The effects of hierarchy,centralization and formalization on municipal fiscal health: An empirical test of the bureaucratic ideal

This research examines the effects of three defining features of bureaucratic organizations – hierarchy, centralization of decision‐making, and the formalization of administrative procedures and rules – on the fiscal health of city governments in the US. It utilizes data from a national survey of top appointed city officials in the US to measure the bureaucratic features of city governments, and assesses budgetary solvency using actual financial data from audited financial reports. Using factor analysis to develop a composite bureaucracy index, and addressing unobserved heterogeneity and possible simultaneity bias through least squares dummy variable regression and instrumental variable regression, the empirical analysis shows that excessive bureaucracy leads to poorer fiscal health. Analysing the effects of the individual components of the index, the results indicate that centralization and formalization exert a statistically significant and negative effect on city budgetary solvency.     

The impacts of the revolution of 1978-1979 on the iranian bureaucracy and civil service

This paper deals with the complex relationship between bureaucracy and revolution. It explains some of the major impacts of the Iranian revolution of 1978-79 on the civil service and the bureaucracy of the country. Three major phases of the revolution are identified: the Provisional Government (February-November 1979), the turbulent radicalization (November 1979-1982), and the institutionalization, stabilization, and Islamization (1983- ).

The revolution was not only against the Shah, but also aimed at altering Iran’ bureaucratic machinery which, as a power instrument, served system- (regime-) enhancement. During the first and second periods, a debureaucratization of society and a democratization of the administrative system was begun. While the bureaucracy increased as a result of nationalization, its functions declined as more and more activities of public administration were taken over by the non-bureaucratic, independent grass-roots organizations that sprang up during and after the revolution.

This trend has been reversed during the third phase by the policy of consolidation, centralization, control and system-maintenance pursued by the Mousavi administration. A rebureaucratization of society commenced and application of most of the old laws and regulations was resumed. Patronage and many patho-logical behaviors, includinf corruption, of the bureaucracy are becoming pervasive again, resulting in the dissatisfaction of the general public. In short, despite some initial revolutiohary attempts to change its structure and nature, the bureaucracy has prevailed as a well-entrenched, established institution of power and administration in Iran.

Finally, the author briefly describes the sources of public dissatisfaction and suggests conceivable remedies. These involve major reforms in the Iranian bureaucracy to achieve both administrative efficiency and popular responsiveness.     

Bridging the donor-decentralization gap: Rethinking incentives and institutional impacts in control-oriented bureaucracies

Some important studies suggest that the organizational imperatives of donor agencies explain the tendency of foreign aid to reinforce institutional centralization rather than to support the development of decentralized institutions in recipient countries. This article shows that certain design features of two decentralized USAID projects completed in Peru during the 1980s facilitated achieving donor objectives, decentralized institutional development, and national-level reforms favoring decentralization. Analysis of this experience reveals that these design features reduced the costs and increased the benefits of decentralized implementation for the donor, while allowing synergies between implementation and institution building to be exploited. Indeed, in the context of Peru’s highly centralized, control-oriented public sector, bypass mechanisms traditionally used by donors to expedite implementation and insulate projects from uncertainty also generally enhanced the development of decentralized institutions. The lessons distilled in this case study have broad relevance since the sorts of administrative obstacles encountered by USAID in Peru—excessive centralization, disbursement bottlenecks, and onerous bureaucratic controls—are all too frequently found in other developing countries. Gregory D. Schmidt is an associate professor of political science at Northern Illinois University and an associate ofSeguimiento, Análisis y Evaluación Para el Desarrollo (SASE), a Peruvian nongovernmental organization specializing in grassroots development. He is the author of a book and various journal articles on development issues, and of a forthcoming book on the 1990 Peruvian presidential election.     

Small Countries,Big Performers: In Search of Shared Strategic Public Sector HRM Practices in Successful Small Countries

This article compares strategic public sector HRM practices between 10 small countries that have consistently shown extraordinary economic, social, and governance performance. The fact that these small countries, which are traditionally considered to be disadvantaged, have become benchmarks of good government suggests they have uniquely maximized and leveraged their key resource: people. In search of novel lessons, we assess through secondary data how their public sectors have organized and institutionalized four key HRM activities: 1) selection, 2) appraisal, 3) training, and 4) compensation, and whether they engage in strategic, centralized efforts to architect and “bundle” these activities. Our exploratory case study findings show that these high performing countries employ various integrated efforts to attract the best and brightest into their public sectors, and train and reward them well, although they differ in terms of their centralization dynamics. We conclude our article with seven propositions for future research and implications for emerging small countries.     

