Religion and representative bureaucracy: Does religion guide administrative discretion?

Abstract

In this paper we seek to understand how religion influences discretion in a developing fragile society: Palestine. Drawing on a recent review of the religion and public administration literature and the theory of representative bureaucracy, we ask: Does active representation on behalf of a religious identity exist? And if so, what does it look like? We explore four different possible manifestations, including none at all. In other words, this is a study of how religiosity influences civil servant behaviour in instances of discretion. Using original small-n in-person survey data, we find active representation by a majority of mid-level civil servants on behalf of a religious identity; we find evidence of religious service being underpinned by public service motivation and by pro-social motivation. Others are guided by traditional Weberian bureaucratic values while others are guided by what they perceive to be the religious foundation of the bureaucracy.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.