From performance to morality: How politicians frame bureaucracy, its organizations, and public sector employees

Abstract

Politicians frequently voice criticisms vis-à-vis bureaucracy, its organizations, and its employees. Previous studies point at the negative impact of this “bureaucratic bashing” on public sector morale, recruitment, retention, and citizen perceptions. Yet, systematic evidence on bashing remains sparse, with even less known about its counterpart: bureaucratic praising. This article aims to fill this gap by conceptualizing both phenomena as forms of framing, by distinguishing macro-, meso-, and micro-levels, and by innovatively using organizational reputation theory to develop a multidimensional framework for the systematic analysis of bureaucratic framing. Empirically, we apply this framework to a novel dataset of 70,853 hand-coded tweets posted by 33 Dutch politicians, covering a wide range of ideological viewpoints. We find that politicians do not so much frame the civil service performatively, in terms of being lazy (or hard working), but rather bash or praise bureaucratic organizations for their (im)morality, whereby four moral subdimensions can be identified.