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.     

Reining in the Bureaucrats: Democratic Transition and Administrative Procedural Reform in Korea

How do civilian presidents control their bureaucracies after taking over from an authoritarian regime? To answer this question, I develop a “reining in” theory of delegation. I argue that presidents who faces intrabranch conflict over policy issues and cannot appoint—and dismiss—freely will solve their delegation problems through administrative procedure acts (APAs) and related laws. While some scholars argue that APAs are tools for preserving the status quo, I find that APAs help presidents change policy. Building on the delegation literature from economics, my theory represents a more general argument than prior theories for why presidents support APAs. I test the theory through a case study of South Korea's first civilian government (post‐1961), under President Kim Young Sam. Kim initiated an APA to rein in a professionalized civil service that opposed his policy preferences. Strict procedural requirements designed to keep tabs on bureaucratic activities enhanced Kim's control over his bureaucracy.     

Moralists, Pragmatists, and Rogues: Bureaucrats in Modern Mysteries

Many contemporary mysteries feature bureaucrats struggling with difficult ethical dilemmas. Should they lie? Disobey an order? Use physical force? Break the law in order to catch a criminal? In addition to their entertainment value, mysteries offer untapped opportunities to reflect on the moral conflicts faced by civil servants. In this article, the author analyzes the work of 12 modern mystery writers whose protagonists include police detectives, a medical examiner, a prosecutor, a park ranger, and a fire chief. Several types of bureaucrats are identified including moralists, pragmatists, and rogues. The author then links these types to broader ethical philosophies, such as actutilitarianism, rule‐utilitarianism, ethical egoism, and Kant's categorical imperative. He concludes that mysteries can be an effective teaching tool for courses in ethics and public administration.     

Ministerial Leadership and Endorsement of Bureaucrats: Experimental Evidence from Presidential Governments

Scholars have debated what constitutes effective ministerial leadership with respect to administrative competence versus political influence. The authors contribute experimental evidence to this debate through a unique survey design of endorsement experiments. Using original data from 949 national civil servants in South Korea, this article examines civil servants’ assessments of ministerial leadership in three central dimensions of public management: internal management, interbranch coordination, and policy formulation/implementation. Further, existing variation in the characteristics of agencies is used to test whether such variation induces systematic differences in civil servants’ responses. Findings show that that civil servants’ attitudes toward ministerial leadership are asymmetric in nature. Ministers with civil service backgrounds are endorsed in all three dimensions, whereas ministers with legislative backgrounds receive increased support only for interbranch coordination skills. The levels of support for ministers with different backgrounds also vary across agency types. This analysis has implications for public management practice and agency control in presidential governments.     

Street-Level Bureaucrats’ Attitude toward Clients: A Study of Work Group Influence in the Dutch and Belgian Tax Administration

Abstract

Classic street-level bureaucracy literature has suggested that individual bureaucrats are shaped by their work group. Work group colleagues can impact how bureaucrats perceive clients and how they behave toward them. Building on theories of work group socialization, social representation, and social identification, we investigate if and how the attitude of individual street-level bureaucrats toward clients is shaped by the client-attitude of the bureaucrat’s work group colleagues. We also test whether this relation is dependent on conditions of attitudinal homogeneity and perceived cohesion of the work group. Results of a survey among street-level bureaucrats in the Dutch and Belgian tax administration (1245 respondents from 210 work groups) suggest that different mechanisms underlie the work group’s impact on the individual street-level bureaucrat in this specific attitude. The analysis furthermore reveals that work groups have a limited impact on the individual’s client-attitude. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Bureaucrats in the Social Policy Process: Administrative Policy Entrepreneurs and the Case of Working Nation

Much of the contemporary literature on Australian social policy tends to focus on broad environmental and institutional variables and to downplay the importance of the social policy decision-making process and its participants. Yet the study of specific cases in social policy-making reveals that senior administrators often have a significant impact on the direction of social policy reform. The income support reforms adopted as part of the fomer Federal Labor government's Working Nation package illustrate the potential for bureaucrats to influence the direction of change. Senior administrative officers within the former Commonwealth Department of Social Security played a crucial role in promoting reforms which increased the generosity of the means test on unemployment payments. These bureaucrats behaved as policy entrepreneurs and worked in a strategic manner to garner support for and reduce opposition to their proposals within the decision-making process.     

Accommodating Bureaucrats in Canberra: A History of the Commonwealth Bureaucracy's Office Space in the National Capital During the Howard Decade

This article seeks to explore an important intersection of the Commonwealth's administrative and spatial histories by examining the Commonwealth bureaucracy's office space accommodation practices between 1996 and 2006 in the urban spatial context of Canberra. After initially conceptualising and describing the experience of the Howard decade and contrasting it with previous policy and practice, the article seeks to theorise the general experience of the last ten years through stressing the interweaving of neoliberalism, path‐dependencies, and contingency. In doing so, the piece offers a number of insights into not just the Howard government, the Commonwealth and Canberra, but also of neoliberalism, and the potential impacts of social spaces on policy processes and public sector practice.     

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。     

Bureaucrats and Markets in China: The Rise and Fall of Entrepreneurial Local Government

Local government entrepreneurship in China in the reform era is argued to have been, on balance, instrumental to growth and market-oriented reform.¹ Economic factors are emphasized in explaining both its rise and anticipated decline. Undeveloped markets and established local state trading networks favored agencies of the local state in exploiting business opportunities arising from deregulation. However, market development and increasing autonomy of firms are now reducing the advantage of local government business agencies, and they face a diminished and changed role.     

The Supply of University Enrollments: University Administrators as Utility Maximizing Bureaucrats

The supply of enrollments in higher education has receivedrelatively little attention in both theoretical and empiricaleconomic research. To address this, we formulate and test amodel of the supply of enrollments in higher education inwhich administrators are modeled as utility maximizingbureaucrats. We find evidence that individual presidents andprovosts have a significant effect on enrollment supply andfaculty demand in a panel of eleven public colleges anduniversities in Maryland from 1988 to 1996, implying thatinstitutions have enough market power to permit thepreferences of administrators to influence enrollment supplyand faculty demand.     

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.     

The Reflective Practitioner and the Uses of Rhetoric

This essay invites reflection on four practical uses of rhetoric: as a way to provide persuasive emphasis in administrative communication; as a technique of analysis to improve public administration and expand its limits; as a resource in identifying individual administrative signature; and as a vehicle for reevaluating public administration's group signature. It reflects on the authors' experiences and considers possibilities for change toward more conscious and effective group self–representations.