Bureaucratic Expertise Research Articles

The politics of presidential removals

Abstract Much scholarship and legal reasoning assume that the ability to remove and replace political appointees furthers presidential control. However, I argue that the possibility of removal changes the agency problem between the president and her appointees in a subtle but important way that affects the president’s appointment problem. I demonstrate that the president may have incentives to make nonally appointments to encourage reliance on bureaucratic expertise. To show this, I develop a formal model that introduces career concerns for appointees that lead them to distort their use of bureaucratic expertise to appear more expert. The president is uncertain of an appointee’s expertise but infers it from the appointee’s involvement in policymaking. In equilibrium, nonexpert appointees more aligned with the president face greater incentives to determine policy themselves to improve their reputation. By selecting nonally appointees, the president commits to sometimes dismiss even experts which improves her control over policymaking (JEL C72, D73).

Local Government Administration and the Challenges of Bureaucratic Professionalism in Nigeria: A Study of Transition Committee in Local Government Councils in Anambra State (2015 to 2022)

The democratic essence of governance is expressed and most often experienced at the grass root. The instrument of government that conveys this is the local government through sound bureaucratic experts. But it appears that the introduction of the Transition Committee has encouraged the rescinding of bureaucratic professionalism in local government administration in Nigeria. This paper becomes imperatively tasked with ascertaining the impact of Transition Committee on bureaucratic professionalism in local government councils in Anambra State. Following this, two research questions were adopted to guide the study. First, does the introduction of Transition Committee down played bureaucratic professionalism in local government administration in Anambra State? Secondly, what factors attributed to Transition Committee are responsible for low performance of local government administration in Anambra State? Data were primarily sourced and complimented with secondary source precisely academic journals and government gazettes. Bureaucratic theory was used as relevant tool of analysis. From the study, it was discovered that majority of the members of Transition Committee in local government councils are people of poor academic qualifications with little or no bureaucratic knowledge. These personalities exhibit administrative rascality in their dealings with career civil servants and bureaucratic ignorance in the discharge of their functions. These have adversely affected bureaucratic professionalism in local government administration in Anambra State. Hence, the study recommends total administrative and financial independence in the local government councils by abrogating transition committee in local government.

Judicial Specialization and Deference in Asylum Cases on the U.S. Courts of Appeals

Many look to the federal courts as an avenue of control of the growing administrative state. Some advocate the creation of specialized federal courts of appeals in areas such as immigration and social security. Yet, little is known about whether repeat exposure to specific types of cases enables federal judges to overcome doctrines of deference and whether such an effect would be policy-neutral. Gathering a sample of over 4000 cases decided by the U.S. Courts of Appeals between 2002 and 2017, we demonstrate that exposure to asylum cases over time emboldens federal judges to challenge administrative asylum decisions, asserting their personal policy preferences. The effect is particularly strong when the legal issue should prompt deference based on bureaucratic expertise. These findings not only address important questions raised by bureaucracy and court scholars but also inform a salient public debate concerning the proper treatment of those seeking refuge within our borders.

When bargaining is and is not possible: the politics of bureaucratic expertise in the context of democratic backsliding

Abstract In looking at the complex relationship between expertise and power in policymaking, what is amiss are studies on how the expertise exchange bargain between politicians and bureaucracy works in practice, especially in antidemocratic contexts. To deal with this limitation, we use Christensen’s (Christensen, J. (2022). When bureaucratic expertise comes under attack. Public Administration) expertise bargain change model for examining the authority transaction between politicians and bureaucrats. Upon external shocks, such as democratic backsliding with the sidelining of policy advice, the extant expertise bargain is challenged. We explore how the bureaucracy acted toward the government’s adversarial (and even antagonistic) stance and how that relationship toward the expertise bargain changed in two policy areas in Brazil (health and environment) during Bolsonaro’s administration (2019–2022). Notably, this article relies mainly on qualitative data from in-depth interviews with bureaucrats who provided expertise to the government on these policy areas during the Bolsonaro administration’s transition. Ancillary documentary sources were examined to detail the strategies of attack from government toward bureaucratic expertise and ancillary documentary sources of quantitative data from a survey with bureaucrats fielded during the Bolsonaro administration’s first year. Results show three factors that condition bureaucratic expertise’s resilience: the nature of the attack (local or extensive), the knowledge base’s and epistemic community’s level of cohesion, and the advice system’s degree of institutionalization. This case study sheds light on how different policy advice arrangements respond and function under antidemocratic contexts, allowing the application and enrichment of policy expertise literature outside regular democratic politics.

