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Beyond specific case responses: Accountability, public service motivation, and bureaucrats’ policy responsiveness

Yao Liu,Pan Zhang,Fanrong Meng

Published 2025 in Public Policy and Administration

ABSTRACT

Policy responsiveness requires changing public policies to follow public opinion, but previous macro-level studies generally focus on the role of politicians and fail to touch on substantive policy regulations, whereas micro-level studies are limited to bureaucrats’ case-by-case responses. This study extends the connotation of policy responsiveness to local individual executive bureaucrats and develop the concept of bureaucrats’ policy responsiveness, which denotes government bureaucrats’ intention to modify policies in response to public opinion. We develop a framework integrating external interventions and intrinsic motivations to analyse how accountability and public service motivation (PSM) jointly shape bureaucrats’ policy responsiveness. Based on a survey experiment conducted among Master of Public Administration (MPA) students in China, the results show that strategic accountability rather than functional accountability has a significantly positive effect on bureaucrats’ policy responsiveness. Bureaucrats with high PSM express high policy responsiveness intentions, and accountability does not significantly crowd out the role of PSM. These conclusions emphasise the role of bureaucrats in policy responsiveness and link it to accountability and motivation.

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