Fear-Based Decision-Making in Public Administration: A Conceptual Framework and Five-Type Typology

Public administration systems have intensified accountability and oversight to address corruption, inefficiency, and misuse of public resources. These developments have reinforced an audit society in which verification and performance control increasingly shape everyday administrative routines. Although scholarship widely documents proceduralism, risk aversion, and compliance-oriented behavior under audit-intensive regimes, it has paid limited attention to the behavioral mechanism through which these outcomes are systematically produced. This paper develops the Fear-Based Decision-Making Framework, positioning fear as an institutionalized mechanism linking audit culture and asymmetric accountability to conservative administrative behavior. Using theory-driven conceptual synthesis across Audit Culture Theory, Risk Aversion Theory, and Behavioral Public Administration, the analysis integrates evidence from peer-reviewed literature and institutional reports, with comparative attention to Western and ASEAN governance contexts. The synthesis shows that expanding audit regimes tend to redefine accountability around documentation and procedural defensibility, encouraging anticipatory compliance and narrowing discretionary space. Conservative administrative behavior commonly manifests as rigid rule adherence, documentation inflation, defensive standardization, and discretion avoidance, reflecting loss-avoidance incentives under conditions of retrospective scrutiny. The framework specifies five-part typology of fear: anticipatory, sanction, reputational, interpretive, and institutionalized, and explains how ASEAN scholarship often masks fear-driven behavior through proxy framings such as capacity and compliance narratives. By making fear analytically explicit, the paper reframes conservative administration as an accountability design problem and provides a basis for developing testable propositions and governance reforms that protect integrity without systematically constraining discretion and judgment.