Expanding the political market framework to explain executive decision‐making during the COVID‐19 crisis

AbstractThe traditional political market framework (PMF) argues that elected officials respond to policy demands by adopting policy that furthers their goal of reelection. However, an emerging crisis can make this approach to decision‐making challenging as the immediacy of response, the needs of the public, and technical expertise may conflict with reelection goals. This conflict can encourage elected officials to engage in blame avoidance by delegating policy‐making powers to the bureaucracy. Utilizing a mixed methods approach to analyze state‐level governor responses to COVID‐19, this paper expands the PMF by capturing the influence of bureaucratic demands on elected official decisions to delegate or transfer power to the bureaucracy. We find evidence that bureaucratic expertise, under the right set of circumstances, influences policymaker decisions to delegate policymaking power. Lastly, we advocate for a renewed focus on democratic principles and the consequences of delegation for transparency, accountability, and social equity. In understanding the specific dynamics at play when bureaucrats and executives work to develop policy in crisis, practitioners may gain a better understanding of how to navigate difficult decisions. The specific executive orders across states are not particularly well‐known, and providing evidence of the steps other states took to combat the crisis may prove useful to practitioners in the emergency management space. If practitioners have a more complete understanding of why policy is made and by what mechanisms, they may apply a focus on implementation strategies that are effective and relevant.

Coal–environmental quality nexus in EU-part of the Eastern Bloc: Do socioeconomic factors and bureaucracy play a substantial role?

Based on the fact that the EU-part of the Eastern Bloc has not fared well in transitioning to renewable energy in the last decade compared to other regions of the bloc, this study investigated the impacts of coal consumption, socioeconomic factors and bureaucracy on the environment and the moderating effect of socioeconomic factors and bureaucracy on the coal consumption–environment relationship in the selected bloc. The study used the AMG, FMOLS and DOLS modelling framework and a panel of six countries in the selected bloc from 1990 to 2018. The study established that coal consumption has a significant dampening effect on CO2 emissions in the EU-part of the Eastern Bloc and that bureaucracy in the region amplifies this effect instead of mitigating it. In another corridor, we found that in the midst of the coal–environmental nexus, socioeconomic factors offer a mitigating path towards emission reduction in the region. Policy recommendations directed at addressing bureaucratic hitches associated with the transition to renewable energy in Eastern Europe. The authors propose the inauguration of hybrid courts (specialised) to settle disputes that may arise from indigenes and standing technical committees to increase bureaucratic expertise, which would reduce the permit acquisition period required for wind, hydropower, and solar installation farms and other technicalities associated with the EU funding for the Eastern Bloc.

When bureaucratic expertise comes under attack

AbstractPoliticians need expertise to make public policies, and civil servants are principal and proximate providers of knowledge. Yet, what constitutes relevant knowledge and skills for bureaucrats is regularly contested—both by politicians and bureaucrats—and subject to change. How can we explain the processes of contestation and change in the expertise of policy bureaucracies? The article presents a theoretical framework for analyzing the politics of bureaucratic expertise. It proposes the concept of “expertise bargains” to capture the understanding between politicians and bureaucrats about the knowledge and skills of civil servants. Based on a transactional view of authority in bureaucratic politics, it argues that the terms of this expertise bargain are mutually defined by politicians and bureaucrats through a dynamic bargaining process. The analytical utility of the framework is demonstrated through a comparative‐historical analysis of contestation and change in bureaucratic expertise in the field of economic policy.

State Building in Crisis Governance: Donald Trump and COVID-19.

State Building in Crisis Governance: Donald Trump and COVID-19.

