Bureaucratic overload, slack resources, and performance auditing

Recent research on policy accumulation and bureaucratic overload (e.g., Knill, Steinbacher, and Steinebach 2021; Adam et al. 2020; Fernández-i-Marín, Hinterleitner, et al. 2024a, 2024b; Fernández-i-Marín, Knill, et al. 2024) implies that implementation of new policy initiatives will be compromised as government bureaucracies become increasingly resource-starved. This important argument chimes with a much older line of theory and scholarship in organization studies, concerned with the effects of “slack resources” on business firms and government agencies (Cyert and March 1963; Bourgeois 1981; Nohria and Gulati 1996; Busch 2002; Mount et al. 2024). Slack resources – those “in excess of current business requirements” (Bentley and Kehoe 2020, 181) facilitate environmental monitoring, innovation processes and internal deal-making (Daniel et al. 2004; Mount et al. 2024; Carnes et al. 2019). They also act to “buffer” organizations from environmental perturbations (Leuridan and Demil 2022; Moulick and Taylor 2017; O'Toole and Meier 2010; Thompson 1967), improving resilience in the face of adversity. And finally, slack should provide public service organizations with a more-or-less accessible stock of resources necessary for completing new policy tasks, resulting in greater responsiveness to changing societal and/or political demands (Elston and Zhang 2024). In this paper, we argue for greater integration of the recent literature on bureaucratic overload and the older literature on slack resources. We then test the effects of slack resources on bureaucratic performance with a novel dataset of requests made of the Dutch government by the Netherlands Court of Audit. We use regression and survival analysis to test the effects of slack resources on the bureaucracy’s compliance with this auditor’s “value-for-money” recommendations. This work is funded by the Court of Audit, and is a replication and extension of Elston and Zhang’s (2024) similar analysis of slack resources and policy compliance in the UK.