Structural Reforms Histories and Signals from Political Principals: Do Civil Servants Place a Higher Emphasis on Signals from Political Principals When Faced with Frequent and Intense Restructuring?

Fueled by doctrines such as New Public Management (NPM) and the appearance of systemic threats such as the 2008 financial crisis, various Western governments have implemented frequent, far-reaching and comprehensive waves of structural reforms over the years. As governments sway back and forth between doctrines and regularly impose new reform packages, the question arises how such a continuous flux of reforms affects public bureaucracies. This study quantitatively investigates the impact of such continuous structural reforms on the importance attached by civil servants to signals from political principals. It is expected that civil servants in heavily reformed organizations will engage in uncertainty-reducing behavior, and will prefer to avoid the risk associated with ignoring or defying a political principal. Accordingly, these civil servants should perceive signals from political principals as relatively important. This relationship is examined by combining data from the 2016-wave of the Norwegian staff survey with data from the Norwegian State Administration Database. Our multilevel results indicate that employees within organizations with ‘turbulent’ reform histories place a much higher emphasis on signals from political principals when carrying out their tasks compared to employees in more ‘stable’ organizations.