Do Institutions Make Street-Level Bureaucrats Prosocial? Agent-Based Evidence Shows That New Public Management Does Not

Does street-level bureaucrats' (SLBs) willingness to sacrifice their own self-interests to meet the needs of their clients vary depending on their contexts? To date, it has been very challenging to empirically examine how SLBs who have different orientations toward social values might act in different institutional and administrative contexts. To overcome this obstacle, in this study, we develop an agent-based simulation of the interactions between SLBs and their citizen–clients. We use our simulations with SLBs in traditional public administration, new public management (NPM), and post-NPM contexts. Our results reveal that the SLBs' personal characteristics are less important than the institutional and administrative context with regard to their interactions with their clients. In NPM environments, SLBs are much less prosocial than in traditional public administration settings. In a post-NPM setting, they are more prosocial than in the NPM environment. In addition, we demonstrate how various elements, including the ratio between SLBs and their citizen–clients play an important role in this regard. Regardless of the institutional or administrative context, adding more SLBs to public administration increases their prosocial orientations. However, this link is not linear.