Public Administrators: Accountability and Anticipatory Policy Preferences

When addressing long-term policy challenges, public administrators are perceived to be in a good position to prioritize long-term benefits in the policy process. However, when making decisions about policy solutions with different temporal characteristics, they face difficult trade-offs that complicate the situation. The most common trade-off when implementing anticipatory policies is between felt accountability to the elected political principal, who seeks quick electoral gains, and their felt professional accountability to pursue solutions that may require high upfront costs, but result in long-term benefits. Yet, the way public administrators navigate these inter-temporal trade-offs inherent in anticipatory policy-making has not been explicitly addressed.
Drawing on fundamental insights from politics, economics, and public policy, this project aims to shed light on this decision-making situation by conducting a conjoint survey experiment among a panel of Norwegian public administrators. The design reflects the complex nature of decision-making in social systems, and allows us to examine the relative importance of different factors influencing prioritization choices, such as different inter-temporal trade-offs and accountability relationships.