We combine personnel records of the United States federal bureaucracy from 1997 to 2019 with administrative voter registration data to study how ideological alignment between politicians and ...bureaucrats affects turnover and performance. We document significant partisan cycles and turnover among political appointees. By contrast, we find no political cycles in the civil service. At any point in time, a sizable share of bureaucrats is ideologically misaligned with their political leaders. We study the performance implications of this misalignment for the case of procurement officers. Exploiting presidential transitions as a source of “within‐bureaucrat” variation in political alignment, we find that procurement contracts overseen by misaligned officers exhibit greater cost overruns and delays. We provide evidence consistent with a general “morale effect,” whereby misaligned bureaucrats are less motivated to pursue the organizational mission. Our results thus help to shed some of the first light on the costs of ideological misalignment within public organizations.
Brokers and Bribes in India Annavarapu, Sneha
Contexts (Berkeley, Calif.),
02/2021, Letnik:
20, Številka:
1
Journal Article
In this essay, the author explores the culture of bribes in India. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over seventeen months (2017-2019) in Hyderabad, the author turns the spotlight away from ...corruption as a “problem” to glean insight into how corruption is perceived and interpreted by citizens who navigate the literal and metaphorical mazes of Indian bureaucracy.
Until now political scientists have devoted little attention to the origins of American bureaucracy and the relationship between bureaucratic and interest group politics. In this pioneering book, ...Daniel Carpenter contributes to our understanding of institutions by presenting a unified study of bureaucratic autonomy in democratic regimes. He focuses on the emergence of bureaucratic policy innovation in the United States during the Progressive Era, asking why the Post Office Department and the Department of Agriculture became politically independent authors of new policy and why the Interior Department did not. To explain these developments, Carpenter offers a new theory of bureaucratic autonomy grounded in organization theory, rational choice models, and network concepts. According to the author, bureaucracies with unique goals achieve autonomy when their middle-level officials establish reputations among diverse coalitions for effectively providing unique services. These coalitions enable agencies to resist political control and make it costly for politicians to ignore the agencies' ideas. Carpenter assesses his argument through a highly innovative combination of historical narratives, statistical analyses, counterfactuals, and carefully structured policy comparisons. Along the way, he reinterprets the rise of national food and drug regulation, Comstockery and the Progressive anti-vice movement, the emergence of American conservation policy, the ascent of the farm lobby, the creation of postal savings banks and free rural mail delivery, and even the congressional Cannon Revolt of 1910.
Emotional Responses to Bureaucratic Red Tape Hattke, Fabian; Hensel, David; Kalucza, Janne
Public administration review,
January/February 2020, Letnik:
80, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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Although red tape has a long history in public administration research, the emotional consequences of bureaucratic procedures for citizens have received little attention in the literature. Within the ...framework of behavioral public administration, this article investigates how varying conditions of administrative delay, administrative burden, and rule dysfunctionality in citizen-state interactions spark discrete emotional reactions. Physiological measurements of emotions (e.g., facial coding, electrodermal activity, heart rate) from 136 participants in a laboratory study show that bureaucratic red tape evokes significant negative emotional responses, especially confusion, frustration, and anger. Experimental evidence also indicates that delay is less stirring than burden, while rule functionality has little placatory effect, regardless of the favorability of outcomes. These results support the conceptualization of red tape as an affective rather than a cognitive phenomenon. They also suggest that negative emotions of citizens are linked to the modus operandi of public administrations.
Historians and social scientists have long identified bureaucracy as the modern state's foundation and the reign of France's Louis XIV as a model for its development. A World of Paper offers a fresh ...interpretation of bureaucracy through a close examination of the department of the Sun King's last foreign secretary, Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy. Torcy, who served as foreign secretary from 1696-1715, is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant foreign ministers of the ancien regime. Building on the work of his predecessors, he fashioned a skilled team of collaborators as he managed the complex issues of war and peace during the turbulent final decades of Louis XIV's reign. John Rule and Ben Trotter examine Torcy's department to depict administrative structures as they emerged through the circulating stream of paper that connected his office with provincial administrators and diplomats abroad. They explore the collection and centralization of information during Torcy's tenure through the creation of a modern state archive, discreet intelligence gathering, and the surveillance and management of the French mails. They also study the postal carriers, couriers, household officers of the royal court, genealogists hired for research, and an informal "brain trust" of experts, and advisors who carried vital information in and out of the department every day. A remarkable reconstruction of the department of Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy, A World of Paper demystifies bureaucracy and explores the ways in which the modern information state developed from his labours.
Bureaucracy is deeply implicated in the biopolitical regimes that create and render invisible social waste—individuals classified as abnormal, deviant, or useless—in contemporary societies. According ...to previous theorists, bureaucracy is able to carry out this critical task through moral distance and reliance on technical efficiency. By specifically focusing on street-level bureaucrats, a unique tier of bureaucracy which is often afforded neither moral distance nor clear directions, this article explains the microprocesses of classification, managing and recycling through which social waste management is carried out in contemporary society. In doing so, this article highlights that in addition to official policies, informal factors like social, organizational, and group norms are critical determinants of bureaucratic behavior in front-line organizations and problematize some of the key assumptions of Weberian bureaucracy. Unlike functional interpretations, we argue that, in some instances, the informal factors influencing street-level bureaucrats are more regressive than official public policies and help explain some of the dystopian features of contemporary bureaucracy and its impact on social inequity.
In this presidential address, I argue for the importance of state-created categories and classification systems that determine eligibility for tangible and intangible resources. Through ...classification systems based on rules and regulations that reflect powerful interests and ideologies, bureaucracies maintain entrenched inequality systems that include, exclude, and neglect. I propose adopting a critical perspective when using formalized categories in our work, which would acknowledge the constructed nature of those categories, their naturalization through everyday practices, and their misalignments with lived experiences. This lens can reveal the systemic structures that engender both enduring patterns of inequality and state classification systems, and reframe questions about the people the state sorts into the categories we use. I end with a brief discussion of the benefits that can accrue from expanding our theoretical repertoires by including knowledge produced in the Global South.
Administrative literacy is the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic information and services from public organizations needed to make appropriate decisions. Citizens’ competencies ...necessary for successful interactions with public administration remain a widely neglected resource. Administrative burden resulting from citizen–state interactions may impact citizens differently depending on their available resources to cope. Research from other fields such as health literacy suggests that these concepts influence a variety of outcomes for both the individual and society. The article develops a concept of administrative literacy to provide new approaches to various fields of public administration and management research.
This article addresses perceived deficiencies in the study of representative bureaucracy by explaining and classifying the sources of passive representation's substantive effects. This classification ...is used to clarify existing empirical research and normative thinking on active representation. Doing so produces a more modest but more accurate interpretation of existing research findings and helps to indicate future research needs. It also reduces normative disagreement to a single source of substantive effects, namely bureaucratic partiality. Minority bureaucratic partiality is of dubious value for helping minorities, and bureaucratic partiality should generally be rejected. However, a passively representative bureaucracy increases in importance because of its other sources of substantive effects. This demonstrates the need to go beyond the passive-active distinction: It is more adequate and accurate to speak of representative bureaucracy and the sources of its substantive effects.
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