Information and American Attitudes Toward Bureaucracy

Abstract

The exploration of American attitudes towards the Internal Revenue Service joins an unusual pair of research domains: public opinion and public administration. Public administration scholars contend that the hostility Americans show towards "bureaucracy" stems from the contradictory expectations Americans have for bureaucratic performance. Drawing upon a survey commissioned by the IRS and conducted in 1987 just after the passage of the Tax Reform Act, we explore attitudes towards the performance of the IRS in eight categories. Using a new heteroskedastic ordinal logit technique, we demonstrate (1) that it is overwhelmingly a single expectation of flexibility that governs attitudes towards the IRS; (2) that these expectations are not in contradiction; and (3) that domain-specific information sharply focuses respondent attitudes towards bureaucracy.

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