Economic crises and augmenting financial bureaucratic power in South Korea

Despite negative public opinion, the role of the Korean government has expanded, while overcoming two rounds of global financial crises. The phenomenon of the re-swelling state is mainly attributed to the strengthening of the central bureaucracy, in particular the financial bureaucracy, rather than the whole central government or the state. The argument of the strengthening of the ‘state’ or the ‘government’ after economic crises might be subject to the error of generalization. Through the two rounds of economic crises, the financial bureaucracy succeeded in acquiring the authority of market supervision and industrial support. In consequence, the bureaucracy's institutional supremacy within the government grew less challenged. The central bureaucracy was no longer the loyal servant to the President. It has reinforced its institutional strength and autonomy vis-a-vis the President, the National Assembly, the Central Bank and civil society, under the pretext of building up the rational and autonomous market and democratic politics.     

Friction and bureaucratic control in authoritarian regimes

Democracies deliberately create “friction” in bureaucratic processes, using inefficiencies to mitigate the impact of government transitions and asymmetric information on leaders' ability to exert control. With far more centralized power, would authoritarians prefer less friction? We argue that they do not. In fact, excess friction is actively supplied to hinder bureaucratic coordination independent of or even in opposition to top-down control, leaving the central leaders the only player powerful enough to organize complex actions. Our analysis of data on the Chinese government indicates that bureaucrats are systematically sent to unfamiliar work environment, and that agencies that are more exposed to the resultant inefficiencies are also more likely to come under direct control by senior Politburo members. The pattern of targeted intervention indicates that bureaucratic control in authoritarian regimes is predicated not only on centralized power in general but also the deliberate supply of friction to obstruct independent actions from the bottom up.     

Economic crises and the nationalisation of politics

The literature on party system nationalisation has yet to provide a better understanding of the impact of short‐term factors upon the nationalisation of politics. This article helps to fill this literature gap by analysing the effect of economic conditions on party system nationalisation. The argument is that economic crises will decrease levels of nationalisation by amplifying territorial variation in preferences for redistribution, limiting political parties’ capacity to coordinate divergent interests across districts and triggering the emergence of new political forces. Data on 47 countries for the 1960–2011 period confirm this hypothesis and show that lower economic growth during the years prior to the election is associated with a decrease in levels of party system nationalisation in the next election. The result is robust to variation in the specification of the econometric model and to the use of different measures of nationalisation. Results also show that federal institutions increase the impact of economic conditions on the nationalisation of politics, whereas any moderating effect of electoral system proportionality on the economy is not found.     

Empirical evaluation of bureaucratic models of inefficiency

Two separate but related strands of literature exist regarding the efficiency of public sector service provision – the theoretical base developed in the bureaucratic models of supply and the methodological base developed in the operations research and economic literatures. Most analyses focus exclusively on either the measurement or causes of inefficiency. This paper seeks to empirically test bureaucratic models of supply by drawing on the measurement literature. In anticipation of the results, it is found that there does exist empirical evidence supporting some of the implications of these models.     

African states,bureaucratic culture and computer fixes

Our central argument in this article is that the introduction of computers in African states fails to produce the intended results. This is precisely because the trajectory of development of bureaucratic institutions in Africa has resulted in internal and external contexts that differ fundamentally from those of the Western states within which computing and information technology has been developed. This article explores the context in which computers were developed in Western industrialized societies to understand the circumstances that the technologies were designed to respond to and the bureaucratic culture that helped produce desired results. We then proceed to analyse the truncated nature of institution building in the colonial state, and how it structured the peculiar setting of the post‐colonial African state and dynamics surrounding the integration of the new information and communication technologies. We argue that the colonial state bequeathed to its post‐colonial successor three crucial characteristics that are of central importance to understanding why the introduction of computers does not produce anticipated improvements in public administration. These are the very limited technical capabilities of the bureaucracy; authoritarian decision‐making processes under the control of generalist administrators; and the predominance of patron–client relationships. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons. Ltd.     

Measuring bureaucratic reputation: Scale development and validation

Despite growing interest in bureaucratic reputation as a theoretical construct, the field lacks a standardized measure that can be used in surveys to capture individual‐level variation in the reputation judgments of citizens and other audiences. The aim of this article, therefore, is to develop a standardized, individual‐level measure of bureaucratic reputation based on the conceptual definition provided by Carpenter ( 2010 ). Employing feedback from experts and data from a survey of over 300 U.S. citizens, this article develops and tests a unidimensional scale of bureaucratic reputation, representing the content domains of performance, morality, procedural fairness, technical competence, and general reputation. Results suggest that our proposed bureaucratic reputation scale (BRS) has good internal reliability and that it is positively associated with support for autonomy, budget, and power, which provides evidence of criterion validity. Potential uses of the scale to study bureaucratic reputation are discussed.     

浅谈政府的合法性问题

政治哲学的核心问题是政府的合法性问题,研究的是把合适的人类组织发展成由法律或本能统治的群体。而政府的合法性问题就是关于政权合法与不合法的问题,即为什么政治集团(国家、州、镇区)的成员必须服从这些集团的法律?把该集团成员合法团结在一起的是什么:血统?国土?出身?一致同意?契约?如果是后两者,这样的协议是否正式?或者,是否有可能不正式?就此几个问题展开,论述政府的合法性。     

理性官僚与后官僚时代背景下的中国行政

韦伯提出的理性官僚制模型是适合工业化大生产的,在资本主义完成工业化的过程中起到了重要的作用,对于正处于工业化时期的我国同样有启示作用。对于后官僚时代兴起的批判或推翻理性官僚制的种种新理论与新派别,我们必须根据自身的实际情况,加以详细区别,不能人云亦云。     

Legitimacy and institutional purpose

ABSTRACT

Institutions undertake a huge variety of constitutive purposes. One of the roles of legitimacy is to protect and promote an institution’s pursuit of its purpose; state legitimacy is generally understood as the right to rule, for example. When considering legitimacy beyond the state, we have to take account of how differences in purposes change legitimacy. I focus in particular on how differences in purpose matter for the stringency of the standards that an institution must meet in order to be legitimate. An important characteristic of an institution’s purpose is its deontic status, i.e. whether it is morally impermissible, merely permissible, or mandatory. Although this matters, it does so in some non-obvious ways; the mere fact of a morally impermissible purpose is not necessarily delegitimating, for example. I also consider the problem of conflicting, multiple, and contested institutional purposes, and the different theoretical roles for institutional purpose. Understanding how differences in purpose matter for an institution’s legitimacy is one part of the broader project of theorizing institutional legitimacy in the many contexts beyond the traditional context of the state.