Redemocratization and economic liberalization in Turkey: The limits of state autonomy

Liberalization policies implemented in semi-industrial countries are based on a common theoretical framework and embody a standard set of policy instruments. Yet, countries differ widely in terms of their capacity to implement liberalization programs, the extent to which liberalization programs are applied as measured by deviations from “orthodox norms,” and, finally, the degree of success generated. The article proceeds from the premise that the institutional characteristics and the policy environment of a country are of crucial significance in accounting for both the nature of the adjustment process and the subsequent economic performance. The organization of the state and society as well as the degree of centralization of the state constitute key components of the domestic structures that help to illuminate why we observe differential responses to a common external shock, namely, an identical economic strategy. Turkey’s patrimonial state tradition has strongly conditioned and modified the nature of economic liberalization as well as the process of democratic consolidation during the 1980s. This article seeks to elucidate the fundamental paradox concerning the weakness and vulnerability of a highly centralized state which, in turn, embodies negative implications for both economic liberalization and the process of democratic consolidation.     

The Sangh Parivar and the Hindu Diaspora in the West:What Kind of "Long-Distance Nationalism"?

"Long-distance nationalism," an expression coined by Benedict Anderson, is often used to refer to transnational political activities, but the dynamics of this expatriate nationalism tend to be neglected. Mere nostalgia or even spontaneous mobilizations are invoked to explain this phenomenon, but fail to explain the mechanisms that lie behind it. Using the example of Hindu nationalist movements, this paper seeks to highlight the implications of political entrepreneurs in the country of origin and the instrumental dimension of long-distance nationalism. The Sangh Parivar, a network of nationalist Hindu organizations, was replicated among the Hindu diaspora and its structure was literally exported by a centralized body located in India itself. The spread of the Sangh Parivar and of its Hindutva ideology abroad was greatly facilitated by local policies like multiculturalism and by the rise of racism in the countries of emigration. A comparison of Hindu nationalist outlets in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada brings to light two main factors instilling long-distance nationalism: a favorable local context for ethnic mobilization among migrants and a centralized organization in the country of origin. The engineering of long-distance Hindu nationalism from India questions the changing nature of nationalism in a globalized world.     

Constructing a social safety net in Africa: An institutionalist analysis of colonial rule and state social policies in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire

This article attempts to explain why, despite nearly identical cultural and economic landscapes and the potentially homogenizing pressures of globalization, social policies differ in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, two neighboring countries in West Africa. In Ghana, the government has generally attempted to strengthen the informal social welfare systems of the extended family and community through a more decentralized social policy, whereas the government in Côte d'Ivoire has tried to replace these informal social networks with the centralized arm of the bureaucracy. The article shows how different legacies of colonial rule produce these divergent social policies in a complex and iterative process over time. While domestic institutions do mediate the effects of globalization, the domestic factors highlighted in this article are not the formal political institutions cited in most studies. Rather, the analysis reveals the critical role of informal institutions, or normative frameworks, that existed under colonial rule and continue to endure in the post-colonial state. The article also contributes to current theories of institutions by showing how formal and informal institutions dynamically interact in the construction of the state and the African family.     

The administrative legacy of ancient India

Marx and Weber considered ancient Asian bureaucracies as irrelevant for the modern world. But one important element of the Indian bureaucratic legacy namely, the district overlord or collector, was taken over by the British and instituted all over their Asian and African possessions. It still forms the foundation of field administration in all these countries after independence. This paper traces the textual origins of centralized Indian bureaucracy in Kautilya's Arthasastra, its dilution over the centuries due to the failure of imperial integration in India, compared to its success in China and the survival of the district overlord institution which the British resuscitated and modernized. The paper also speculates about the reasons for the failure of Marx and Weber to interpret or predict Indian development.     

Social inequalities without class cleavages in Latin America’s neoliberal era

Social inequalities have deepened in Latin America over the past several decades, yet an erosion of class cleavages has occurred in the political arena. During the era of import-substitution industrialization (ISI), “stratified” cleavage structures based on class distinctions emerged in a subset of Latin American countries where party systems were reconfigured by the rise of a mass-based, labor-mobilizing party. These nations typically experienced more severe economic crises during the transition from ISI to neoliberalism than nations that retained elitist party systems with “segmented,” cross-class cleavage structures. They also experienced greater political upheaval, as neoliberal critical junctures produced an erosion of stratified cleavages along their structural, organizational, and cultural dimensions in the labor-mobilizing cases, while leaving the segmented cleavages of elitist systems relatively unscathed. The Latin American experience differs from that of Europe, where strong labor movements and labor-backed parties were associated with superior economic performance during periods of economic adjustment. It also challenges Duverger's notion of an organizational “contagion from the Left,” as the dramatic weakening of labor movements and the shift away from mass-based party organizations have caused party systems to converge on elitist organizational models during the neoliberal era.     