Research on New Public Management from a Multi-dimensional Perspectiv

At present, community pension has become a new type of pension. However, with economic development and social transformation, our country has entered a special period of diversified interests and complex contradictions. Environmental mass incidents show a high incidence trend. "Dilemma." This article uses a new perspective of behavioral public management to analyze the interaction between the government and the public in the decision-making process of environmental projects, and draws the conclusion of "two transformations": the cognitive framework of "public management". Scientific understanding is needed. Transform into the cognitive framework of "public epistemology"; accordingly, the interactive mode of the one-way role of the government and the people and the intermediary influence of experts needs to be transformed into the two-way role of "public epistemology". Based on the interactive mode in which the government, the people and experts play a regulatory role, it is recommended to transform the path dependence of government decision-making led by bureaucratic experts and technical experts into completely democratic decision-making.

Civil Society, Democracy and Budgeting: Citizens Engagement and Transformations in Nigeria’s Budgeting

ABSTRACT Democracy in the sphere of policy-making warrants fulfilling the popular will by opening spaces for citizen knowledge of the governance processes participation, inclusion and a framework for accountability. The four budget stages of preparation, approval, implementation, and audit necessarily ought to integrate the above principles for an essential nexus with democracy. Using the work of two groups of civil society partners working on Nigeria’s budgeting, we studied the 2016–2019 period around the principles of democratic budgeting as well as explored changes related to civic engagements over the period. We found a monopoly of budget preparation by cloistered bureaucratic experts. The approval stage is marred by politics of vested interests in the legislature and executive with resulting delays in implementation and limited monitoring of the process by citizens. Budget audit suffers delays and non-response to its sensitive findings. Nonetheless, participatory civic engagements have led to a legal framework for civic vigilance in budgeting and enabled the country to save US$500,373,421.40 from frivolous allocations as well as annual budget adjustments for pro-poor inclusiveness and fair distribution of capital projects. Hence, civil society work for democratic budgeting regime is slow but incremental and unfolds amidst encumbering political and institutional dynamics.

A Centralist Approach to Regional Development: The Case of the Russian Ministry for the Development of the Far East

Since 2012, with a view to strengthen the development of strategically important regions, Russia has established several federal agencies responsible for these territories. The essay investigates one of these agencies: the Ministry for the Development of the Far East (Ministerstvo Rossiiskoi Federatsii po razvitiyu Dal’nego Vostoka). We identify two main trade-offs associated with the governance approach used in Russia—between federal power and local knowledge, and between bureaucratic expertise and novel ideas—and examine how the ministry has dealt with these trade-offs and their consequences for the ministry’s performance.

Does politicization influence senior public officials’ work attitudes? Different forms and effects of politicization in the civil service

ABSTRACT Despite a large body of literature on the effects of politicization, relatively little is known about its relationship with the work attitudes of public employees. This study investigates how different forms of politicization relate to senior executives’ job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Using data from a large-scale executive survey conducted in Europe, we found that senior public officials exhibit negative work attitudes when there is political intervention in civil service staffing, when they have little policy influence, and when political actors interfere in their managerial activities. In particular, politicians’ disrespect for bureaucratic expertise had the largest effect on work attitudes.

The Costs of Populism for the Bureaucracy and Government Performance: Evidence from Italian Municipalities

We study the consequences of populism on bureaucratic expertise and government performance. We use novel data on about 8,000 municipalities in Italy, over a period of 20 years, and we estimate the effect of electing a populist mayor with a close-election regression discontinuity design. We find that the election of a populist mayor leads to (1) higher turnover among top bureaucrats; (2) an increase in the probability of replacing expert with non-expert bureaucrats; (3) a decrease in the percentage of highly educated bureaucrats; (4) and lower performance overall. Moreover, we find evidence that the increased inefficiency of the bureaucracy is accompanied by proliferation of council and executive resolutions, in line with the recent literature on overproduction of laws and bureaucratic inefficiency.

