Red Tape, Rule Legitimacy, and Public Service Motivation: Experimental Evidence From Korean Citizens

• Author: Yongjin Ahn,Jesse W. Campbell
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00953997211069046
• Published date: 01 October 2022
• Date: 01 October 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997211069046

Administration & Society

2022, Vol. 54(9) 1651 –1688

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00953997211069046

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Article

Red Tape, Rule

Legitimacy, and Public

Service Motivation:

Experimental Evidence

From Korean Citizens

Yongjin Ahn1 and Jesse W. Campbell2

Abstract

While legitimacy plays a key role in determining if a public sector rule or

process objectively qualifies as red tape, it is unclear if legitimacy shapes

subjective red tape judgments. We use a sample of South Korean citizens and

a vignette-based survey experiment describing applying for a small business

COVID-19 relief fund to test the relevance of rule legitimacy for perceived

red tape. We find that obtaining a favorable outcome (receiving the fund)

reduces perceived red tape, but that neither input nor output legitimacy

plays a consistent role. Second, we find that public service motivation

moderates the role of both input and output legitimacy on perceived red

tape, though in different directions. For those with high levels of public

service motivation, output legitimacy reduces perceived red tape. However,

for the same group, input legitimacy increases it. We provide a detailed

discussion of the contributions of our study.

Keywords

red tape, rules, legitimacy, public service motivation, outcome favorability

1University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

2Incheon National University, Republic of Korea

Corresponding Author:

Jesse W. Campbell, Department of Public Administration, Incheon National University, 119

Academy-ro, Songdo 1-dong, Yeonsu-gu, Incheon, South Korea, 22012.

Email: jcampbell@inu.ac.kr

1069046AAS0010.1177/00953997211069046Administration & SocietyAhn and Campbell

research-article2021

1652 Administration & Society 54(9)

Introduction

The design of public sector rules contributes to the effectiveness of public

organizations, and Bozeman’s (1993) conceptual definition of red tape as

rules that consume resources but fail to advance the goals of the organization

is at the heart of economic benefit-cost models of public sector rule quality

(Pandey, 2021). However, rules are implemented by public employees and

shape client interactions with government. Red tape thus has a human dimen-

sion and perceptions of it have their origins in “both objective organizational

conditions and individualistic or subjective perceptions” (Pandey & Kingsley,

2000; Scott & Pandey, 2005, p. 158). Psychological process models of red

tape privilege the experience of rules, assuming both that red tape is a percep-

tual phenomenon and that attributions of red tape are determined by (social)

psychological processes in addition to objective rule characteristics (Davis &

Pink-Harper, 2016; Pandey, 2021). Acknowledging the perceptual nature of

red tape is a prerequisite to understanding why attributions of red tape can

vary between individuals exposed to the same objective rule context. This

acknowledgment, however, also entails integrating factors “beyond the rules”

(Kaufmann & Feeney, 2014, p. 178) into empirical models of red tape.

Rather than organizational or program goals, citizens can have their own

objectives in mind when evaluating rules (Campbell, 2019), and empirical

research has repeatedly demonstrated that outcome favorability, or whether the

individual achieves the objective motivating their involvement in a given pro-

cess (Skitka et al., 2003), drives perceptions of red tape (Kaufmann & Feeney,

2014; Kaufmann et al., 2021; Moon et al., 2020). Nevertheless, although the

outcome favorability perspective has provided insight into factors affecting

citizen attributions of red tape, rules cannot be evaluated solely in terms of

outcome favorability for specific citizens. Public processes must be judged

based on their contribution to policy objectives, which affect citizens in the

aggregate rather than individuals, as well as whether they conform to the nor-

mative values associated with government service (Jørgensen & Bozeman,

2007). Although satisfying these values entails that not every interaction with

government results in a favorable client outcome, the relevant public values are

seldom known or salient to the individual during their interaction with govern-

ment. Without knowledge of the grounds of rule legitimacy, citizens are left to

make judgments about rules based on their individual outcomes, and may draw

upon stereotypes of government as inefficient and indifferent to the concerns of

citizens (Campbell, 2020; Marvel, 2015).

In this study, we draw on the policy legitimacy literature (Scharpf, 1999)

and use a vignette-based survey experiment to test how exposure to sources

of rule legitimacy information can affect perceptions of red tape, even as

Ahn and Campbell 1653

individual outcomes vary. Legitimacy has been an important performance

construct in organization studies since the rise of the new institutionalism in

the 1970s and 1980s (Deephouse & Suchmann, 2008), and Bozeman’s (1993)

conceptual reimagining of red tape employs (il)legitimacy as a core value.

However, it is an open question whether the conceptual centrality of legiti-

macy in organizational models of red tape will translate to a status of equal

importance in psychological process models, and a goal of this study is to test

its relevance empirically. Drawing on Bozeman (1993), we suggest that rules

and the inevitable compliance burden associated with them have output legit-

imacy to the extent that they contribute to the goals for which they were cre-

ated. In contrast, a normative principle of democratic theory is that those who

will be affected by public policy should have a voice in its creation (Moynihan,

2003), and we operationalize input rule legitimacy as the participation of

stakeholders and experts in the rule creation process. We present an experi-

mental test of whether these factors contribute to perceived red tape among

citizens who experience both favorable and unfavorable individual policy

outcomes.

Second, we tie our study into the public service motivation (PSM) research

agenda. Defined by Perry and Wise (1990, p. 368) as “an individual’s predis-

position to respond to motives grounded primarily or uniquely in public insti-

tutions and organizations” and variously since (Bozeman & Su, 2015), PSM

has been implicated in value-based judgments about policy and performance

(Coursey et al., 2012; van Loon et al., 2018). We argue that PSM will be

negatively associated with perceived red tape, as those with stronger service

motives may more readily attribute benevolent intentions to policy makers.

Additionally, we draw on Perry and Vandenabeele’s (2008) reimagining of

the PSM construct as an identity-based, contextually activated motivator as

well as recent work by Davis, Stazyk, and colleagues (Davis et al., 2020a,

2020b) recasting PSM as a dispositional trait and argue that high levels of

PSM will be linked to a stronger weighting of rule legitimacy in an individu-

al’s evaluations of red tape. Due to its association with commitment to the

public interest and a willingness to make sacrifices for the good of society,

we argue that PSM should amplify the (negative) effect of policy legitimacy

on perceived red tape.

We test our hypotheses by embedding them in a vignette-based survey

experiment describing a fictional public support program for small busi-

nesses affected by COVID-19 in South Korea. The two (positive outcome

and negative outcome) by three (no legitimacy information, input rule legiti-

macy, and output rule legitimacy) experiment was conducted with a sample

of 558 Korean citizens in February of 2021. Our results suggest that while the

effect of outcome favorability on perceived red tape dominates that of rule