Explaining bureaucratic responsiveness: A vignette study of EU agencies’ prioritization judgments and decision-making processes

Government agencies must operate in environments marked by competing demands originating from the multiplicity of audiences observing and judging their bureaucratic conduct. Due to the wide diversity and multidimensional nature of external demands, agencies must prioritize to which demands they respond first. A failure to timely and adequately address simulations and competing, external demands may result in colossal reputational loses. As a result, as bureaucratic reputation scholars argue, agencies are vigilant in deciding if, when, and how external demands are attended to. Resent scholarship has advanced our understanding of how bureaucrats prioritize between the multiplicity of simultaneous demands that vary on multiple aspects. However, while we know more about the causal effects of the source, content, and salience of external demands on bureaucrats’ prioritization decisions, we lack a better understanding of real-time prioritization judgements and decision-making processes. This study builds on the extant bureaucratic responsiveness scholarship to further theorize and empirically examine why bureaucrats choose to prioritize one external demands over the other and how reputational considerations feed in their prioritization judgements and decision-making processes. Empirically, we rely on a vignette interview study with bureaucrats working at EU-level agencies, public organizations particularly exposed to multiple external demands. Our vignette study enables us to assess participants’ choices by capturing actual decision-making processes by asking participants to choose and justify their choice to prioritize a particular external demand.