Abstract:

The essence of public administration is public decision-making. Social license of public decision (SLPD) refers to the extent to which local people accept and support a public decision from government or public authorities. Lack of this license not only hinders the efficiency of government policy, but also affects the decision-making authority and long-term goals of society. Moreover, government transparency is regarded as an important factor to eliminate public decision-making dilemma and enhance administrative legitimacy both in value and democratic practices.

This research explored the causal relationship between transparency of government decision-making (i.e., transparency in process and transparency in rational) and SLPD from the perspective of Behavioral Public Administration (BPA), which is a bridge linking Public Administration and Psychology. In other words, BPA is a new interdisciplinary sub-field of Public Administration from Psychology. The research of BPA mainly focuses on the process between government decision-making and citizen experience. In addition, based on the concept of bounded rationality and heuristic judgment as well as system justification theory, we built and tested the moderating roles of trust in government and outcome dependence between transparency of government decision-making and SLPD in two models. Outcome dependence is the extent to which someone is dependent on a powerful authority (i.e., the representative of a system) when that authority controls valued resources whose social and/or material outcome the person desires.

This research includes three studies, two survey experiments (N = 354 + 354) and one field survey (N = 520). The studies were conducted in China. The results showed that:

First, transparency of governmental decision-making positively influenced SLPD. That is, for both transparency in process and transparency in rationale of government decision-making, the higher the transparency is, the higher the SLPD is.

Second, trust in government moderated the relationship between transparency in rational and SLPD. Specifically, the positive relationship between transparency in rational and SLPD gets weakened when the trust in government is higher.

Third, outcome dependence moderated the relationship between transparency of governmental decision-making and SLPD. Specifically, the positive relationship between two types of transparency and SLPD gets weakened when the outcome dependence is higher.

Therefore, “Transparency effects” of SLPD was proposed through the present research. In addition, “cautious indifference” was used to indicate the moderating role of trust in government, and “selective neglect” was used to indicate the moderating effect of outcome dependence. The theoretical contributions were embodied in three aspects: (1) defining a new concept (i.e., SLPD); (2) introducing a new perspective (i.e., BPA); (3) discovering a new mechanism (i.e., transparency effect and its moderators). Regarding the practical implications, this research could shed light on the transparency practice, and provides empirical evidence to government for further enhancing the legitimacy of public decisions.

Key words: Behavioral Public Administration, transparency in rational, transparency in process, trust in government, outcome dependence, social license