Unelected Bureaucrats Research Articles

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.

Leveraging city officials’ professional and social Identities to facilitate affordable housing

Housing affordability is an acute problem in many developed economies. It is rooted, inter alia, in a conflict of interests across levels of government. Policies that seek to increase the supply of housing and lower their purchase price are popular among the general electorate, yet local governments deploy urban planning regulations to restrict densification and development of affordable housing within their jurisdictions. Moves to address this conflict would benefit from unpacking city officials' policy preferences and their variation. This paper compares the positions of local-government politicians vs. those of unelected bureaucrats in Israeli cities, drawing on survey and interview data. Our findings confirm the conflicts of interest between levels of government even within Israel's unitary, centralized context. However, we show that career bureaucrats, given their relative freedom from electoral pressures and commitment to professional values, are more amenable to citizens' and central government's shared interest in densification and affordable housing. We also highlight city officials' place of residence—within vs. outside the city—and their social identification with citizens and residents as antecedents of their urban-planning preferences. We draw on these findings to delineate directions for more effective central–local government collaboration in seeking affordable housing solutions.

Who Answers for the Government? Bureaucrats, Ministers, and Responsible Parties

AbstractA key feature of parliamentary democracy is government accountability vis‐à‐vis the legislature, but the important question of who speaks for the government—cabinet ministers or unelected bureaucrats, and the institutional underpinnings of this behavior—receives scant attention in the existing literature. We investigate this question using the case of Japan, and data on more than four million committee speeches spanning distinct electoral and legislative institutional environments. We document how a party‐strengthening electoral system reform in 1994 facilitated a dramatic shift in the nature of government accountability to parliamentary committees: speeches by ministers increased, speeches by bureaucrats decreased, and discursive accountability between ministers and opposition legislators increased. Subsequent legislative reforms expanding junior ministerial roles and placing explicit limits on bureaucratic participation further reinforced the effects. These findings shed new light on the institutional foundations of responsible party government in general as well as its progressive development in Japan.

Corruption victimization and anti‐incumbent voting

AbstractDo citizens punish elected politicians for corruption carried out by unelected bureaucrats? Most studies of corruption punishment focus on accusations against politicians. We argue that the direct, and therefore undeniable, experience of corruption at the hands of street‐level bureaucrats will lead citizens to punish national incumbents. We explore whether this punishment of corruption is mitigated in circumstances where voters believe that politicians have less control over bureaucrats. We combine cross‐national survey data on corruption victimization and political behavior in a sample of 60 countries from Africa and Latin America. We find a robust, negative effect of personal corruption victimization on vote intention. Surprisingly, we do not identify any significant country‐level predictors of the strength of this relationship, nor do we find evidence of systematic differences in how copartisans respond to bureaucratic corruption relative to noncopartisans. Our paper contributes to the growing literature on how interaction with street‐level bureaucrats drives political behavior.

Trump and the “deep state”

ABSTRACT Donald Trump and his loyalists invoked the concept of the deep state when confronted with resistance to the president’s agenda. The hazy concept of the deep state was tied to the long-standing conservative critique of the administrative state and the growth of the federal bureaucracy. Together, they conveyed reproach that Trump was subverted by a shadowy network of unelected bureaucrats that illegitimately holds the levers of real power in the United States. But there is no deep state. The conflict between the bureaucracy and Trump underscores a conflict between liberal and populist conceptions of democracy; between, utilizing Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation,” an ethic of responsibility and an ethic of conviction. The bureaucracy’s commitment to liberalism and instrumental rationality butts up against the Caesarist authority claimed by a leader on the basis of his presumed plebiscitary electoral mandate. Trump’s rhetorical accusation of a deep state undermined confidence in government and the legitimacy of the state.

Some Costs & Benefits of Cost-Benefit Analysis

Abstract The American administrative state has become a cost-benefit state, at least in the sense that prevailing executive orders require agencies to proceed only if the benefits justify the costs. Some people celebrate this development; others abhor it. For defenders of the cost-benefit state, the antonym of their ideal is, alternately, regulation based on dogmas, intuitions, pure expressivism, political preferences, or interest-group power. Seen most sympathetically, the focus on costs and benefits is a neo-Benthamite effort to attend to the real-world consequences of regulations, and it casts a pragmatic, skeptical light on modern objections to the administrative state, invoking public-choice theory and the supposedly self-serving decisions of unelected bureaucrats. The focus on costs and benefits is also a valuable effort to go beyond coarse arguments, from both the right and the left, that tend to ask this unhelpful question: “Which side are you on?” In the future, however, there will be much better ways, which we might consider neo-Millian, to identify those consequences: 1) by relying less on speculative ex ante projections and more on actual evaluations; 2) by focusing directly on welfare and not relying on imperfect proxies; and 3) by attending closely to distributional considerations–on who is helped and who is hurt.

