Behavioral Public Administration: Combining Insights from Public Administration and Psychology

By Stephan G. Grimmelikhuijsen, S. Jilke, A. Olsen, Lars Tummers. 2017

481 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Behavioral public administration is the analysis of public administration from the micro-perspective of individual behavior and attitudes by drawing upon insights from psychology on behavior of individuals and groups. We discuss how scholars in public administration currently draw on theories and methods from psychology, and related fields, and point to research in public administration that could benefit from further integration. An analysis of public administration topics through a psychological lens can be useful to confirm, nuance or extend classical public administration theories. As such, behavioral public administration complements traditional public administration. Furthermore, it could be a two-way street for psychologists who want to test the external validity of their theories in a political-administrative setting. Finally, we propose four principles to narrow the gap between public administration and psychology.

Subfields: Communication, Public Administration, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a4e8748b5b5e876b0b9fe64e02cc5b3d76eb5508

Citations in the corpus

• Moving beyond the obsession with nudging individual behaviour: Towards a broader understanding of Behavioural Public Policy (2020, unknown): “What is academically termed ‘Behavioural Public Administration’ (Grimmelikhuijsen et al., 2017) and ‘Behavioural Government’ (BIT, 2018) are as yet untapped variants of BPP: ‘We wouldn’t be logically consistent if we were eager to apply behavioural insights for everybody but not to policymakers them”