How Public Managers Make Tradeoffs Regarding Lives: Evidence From a Flood Planning Survey Experiment

• Author: Kris Wernstedt,Patrick S. Roberts,Lucia Velotti
• Published date: 01 April 2021
• Date: 01 April 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0095399720944811
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0095399720944811

Administration & Society

2021, Vol. 53(4) 496 –526

© The Author(s) 2020

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0095399720944811

journals.sagepub.com/home/aas

Article

How Public Managers

Make Tradeoffs

Regarding Lives:

Evidence From a

Flood Planning Survey

Experiment

Patrick S. Roberts1, Lucia Velotti2,

and Kris Wernstedt1

Abstract

Public managers make decisions that may directly or indirectly affect the loss

of human life, but there are few empirical analyses of whether and how public

managers make tradeoffs among lives and other goods. We survey local

government managers in the United States about tradeoffs using a vignette

experiment with hypothetical flood scenarios. We find that managers make

tradeoffs regarding lives saved compared with other features of the scenario,

including project cost and property damage. Public works managers show a

greater aversion to fatalities, while city managers and planners appear less

averse. Our study also finds evidence of an equity preference.

Keywords

tradeoffs, ethics, value of life, emergency management, public managers,

public works, flood planning, disasters

1Virginia Tech, Arlington, USA

2John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, New York City, USA

Corresponding Author:

Patrick S. Roberts, Center for Public Administration and Policy, School of Public and

International Affairs, Virginia Tech, Arlington, VA 22203, USA.

Email: robertsp@vt.edu

944811AASXXX10.1177/0095399720944811Administration & SocietyRoberts et al.

research-article2020

Roberts et al. 497

Public managers confront choices among competing values, principles, and

standards of behavior (Kettl, 1993, pp. 17–20). For example, street-level

bureaucrats make choices about how to distribute goods, or which value to

favor in exercising discretion individual cases (Maynard-Moody & Musheno,

2003; Zacka, 2017). In some public realms (e.g., health, transportation, emer-

gency management), these choices may entail the potential loss of human

life. Normatively oriented scholars use the term values, while economists are

more comfortable with the language of competing goods. Goods are not

themselves values, but choosing one good over another implies that people

have different preferences, which are formed by values (as well as habit,

culture, and human nature) (Haidt, 2012; Halaby, 2003).

One way to express how managers make choices among different goods

and services is to borrow the notion of a tradeoff from economics. Tradeoffs

refer to the choice to diminish or enhance one good or service in exchange

for more or less of another finite good or service. Tradeoffs are often

expressed in terms of opportunity costs—the losses in potential gains from

other alternatives. Mid-level managers make implicit tradeoffs when

engaging in inter- and cross-organizational planning processes (Gregory,

2002; Lauria & Long, 2017). Public administration scholars in the norma-

tive tradition—preferring a language of value—acknowledge that in allo-

cating scarce resources and opportunities, public officials oftentimes make

“difficult choices or judgments among incompatible and incommensurable

values” (Spicer, 2009, p. 541) resulting in “difficult value choices”

(Wagenaar, 1999, p. 444).

While the notion of a tradeoff has its roots in economics, some public

administration scholars examine assumptions about how managers make

tradeoffs. Empirically oriented public value theorists believe that selecting

among competing values depends on the decision maker’s analytical frame-

work for sorting through individual versus organizational or sector-specific

public values (Bozeman, 2007; Van Wart, 1998). A normative tradition iden-

tifies the salient regime values that prevail in the United States, flowing from

the Constitution to public managers, who must use their discretion to choose

among them (Elias & Olejarksi, 2020; Green & Morgan, 2014; Rohr, 2002;

Uhr, 2014).

Our article takes a different approach by beginning with a managerial

situation—choosing among flood mitigation scenarios with different fea-

tures—and then using statistical tools to analyze how managers differ in

their choice to save lives versus other goods. Specifically, we present a

national U.S. sample of local government managers with multiple flood

mitigation plans (quasi-experimental vignette design) and ask them to

choose among plans with different values for the total local government