Accountability intensity and bureaucrats’ response to conflicting expectations: a survey experiment in China
通过在中国进行的调查实验，研究基层官僚如何应对上级和公民的冲突期望，发现过度严格的问责可能削弱其服务公众的内在动力，导致机械执行上级指令。
Grassroots bureaucrats are confronted with multiple accountability pressures which result in diverse or even conflicting expectations. Based on a survey experiment conducted in China, this study examines how bureaucrats respond to the divergent expectations of upper-level authorities and local citizens and how the intensity of such accountability influences those responses. The findings show that although bureaucrats tend to put more effort into tasks that are aligned with citizens’ interests, over-stringent accountability may crowd out their intrinsic motivation to serve the public and push them to follow top-down instructions mechanically. Intensified accountability may not necessarily lead to better policy outcomes.