Forcing officials to decide in public recruits clients into their reference groups.

Evidence

The desire to make decisions about people in private, particularly when they are likely to be negative or disappointing, is entirely understandable. Yet public policy often calls for street-level bureaucrats to make decisions in public precisely so that they can be exposed to, if not influenced by, the presence of those affected by the decisions. Such policy incorporates the theory that clients are likely to become more a part of bureaucrats’ reference groups if they are present at times when decisions are made. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 939

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: ‘the architecture of decision visibility’ — why procedural transparency is designed as exposure rather than accountability, and what happens when the exposure channel is quietly closed.
• XREF: Connects to Scott’s Seeing Like a State / Hughes’s street-level accounts, and to the trust literature’s point that visibility structures shape who gets counted. — connects to: Street-level bureaucracies manufacture client categories that people then internalize — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 455

Broader Connections

• Street-level bureaucracies manufacture client categories that people then internalize #corroborates (0.95) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 455