DOE. Individuals with higher incomes, in turn, are more likely to judge the reputations of the CDC, the DOD, and the FDA in positive terms. Overall, however, income and education are related to the bureaucratic reputation in a somewhat more mixed pattern than we had assumed.
Turning to regional differences, in the Northeast, the CDC, NASA, and the DHS are agencies that are judged by people as having generally better reputations. In the South, people do not appear significantly distinct from people living in other regions except with respect to their judgments of the reputations of the CDC and NASA (both agencies with a large presence in the South). In the West, citizens tend to judge the DOE and DOD somewhat less favorably. Taken together, these results confirm the existence of a regional difference in the US in the perceived reputations of various federal agencies, although the pattern is complex and not entirely what we expected. We also found some urban–rural differences, with people living in rural areas viewing the reputation of the CDC in a less favorable light, perhaps because of the public health concerns in many rural areas in the US related to chronic disease and (more recently) opioid abuse. In contrast, people in urban areas tend to have a more favorable view of the reputation of the DOJ, while discounting that of the DHS. This may reflect the role of the DOJ in addressing the problems of policing in urban America (at the time of the survey) as well as the general concern with civil rights in more diverse, urban communities. Again, these patterns are complex and not fully in line with our preliminary assumptions.
Ideological factors, including political ideology and trust, emerge as the most consistent and strong predictors of the reputations of federal agencies in our results. As expected, conservatives have unfavorable attitudes towards regulatory agencies like the FDA and the EPA, as well as social welfare agencies like the HHS and civil rights agencies like the DOJ. Curiously, conservatives also discount the reputations of security agencies like the DHS and NSA. Liberals, for their part, view the reputation of the CDC positively, as well as the HHS, the EPA, and the DOE. In line with our expectation, liberals tend to have negative views of security agencies like the DOD and the DHS. The IRS is an especially interesting agency with respect to ideology, as it is viewed quite negatively by conservatives yet positively by liberals, most likely because of deeply divided views of the appropriate size and role of government. Finally, generalized trust in government is positively and significantly associated with all federal agencies’ reputations, meaning that people with higher trust gave higher reputation scores for every federal agency.
Discussion
This study provides some insights into the distinctive reputations of US federal agencies in the eyes of citizens and factors associated with reputation judgments. Some agencies are judged to have better reputations than others, we found, and this variation is tied to demographic, socioeconomic, geographic and ideological characteristics of citizens. For example, the CDC is rated as having the best reputation among the federal agencies studied, and its reputation is positively associated with income and also region (Northeast and South). The IRS is rated as having the lowest reputation among the 12 agencies in this study, and we found that liberals tend to judge the reputation of the IRS more positively than conservatives.
Somewhat expectedly, the reputations of federal agencies are strongly associated with how much citizens trust government generally. Those who trust government more judge the reputations of most agencies better than people who trust government less. This is in line with previous studies pointing out the relationship between the image of government and trust in government, which find that negative images of government organizations stem from the decline of general trust in government (Wæraas and Byrkjeflot, 2012). These findings have some implications for the debate about attitudes towards the public sector, specifically whether they are influenced by performance or more deep-seated stereotypes (Van de Walle et al., 2008). We can infer that regardless of the performance of the 12 federal agencies in this study, citizens’ judgments appear to be strongly influenced by their pre-existing trust in government in general.
Also, this study found that political ideology is an important factor, suggesting it may serve as a heuristic that citizens use to make inferences about a public organization, as Lavertu and Moynihan (2013) suggest. For liberals, we found contrasting attitudes towards so-called ‘liberal agencies’ and ‘conservative agencies’. Specifically, liberals give higher reputation ratings to agencies that reflect liberal policy priorities, such as the environment, education or health and human services. In contrast, liberals tend to view agencies having responsibility for national defense less favorably. Contrary to our expectation, conservatives view both liberal and conservative agencies less favorably, perhaps a reflection of their overall anti-government posture (Goodsell, 2014). Because the Pew survey was conducted in 2013 when Barack Obama was president and Democrats controlled the Senate, the political moment of the survey also likely influenced how conservatives rated federal agencies. It would be interesting to study how these views might have changed under President Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress. Interestingly, conservative ideology is only associated with the less favorably viewed federal agencies but not the four most highly-rated agencies. We can infer that the agencies with lower reputations tend to be more vulnerable to political ideology, and especially prone to criticism by conservatives.
Many of the other potential predictors, including demographics, SES, and geographic characteristics, have relatively weak relationships with bureaucratic reputations. Although previous studies suggest that age influences policy preferences, our results show that age was not a strong predictor of agency reputations. Also contrary to the policy preferences literature, we did not find a link between SES and the reputations of civil rights or environmental agencies. However, we did find an association between SES and the reputation of agencies involved in health, education, and security. Taken together, these results suggest that traditional predictors of policy preferences do not completely explain bureaucratic reputations.
Also, this study found some interesting inconsistencies in reputations between parent agencies and their subsidiaries. Our results show that the determinants of the reputation of the HHS are different from those of the CDC and FDA, which is somewhat surprising considering that the HHS is the parent agency of the CDC and FDA. The NSA, which is a part of the DOD, likewise shows a different pattern of determinants from its parent agency. These results indicate the possibility that each federal agency has its own somewhat independent reputation, and thus agencies within a larger department can and do appeal to different audiences in the larger society. More research should be done on this topic, including studies that look at the implications for bureaucratic politics and management when different agencies within the same department appeal to different audiences to bolster their reputations.
Limitations and implications for future research
This study has some limitations as well as implications for future research that seeks to understand how citizens view bureaucratic reputation. To begin with, we used questions on favorability as proxies for the reputations of federal agencies. Favorability ratings reveal the overall perceptions of an agency, but ‘favorability’ may not encompass all of the various dimensions that make up an agency’s reputation, such as performance, morality, procedural fairness, and technical competence (Carpenter, 2010). More effort should be made to improve the measurement of bureaucratic reputation in the eyes of citizens, including the development and validation of multi-item scales with better reliability as well as content validity along these key dimensions.
In addition, it would be helpful for future research to consider additional citizen characteristics and contextual factors as predictors of bureaucratic reputation. We examined a set of core variables, available in the Pew survey, that have some interesting associations with the reputations of various agencies. But it would be useful to consider other variables, particularly related to variation in citizens’ contact with and use of government services. Also, identifying the exact reasons why certain groups perceive agencies positively or negatively is limited in our study. Some possible mechanisms, as discussed earlier, include: preferences for the policies of the agencies, the performance of the agencies, the party in power and thus the overall direction of government policy, and even agency scandals. Further study, perhaps using more qualitative methods, should be done to probe the underlying reasons why citizens form their various reputation judgments of federal agencies.
Lastly, this study includes only 12 US federal agencies, which makes it hard to generalize the results to other US federal agencies, other levels of government, and other countries and national contexts. By adding more agencies, future studies could provide practitioners more ideas about how particular groups of people perceive their organizations. Also, studies of state and municipality governments, as well as studies from other parts of the world, would contribute to a better understanding of how citizens form their judgments of bureaucratic reputation.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.