From Here to Eternity? Measuring the Stability of the Beliefs and Values of Individual Bureaucrats

In so far as the ideas and beliefs of individuals are deemed to be important in public administration scholarship, the settled view in both older scholarly traditions and more recent institutionalist literature is that the beliefs and the values of bureaucrats are largely stable, at least in normal times. Yet this understanding may do little more than reflect the availability or limitations of existing data, which rarely permits the beliefs or values of bureaucrats to be tracked over time. Using responses to the same questions from surveys of bureaucrats working in the same public institution conducted -- the European Commission -- six years apart in 2008 and 2014 respectively, this paper uses a new technique to test whether the beliefs and values of individual personnel do indeed remain the same over time. It finds not only that the perceptions, beliefs, as well as the second-order values of bureaucrats can and do change, but that their beliefs and values are significantly more volatile than hypotheses derived from the main institutionalist perspectives would anticipate, while the hypotheses derived from a third new approach that emphasizes the capacity of individual bureaucrats both to learn and to be responsive to changes internal and external to the organization are confirmed.