Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

How do citizens form their opinions about executive agencies? With public trust in government at record lows, the answer to this question is as critical as ever before. What perceptions underlie this lack of trust, and what information do they use to form these perceptions? In this paper, we conduct a novel experiment to test whether Americans form their opinions on executive agency decisions based on whether those decisions are framed as emerging from either technocratic or democratic deliberative processes. This experiment allows us to uncover the type of reasoning that appeals most to the public—and therefore points toward better communication strategies for agencies to improve their reputation and citizen buy-in.

In this experiment, we conceptualize executive agency decision-making as a dual reasoning process. When faced with a problem, bureaucrats seek input from two sources before implementing a solution: experts and the public at large. We define these two feedback mechanisms as the “technocratic” and “democratic” approaches, respectively. We hypothesize that the framing of an agency’s decision will determine a citizen’s satisfaction in the decision on the basis of citizen education. In other words, if an agency decision is framed as the output of a democratic process, less educated citizens are more likely to approve of that decision than as the output of a technocratic process. We further hypothesize that these frames are less powerful when they interact with strong partisan associations with the agency in question—but that they do have limited success in countering those biases.

The experiment first tests the participants “mission match” with three agencies with different partisan associations. The participants are then randomly assigned to a questionnaire related to one of these agencies, at which point they are divided into one of three groups: the technocratic treatment group, the democratic treatment group, and the control group. Within a given agency, all three groups are told about a problem faced by the agency and the ultimate solution implemented by the agency. The treatment groups are also told about the process that led to the solution. The technocratic treatment describes to the subject the experts consulted and the analysis conducted, while the democratic treatment describes the public hearings and comments received and read. Subjects are then asked for their opinion about the decision and the agency. The results reveal the extent to which different types of information motivate opinion formation. The moderating effect that information frames have on “mission match” reveals the extent to which this reasoning varies in the presence of strong partisan priors about the agency.

Our findings will reveal a new and useful understanding of the reasoning underlying public opinion and indicate the effectiveness of different communication strategies in ameliorating the “bureaucrat bashing” fashionable among many politicians and citizens. In so doing, our work reveals how Americans envision the executive branch conducting policy and what they expect of federal employees in order to earn their trust.