Responses of regulatory professionals to multiple and conflicting accountability pressures
Marija Aleksovska, Utrecht University School of Governance, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Thomas Schillemans, Utrecht University School of Governance, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Suppose you work as an inspector at the health care inspectorate. During an inspection of a nursing home, you pick up some cues that indicate potential neglect of the elderly residents. The residents do not currently experience any direct negative consequences of this neglect, but there are looming risks to their well-being. The media has picked up on the case, and the situation already receives a lot of attention. A number of concerned parties have expectations on how to address the situation: residents and their families, care providers, administrators, the nursing homes association, the municipality, and the ministry. Some of them have also voiced their demands in public, and their expectations stand in conflict with one another, ranging from demands for immediate closure of the nursing home to demands that the organization is given time to remedy the problems. Now, what will you do as an inspector?
The above fictional case was given to 270 regulatory professionals from different inspectorates in the Netherlands to solve. We examine how regulatory decision-making is influenced by multiple and conflicting demands of stakeholders. We focus on the decision-making process, rather than on the content of the decision, and examine the likelihood of pursuing a set of decision-making strategies depending on the context and content of stakeholder expectations. Specifically, we look at how the number of stakeholders, and the compatibility of their accountability demands, affect the regulatory decision-making process.
Would the increase in pressure from the publicly-expressed demands of the stakeholders affect the way regulators approach the situation? On the basis of psychological research, we made two hypotheses about how regulators would deal with the situation. The first was that participants would respond to pressure by putting more time and effort into handling the case. We call this pursuing “high-effort” strategies. The second hypothesis was that pressure would, conversely, make them more likely to pursue avoidant, “low-effort” strategies. Examples of such strategies include passing the case to a colleague, or procrastinating.
Multiple stakeholders (as opposed to one), and incompatible demands (as opposed to compatible ones), were both expected to increase the pressure on regulators and, thus, make them more likely to pursue high or low-effort strategies. However, the pressure stemming from conflicting accountability demands was expected to be more impactful on decision-making processes than having multiple stakeholders, as it would require more delicate management of stakeholder expectations.
The results from the survey experiment conducted to test our hypotheses provided partial support for our expectations. Both the multiplicity of stakeholders, and the conflictual nature of the publicly expressed opinions, affected how the regulators approached the case. As expected, the conflict in expectations was more consequential for the decision-making processes of regulators than the multiplicity of stakeholders expressing opinions. The increase in pressure led the regulators to seek more help from their colleagues and superiors, and also to procrastinate less in taking action on the case.
We did not observe any variation in the use of high-effort strategies as a result of the increase in stakeholder accountability pressure. In fact, from the descriptive results we can tentatively infer that almost all surveyed regulators took the task seriously and invested relatively high effort in responding to the case. Thus, the variation in regulatory behavior as a result of the increase in accountability pressure is found in what we called low-effort strategies. However, the patterns in the data do not allow us to conclude that simply more stakeholder pressure leads to regulators adopting more responsibility-avoidant strategies in their decision-making processes. Contrary to our expectations, regulators who faced the increase in pressure did not procrastinate more when taking action about the case, but less. Furthermore, regulators did not attempt to pass the buck, but they did seek out help from colleagues and superiors. These results led us to reevaluate the previously adopted dichotomy of high- versus low-effort decision-making strategies from the behavioral sciences, in order to interpret the picture that emerges from the results as a whole. We thus argue that regulators’ decision-making is affected by the pressures of multiple accountabilities, but that the way they cope with them is likely a nuanced combination of high-effort investment with some dose of responsibility dispersion, suited to the professional context of regulatory work.
What do these research insights mean for regulatory practice? Regulators routinely face (conflicting) accountability demands from multiple stakeholders, as about 90% of our respondents indicate. While the academic literature generally describes multiple accountabilities as problematic, the picture emerging from our findings suggests that this is not necessarily the case. It seems that regulators develop nuanced strategies to cope with such challenges, and high-pressure situations do not seem to lead to dysfunctional low-effort solutions. There is, however, a caveat in these results. It seems that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and that cases that receive stakeholder attention are prioritized. This is potentially bad news for some of the residents of nursing homes described in our starting case: the absence of stakeholder pressure could mean that the healthcare inspection will spring into action later; potentially too late. If cases that receive more stakeholder attention or stir more controversy receive disproportionally more regulatory attention than others, then policymaker action might be necessary to restore the balance.
