Actors and Strategies of the Bureaucratic Reputation Game

Abstract

I provide a description of what I call the "bureaucratic reputation game", by defining the incentives of the relevant actors, their likely preferences, their available strategies, and how the playing out of such strategies produces organizational outputs. The main conclusions are twofold. First, we should not take it for granted that public organizations benefit from having a good reputation. We have good reasons to expect that public administrators, and even more so their political principals, should often be "reputation satisficers", as opposed to maximizers. Second, when desiring to improve the reputation of a public organization, the most straightforward route is to improve the organization itself. Communication strategies do have a role in the bureaucratic reputation game, but it a subtle one and, overall, they should be employed with much care.