Building a wall or a bridge: Citizens’ behavior in their encounters with the public sector

Resumé

We know from implementation studies that street-level bureaucrats have a significant impact on the distribution of public goods, and that their decisions are affected by the behavior of the individual citizens with whom they interact. In this way, citizens indirectly affect the implementation of public policies. Yet, we have only limited knowledge about citizens’ behavior in these interactions. This article aims to build a systematic conceptual framework on citizen behavior in interaction with public agents. It builds on data from an e-survey that examines self-reported behavior of respondents in a set of hypothetical scenarios across three public sector fields, and uses cluster analysis to identify behavioral types. The analysis shows distinct behavior types in each sub-sector, but varying across areas. However, these types do not correlate with classic sociodemographic variables.