Implicit Citizenship Theories: Content and structure, antecedents and consequences of implicit assumptions about citizens in the public sector

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Rick Vogel; Professor Dr. Dominik Vogel
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Accounting and Finance ; Political Science ; Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 438530488

• Final Report Year: 2024

Final Report Abstract

Government action primarily occurs through interactions between public employees and citizens; this is where policy is implemented and where the state becomes tangible for citizens. It is thus crucial to understand the preconceptions public employees hold regarding citizens, as these assumptions could be potential sources of unequal treatment or even discrimination. This project developed a socio-cognitive approach centered around the novel concept of Implicit Citizenship Theories (ICTs). These are not scientific theories but everyday beliefs that public employees have about the typical or ideal characteristics of citizens. They serve as cognitive filters for processing otherwise overly complex environmental information, enabling quick attitudinal and behavioral responses. The smallest unit of ICTs is the association of traits with citizens. Traits that frequently co-occur and share semantic similarities group into prototypes, which together form the overarching taxonomy of ICTs. Through a series of empirical studies, the project extracted and validated six such citizen prototypes. They also differ in desirability: a negative, undesirable prototype (anti-prototype) is Determination (assertive, demanding, egoistic), while a positive, desirable prototype is Engagement (conscientious, goaldriven, motivated). The results also indicate that the ethnic background of citizens is indeed part of the cognitive categorization system used by public employees when processing citizen cues. However, this prototype has a neutral valence and plays only a minor role in decisions. We, therefore, do not find evidence of a latent, widespread tendency toward racial discrimination. The project also explored potential antecedents and consequences of ICTs. Overall, ICTs show high stability even across work contexts as diverse as redistributive and regulatory policies. However, demographic characteristics, such as gender or hierarchical level, do influence ICTs. The project delved into the impact of past experiences with workplace violence: The more severe incidents targeting public employees were, the more negative their ICTs are. As expected, ICTs also have significant attitudinal and behavioral consequences. One sub-study demonstrates that the presence of certain prototypes in the minds of public employees influences their willingness to co-produce public goods and services with citizens. However, this applies only to core tasks where their professional identity is prominently at play.

Publications

• Aggressions and Associations: How Workplace Violence Affects Public Employees’ Implicit Citizenship Theories. Paper presented at EGPA Conference 2021, Brussels, Belgium
  Liegat, M.C., Hensel, D., Vogel, R. & Vogel, D.
  
• Aggressions and Associations: How Workplace Violence Affects Public Employees’ Implicit Citizenship Theories. Paper presented at PMRC Conference 2021 (online)
  Vogel, R., Vogel, D., Liegat, M.C. & Hensel, D.
  
• Aggressions and associations: How workplace violence affects what public employees think of citizens. Public Administration, 102(1), 222-248.
  Liegat, Marlen C.; Hensel, David; Vogel, Dominik & Vogel, Rick
  
• Implicit Citizenship Theories – How do public servants categorize citizens? Paper presented at PMRC conference 2022, Phoenix, USA
  Vogel, R., Vogel, D., Liegat, M.C. & Hensel, D.
  
• The engaged, the friendly, and the needy? How public employees prioritize citizens. Paper presented at PMRC conference 2023, Utrecht, Netherlands
  Hensel, D., Liegat, M.C., Vogel, D. & Vogel, R.
  
• From social categorization to implicit citizenship theories: Advancing the socio‐cognitive foundations of state–citizen interactions. Public Administration Review, 85(2), 402-418.
  Vogel, Rick; Vogel, Dominik; Liegat, Marlen Christin & Hensel, David
  
• Looking at the public encounter through a socio-cognitive lens (Dissertation, Universität Hamburg)
  Liegat, M.C