Bureaucratic Roles: Political Loyalty and Professional Autonomy*

Political leaders in many countries have experienced growing problems of capacity in the postwar period, a development leading to an increase in the delegation of authority to public administration and civil servants. This delegation of authority creates a significant potential for discretionary decision-making authority on the part of public bureaucrats. One way of studying how bureaucrats handle this situation is to focus upon bureaucratic roles. Bureaucratic roles traditionally contain both political and professional norms. This article discusses how these political and professional considerations can be defined and how these norms are balanced given the potential for conflict which is present. The discussion is illustrated by measuring the perception of bureaucratic norms and role enactment among civil servants in Norwegian ministries. Results indicate that civil servants appear to have few problems in attending to and balancing both political and professional role norms.     

The Politics–Bureaucracy Interface in Developing Countries

The political–bureaucratic interface has been the subject of much academic interest. However, research has tended to focus exclusively on wealthy institutionalized democracies, with little attention given to the political–administrative relationship in developing countries. However, recent evidence from reform processes in poorer nations increasingly highlights the importance of interactions between politicians and bureaucrats. This paper provides a systematic overview of the political–bureaucratic relationship in developing countries and in doing so makes two key contributions. First, it introduces a typology of political–bureaucratic relations based on four models—collaborative, collusive, intrusive, and integrated—discussing examples of each. Second, it analyses the main factors associated with different models of political–bureaucratic relations and considers how countries can move from one model of relations to another. The paper provides a much‐needed entry point for scholars and policymakers to better understanding the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats in developing countries. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What Do Bureaucrats Like Doing? Bureaucratic Preferences in Response to Institutional Reform

How do bureaucrats respond to administrative reform in relation to their overall administrative goals? The authors test the bureau‐shaping thesis, which holds that bureaucrats’ preferences for certain kinds of roles and tasks motivate their support for bureau reform. Drawing on attitudinal and behavioral data from a survey of English local government officials, the findings underscore how bureaucrats with different interests and motivations sort themselves into job types. Their preferences drive support for reform, which, in turn, strengthens the executive structure of English local government. Drawing on the literature on bureaucratic responses to institutional reform, the authors offer a more nuanced portrayal of bureaucratic preferences in line with the bureau‐shaping model. A key conclusion: political principals need improved empirical awareness of bureaucratic preferences when undertaking public institutional reforms.     

Low‐trust bureaucracy: Understanding the Mexican bureaucratic experience

Latin American bureaucracies are notorious for their inefficiency and opacity, yet there is very little empirical research done on what exactly constitutes the “bureaucratic experience” for citizens and what the costs of bureaucratic dysfunction are. To improve our understanding of this topic, 5 cases of Mexican citizens' encounters with public bureaucracies are used to develop the notion of “low‐trust bureaucracy”: public organisations in which access to services is unreliable and the levels of control towards both citizens and bureaucrats are excessive. This bottom‐up analysis of administrative practices contributes to our understanding of the ineffectiveness of government programmes and services, but also of how bureaucracies in developing countries amplify social inequality rather than function as a social equaliser. Furthermore, this article adds new insights to the existing understanding of administrative burdens as a result of either political tactics or mere benign neglect. The data presented here suggest that structural and intractable characteristics of the broader administrative context, such as authoritarian legacies, can produce behavioural patterns that shift bureaucratic attention away from a fair and efficient service provision.     

Unprincipled Principals: Co-opted Bureaucrats and Corruption in Ghana

In theory, granting politicians tools to oversee bureaucrats can reduce administrative malfeasance. In contrast, I argue that the political control of bureaucrats can increase corruption when politicians need money to fund election campaigns and face limited institutional constraints. In such contexts, politicians can leverage their discretionary powers to incentivize bureaucrats to extract rents from the state on politicians' behalf. Using data from an original survey of bureaucrats (N = 864) across 80 randomly sampled local governments in Ghana, I show that bureaucrats are more likely to facilitate politicians' corrupt behavior when politicians are perceived to be empowered with higher levels of discretionary control. Using qualitative data and a list experiment to demonstrate the mechanism, I show that politicians enact corruption by threatening to transfer noncompliant officers. My findings provide new evidence on the sources of public administrative deficiencies in developing countries and qualify the presumption that greater political oversight improves governance.     

