Abstract
While a number of scholars have examined citizens’ satisfaction with specific encounters with
government agencies, few studies have assessed explanations of the public’s overall evaluations of
bureaucratic performance, especially accounts that address sources of variation over time. Implicit in this
lack of attention is an assumption that such assessments are a constant, a collection of ever present
background presumptions about public agencies that citizens maintain at some deeply symbolic level.
We test this assumption with a new annual time series measure of aggregate assessments of the U.S.
bureaucracy. We find that assessments of bureaucratic performance vary markedly over time. We then
test a number of prior explanations for this movement focusing on both broad contextual forces in the
political environment and more specific variables more closely associated with the bureaucracy. While
data limitations preclude developing a fully specified model tapping all of the explanations
simultaneously, we are able to rule out a wide range of “usual suspects” as free standing or sufficient
accounts of variations in aggregate bureaucratic approval over time.
Convention