Why People Do Not Trust Ambitious Bureaucrats.

Do the personal traits of bureaucrats matter? This question has received extensive scholarly attention over the years. Yet, for all the talk about bureaucratic personalities, there is little empirical research to explain why the personal traits of bureaucrats matter, specifically, why people tend to react negatively to ambitious bureaucrats. In this paper we employ two laboratory experiments to test how people react to ambitious decision makers in simple bargaining scenarios. We find that people tend to equate ambition for decision making authority with self-interested and unfair behavior. Moreover, people tend to be less satisfied with decisions made by ambitious decision makers compared to decisions made by unambitious decision makers. This finding is significant given that in both conditions subjects receive a highly unfavorable outcome. In other words, people tend to generally dislike ambitious decision makers independent of policy outcomes. We discuss the implications of these experiments in light of recent work on council-manager relations and in terms of recent calls for reforming the bureaucracy through entrepreneurial leadership. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]