Ethnic boxes: the unintended consequences of Habsburg bureaucratic classification

The classificatory efforts that accompanied the modernization of the Habsburg state inadvertently helped establish, promote, and perpetuate national categories of identification, often contrary to the intentions of the Habsburg bureaucracy. The state did not create nations, but its classification of languages made available some ethnolinguistic identity categories that nationalists used to make political claims. The institutionalization of these categories also made them more relevant, especially as nationalist movements simultaneously worked toward the same goal. Yet identification with a nation did not follow an algorithmic logic, in the beginning of the twentieth century, sometimes earlier, various nationalisms could undoubtedly mobilize large numbers of people in Austria–Hungary, but people still had agency and nation-ness remained contingent and situational.     

A Challenging State of Affairs: Public Administration in the Republic of Lebanon

ABSTRACT

This article highlights Lebanon’s administrative challenges and reform efforts, since the end of its Civil War (1975–1990). In recent years, Lebanon and international donors have worked to improve transparency, promote modern management techniques, and encourage the use of information technology throughout the public sector. Despite these efforts, Lebanon’s public institutions remain constrained by the centralization of power, corruption, outdated bureaucratic structures, and deficiencies in administrative knowledge. The success of future reform efforts will depend on whether the Lebanese bureaucracy can overcome the challenges created by regional political tensions, its Syrian refugee crisis, and an increasingly indifferent Lebanese public.     

State power, state embeddedness, and national development in less developed countries: A cross-national analysis

In this article, we test the prevailing statist argument about the state’s contribution to economic development in less developed countries (LDCs). State power in terms of centralized control of societal resources has been long considered a primary factor for economic growth. From the embeddedness perspective, the state’s effective embedding in the economy advances productive growth, while state power actually operates as a structural precondition of such policy action. Featured in our measurement are representative and financial embeddedness (operationalized as the central government’s tax income and its lending to the private sector and local states, respectively). The empirical testing is based on a pooled cross-national data of sixty-one underdeveloped countries. As indicated from modeling both manufacturing growth and increase in GNP per capita as dependent variables (during the period 1975–1990), the state power variable does not produce expected growth outcomes. However, two embedded state measures display significant but sectorbiased growth effects only for manufacturing production. Herein we further compare strong state power countries with weak ones, concluding that state power serves as a structural prerequisite so that late industrialization for LDCs can benefit from the growth coalitions in which the central state collaborates with (rather than dominates) actors at the subnational level of society and authorities. Ming-Chang Tsai teaches sociology in Taiwan. He was Fulbright Visiting Scholar in the Institute for Social, behavioral, and Economic Research, University of California at Santa Barbara (1998–99). He wishes to thank professors Diane Davis and Ian Roxborough for invaluable comments. An earlier version of this article was presented in the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, August 1997, Toronto.     

An Approach to Measuring Subnational Administrative Autonomy in Education

Efforts to measure decentralization have focused on political or fiscal autonomy, but not on administrative autonomy. Focusing on the education sector, we measured de facto subnational administrative autonomy across 64 countries/economies, via the domains of human resource management, salary management, budget management, and service content design. The findings reveal that subnational autonomy can differ substantially across those domains and within countries, and that the use of a single country-level indicator for administrative decentralization is inadequate. Furthermore, we show that administrative decentralization is as significant a factor as federal status in evaluating the degree to which a country/economy is decentralized or centralized.     

The Potential of Islamist Terrorism in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper is about the potential of terrorism in African Islamic movements. In order to lessen ambiguities related to the plethora of definitions given to the Islamist phenomenon, the various definitions related to the phenomenon of Islamism are examined as introductory information indispensable to the understanding of the topic. While it describes the encounter of sub-Saharan Africa with Islam, it also covers a number of movements in different countries in the African continent: Nigeria, Tanzania, Senegal, Kenya, South Africa, Somalia, Ethiopia, Niger, Mali, Chad, and Sudan. In all of these countries, the emergence of Islamic movements, their socio-political status, their present position in relation to the ongoing debate on their perceived radicalization or their supposed threat of violence or terrorism are comparatively analyzed.     