Romanticizing bureaucratic leadership? The politics of how elected officials attribute responsibility for performance

A core task for elected officials is to hold bureaucratic leaders responsible, but how do they determine if public managers actually influence outcomes? We propose that partisan and leadership heuristics affect how politicians apply a logic of individualized responsibility, that is, focus on individual bureaucrats rather than situational factors to explain organizational outcomes. We match survey data of local elected officials in Denmark with individual partisan variables and objective performance data about the schools they oversee. We provide evidence that partisan beliefs matter, with conservative elected officials more willing to pursue a logic of individualized responsibility. We also find that elected officials are more likely to assume that bureaucratic leaders determine organizational outcomes where performance is very high or low, a leadership attribution heuristic previously established in private sector studies. We argue that our findings have important implications for contemporary governance, given the growing reliance on performance metrics to assign responsibility.     

Understanding Street‐Level Bureaucrats' Decision Making: Determining Eligibility in the Social Security Disability Program

Personal interactions between clients and street‐level bureaucrats are significant in explaining why street‐level bureaucrats behave as they do. Not all bureaucracies that apply program rules to individuals, however, engage face‐to‐face with their clientele. As more intake procedures are automated, such “one‐on‐one” encounters decrease. The author generates and tests hypotheses about frontline bureaucratic decision making in the Social Security Disability program, by applying bounded rationality theory. The findings show that eligibility decisions by street‐level bureaucrats are affected by their adherence to subsets of agency goals and perceptions of others in the governance system. How quickly they make decisions also has an impact. There is no evidence that the way in which bureaucrats evaluate clients explains their decisions when they lack face‐to‐face contact.     

Public Sector Governance Reform and the Motivation of Street-Level Bureaucrats in Developing Countries

This article draws on health sector reform in Honduras to examine the mechanisms through which governance reforms shape the behavior of street-level bureaucrats. It combines insights from behavioral public administration with original data from lab-in-the-field workshops conducted with more than 200 bureaucrats to assess the relationship between decentralization and motivation. Findings show strong evidence that motivation, measured as self-sacrifice, is higher among bureaucrats in decentralized municipalities compared with bureaucrats in comparable centrally administered municipalities. Increased motivation is most pronounced in decentralized systems led by nongovernmental organizations compared with those led by municipal governments or associations. Additionally, the evidence suggests that higher motivation is related to changes in the composition of staff rather than socialization or changes among existing staff. Overall, this research helps move beyond indiscriminate calls for decentralization by highlighting the interplay between reform design and bureaucratic behavior, as well as the limitations of governance reforms in motivating more experienced bureaucrats.     

Agents of past principals: The lasting effects of incumbents on the political ideology of bureaucrats

Understanding representation is central to politics. Numerous studies assess under which conditions politicians share citizens’ ideological preferences. However, under which conditions bureaucrats share citizens’ ideological preferences has not been systematically studied. Yet, bureaucratic preferences shape policy outcomes. Our paper thus studies why bureaucrats are more right or left-wing than citizens in some countries and points of time, yet not others. We theorize that political ideologies of past incumbents shape this variation. Incumbents can select ideologically aligned bureaucrats and socialize bureaucrats into ideological preferences; moreover, prospective bureaucrats may self-select into ideologically aligned governments. As bureaucratic tenure exceeds political tenure, this politicization has lasting effects. Survey data from 87 countries supports this argument: bureaucrats are more left-leaning than citizens in countries with longer prior rule by economically left-wing governments, and more right-wing in countries with more authoritarian pasts. This suggests that incumbents continue to shape the ideological preferences of bureaucrats after leaving office.     

Serving many masters: Public accountability in private policy implementation

In recent decades, the introduction of market principles has transformed public service delivery into a hybrid. However, little is known about how these changes are reflected in the attitudes of private implementing agents: The hybridization literature neglects individuals, and street‐level bureaucracy research has disregarded hybridization. This article extends Hupe and Hill's ( 2007 ) accountability regimes framework to introduce the market as an additional accountability regime alongside state, profession, and society. Using a configurational approach, the article explores how public and private food safety inspectors in Switzerland perceive the multiple norms for behavior stemming from their environment. Results suggest that the plural accountabilities of for‐profit street‐level bureaucrats can increase the dilemmas involved in their work. Under certain circumstances, for‐profit street‐level bureaucrats have particular difficulties reconciling rule pressure with market incentives and client demands. The extended accountability regimes framework fruitfully captures such dilemmas and helps identify suitable governance responses.     

