Bureaucratic Policy Research Articles

Contesting “VIP urbanism”

We live in an age of extreme and worsening urban inequality. One result is the increased prevalence of “VIP urbanism”—the idea that cities govern land use through two sets of rules, one of them reserved for “very important people”. The first set of rules applies to most urbanites, through de jure laws and standardized bureaucratic policies. However, in many places a second set of practices operates quietly alongside the official rules, as a de facto system of loopholes, easements, exemptions, lobbying, and veto power that enable some actors to shape cities in ways that violate the spirit—and sometimes even the letter—of the law. This special issue presents empirical research and theoretical commentary on the VIP urbanism phenomenon, with cases including Bengaluru, Hong Kong, Milan, New York City, Paris, Valparaiso, and Venice. The authors identify how preferential treatment for elites has impacted urban governance in a diverse geography of cities, and evaluate how these practices have been contested by social movements and other urban stakeholders.

Populist hyperpersonalization and politicization of foreign policy institutions

Abstract This article explains how right-wing populist leaders in Hungary, Poland, Russia and Turkey have transformed their states' foreign policy institutions through personalization and politicization. We examine the transformation of foreign policy institutions in the four cases and make two contributions. First, we differentiate between disparate types of personalization by proposing the term ‘hyperpersonalization’—populist leaders' reliance on security institutions in foreign policy decision-making—which distinguishes the populist transformation of foreign policy institutions in Russia and Turkey. We argue that lower levels and speed of autocratization lead to politicization combined with milder cases of personalization of the foreign policy bureaucracy, while higher levels and speed of autocratization lead to higher levels of personalization in the foreign policy institutions. Second, we lay out the steps and patterns of populist politicization and hyperpersonalization that bring ‘deinstitutionalizing restructuring’ to foreign policy institutions. As we illustrate, this deinstitutionalizing restructuring involves concurrent bureaucratic expansion and bureaucratic retrenchment. The process is accompanied by a populist narrative that this restructuring is done to realize the ‘popular will’ or to regain ‘full sovereignty’. We conclude the article with the policy implications of this populist transformation of foreign policy institutions.

Determinants of Inflation in Indonesia: Do Changes in World Oil Prices Matter?

This research was conducted to investigate the effect of world oil prices, interest rates, and money supply on inflation in Indonesia. This study uses the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) analysis method. The data used were monthly data from January 2014-May to 2022. The results show that interest rates do not significantly affect inflation in the short or long run. Money supply has a negative relationship with inflation in the short and long run. In the short term, world oil prices have a negative effect on inflation. Meanwhile, world oil prices have a positive and significant relationship with inflation in the long run. This finding implies that it is necessary to emphasize policies other than interest rates when controlling inflation, such as more straightforward bureaucratic policies, ease of investment services, and a more effective import trading system. Bank Indonesia should also remain consistent and focus on prudence when implementing macroeconomic policies. The government must also consider the timeframe for determining the oil price policy because it has different short-term and long-term effects.

Analysis of Bureacracy Downsizing in Indonesia by Using Strategic Action Field Framework

Introduction: The purpose of this article is to find out how the strategic action field capacity of the Indonesian bureaucracy on bureaucratic simplification has been implemented. Literature Review: The meaning of delayering, with reference to such metaphors, is commonly taken to describe the planned vertical compression of various levels of the managerial hierarchy, including the wholesale removal of one or more levels of managerial or supervisory staff from an organization's personnel roster. (Keuning and Opheij, 1994; Miller and Longair, 1985; Wheatley, 1992). Method: This research uses qualitative research through primary data collection through interviews and secondary data through literature study. Result and Discussion: The results show that bureaucratic simplification has not been proven effective in improving the performance of the bureaucracy in Indonesia, it is still only at the stage of fulfilling administrative obligations. Conclusions: Key findings as novelty in studies related to implementation of bureaucratic policy researchers with locus Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministries of Religion, Ministry for Rural and Rural Development of the Remnant, and Ministries for State Apparatus Disclosure and Reforms The bureaucracy suggests that organizational capacity must be derived from individual capacity, as the primary capital of an organization before making organizational change.

Racial Tropes in the Foreign Policy Bureaucracy: A Computational Text Analysis

AbstractHow do racial stereotypes affect perceptions in foreign policy? Race and racism as topics have long been marginalized in the study of international relations but are receiving renewed attention. In this article we assess the role of implicit racial bias in internal, originally classified assessments by the US foreign policy bureaucracy during the Cold War. We use a combination of dictionary-based and supervised machine learning techniques to identify the presence of four racial tropes in a unique corpus of intelligence documents: almost 5,000 President's Daily Briefs given to Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. We argue and find that entries about countries that the US deemed “racialized Others”—specifically, countries in the Global South, newly independent states, and some specific regional groupings—feature an especially large number of racial tropes. Entries about foreign developments in these places are more likely to feature interpretations that infantilize, invoke animal-based analogies, or imply irrationality or belligerence. This association holds even when accounting for the presence of conflict, the regime type of the country being analyzed, the invocation of leaders, and the topics being discussed. The article makes two primary contributions. First, it adds to the revival of attention to race but gives special emphasis to implicit racialized thinking and its appearance in bureaucratic settings. Second, we show the promise of new tools for identifying racial and other forms of implicit bias in foreign policy texts.

