Building on principal-agent theory, public administration research has thus far focused on agencies' responses to top-down pressures by elected politicians. By comparison, agencies' responses to bottom-up public pressures, such as media coverage and social protest, and the micro mechanisms that underlie variation in their response, received less attention. This study contributes to current literature by analyzing the extent to which variation in agencies’ subjection to political control shapes their direct response to bottom-up public pressures. Based on current literature, we hypothesize two distinct micro mechanisms through which political control moderates organizations' direct response to bottom-up public pressures. On the one hand, building on principal-agent theory, we expect higher levels of political control to render agencies more attentive to public pressures in order to preempt intervention by politicians who are reliant on public support (the principal-agent mechanism). Conversely, building on the socio-institutional literature on non-majoritarian institutions, we expect public agencies that enjoy greater autonomy from political control to display their attentiveness to salient public pressures in order to compensate for their low democratic legitimacy (the legitimacy-deficit mechanism). Empirically, we analyze the responses of a diverse set of 36 public agencies to the unprecedented mass social protests that took place in Israel during 2011. We focus on agencies’ symbolic responses via advertising campaigns. Our analysis shows that higher levels of political control enhanced agencies’ inclination to engage in symbolic interaction in response to the social protests, supporting our extended application of the principal-agent model.
