Fighting for the People with Guerrilla Government ? A Preliminary Study of Public Administrators’ Behavior and Motivation for Dissent in Taiwan
Author: Chien-hsun Huang
Abstract / Chinese PDF Download
What drives public servants to become guerrillas? This study aims at examining the resistant behavior of dissenting bureaucrats as implied by O’Leary’s “guerrilla government”, and their motivation for pursuing public interests. This study uses survey data from the TGBS (Taiwan Government Bureaucrat Survey) in 2008 to focus on two types of resistant behavior: passive obedience and leaking information to stakeholders. The analyses show that there is a greater chance for public administrators to obey orders passively when their work goals are public interest-oriented, but that there is no significant relationship between leaking information and public interest-oriented goals/sector choices. These empirical results provide a quantitative contribution to the guerrilla government literature which has mostly relied on case studies, and give evidence-based support for the role of public orientation and trusteeship argued by normative theories in the public administration literature. Research limitations and suggestions for future research will also be identified.