Enhancing democracy via bureaucracy: Senior managers' social identities and motivation for policy change
研究挑战了官僚机构阻碍民主回应的传统观点，基于社会身份理论，分析以色列高级公务员对2011年大规模抗议者的社会认同如何激发其政策变革动机。
This article challenges the depiction of bureaucracy as a hurdle to democratic responsiveness. It proposes that senior civil servants' (SCSs) dual position as professionals and citizens may enhance government permeability to salient public agendas. Building on social identity theory, we argue that salient public agendas may arouse SCSs' social identification with in‐groups and thereby elicit their motivation for policy change within their task domain. Employing a mixed‐methods design, we analyze SCSs' social identification with the participants of the large‐scale social protests that took place in Israel during the summer of 2011, and their motivation for policy change in response to the protest agenda. We find that SCSs' social identification with the protesters enhanced their motivation for policy change. In addition, SCSs' perception of a conflict between responsiveness to the protest agenda and their organizational or professional identities shaped their preferences for policy solutions more than their motivation for policy change.