The effect of politician-constituent conflict on bureaucratic responsiveness under varying information frames

With whom bureaucrats side has consequences for the efficacy of participatory governance processes. Participatory governance claims to ``deepen'' democracy by offering citizens opportunities to express policy preferences throughout the electoral cycle. When citizen input derived from participatory governance initiatives is at odds with the orders of politicians in power, (i) do bureaucrats side with political principals as most political economy accounts would predict, (ii) do they shape policy as the bureau-shaping hypothesis proposes, (iii) or is their reaction much more ad-hoc and driven by behavioural biases as theories of representative democracy and behavioural public administration would predict? This study assesses this using a survey experiment with bureaucrats with managerial responsibilities, employed in the UK and US public sector. It finds that when citizen input and demands of political principals are at logger-heads, bureaucrats behave in line with the bureau-shaping hypothesis - they will shape policy design according to their professional norms and values. There is no evidence that they react to differences in how the information is framed, speaking against purely behavioural interpretation.