Tracing the effects of politicization on public procurement specialists’ decision-making through values: A structural equation model of the broker-purist lens

Abstract

Currently, our understandings of the dynamics behind the effects of politicization on values and on administrative decision-making remain largely muddled and far from complete. The richness of theoretical accounts, amassed over the past eight decades, has yielded only a limited number of empirical examinations. This failure to develop a coherent collection of empirical works can be for the most part attributed to the complexity associated with studying values, particularly to the lack of clear and testable theories and models. This article attempts to address this deficit and to add to our understandings of the association between values and administrative decision-making at the individual level by explicitly testing the Broker-Purist (BP) model (within a sample of public procurement specialists). It is found that the BP model fits the data well, which suggest the framework as a valid and useful perspective for conceptualizing the effects of environmental politicization on administrative decision-making in public procurement specifically, and in public administration in general.