A Tale of Two Cities: Bureaucratisation in Mayor-Council and Council-Manager Municipalities

This paper presents a theory that predicts under what circumstances self-interested politicians ‘bureaucratise’ their administrations, in the sense that they delegate the powers to hire, fire and promote public employees to autonomous bodies (like civil service commissions). The main testable proposition is that, in polities with a higher concentration of powers, politicians will bureaucratise their administrations to overcome time inconsistency problems in their relationships with public employees. This prediction is tested with data drawn from US municipalities, where two main types of local governments co-exist: mayor-council and council-manager. Results show that municipal governments with a higher concentration of powers (i.e. mayor-council) tend to have more bureaucratised administrations.