Effective Management for National or Local Policy Objectives?

This research considers the role of local policies and management in affecting street-level bureaucrats’ actions in implementing national policy mandates. The focus on sanctioning behavior by social workers provides a strong test of these effects, given that the behaviors are both visible and have consequential policy outcomes. We extend principal-agent theorizing to frame decisions by street-level bureaucrats as the result of a set of interlocking principal-agent chains that establish different information asymmetry problems. The setting is the implementation of a Danish welfare and employment policy for which a shift in policy placed greater emphasis in 2003 on the use of sanctions for the failure of clients to participate in employment-enhancing measures. The policy was to be implemented by 268 semi-autonomous munici¬palities. We use data from nation-wide surveys of CEOs of municipal employment services, middle managers, and front-line workers.