Executive coalition building

AbstractWhy do executive agencies form coalitions? Legislative coalitions are widely theorized and studied, but less attention has been paid to executive coalitions. Executive agencies’ dependence on the political branches calls for a distinctive theory of coalition building. This article presents such a theory, arguing that agencies form coalitions to optimize their autonomy given their subordinate position in a separation of powers system by signaling to overseers that their policies are efficient and should be maintained. Bureaucrats form coalitions actively to advance their policy goals in the face of political opposition. Using data on dozens of agencies over seventeen years, I find that agencies are most likely to form coalitions when their preferences are misaligned with the president but aligned with each other. I also find evidence that coalitions send credible signals that bureaucratic policies are efficient since Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is less likely to request regulatory revisions of policies produced by coalitions.

Macrolevel factors encouraging bureaucratic policy entrepreneurship: The case of religion and state in Israel

AbstractHow do external macrolevel factors encourage bureaucrats to become policy entrepreneurs? And what are their organizational goals in pursuing entrepreneurship? Contrary to traditional public choice literature on bureaucracy that sees the latter as change‐resistant, this study stresses that bureaucracies can and do change; they are not as insulated from reformist pressure. In this study, we lay the conditions under which change occurs, making bureaucrats—policy entrepreneurs. We argue that: (1) bureaucratic inefficiency, leading to (2) societal pressure as expressed by public opinion, and consequently to (3) pressure from potential new providers offering bottom‐up competition, will encourage bureaucrats to turn to policy entrepreneurship strategies. In addition, we assert that their goals in doing so are to modify and design efficient services, while protecting their monopoly on service provision. We test these claims by analyzing the state‐religion dynamics in Israel, and specifically the case of the 2021 kosher food inspection reform.

Decentralized legislative oversight of bureaucratic policy making

Congressional oversight is a potentially potent tool to affect policy making and implementation by executive agencies. However, oversight of any agency is dispersed among several committees across the House and Senate. How does this decentralization affect the strategic incentives for oversight by each committee? And how do the strategic incentives of oversight committees align with the collective interest of Congress as a whole? We develop a formal, spatial model of decentralized oversight to investigate these questions. The model shows that when committees have similar interests in affecting agency policy, committees attempt to free ride on each other, and oversight levels are inefficiently low. But if committees have competing interests in affecting agency policy, they engage in “dueling oversight” with little overall effect, and oversight levels are inefficiently high. Overall, we contend that committee oversight incentives do not generally align with the collective interests of Congress, and the problem cannot be easily solved by structural changes within a single chamber.

Bureaucratic policy work and analytical capacities in central administrations in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain: The results of a comparative survey

Policy analytical capacity is a pivotal source of good governance. Although this capacity can be acquired by decision makers in various ways, it is clear that the internal stock of analytical capacity is strategic in terms of supporting policymaking. This stock can be concentrated in specific types of organisational roles (like policy professionals), but it can also be considered a constitutive component of ordinary bureaucratic work. This paper adopts this latter perspective to analyse the characteristics in terms of policy work and analytical capacities of high-level bureaucrats of the central administrations of the Old Southern Four: Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. The data were collected through a large online survey involving more than 1000 high civil servants. The empirical evidence offered shows the high differentiation in terms of policy work and analytical capacities that characterise the four analysed central bureaucracies and confirms that, despite the expected similarities among the four countries, differences are striking and concern almost all dimensions of analysis. Moreover, Spain has a higher stock of policy analytical capacities. Thus, adopting a policy work perspective can be a fruitful lens for analysing whether and how administrative reforms are capable of penetrating the micro dimensions of administrative behaviour. Points for practitioners The paper offers the first comparative analysis of the policy work and the analytical capacities of the central administration in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. The results show that, despite the many similarities among the four countries, there are significant differences in terms of ways of working and the held analytical capacities of the high level servants. The offered data show a specific map of policy analytical skills that can be used as a point of departure for designing improvements in high civil servants’ training.

