Individual Agency in Street-Level Bureaucrats' Implementation of Policy Reforms: The Role of Their Policy Evaluation and Self-efficacy

This paper develops and tests a parsimonious micro-theory of street-level bureaucrats' individual implementation behavior. By systemizing and synthesizing theoretical insights from Ajzen's theory of planned behavior, from Bandura's theory of perceived self-efficacy, and from implementation literature, we claim that street-level bureaucrats' policy implementation behavior is a function of their individual evaluation of the efficacy of the policy and of their own ability to implement the policy measures in terms of their perceived self-efficacy. We test our theory on a panel data set capturing teachers' implementation of the wide-scale Danish public school reform of 2014. We use administrative data and a five-wave panel survey (2014-18) of 2,055 teachers in approx. 200 schools as well as their school leaders. Our results confirm the importance of teachers' perceived policy efficacy and of their perceived self-efficacy for their implementation behavior. When, as shown in this study, street-level bureaucrats' individual evaluations of a policy and their own perceived abilities shape their implementation behaviors, street-level bureaucrats become even more important individual policymakers than depicted in most research on street-level bureaucrats that mainly focuses on structural determinants of their behaviors rather than individual factors.