Protecting Climate Change Law from a Revived Nondelegation Doctrine

In an era of political gridlock, a potential revitalization of the nondelegation doctrine threatens the Environmental Protection Agency’s existing framework for regulating greenhouse gas emissions and addressing the urgent threat of climate change. At its apex, the nondelegation doctrine briefly constrained permissible delegations from the legislature to the executive branch after two Supreme Court decisions in 1935. The doctrine has since weakened under the lenient “intelligible principle” standard. That standard today allows the legislative branch to make broad delegations to administrative arms of the executive branch, which then use technological and bureaucratic expertise to clarify, implement, and enforce statutes. The result is today’s administrative state—the federal government’s answer to the demanding complexities of modern society, the expansive duties of the federal government, and intense political gridlock in the legislature. However, with multiple Supreme Court Justices indicating support for reviving a stricter form of the nondelegation doctrine, many key, broad agency delegations are under threat, including the Clean Air Act’s delegation to the Environmental Protection Agency requiring regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. The urgency of the fight against climate change, combined with the political difficulty in passing new legislation, necessitates careful consideration of what revived nondelegation doctrine may require of legislative tasks assigned to the executive. In this note, I analyze the potential threat and its solutions and conclude that a revived nondelegation doctrine poses a substantial threat to the Clean Air Act’s delegation to the EPA. For this reason, intricate constitutional arguments and carefully crafted legislation may both be necessary to preserve the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Compared to whom? Social and historical reference points and performance appraisals by managers, students, and the general public

Experimental studies in public administration often focus on samples of non-practitioner groups. In these cases, it is unclear whether findings from non-practitioner groups are generalizable to public managers. Some literature suggests that bureaucrats are likely to hold biases similar to the rest of the population while other research argues that bureaucratic expertise and training allow practitioners to make decisions in more strategic or rational ways. This study works within the literature of performance information to test for differences in responses to the same experiment among college students, citizens, and public managers in the context of U.S. K-12 education. Some differences were detected across groups, though results reveal largely similar findings which have implications for when and how scholars might rely on non-practitioner samples to consider the attitudes and behaviors of bureaucrats or elected policymakers.

Between Elitism and Populism: A Case for Pluralism in Schooling and Homeschooling

ABSTRACT Inherently, populism questions elite values and expertise; thus, populists oppose and usually are opposed by elites. Here, I discuss how American Political Science treats elitism, pluralism, and populism, relying heavily on the U.S. Founders’ constitutional approaches limiting the power of factions to impose social and political uniformity. Second, I summarize how these models approach the provision of schooling, particularly school choice including homeschooling. In America, public education practice is dominated by elite bureaucratic experts supporting quasi-monopolistic factory models of schooling and unsupportive of the academic rigor some parents desire. Pluralist education as practiced in certain other nation states and historically may offer greater academic success and social peace through diversity, while enhancing achievement and equity. I use these discussions as foundations to critique Bartholet , who argues for severely restricting homeschooling to empower bureaucratic experts and disempower parents. I find it unlikely that such schemes can be implemented without animus against minority factions, and thus without degrading the social diversity inherent to pluralism.

The Roberts Court and Administrative Law

This article assesses where the Supreme Court stands on administrative law after the 2018 term, focusing on Kisor v. Wilkie and Department of Commerce v. New York. Over the last decade, the Roberts Court had demonstrated increasing concerns about an out-of-control federal bureaucracy at odds with the constitutional order, but hadn’t pulled back significantly on administrative governance in practice. The 2018 term provided the Court with a chance to put its might where its mouth was. Yet administrative law’s denouement did not come; established administrative law doctrines remain in force, albeit narrowed. The 2018 Term cases demonstrate that the Roberts Court is deeply divided on administrative law along clear ideological lines. The cases also illuminate several core analytic themes and tensions in the Roberts Court’s administrative law jurisprudence, in particular disagreements over: the relationship of law and policy; formalism and nonformalism; the role of history; and administrative common law versus Administrative Procedure Act originalism. Taking a further step back, two contrasting frames emerge from the Roberts Court’s 2018 term administrative law opinions. One is radical, with a categorical and uncompromising formalism, commitment to limited government and aggressive judicial review, insistently originalist stance, and rejection of contemporary judicial review doctrines as at odds with traditional understandings of judicial power and the meaning of the APA. The other is incrementalist and common law in character, encompassing justices with a broader range of views about constitutional structure and administrative government but united in their unwillingness to disrupt existing governance regimes, at least not all at once. Which of these analytic frames will ultimately prevail still remains an open question, but incrementalism was plainly the victor in the 2018 Term’s administrative law decisions. That is significant, but should also not obscure that there was unity across the Court in urging greater judicial scrutiny of administrative action. Moreover, despite invocations of the importance of bureaucratic expertise, these decisions share the concerns with unaccountable, aggrandized, and arbitrary administrative power that characterize the Roberts Court’s administrative jurisprudence more widely. Notably lacking is reference to the ways that the administrative state operates to constrain power, render it accountable, and advance individual liberty. Absent a more balanced view of the administrative state, the Roberts Court is unlikely to develop a coherent approach to administrative law.

