Does clientelism perpetuate the weak state capacity that characterizes many young democracies? Prior work explains that clientelistic parties skew public spending to private goods and under-supply ...public goods. Building on these insights, this article argues that clientelism creates a bureaucratic trap. Governments that rely on clientelism invest in labor-intensive, low-skilled bureaucracies that can design and implement relatively more straightforward distributive policies. Although such bureaucracies are useful to win some elections, they lack the administrative capacity to sustain economic and human development. Empirically, the article examines the wage structure of municipal bureaucracies as a proxy for the personnel’s education and skills in Mexico between 2012 and 2018. During this period, turnover in the party in power in municipalities was frequent, a situation that also allows investigating how resilient the bureaucratic trap is to increased competition. The results show that all political parties invest in labor-intensive, low-skilled bureaucracies. However, the bureaucratic trap has a different grip on the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), a quintessential clientelistic party, compared to other parties. After an electoral turnover, PRI’s bureaucracies have a larger proportion of low-wage personnel compared to the bureaucracies of other parties. Moreover, after an electoral turnover, the PRI allocates more resources to social assistance, subsidies, and internal transfers that are more conducive to clientelism. The overall size of the bureaucracy and the total wage bill are not affected in the same way, suggesting that there is indeed a trade-off between hiring lower and higher skilled employees. While prior work has proposed other clientelism-induced negative equilibria, this article offers a more direct path from clientelism to state capacity. The results help explain why more fiscal resources, political competition, and demand-side strategies to fight vote buying are insufficient and underscore the importance of civil service reform to tame clientelism.
Public management scholars have long debated public and private sector differences. However, the generalizability of empirical results has been limited due to the shortage of cross-national studies. ...Using a data set including citizens in twenty-one European countries, we compare citizens' perceptions of meritocracy (i.e. hard work determines success rather than luck or connections) in public and private organizations and test how such sector differences are linked to country-level macro factors. We find that sector differences in meritocracy exist in almost all European regions. However, sector differences are smaller in countries where NPM practices and meritocratic principles are established.
Finding a mission is important for employees to perform well in public service jobs. Research has demonstrated that leadership can facilitate mission valence among followers, but if and how ...leadership unfolds this effect in the presence of excessive bureaucracy (i.e., red tape) is unclear. This interaction is particularly interesting in the case of authentic leadership (i.e., a positive leadership style based on self‐awareness, consistent behaviors, and transparent relations with followers), as red tape may either neutralize or enhance the association of authentic leadership with mission valence. We test these rivalry hypotheses in a sample from a two‐wave survey among public employees in Germany. Results provide support for the neutralization hypothesis, as the relationship between authentic leadership and mission valence strengthens at lower levels of red tape. HR practitioners are thus challenged to reduce red tape and to make public organizations authentic places, where leaders can develop authenticity through self‐awareness.
Based on interviews with bureaucrats and judges in several Swiss cantons, this article analyzes how bureaucrats decide to order immigration detention and how the judicial review shapes their ...decisions. The authors argue that discretionary decision-making regarding immigration detention is structured by the web of relationships in which decision-makers are embedded and affected by the practices of other street-level actors. The varying cantonal configurations result in heterogenous bureaucratic practices that affect the profiles and numbers of persons being detained. In particular, differences in judges’ interpretation of legal principles, as well as in their expectations, strongly affect bureaucratic decisions.
While research provides numerous insights about the fear and insecurity that Latino immigrants experience at the hands of the police, much less is known about the experiences and practices of local ...police vis-à-vis Latino immigrant residents. This article contributes to research on street-level bureaucracies and immigrant incorporation by examining police practices in a new immigrant destination. Drawing on two years of fieldwork with the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, it offers an extended ethnographic look at policing dilemmas in the era of immigration control. As the findings reveal, police bureaucracies respond to immigrant residents in contradictory ways. On one hand, the department has an official community policing program to increase trust and communication with Latino immigrant residents. On the other hand, street-level patrol officers undermine these efforts by citing and arresting Latino residents who lack state-issued ID. Thus, alongside ostensibly sincere efforts to incorporate immigrant residents, ultimately, police produce a form of social control and urban discipline through their discretionary decisions.
Using a study of the relationship between bureaucratic work environments and individual rates of entrepreneurship, I revisit a fundamental premise of sociological approaches to entrepreneurship, ...namely, that the social context shapes the likelihood of entrepreneurial activity, above and beyond any effects of individual characteristics. Establishing such contextual effects empirically is complicated by the possibility that unobserved individual traits influence both the contexts in which people are observed and their likelihood of becoming entrepreneurs. This paper presents the first systematic study of the effects of bureaucracy on entrepreneurship that accounts for such unobserved sorting processes. Analyses of data on labor market attachments and transitions to entrepreneurship in Denmark between 1990 and 1997 show that people who work for large and old firms are less likely to become entrepreneurs, net of a host of observable individual characteristics. Moreover, there is strong evidence to suggest that this negative effect of bureaucracy does not spuriously reflect self-selection by nascent entrepreneurs into different types of firms. An important implication of this finding is that the structure of organizational populations affects the supply of nascent entrepreneurs, as well as the availability of entrepreneurial opportunities.
The nexus between corruption and economic growth has been examined for a long time. Many empirical studies measured corruption by the reversed Transparency International's Perception of Corruption ...Index (CPI) and ignored that the CPI was not comparable over time. The CPI is comparable over time since the year 2012. We employ new data for 175 countries over the period 2012–2018 and re-examine the nexus between corruption and economic growth. The cumulative long-run effect of corruption on growth is that real per capita GDP decreased by around 17% when the reversed CPI increased by one standard deviation. The effect of corruption on economic growth is especially pronounced in autocracies and transmits to growth by decreasing FDI and increasing inflation.
Why do some states comply with international agreements while others flout them? In this article, I introduce a previously unconsidered explanation: bureaucratic structure. I develop a rational ...choice model examining the impact of bureaucratic structure on compliance, suggesting that the existence of several distinct bureaucracies can mute compliance with an international agreement by insulating some bureaucrats from pressure to comply. I examine this theory through newly coded data on a 2001 OECD agreement designed to decrease the percentage of aid that is “tied” to donor‐state products and services—a practice that is popular among special interests but which decreases foreign aid's effectiveness. I find that non–development‐oriented bureaucracies, such as departments of interior, labor, and energy, were significantly less likely to comply with the agreement than traditional development bureaucracies. This aggregates to the state level as well, where states with many aid agencies were less compliant than states with a streamlined bureaucracy.
Countries are increasingly looking to ‘digitalise’ how public services are delivered, with welfare‐to‐work and public employment services being key sites of reform. It is hoped that digitalisation ...can achieve efficient, effective, and targeted services for those in need and there is now a growing body of research on both the opportunities and pitfalls associated with this transition to digital welfare states. However, as a concept, ‘digitalisation’ remains ambiguously defined, hindering understanding of the distinct ways that discrete technological innovations are reshaping citizens' access to social protection and the role of street‐level discretion in welfare administration. Drawing on interviews with expert informants from three countries pioneering digital reforms, this study aims to better understand what digitalisation entails for the delivery of activation. We identify three discrete modes of ‘digitalisation’ in welfare‐to‐work programmes: virtual engagement (remote activation), transactional automation (self‐activation), and digital triaging (targeted activation). Far from digitalisation heralding the automation and curtailment of frontline discretion, the different modes reshape frontline delivery and citizens' access to social protection in specific ways.
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