Egypt’s Many Public Administration Transitions: Reform Vision and Implementation Challenges

ABSTRACT

This article discusses Egypt’s many transitions toward public administration reform. It argues that some of these transitions have collided with an existing large and complex bureaucracy and a legacy of state-led development, such as the protracted and contentious process related to the civil service regulation reforms. Similarly, despite decades of decentralization efforts, state budgeting praxis remains centralized and concentrated. While attracting private investment for job creation and economic growth is a key priority to Egypt, state centrism overshadows the experience. Other transitions, however, have thrived at a much faster pace, such as the adoption of e-government.     

LEADERSHIP IN PUBLIC SERVICES NETWORKS: ANTECEDENTS,PROCESS AND OUTCOME

In this article, the authors examine the implementation of policy aimed to promote the role of organizational networks and distributed leadership in the establishment and consolidation of public service reform. In theory, leadership and networks should complement each other, with the less hierarchical logic of the network allowing leadership of change, distributed among network members, rather than led from a single organizational apex, to flourish. In practice, as a consequence of inherent bureaucracy, power differentials between network participants, and a strong centralized performance management policy regime, a relatively parsimonious form of distributed leadership is enacted, with the networks tending towards ‘managed partnerships’.     

Mechanisms of the ‘Aid Curse’: Lessons from South Korea and Pakistan

Recently scholars have argued that, far from contributing to development, foreign aid hinders development. But in the 1960s the East Asian countries developed rapidly despite receiving large amounts of aid. To examine why aid seems to undermine development in some cases but not in others, we conduct a detailed comparison of the mechanisms of the ‘aid curse’ in South Korea and Pakistan. We show that South Korea saw astonishing levels of corruption, but this did not hinder its development; and Pakistan had a strong bureaucracy, which did not help it to grow. The key difference between the two countries was in the strength of their tax systems: foreign aid in the context of underdeveloped tax administration leads to increasing cycles of debt that undermine development. When foreign aid arrives in the context of commitment to strong taxation, a country can avoid the ‘aid curse.’     

Depolitization of Bureaucracy: The Case of Central and Eastern European Countries

Political parties worldwide seek to work with bureaucrats who are close to their programs, willing to cooperate, and concerted. On the other hand, there is a huge body of literature which argues that bureaucracy should be separate from politics and that it has to consist of public servants who are technically knowledgeable, expert, and also politically neutral. The countries of Central and Eastern Europe suffered from highly politicized public administrations under one-party regimes, and have struggled to separate their bureaucracies from politics since early 1990s. In view of the relation between politics and bureaucracy from the perspective of (de)politization, this paper looks into the changes that Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) have gone through after the institutionalization of multi-party regimes and tries to provide some generalizations.     

Bureaucratic Perceptions to the Politics–Bureaucracy Relations in Bangladesh: A Moral Dilemma in between Political Neutrality and Responsiveness

Irrespective of the systems of government, a major question is: what are the views and perceptions of the bureaucrats about politics–bureaucracy relations? Aiming to address this problem, in this article an attempt has been made to undertake an empirical study of bureaucracy in Bangladesh. The study reveals that as a post-colonial structure, government bureaucracy is an essential and integral part of the administration in Bangladesh but the bureaucracies are always in a dilemma regarding their relationship with the political leaderships. The relationship between politicians and bureaucrats is neither normatively dichotomous with political neutrality nor abundantly cohesive or responsive to the political leaderships according to the perceptions of bureaucracy. Moreover, bureaucracy in Bangladesh is suffering from a moral puzzle between political neutrality and political responsiveness even though the bureaucrats are still in a dominant position in some cases.     

State Business Relations and Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper contributes to the literature on the determinants of economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa by examining the effect of effective state-business relations on economic growth for a panel of 19 sub-Saharan African countries for the period 1970–2004. We propose a measure that we argue captures the various dimensions of effective state–business relations in sub-Saharan Africa. We then estimate standard growth regressions using dynamic panel data methods with this measure, along with the more conventionally used measures of institutional quality such as degree of executive constraints, the rule of law, the degree of corruption and the quality of the bureaucracy. Our results show that effective state–business relations contribute significantly to economic growth – countries which have shown improvements in state–business relations have witnessed higher economic growth, controlling for other determinants of economic growth and independent of other measures of institutional quality.