Why do governance reforms in developing democracies so often fail, and when might they succeed? When Democracies Deliver offers a dynamic framework for assessing the effectiveness and durability of ...policy change. Drawing on detailed analyses of public sector reforms in Brazil and Argentina, this book challenges conventional wisdom to reveal that incremental changes sequenced over time prove more effective in promoting accountability, increasing transparency, and strengthening institutions than comprehensive overhauls pushed through by political will. Developing an innovative theory that integrates cognitive-psychological insights about decision making with research on institutional change, Katherine Bersch shows how political and organizational factors can shape reform strategies and information processing. Through extensive interviews and field research, Bersch traces how two competing strategies have determined the different trajectories of institutions responsible for government contracting in health care and transportation. When Democracies Deliver offers a fresh insight on the perils of powering and the benefits of gradual reform.
Responding to COVID‐19 presents unprecedented challenges for public sector practitioners. Addressing those challenges requires knowledge about the problems that public sector workers face. This ...Viewpoint essay argues that timely, up‐to‐date surveys of public sector workers are essential tools for identifying problems, resolving bottlenecks, and enabling public sector workers to operate effectively during and in response to the challenges posed by the pandemic. This essay presents the COVID‐19 Survey of Public Servants, which is currently being rolled out in several countries by the Global Survey of Public Servants Consortium to assist governments in strategically compiling evidence to operate effectively during the COVID‐19 pandemic.
Defining Bureaucratic Autonomy Bersch, Katherine; Fukuyama, Francis
Annual review of political science,
06/2023, Volume:
26, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In political science, one issue still in need of greater theorizing is the proper measurement of bureaucratic autonomy, that is, the degree of discretion that political principals should grant to ...bureaucratic agents. This article reviews the literature on bureaucratic autonomy both in US administrative law and in political science. It uses the American experience to define five mechanisms by which political principals grant and limit autonomy, then goes on to survey the comparative literature on other democratic systems using the American framework as a baseline. Other democracies use different mixtures of these mechanisms, for example by substituting stronger ex post review for ex ante procedures or using appointment and removal power in place of either. We find that the administrative law and social science literatures on this topic approach it very differently, and that each would profit from greater awareness of the other discipline.
Scholars of governance reforms in developing countries often argue that the surest way to address corruption, cronyism, inefficiency, and red tape is swift, dramatic change enacted by political ...leaders during moments of upheaval (i.e., "powering" reforms). This research
finds that a very different type of change is not only possible but also more effective and enduring. A comparison of attempts to increase accountability, transparency, and institutional strength in Brazil and Argentina demonstrates that incremental changes sequenced over time in response
to failings in previous policy (i.e., "problem-solving" reforms) provide two crucial advantages over powering's wholesale and rapid overhauls of the state: (1) continual adjustments and modifications benefit from learning; and (2) an incremental approach makes reform more durable
and helps preserve bureaucratic autonomy.
Recent scholarship on transparency has been voluminous, and transparency policies continue to garner international adherents through global initiatives such as the Open Government Partnership. Yet ...extant scholarship has failed to address the empirical parameters for what constitutes 'transparency' and what does not. This lacuna gives way to misuses and abuses, jeopardizing the analytical utility of the term and the integrity of so-called 'transparency' policies. This article provides a framework and a vocabulary for identifying and evaluating transparency, which depends on two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions: the visibility of information, and its inferability -- the ability to draw accurate conclusions from it. By disaggregating these two conditions for identifying transparency, this article provides a framework for the emerging research agenda on the quality of transparency. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Scholars of governance reforms in developing countries often argue that the surest way to address corruption, cronyism, inefficiency, and red tape is swift, dramatic change enacted by political ...leaders during moments of upheaval (i.e., "powering" reforms). This research finds that a very different type of change is not only possible but also more effective and enduring. A comparison of attempts to increase accountability, transparency, and institutional strength in Brazil and Argentina demonstrates that incremental changes sequenced over time in response to failings in previous policy (i.e., "problem-solving" reforms) provide two crucial advantages over powering's wholesale and rapid overhauls of the state: (1) continual adjustments and modifications benefit from learning; and (2) an incremental approach makes reform more durable and helps preserve bureaucratic autonomy. web URL: http://jcp.gc.cuny.edu/2015/12/14/volume-42-number-2-january-2016/
Effective democratic governance rests on the executive’s ability to forge coalitions that can advance policy and sustain the government against challengers. Scholars have long focused on cabinet ...appointments to understand how executives build coalitions with their legislative allies. In many democracies, however, cabinet appointments at the ministerial level may only represent the tip of the iceberg. We show that administrative political appointees (APAs) beneath the ministerial level constitute one of the most important ways that cooperation between legislative and executive is forged. Leveraging a unique and comprehensive database of an average 2600 Brazilian APAs per year over two decades, we evaluate their effect on coalition unity in critical legislative votes. We demonstrate that these APAs, which we collectively term the “patronage coalition,” have a significant effect on legislative support and thus are a critical tool for presidents. Our results are particularly relevant to a new emphasis in the political science literature on the “toolbox” that presidents utilize to address the challenges of simultaneously maintaining legislative support while implementing policy. These results demonstrate that the patronage coalition is a fundamental tool that should be more widely integrated into models of legislative-executive bargaining.
Responding to recent articles in Governance highlighting the need for improved measurement of bureaucratic characteristics, this article describes efforts to map Brazil's federal agencies on three ...dimensions—capacity, autonomy, and partisan dominance—derived from data on more than 326,000 civil servants. The article provides a “proof of concept” about the utility of agency‐level measures of these variables, demonstrating how they relate to an output common to all agencies: corruption. The article provides a first step in the direction of building a comparative research program that offers objective evaluation of bureaucracies within nation‐states, with the intent of better disentangling their impact on governance outcomes.
This article examines challenges of measurement validity in aggregate governance indicators. We focus on three deleterious consequences of aggregating perception-based indicators in the absence of ...conceptual clarity: (i) the scant attention to content validity; (ii) the conflation of causes, characteristics and consequences of governance; and (iii) the underestimation of uncertainty. As an alternative, we present a Bayesian latent variable framework for measuring governance. This alternative formal statistical model offers several advantages: it is a principled method that allows the researcher to make explicit the conceptual choices in measuring governance, and it provides an assessment of uncertainty by letting measurement error (noise) in governance measures propagate into inferences. We argue that this multidimensional, disaggregated and transparent approach will lead to greater measurement validity and transparency about the uncertainty in governance measures. The conceptual and empirical analysis uses data from the World Bank Governance Indicators.
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