Most research on administrative burdens focuses on measuring their impact on citizens’ access to services and benefits. This article fills a theoretical gap and provides a framework for understanding ...the organizational origins of administrative burden. Based on an extensive literature review, the explanations are organized according to their level of intentionality (deliberate hidden politics or unintended consequences) and their level of formality (designed into formal procedures or caused by informal organizational practices). The analysis suggests that administrative burdens are often firmly rooted in a political economy of deeply engrained structures and behavioral patterns in public administration.
The study aims to identify the causes and effects of the bureaucratization of the Romanian education system, in relation to the Weberian theory of bureaucracy. The principles of bureaucracy, ...enunciated by Max Weber, are discussed and the way they are taken into account and perceived in the case of education in Romania is followed. The study also aims to compare Romania with other countries (Finland, Spain and the United Kingdom) in terms of the perception of bureaucracy. The main results of the other research show that the countries mentioned follow a pragmatic approach, while the Romanian education system prefers a bureaucratic approach. This difference results from the standards that are lacking in Romanian education, both at management level and in terms of educational activities themselves. In pre-university education in Romania, for example, there is a culture of control, without a clear picture of what a high-performing school means, school inspections become only a bureaucratic action, without really measuring the quality of teachers and education. In higher education, bureaucracy is confirmed by the permanent appointment of rectors or by other legislative decisions that burden universities with tasks that should be carried out by other institutions. The new education laws in Romania increase the bureaucracy already existing in the education system, and all this is the result of misunderstanding and misapplication of the principles of bureaucracy.
Bureaucratic compliance is often crucial for political survival, yet eliciting that compliance in weakly institutionalized environments requires that political principals convince agents that their ...hold on power is secure. We provide a formal model to show that electoral manipulation can help to solve this agency problem. By influencing beliefs about a ruler's hold on power, manipulation can encourage a bureaucrat to work on behalf of the ruler when he would not otherwise do so. This result holds under various common technologies of electoral manipulation. Manipulation is more likely when the bureaucrat is dependent on the ruler for his career and when the probability is high that even generally unsupportive citizens would reward bureaucratic effort. The relationship between the ruler's expected popularity and the likelihood of manipulation, in turn, depends on the technology of manipulation.
Within seemingly weak states, exceptionally effective subunits lie hidden. These highperforming niches exhibit organizational characteristics distinct from poor-performing peer organizations, but ...also distinct from high-functioning organizations in Western countries. This article develops the concept of interstitial bureaucracy to explain how and why unusually high-performing state organizations in developing countries invert canonical features of Weberian bureaucracy. Interstices are distinct-yet-embedded subsystems characterized by practices inconsistent with those of the dominant institution. This interstitial position poses particular challenges and requires unique solutions. Interstices cluster together scarce protobureaucratic resources to cultivate durable distinction from the status quo, while managing disruptions arising from interdependencies with the wider neopatrimonial field. I propose a framework for how bureaucratic interstices respond to those challenges, generalizing from organizational comparisons within the Ghanaian state and abbreviated historical comparison cases from the nineteenth-century United States, early-twentieth-century China, mid-twentieth-century Kenya, and early-twenty-first-century Nigeria.
This paper seeks to extend geographic thinking on the changing constitution of the UK welfare state, suggesting the need to supplement ideas of the “shadow state” with an analysis of the blurring of ...the bureaucratic practices through which welfare is now delivered by public, private and third sector providers alike. Focusing on the growing convergence of the bureaucratic practices of benefits officials and food bank organisations, we interrogate the production of moral distance that characterise both. We reveal the ideological values embedded in voucher and referral systems used by many food banks, and the ways in which these systems further stigmatise and exclude people in need of support. Contrasting these practices with those of a variety of “ethical insurgents”, we suggest that food banks are sites of both the further cementing and of challenge to the injustices of Britain's new welfare apparatus.
Urban growth and the unprecedented expansion of imperial Spain sparked a sense of constant fluctuation and anonymity that challenged early modern categories of belonging and space demarcation. The ...Spanish crown claimed a monopoly which sought to exclude tentatively defined foreigners, and in the peninsula, urban growth encouraged measures to identify and restrict the presence of the 'undeserving' poor. Nascent frameworks of legal identity exacerbated a public discourse of suspicion against constant motion and the 'undocumented', and this interaction between mobility and emerging techniques of identification has an intellectual history that has not received sufficient attention. The Dominican theologian Francisco de Vitoria controversially oscillated between the ethical defence of hospitable behaviour and a notion of 'openess' permeated by the language of the rights of 'nations'. His disciple Domingo de Soto more openly challenged current measures by insisting on the limits of any attempt to create fixed definitions of poverty and legitimate movement. This research explores how movement was both monitored and discussed in a highly mobile world of fragile categories of identity and fragmentary and porous boundaries. It inquires how different narratives of identity and belonging were articulated in regulations and legal cases, and examines their influence on intellectual debates about hospitality and kindness to strangers in both transatlantic and local frameworks. In this context, I intend to offer new insights on the means through which nebulous identities and mechanisms of identification were incorporated to an emerging bureaucracy of movement, and contribute to a better understanding of how these practices helped shape the terms in which freedom of movement was advocated or objected. This research claims that the discursive ambivalence of notions like the right to travel or the itinerant-undeserving poor, exposed a climate of resistance to an emerging bureaucracy of identification and increasing mobility regulations.
This essay addresses how the Norwegian government has handled the coronavirus pandemic. Compared with many other countries, Norway has performed well in handling the crisis. This must be understood ...in the context of competent politicians, a high‐trust society with a reliable and professional bureaucracy, a strong state, a good economic situation, a big welfare state, and low population density. The Norwegian government managed to control the pandemic rather quickly by adopting a suppression strategy, followed by a control strategy, based on a collaborative and pragmatic decision‐making style, successful communication with the public, a lot of resources, and a high level of citizen trust in government. The alleged success of the Norwegian case is about the relationship between crisis management capacity and legitimacy. Crisis management is most successful when it is able to combine democratic legitimacy with government capacity.
Behavioral public administration is the analysis of public administration from the micro-level perspective of individual behavior and attitudes by drawing on insights from psychology on the behavior ...of individuals and groups. The authors discuss how scholars in public administration currently draw on theories and methods from psychology and related fields and point to research in public administration that could benefit from further integration. An analysis of public administration topics through a psychological lens can be useful to confirm, add nuance to, or extend classical public administration theories. As such, behavioral public administration complements traditional public administration. Furthermore, it could be a two-way street for psychologists who want to test the external validity of their theories in a political-administrative setting. Finally, four principles are proposed to narrow the gap between public administration and psychology.
This article argues that administrative burden—that is, an individual's experience of policy implementation as onerous—is an important consideration for administrators and influences their views on ...policy and governance options. The authors test this proposition in the policy area of election administration using a mixed-method assessment of local election officials They find that the perceived administrative burden of policies is associated with a preference to shift responsibilities to others, perceptions of greater flaws and lesser merit in policies that have created the burden (to the point that such judgments are demonstrably wrong), and opposition to related policy innovations.
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