Institutional pressures, discretion, and bureaucratic responses to clients: An experimental study of school-based law enforcement officers
通过一项针对美国校园执法人员的调查实验，研究制度压力（如资源稀缺和不确定性）如何影响官僚对服务对象的惩罚性回应，发现实际工作场所的制度特征比个人特征更能预测行为。
Existing scholarship highlights how social inequalities among the public are shaped by and perpetuated through bureaucratic institutions, with most studies focusing on micro-level explanations such as bureaucratic values and biases. The present study aims to assess the potential role meso- and macro-level factors play in shaping bureaucrats’ behavior by building on work suggesting that administrators will adopt a more punitive approach toward clients under conditions of greater resource scarcity and uncertainty. We examine data from a 2 × 2 factor survey experiment with school-based law enforcement personnel throughout the United States based on a vignette describing a classroom disruption under varying conditions of the school’s environment. Findings suggest exposure to the hypothetical environment does not produce detectable differences in intended behavior. Instead, institutional features of the respondents’ actual workplace—the political environment, perceived public support, and school level, type, and number—more consistently predict bureaucratic responses than individual characteristics.