SPEAKING IN 2 VOICES - AMERICAN EQUIVOCATION ABOUT THE INTERNAL-REVENUE-SERVICE

Theory: The exploration of American attitudes towards the Internal Rev enue Service joins an unusual pair of research domains: public opinion and public administration. Public administration scholars contend tha t the hostility Americans show towards ''bureaucracy'' stems from the competing expectations Americans have for bureaucratic performance. Th e question explored hen is whether these competing expectations surfac e in the minds of individual respondents as problems of ambivalence, u ncertainty, or equivocation. Hypotheses: If respondents are ambivalent about bureaucracy, then coincident expectations about bureaucracy and lack of information about the particular bureaucracy should increase the variability of individual beliefs about the performance of the bur eaucracy in question. Methods: We draw upon a survey commissioned by t he IRS and conducted in 1987 just after the passage of the Tax Reform Act and explore attitudes towards the performance of the IRS in eight categories. To test our hypotheses we use heteroskedastic ordinal prob it. Results: We demonstrate (1) it is overwhelmingly the expectation o f responsiveness that governs attitudes towards the IRS while expectat ions of fairness and honesty play much weaker roles; (2) coincident ex pectations of responsiveness and honesty produce equivocation in attit udes about the IRS; and (3) chronic information, but not domain-specif ic information, modestly focuses respondent attitudes towards bureaucr acy.