Crisis and Bureaucratic Discretion: How Bureaucratic Scandals Shape Discretionary Attention Among Government Officials

This study examines the distribution of discretionary attention among government officials facing contexts characterized by urgency and ambiguity. Specifically, researching discretionary distribution among government officials 4 years after a severe crisis, the paper offers novel knowledge of postcrisis effects. The study identifies five conceptual dimensions of discretionary distribution and applies meso‐level theorizing to account for observed variations. The research context is the Norwegian Welfare and Labor Administration that faced an administrative scandal in 2019 due to successive governments' misinterpretation and mishandling of European Union regulations, resulting in the illegal imprisonment of welfare beneficiaries. Benefiting from novel survey data (N = 466), the study demonstrates that this scandal left postcrisis effects on the discretionary distribution among agency officials, and that these effects were meditated by the organizational design of the administrative apparatus.