Red Tape, Rule Legitimacy, and Public Service Motivation: Experimental Evidence From Korean Citizens

While legitimacy plays a key role in determining if a public sector rule or process objectively qualifies as red tape, it is unclear if legitimacy shapes subjective red tape judgments. We use a sample of South Korean citizens and a vignette-based survey experiment describing applying for a small business COVID-19 relief fund to test the relevance of rule legitimacy for perceived red tape. We find that obtaining a favorable outcome (receiving the fund) reduces perceived red tape, but that neither input nor output legitimacy plays a consistent role. Second, we find that public service motivation moderates the role of both input and output legitimacy on perceived red tape, though in different directions. For those with high levels of public service motivation, output legitimacy reduces perceived red tape. However, for the same group, input legitimacy increases it. We provide a detailed discussion of the contributions of our study.