Politicization in the Public Eye: How Perceived Bureaucratic Politicization Shapes Administrative Burden and Citizens’ Behavioral Intentions

Under populist governance, public bureaucracies increasingly become visible sites of political contestation. Political efforts to strengthen control over the bureaucracy, together with bureaucratic responses to these pressures, may meaningfully shape how citizens perceive them and their political agency. We suggest that citizens’ perceptions of these politicization pressures and conflicts may impact their everyday encounters with public organizations. This article introduces perceived bureaucratic politicization (PBP) as a citizen-level construct that captures citizens’ judgments that a public organization is aligned with a specific political camp and that this alignment meaningfully guides its decisions or actions. These perceptions may shape citizens’ expectations of procedural fairness and affect their interactions with public organizations, thereby influencing their experience of administrative burden and, in turn, their willingness to engage with, or withdraw from, administrative processes. The proposed theoretical model will be examined in the Israeli context through a vignette survey experiment that aims to simulate real-world encounters with different public organizations. The study will experimentally manipulate the levels of procedural complexity and examine whether citizens’ perception of bureaucratic politicization exacerbates the effect of procedures on citizens’ perceptions of burden and intentions to cooperate. By connecting political conflict surrounding the bureaucracy to citizens’ interpretations of routine administrative procedures, the article extends research on public administration under populist governance beyond political–administrative relations and brings citizens’ everyday encounters with politicized institutions into view.