Bureaucratic expertise,overconfidence, and policy choice

Classic theory on bureaucracy suggests that one primary source of bureaucratic power in public administration and the policy‐making process derives from bureaucratic issue‐specific expertise. Studies in psychology and behavioral economics suggest that experienced experts tend to be overconfident in estimating their expertise, but few researchers have examined whether experienced bureaucrats are prone to overconfidence and, if so, how overconfidence may correlate with their policy choice. Drawing on past theoretical and empirical literature, this study is the first to investigate these questions by using survey data collected from 579 officials in various agencies related to climate change mitigation and adaptation. Our analyses demonstrate that (a) the level of issue‐specific expertise perceived by individual bureaucrats is positively associated with their work experience/job relevance to climate change, (b) more experienced bureaucrats tend to be more overconfident in assessing their expertise, and (c) overconfidence, independently of sociodemographic characteristics, attitudinal factors and political ideology, correlates positively with bureaucrats’ risk‐taking policy choices.     

Managing for Legitimacy: Agency Governance in Its “Deep” Constitutional Context

Recent literature on bureaucratic structure has gone further than studying discretions given to bureaucrats in policy making, and much attention is now paid to understanding how bureaucratic agencies are managed. This article proposes that the way in which executive governments manage their agencies varies according to their constitutional setting and that this relationship is driven by considerations of the executive's governing legitimacy. Inspired by Charles Tilly (1984), the authors compare patterns of agency governance in Hong Kong and Ireland, in particular, configurations of assigned decision‐making autonomies and control mechanisms. This comparison shows that in governing their agencies, the elected government of Ireland's parliamentary democracy pays more attention to input (i.e., democratic) legitimacy, while the executive government of Hong Kong's administrative state favors output (i.e., performance) legitimacy. These different forms of autonomy and control mechanism reflect different constitutional models of how political executives acquire and sustain their governing legitimacy.     

The practice and effect of development planning in Bangladesh

Development planning in Bangladesh has not been conspicuously successful. Neverthless it is essential for the nation to continue to plan its economy. Bangladesh's plans must be explored within the context of the economic and sociopolitical constraints that are placed upon the plan and its implementation. The First Five Year Plan (FFYP) was prepared within the framework of a socialist economy but not implemented accordingly. The attitude of the government was a major factor in the eventual distortion of this plan. The mobilization of national resources and their allocation, land reforms, subsidy measures, and industrial policies pursued by the government appeared to protect group interests rather than following recommendations of the plan. A bitter triangular relationship emerged among the politicians, the bureaucrats and the planners. This can explain why the implementation of the plan fell short of what was minimally expected. Subsequent plans, unlike the FFYP which placed high priority on social sectors, have been formulated in favour of the more productive sectors of agriculture and manufacturing. The outcome has been a modest increase in economic growth, but inequality and poverty have tended to perpetuate themselves. To achieve growth with social equality, planning in Bangladesh appears to need strong public commitment and bureaucratic support, the absence of which may prove to make national development planning ineffective, if not counterproductive.     

Authoritarian Integrative Governance in China: Understanding the Crucial Role of Political Risk Aversion

Establishing a model of public administration distinct from those of Western countries has been a long standing hope of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chinese government. Using the Creating a National Healthy City (CNHC) campaign as a case study, this article demonstrates evidence for an emerging authoritarian integrative governance model (AIGM) in China. Given their limited and scattered resources in terms of both bureaucratic structure and geography, local government officials cannot effectively complete the numerous tasks transferred to them from higher‐level government offices. Therefore, relying on an authoritative system to integrate dispersed resources has become a rational solution. The emergence of AIGM is more contingent upon the weighing the political risks that originate from competition between different political ideologies, environmental feedback on the failure or success of solutions to bureaucratic problems are considered less significant, which furthers allow the emergence of AIGM to be an inevitable consequence. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Budget‐Minimizing Bureaucrat? Empirical Evidence from the Senior Executive Service

