Advocating the Public Good? Comparing the Effect of PSM and Punishment on Contribution behavior in a Linear Public Goods Game among Students of Public Administration, Economics and Law

The provision of public goods is certainly one of the noblest tasks of public administrators. These administrators’ task, however, includes to detect and sanction those who defect to contribute to the public good. Scholars in the field of Public Service Motivation (PSM) pay a great deal of attention towards the attitudes that lead subjects to select themselves into public administration, but did not yet consider the role of a sanctioning regime. At the same time it is important to Public Service Management scholars as well as practitioners to learn more about the mechanism behind cooperation behavior, intrinsic motivation and extrinsic impacts. A vast body of public administration research builds on the assumption that public employees are characterized by a particular interest in serving the public good. The Public Service Motivation approach (PSM) follows this idea and claims that people who feel especially obliged to serve the public good as a consequence self-select into public sector work (Perry and Wise 1990; Perry 2000; Delfgaauw and Dur 2010; Luechinger, Stutzer, and Winkelmann 2010). This study untangles the impact of PSM and public sector affiliation on prosocial behavior, using the controlled environment of a linear Public Goods Game (PGG) with and without punishment, and the self-reported level of PSM. The participants reflect the public (students of Public Administration) and private (students of Economics, Law, and various disciplines) working sector affiliation. The basic idea is simple: If we measure differences between the groups they must be due to the subject pool affiliation, because all other factors are held constant. The group of Public Administration students serves as our target group as they are future public servants. The purpose of this study is to shed light on the individual motives driving the cooperation behavior of (future) public servants and of their private sector counterparts. Accordingly, the research questions is: Do future bureaucrats are more likely to cooperate than comparable students? This question, however, assumes that Public Administration students actually reveal higher levels of PSM than other students. Because this connection can be challenged which is why we also ask: Does this relationship hold true for High PSM individuals? Our statistical analysis yields two main findings. First, we find that a high PSM level increases contributions in the PGG under the non-punishment regime. This result is in line with findings by Esteve et al. (2016), who to the best of our knowledge provide the only prior study observing the relationship between PSM and PGG behavior. Second, we find that introducing the punishment option, however, decreases the PSM driven difference in contribution behavior. We find that punishment increases the contribution behavior of Low PSM individuals to an extent that the difference to the High PSM players becomes negligible. Both observations confirm our theoretical expectations, deduced from both PSM literature and crowding theory (e.g. Frey and Jegen 2001). Moreover, we find that the subject pool affiliation does not predict contribution behavior. This finding supports prior concerns regarding the public sector dominance in PSM driven prosocial behavior.