Iron Cages and Ballot Boxes: Prosecutors, Elections, and Subnational Statebuilding

Abstract

The literature on bureaucratic capacity and autonomy in American political development is focused on federal agencies, with little attention paid to the development of subnational bureaucracies whose leaders are elected. I argue that while the “policrats” who lead such agencies value their status as elected officials, it also makes them vulnerable to the charge of being mere political hacks. Using the example of district attorneys, I argue that the rise of the administrative state enhanced the potency of this threat, so that policrats increasingly had to harmonize their classic electoral, credit-claiming activity with the work of building the reputations of their bureaucracies. One solution was to create professional organizations and claim they had expertise, authority, and standards analogous to those of the traditional professions, such as medicine or the law. Critically, this expertise was claimed to incorporate a “commonsense” mentality compatible with popular election. Thus, subnational actors borrowed core tactics and ideas of national statebuilding to entrench the fragmented “old American state” and layer it with new coercive powers.