What Bureaucrats Expect Shapes How Strictly They Enforce the Rules, Experiment Finds

When a government policy lands on the desk of a frontline official, the way that official enforces it may depend less on the letter of the law than on what they expect to happen next. A new survey experiment from China suggests that the expectations street-level bureaucrats hold about a policy—how long it will last and how much resistance it will face—can measurably shift their tendencies toward strict or lenient enforcement, and that a psychological factor called self-efficacy sits at the heart of that relationship. The study, published in the journal Global Public Policy and Governance, offers one of the clearest experimental tests to date of how anticipation, not just instruction, drives the behavior of the officials who turn policy into practice.

Street-level bureaucrats—the police officers, inspectors, social workers, teachers, and regulators who interact directly with citizens—have long occupied a paradoxical position in public administration scholarship. Since Michael Lipsky’s foundational work in 1980, researchers have recognized that these workers exercise substantial discretion: they cannot possibly apply every rule to every case with mechanical precision, so they inevitably make choices about how vigorously to enforce, whom to prioritize, and when to look the other way. What has remained harder to pin down is the psychology behind those choices. The new study, conducted by Yingwei Wang of East China Normal University and Hong Pan of Chongqing University, turns to expectation theory to supply that missing psychological mechanism.

Expectation theory holds that people’s motivation and behavior are shaped not only by outcomes they have experienced but by outcomes they anticipate. In economics, this logic underpins studies of inflation expectations and consumer spending; in education, it animates the expectancy-value theory of motivation developed by Allan Wigfield and Jacquelynne Eccles. Wang and Pan extended this framework to the enforcement context, proposing that a bureaucrat’s expectations about a policy’s time horizon and about the level of resistance it will provoke should influence how strictly that bureaucrat is inclined to enforce it—and that self-efficacy, the belief in one’s own capacity to execute the task successfully, should mediate that influence.

To test these propositions, the researchers designed a survey experiment with a two-by-two factorial structure. Participants were randomly assigned to scenarios that varied along two dimensions: time expectations, manipulated as either long-term or short-term policy duration, and resistance expectations, manipulated as either strong or weak anticipated pushback from those affected by the policy. This experimental design is a hallmark of behavioral public administration, a movement that has gained momentum since a landmark 2017 review by Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen and colleagues argued for combining the analytical tools of psychology with the substantive questions of public administration. By randomly assigning expectations rather than merely measuring them, the researchers could draw causal inferences about their effects—something observational studies of bureaucratic behavior rarely permit.

The results were striking in their symmetry. Short-term expectations weakened street-level bureaucrats’ strict enforcement behavior tendencies more than long-term expectations did. In other words, when officials believed a policy was a passing campaign rather than a durable commitment, their inclination to enforce it rigorously declined. This finding resonates with a broader literature on policy feedback and bureaucratic compliance: work by Peter Kettunen and colleagues, and by researchers examining how stability in policy signals builds trust, has suggested that long-term expectations foster a sense of seriousness and legitimacy that short-term initiatives lack. A policy framed as permanent invites officials to invest in it; a policy framed as temporary invites them to wait it out.

Resistance expectations worked in the opposite direction. Strong resistance expectations strengthened strict enforcement tendencies more than weak resistance expectations did. This result may appear counterintuitive at first glance—one might expect officials facing stiff opposition to back off. But the authors’ framework, and the surrounding literature on policy resistance, suggests a different interpretation: anticipated resistance can signal that a policy matters, that enforcement is consequential, and that a bureaucrat’s role in defending it is legitimate and necessary. Related scholarship by Gómez and Padró on anticipated resistance and strategic adaptation, and by Peters, Pierre, and Stoker on policy enforcement under pressure, has similarly portrayed resistant contexts as ones in which strict adherence becomes a deliberate, even defiant, choice rather than a default.

Perhaps the most theoretically significant finding concerns the mechanism linking expectations to behavior. Self-efficacy mediated the relationship between policy expectations and enforcement tendencies. That is, expectations did not simply push behavior directly; they worked by changing how capable bureaucrats felt. Long-term expectations and strong resistance expectations appear to bolster the sense that enforcement is achievable and meaningful, which in turn strengthens the tendency toward strict enforcement. This mediating role aligns with a growing body of work on self-efficacy in public service, including studies by Bevan and Hood on perceived policy success and bureaucratic performance, by López and Stoker on expectations of success and implementers’ actions, and by Walker on self-efficacy and public sector innovation. Together, these findings suggest that confidence is not a fixed trait but a dynamic state that policy communication can cultivate or erode.

The Chinese setting gives the findings particular weight. China’s governance system relies heavily on campaigns—intensive, time-limited pushes to achieve specific policy goals, from environmental inspection to pandemic control—that are implemented by regulatory street-level bureaucrats. Previous experimental work by the same authors examined how information frameworks affect compliance with policies that challenge traditional customs, and how digital regulation shapes enforcement attitudes during pandemic emergencies. Other Chinese studies have explored gender, situational visibility, and discretionary decision-making among regulatory bureaucrats. The new study adds expectation management to this toolkit, implying that how campaigns are framed—whether as enduring commitments or temporary drives—may systematically alter the rigor of frontline enforcement across China’s vast administrative apparatus.

The practical implications extend well beyond China. Governments everywhere struggle with the gap between policy design and street-level implementation, a gap that scholars from Lipsky to Tummers and Bekkers have documented across decades and continents. If short-term expectations weaken strict enforcement, then governments that cycle policies rapidly, or that announce initiatives without signaling durability, may be quietly undermining their own front lines. Conversely, if anticipated resistance strengthens enforcement, then preparing officials psychologically for pushback—rather than shielding them from information about it—may produce more consistent implementation. The mediating role of self-efficacy points to a further lever: training, supervisory support, and success feedback that build implementers’ confidence could amplify the effects of well-managed expectations. Hassan and colleagues’ work on supervisory support as a moderator of discretion, and Luthans and Youssef’s research on positive organizational behavior, both suggest concrete avenues for such interventions.

The study also carries methodological significance for the field. Survey experiments of this kind—randomizing vignette conditions and measuring behavioral tendencies—remain relatively rare in studies of enforcement, where access to frontline officials is difficult and behavior is hard to observe directly. By demonstrating that two theoretically distinct dimensions of expectation can be manipulated independently and that their effects operate through a measurable psychological mediator, Wang and Pan have provided a template that researchers in other countries and policy domains can adapt. The theoretical payoff is an expanded framework of street-level bureaucratic behavior, one in which anticipation, confidence, and discretion interact rather than operate in isolation. The practical payoff is a reminder that the fate of any policy is decided not only in ministries and legislatures, but in the expectations carried by the officials who meet the public—and that those expectations, unlike many drivers of bureaucratic behavior, can be deliberately shaped.

Subject of Research: How policy expectations and self-efficacy shape street-level bureaucrats' enforcement behavior tendencies in China

Article Title: Policy expectations, self-efficacy, and street-level bureaucrats’ enforcement behavior tendencies: a survey experiment in China

Article References: Wang, Y., & Pan, H. (2025). Policy expectations, self-efficacy, and street-level bureaucrats’ enforcement behavior tendencies: a survey experiment in China. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(3), 274-296. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00121-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00121-z

Keywords: street-level bureaucracy, policy expectations, self-efficacy, enforcement behavior, survey experiment, policy implementation, behavioral public administration, China, discretion, expectation theory, policy resistance, public administration