Technocratic Pragmatism, Bureaucratic Expertise, and the Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve (Fed) regularly faces novel challenges to its broad statutory mandates. Often, these challenges—from financial crises to pandemics to climate change—raise a critical question. When should the Fed act beyond the boundaries of its core institutional identity and expertise? On the one hand, some voices demand the Fed “stay in its own lane,” avoiding experimentation so that it may preserve its perceived legitimacy to carry out core historical functions. On the other, hewing too closely to precedent and existing expertise risks institutional failure of a different sort.To navigate that tension, this Feature sketches an ethos of technocratic pragmatism—one that permits the Fed to develop the expertise necessary to address emergent problems as long as it remains constrained by norms designed to preserve its long-run legitimacy. We illustrate the ethos by examining three cases where the Fed has confronted, or is confronting, challenges that test the boundaries of its expertise: engagement with cyber risk, emergency lending before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and nascent efforts to understand the intersection of central banking and global climate change. We also engage with cases where the Fed has transgressed legitimacy-preserving limits by intervening in policy disputes beyond the range of its statutory concerns. Taken together, these cases illustrate how the Fed must walk a fine line between valuable experimentation and the usurpation of politics.

How Science Became Technical

Not until the 20th century was science regarded as fundamentally technical in nature. In that sense, a “technical field” refers not so much to a field capable of producing technology and not only to one difficult to master, but also to a field based on concepts and vocabulary that matter only to its specialists. That understanding implies unequal access to the contents of science, as the predominantly technical parts of it are given over to the specialists. In addition, it serves as a defense against interference from politics and religion. A historical review of the technicality of science is taken up in the second part of the article. An alternative understanding, which identified science with an ideal of public reason, attained its peak of influence in the late 19th century. Until the 1920s and ‘30s, the most prominent advocates of science emphasized its contribution to the moral, economic and intellectual order, sometimes abetting tradition but more often (and more naturally) challenging old authorities or established religion and promising grounds for moral and intellectual progress. While the scale and applicability of science advanced enormously after 1900, scientists have usually preferred a pose of detached objectivity in service to bureaucratic experts rather than cultivating engagement with the public. This reshaping of science, which has been both celebrated and condemned, provided a stimulus to the nascent field of history of science, and it remains a key historical problem. The article traces the vicissitudes in the development of this problem and the solutions to it proposed by scientists and histo¬rians of science from different generations.

Punctuated Equilibrium and Bureaucratic Autonomy in American City Governments

Several recent applications of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET) have yielded compelling findings linking institutional design and change distributions, yet, much more work needs to be done to understand institutional arrangements that make punctuated processes more or less likely. In responding to the recent call for more research on unraveling particular mechanisms through which bureaucracy moderates the odds of policy punctuations, this research explores the potential of bureaucratic expertise and professionalism in fostering rational decision making, and thus the stability in change dynamics. One important feature of urban government receives close attention: the position by professionalized, trained bureaucrats in municipalities (city manager and chief administrative officer) and the effects of their discretion on altering municipal budgetary change distributions. Analysis of a novel dataset of fiscal policy changes, charter and census information of city governments in the State of Michigan, 2005–11, suggests city governments, on average, produce change patterns that conform to the expectations of PET; more importantly, it reveals that heightened levels of managerial discretion can have a significant implication for helping cities experience less abrupt, punctuated budget changes. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these results for PET, policy change dynamics, and the design of city‐governing institutions.