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This paper investigates citizens’ perception of decisions made by bureaucrats and by algorithms. Representative bureaucracy researchers find that clients have positive evaluations of public organizations and agents that share clients’ characteristics (Meier, 1993; Nicholson-Crotty, Grissom, Nicholson-Crotty, & Redding, 2016). On the other hand, system-level bureaucracy suggests that, although the uses of algorithms can improve efficiency and avoid individuals’ prejudices, they raise concerns about technological discrimination and systematic biases caused by algorithms per se (Bovens & Zouridis, 2002). With that in mind, questions combining both perspectives are largely unexplored. For instance, holding the application criteria unchanged, do citizens believe decisions made by algorithms are less biased than those made by bureaucrats? When representative bureaucrats are not available, would clients believe that algorithms’ decisions are more legitimate and justified than bureaucrats’ ones? To answer these questions, we employ a conjoint experiment that manipulates bureaucracy representation and algorithms. |
