Frames for Interpreting and Influencing Public Employee Voice

This study involves an online vignette experiment with public-sector professionals recruited through Prolific. Participants read a workplace scenario describing a city emergency relief fund that appears to be distributed inequitably, favoring politically connected neighborhoods. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three brief “expectations for employees” frames—Bureaucracy, Democracy, or Pragmatism—which signal different normative understandings of whether and how public employees should speak up. Following exposure to the assigned frame, participants completed a sequential decision task indicating whether they would remain silent or escalate concerns through internal and potentially external channels. The study examines whether exposure to these competing interpretive frames systematically influences the likelihood, form, and escalation trajectory of public employee voice.