Bureaucratic Politics: Blind Spots and Opportunities in Political Science

Bureaucracy is everywhere. Unelected bureaucrats are a key link between government and citizens, between policy and implementation. Bureaucratic politics constitutes a growing share of research in political science. But the way bureaucracy is studied varies widely, permitting theoretical and empirical blind spots as well as opportunities for innovation. Scholars of American politics tend to focus on bureaucratic policy making at the national level, while comparativists often home in on local implementation by street-level bureaucrats. Data availability and professional incentives have reinforced these subfield-specific blind spots over time. We highlight these divides in three prominent research areas: the selection and retention of bureaucratic personnel, oversight of bureaucratic activities, and opportunities for influence by actors external to the bureaucracy. Our survey reveals how scholars from the American and comparative politics traditions can learn from one another.

Between hierarchies and markets: How street‐level bureaucratic autonomy leads to policy innovations

AbstractAlthough street‐level bureaucrats (SLBs) play a key role in the implementation of market‐based instruments (MBIs), their participation is widely understudied. This paper addresses this blind spot by engaging the concept of street‐level bureaucratic policy entrepreneurship. Using the case of conservation banking, a market‐based environmental policy in the United States, we explore why this novel instrument has only been adopted in a handful of jurisdictions. We examine both non‐adoption and adoption of conservation banking to find that SLBs are likely to engage in such entrepreneurial acts when a new policy form is particularly useful in legitimizing regulatory enforcement. Implementing a MBI is, however, not straightforward. Organizational conditions can restrain SLB autonomy to implement MBIs, preferring instead to persist with baseline policies, which further underscores the importance of SLB risk‐taking behavior. SLBs must strategically straddle their unique position between the market and the hierarchy to enroll different actors into the new policy arrangement, all within dynamic political–economic conditions.

What Public Comments During Rulemaking Do (and Why)

Public comments on proposed federal regulations are thought to influence bureaucratic policy choices, but why? While reelection incentives give politicians straightforward reasons for catering to public preferences, regulators lack similarly direct incentives to accede to demands from stake-holders. We argue commenters may adopt several different tactics to try and persuade regulators. Broadly, they may either describe policy consequences or threaten the regulator with sanctions, especially by the Courts or Congress. But which tactics do members of the public – especially firms and interest groups – use during commenting, and why? We explore this question by extensive manual coding of comments submitted by strategic actors during high-stakes financial rulemaking. We find that the vast majority of comments have purely informational content, with very limited threats to involve political principals. These findings should be surprising to a literature that often presumes a model where interest group commenting is a form of bargaining in the shadow of the Courts or Congress. To assess whether this behavior is driven by the benefits of information versus the costs of threatening, we explore how the strategy of outside interests changes across the resource distribution, and analyze the litigation records of firms against these agencies. We conclude with a case study of a high-stakes policy where different kinds of interests used different strategies.

Loyal Leaders, Affluent Agencies: The Budgetary Implications of Political Appointments in the Executive Branch

A central issue in democratic theory concerns whether and how politicians can maximize their policy returns from bureaucratic delegation. In this article, we propose that politicians assure favorable delegation outcomes in part by strategically matching responsive personnel and prioritized resources across policy issues and over time. We substantiate our analysis with four decades’ worth of data from the Swedish executive bureaucracy, taking particular advantage of the fact that the cabinet ministers generally appoint their agency heads on tenure-protected fixed terms. Using a within-agency research design, we show that the governing parties award more funds to agencies appointed by their ideological allies than to agencies appointed by their ideological opponents. Our findings underscore that political decisions about bureaucratic appointments and appropriations are both part of the same general delegation process but also highlight how political competition can undermine democratic control of bureaucratic policy making.

Special Interests in Foreign Policy Bureaucracies: Evidence from Foreign Aid

Previous articleNext article No AccessSpecial Interests in Foreign Policy Bureaucracies: Evidence from Foreign AidShannon CarcelliShannon Carcelli Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Politics Just Accepted Sponsored by the Southern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/723821 Views: 24Total views on this site HistoryAccepted October 14, 2022 © 2023 Southern Political Science Association. All Rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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.

EVIDENCE-BASED POLICY: DATA’S USE IN SUPPORTING PUBLIC POLICY PROCESS

Bureaucratic reform became the backbone in changing the life of the nation and state. Through bureaucratic reform, arrangements are carried out on the system of government administration to make it more effective and efficient. One of the important bureaucratic reform agendas to realize is improving the quality of policies. Therefore, through this article, the author aims to provide an overview of the meaning of data / evidence in the public policy process. The writing of this article uses the literature review method, namely by utilizing secondary data or sources in the form of journals, books, documentation, the internet and various libraries that are relevant to the issues and topics of this article. The researcher concluded that the contribution of the EBP approach in the bureaucracy and policy of public institutions in each policy cycle can be a breakthrough in the birth of innovative policies. The use of research data is an important aspect in the success of government bureaucratic policies. Moreover, superior research as a source of data can identify problems more precisely and help governments design the most effective and innovative policy options.