In a representative democracy, we assume the populace exerts some control over the actions and outputs of government officials, ensuring they comport with public preferences. However, the growth of the fourth branch of government has created a paradox: Unelected bureaucrats now have the power to affect government decisions (Meier 1993; Rourke 1984; Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman 1981).
In this article, I rely on two competing theories of bureaucratic behavior-representative-bureaucracy theory and Niskanen's budget-maximization theory-to assess how well the top ranks of the federal government represent the demands of the citizenry. Focusing on federal-spending priorities, I assess whether Senior Executive Service (SES) members mirror the attitudes of the populace or are likely to inflate budgets for their own personal gain. Contrary to the popular portrayal of the budget-maximizing bureaucrat (Niskanen 1971), I find these federal administrators prefer less spending than the public on most broad spending categories, even on issues that fall within their own departments' jurisdictions. As such, it may be time to revise our theories about bureaucratic self-interest and spending priorities.     

Does appealability foster more citizen-friendly decisions at the street level?

Unbiased conduct is an essential part of the social contract between the state and its citizens. Yet, when tasked with settling disputes between citizens and other state officials, are public administrators truly impartial in their resolutions? Such a question is vital for street-level bureaucrats whom the public perceives as the face of governance. This study investigates the relations between the pro-citizen tendencies in street-level bureaucrats' resolutions, their internal appealability, and the discretionary space under which they are made. Using quantitative analysis of real-world lower-court rulings in Israeli tax disputes between 1980 and 2021, the research findings indicate that unregulated expansion of street-level bureaucrats' discretionary space relates to favoring the state's arguments in their resolutions and may impair procedural fairness. The findings also imply that regulation promoting citizens' right to appeal such resolutions within their agency, can increase street-level bureaucrats' pro-citizen tendencies and potentially counteract such outcomes.     

政府环境治理工作的公众评价：央地差距与结构性制约

近年来,随着环境问题日益受到社会各界的重视,政府在环境治理工作中的表现正成为公众关注的重点。但是,我们对于目前我国政府环境治理工作公众评价的基本情况和影响因素还知之甚少。基于对中国综合社会调查2013年（CGSS2013）数据的分析,我们发现,我国公众对于中央政府环境治理工作的评价显著高于地方政府,包括受教育程度、收入水平、社会经济地位感知、政治身份、城乡差距和地区差距在内的结构性因素制约着公众对于政府环境治理工作的评价。在对研究发现进行深入讨论的基础上,进一步提炼了研究发现在政策意义上的启示。     

Cooking the books: Bureaucratic politicization and policy knowledge

Accurate knowledge about societal conditions and public policies is an important public good in any polity, yet governments across the world differ dramatically in the extent to which they collect and publish such knowledge. This article develops and tests the argument that this variation to some extent can be traced to the degree of bureaucratic politicization in a polity. A politicized bureaucracy offers politicians greater opportunities to demand from bureaucrats—and raises incentives for bureaucrats to supply—public policy knowledge that is strategically biased or suppressed in a manner that benefits incumbents reputationally. Due to electoral competition, we suggest that the link between bureaucratic politicization and politicized policy knowledge will be stronger in democracies than in autocracies. A case analysis of Argentina's statistical agency lends credence to the underlying causal mechanism. Time‐series cross‐sectional analyses confirm the broader validity of the expectations and show that the relationship is present only in democracies.     

Between governance-driven democratisation and democracy-driven governance: Explaining changes in participatory governance in the case of Barcelona

Scholars of participatory democracy have long noted dynamic interactions and transformations within and between political spaces that can foster (de)democratisation. At the heart of this dynamism lie (a) the processes through which top-down “closed” spaces can create opportunities for rupture and democratic challenges and (b) vice-versa, the mechanisms through which bottom-up, open spaces can be co-opted through institutionalisation. This paper seeks to unpick dynamic interactions between different spaces of participation by looking specifically at two forms of participatory governance, or participatory forms of political decision making used to improve the quality of democracy. First, Mark Warren's concept of ‘governance-driven democratization’ describes top-down and technocratic participatory governance aiming to produce better policies in response to bureaucratic rationales. Second, we introduce a new concept, democracy-driven governance, to refer to efforts by social movements to invent new, and reclaim and transform existing, spaces of participatory governance and shape them to respond to citizens’ demands. The paper defines these concepts and argues that they co-exist and interact in dynamic fashion; it draws on an analysis of case study literature on participatory governance in Barcelona to illuminate this relationship. Finally, the paper relates the theoretical framework to the case study by making propositions as to the structural and agential drivers of shifts in participatory governance.