BIO

Mia Medney is a freshman at Florida State University majoring in Behavioral Neuroscience and plans to graduate in the spring of 2025. She grew up in New York City and currently resides in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Mia aspires to become a neuropsychiatrist. This would allow her to study the interaction of neuroscience and social psychology through helping others. Mia is extremely thankful for her UROP experience has it has taught her that research is everywhere. In addition, UROP has helped to expose her to explore potential future research opportunities through the skills she has learned this past year.

Literature Review on Administrative Discretion

Abstract

The objective of this project is to understand what administrative discretion is, how it works and to introduce the concept of discretion to the public. Discretion is the autonomy of professionals in their fields of work, it is flexible, subjective, and can there are different levels of discretion. Thus, administrative discretion can be open to interpretation. This interpretation is where it can get complicated as is it impossible to please everyone. Connecting sociology with social science we can see a strong correlation between social capital, client meaningfulness and the professionals’ willingness to implement policies. Social capital is based in the ideology of it’s not what you know, but who you know. Client meaningfulness is the perception of street-level bureaucrats implementing policy that has values for their clients. A professionals’ willingness to implement policies is the positive behavioral intention towards implementing policies by street-level bureaucrats. I will often use the term Street-level bureaucrats throughout the presentation, so to define it they are public employees who deal directly with clients and have discretion in their jobs. Examples of such are police officers, construction workers, teachers, and doctors. There are no previous studies that have done a review of administrative discretion in a systematic sense like this one. The journal articles used for this review were all found through JSTOR, a reliable source. In the poster, not only is there a clear outline of the research but there are also diagrams taken directly from the journal articles to illustrate the power of discretion.

Keywords: Administrative Discretion Literature Review