Bureaucratic entrepreneurship and morality politics: Dividing lines within the state

AbstractBased on a qualitative and quantitative research design, this article examines the implementation of a morality policy – the medical cannabis policy in Switzerland – to investigate three understudied aspects of bureaucratic entrepreneurship. First, moving away from mono‐professional studies, the focus is on a policy characterized by a dispute between two groups of bureaucrats: physicians and jurists. Second, key conditions triggering bureaucratic policy entrepreneurship are identified, with a focus on mid‐level administrative entrepreneurs. Third, vertical alliances between bureaucrats and politicians of the executive and legislative branches are examined and these processes are reflected in the wider perspective of the politics‐administration dichotomy. Results show that law obsolescence, disputes between groups of bureaucrats and the need for political arbitration are favourable conditions for bureaucratic policy entrepreneurship. The study also shows that within the traditional separation of powers, bureaucratic entrepreneurship reinforces the executive power and creates dividing lines within the different branches of government.

Turf Wars in Foreign Policy Bureaucracy: Rivalry between the Government and the Bureaucracy in Turkish Foreign Policy

Abstract This paper, using examples from Turkish foreign policy between 2002 and 2014, argues that the fragmentation in foreign policymaking due to adopting different foreign policy ideas, that is, ideas of the elected leadership and the bureaucracy, is likely to generate competition between the state agencies that constitute the foreign policy bureaucracy. If there is backlash in the bureaucracy to realize the government's revisionist foreign policy goals, then the government aims to transform the bureaucracy by empowering certain small bureaucratic units, that is, missionary agencies. Once the degree of conflict between the government and the bureaucracy becomes severe, then the elected officials opt to work with the established bureaucratic agencies to speed up the decision-making processes. The analysis based on a series of interviews conducted with sixty-one Turkish foreign policymakers shows that the turf war in the foreign policy bureaucracy is a conceptual framework for comprehending how elected officials use bureaucratic tactics to undermine the involvement of bureaucrats in decision-making processes. Finally, the study contributes to current debates on populism and the presidentialization of foreign policy by showing that the foreign policy bureaucracy is not immune from the anti-elite, anti-establishment rhetoric of governments.

Do bureaucratic policy and socioeconomic factors moderate energy utilization effect of net zero target in the EU?

Based on the commitment to improve environmental quality across European Union under the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals and varying national goals, this study investigates the dynamic linkages between bureaucracy, socioeconomic factors, conventional fossil fuel energy consumption vis-à-vis aggregate fossil and disaggregate fossil (oil, coal, and gas) fuels and environmental quality in the panel of selected 25-EU nations for the period 1990-2017. The study employs relevant second-generation empirical method and unearth the following results: (1) inverted environmental Kuznets curve was validated while fossil fuel consumption has a deteriorating impact on environmental performance due to its positive effect on carbon emission; (2) fossil fuel energy consumption (both aggregate and it components) exerts a dampening impact on environmental performance due to its positive effect on carbon emission; (3) that direct effect of bureaucracy and socioeconomic factors promote environmental quality but the degree or magnitude of influence is significantly different between bureaucratic system and socioeconomic factor, and (4) the moderating or indirect impact of bureaucracy, socioeconomic on the environment via fossil fuel energy consumption is observed and significantly different across the model specification. Moreover, the result reveals a unidirectional causal relationship flows from GDP per capita, bureaucracy and socioeconomic factors to carbon emission, while bi-directional relationships between oil, gas and carbon emission are established. In policy direction, the study therefore recommend that the European Union member countries should further explore the opportunities in clean energy development in order to ameliorate the continent's environmental concerns. Furthermore, in the quest to scale up the bloc's energy transition, significant improvement in the countries' bureaucracy establishment and socioeconomic conditions could hasten the energy transition and efficiency policy while improving the environmental sustainability drive.

Deconstruction of the Policy for the Establishment of Houses of Worship in Indonesia

This study examines the conflict in establishing houses of worship in Indonesia and the problems faced with PBM policies No. 9 and 8 of 2006. This research is purely a literature study using a qualitative approach. The government guarantees freedom of religion and performs worship according to their religion. Unfortunately, in PBM Numbers 9 and 8 of 2006, the policy of establishing houses of worship in its implementation takes work. The problem of establishing places of worship occurs due to the government's need for more socialization with the public regarding policies for the establishment of houses of worship, bureaucratic policies that tend to be discriminatory, and local religious leaders. Its are not involved in Such policies can potentially lead to the dualism of authority, unclear policies can lead to multiple interpretations, and in the perspective of human rights, these policies ignore human rights. Therefore, the government needs to reorganize or deconstruct the policy for establishing houses of worship in PBM Numbers 9 and 8 of 2006 so that there will be no conflict over establishing places of worship in the future.