Is It Going Above and Beyond or Breaking the Rules? How Clients' Identities, Perceived Deservingness, and Outcomes Affect Citizens' Judgments of Bureaucrats' Rule Decisions

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I explore factors that shape citizens' agreement with street‐level bureaucrats' decisions to either follow agency rules or break them for the explicit purpose of benefitting their clients (i.e., pro‐social rule breaking). I use data collected via an original survey experiment (n = 3485) to assess the relative effects of information about a street‐level bureaucrat's compliance with agency rules and the outcome their client experienced, asking whether the ends (e.g., a positive client outcome) ever justify the means (e.g., a bureaucrat choosing to pro‐socially break agency rules to help a client) for citizens. I also go a step further, assessing relative effects of information about the client's identity (i.e., race and gender) and deservingness to ask whether questions of for whom street‐level bureaucrats follow/pro‐socially break agency rules influence citizens' agreement. I find that citizens expressed significantly more average agreement with bureaucrats' decisions to follow rules rather than pro‐socially break them, and that citizens expressed more agreement with pro‐social rule‐breaking decisions when clients experienced positive outcomes. While cues about the client's race, gender, and deservingness initially seemed insignificant, a closer examination showed that citizens' agreement with bureaucrats' rule decisions sometimes depended on the race and gender of the client for whom those decisions were made. Overall, results indicate that some citizens base their agreement with a bureaucrat's rule decision on not only the bureaucrat's compliance and the client's outcome but also on whom the bureaucrat is serving.