Some Benefits and Costs of Cost-Benefit Analysis

The American administrative state has become a cost-benefit state, at least in the sense that prevailing executive orders require agencies to proceed only if the benefits justify the costs. Some people celebrate this development; others abhor it. For defenders of the cost-benefit state, the antonym of their ideal is, alternately, regulation based on dogmas, intuitions, pure expressivism, political preferences, or interest-group power. Seen most sympathetically, the focus on costs and benefits is a neo-Benthamite effort to attend to the real-world consequences of regulations, and it casts a pragmatic, skeptical light on modern objections to the administrative state, invoking public-choice theory and the supposed self-serving decisions of unelected bureaucrats. The focus on costs and benefits is also a valuable effort to go beyond coarse arguments, from both the right and the left, that tend to ask this unhelpful question: “Which side are you on?” In the future, however, there will be much better ways, which we might consider neo-Millian, to identify those consequences: (1) by relying less on unreliable ex ante projections and more on actual evaluations; (2) by focusing directly on welfare and not relying on imperfect proxies; and (3) by attending closely to distributional considerations – on who is helped and who is hurt.

Who Answers for the Government? Institutional Reform and Ministerial Accountability in Japan

A key feature of parliamentary democracy is government accountability vis-a-vis the legislature, but the important question of who speaks for the government—cabinet ministers or unelected bureaucrats, and the institutional underpinnings of this behavior—receives scant attention in the existing literature. We investigate this question with the case of Japan, and data on more than 4 million committee speeches spanning distinct electoral and legislative institutional environments. We document how a party-strengthening electoral system reform in 1994 facilitated a dramatic shift in the nature of government accountability to parliamentary committees: speeches by ministers increased, speeches by bureaucrats decreased, and discursive accountability between ministers and opposition legislators increased. Subsequent legislative reforms expanding junior ministerial roles and placing explicit limits on bureaucratic participation further reinforced the effects. These findings shed new light on the institutional foundations of responsible party government in general, as well as its progressive development in Japan.

A Note on Human Welfare and the Administrative State

The American administrative state has become, in important respects, a cost-benefit state. At least this is so in the sense that prevailing executive orders require agencies to proceed only if the benefits justify the costs. For defenders of the cost-benefit state, the antonym of their ideal is, alternately, regulation based on dogmas, intuitions, expressivism, or interest-group power. The focus on costs and benefits is an important effort to attend to the real-world consequences of regulations – and it casts a pragmatic, skeptical light on modern objections to the administrative state, invoking public-choice theory and the supposed self-serving decisions of unelected bureaucrats. In the future, however, there will be better ways to identify those consequences, by focusing directly on welfare, and not relying on imperfect proxies.

Public Service or Propaganda? How Americans Evaluate Political Advocacy by Executive Agencies

ObjectiveExecutive agencies of the federal government frequently engage in explicit political advocacy, exhorting the public to adopt policy positions and engage in political actions. This advocacy conflicts with legal restrictions on unelected bureaucrats. It is unclear what the public thinks of this kind of advocacy. We assess whether Americans judge this advocacy based on principles about acceptable political processes or based on policy goals.MethodsWe use observational and experimental data from two national surveys of American adults to assess the role of policy preferences in acceptance of political advocacy by executive agencies.FindingsWe find that Americans approve a broad range of public communications from executive agencies, but approval of political appeals is highly sensitive to whether an individual shares the policy goal of the agency.ConclusionsPolicy agreement, rather than preferences about process, drives Americans' attitudes toward this kind of advocacy. Americans support political advocacy by executive agencies when it dovetails with their own policy preferences or partisanship and oppose it when these agencies advocate for policies that contradict their own preferences or partisanship. Indeed, they do not draw any distinction between unelected bureaucrats and elected politicians when it comes to evaluating these forms of advocacy.

A Question of Sovereignty: Tax and the Brexit Referendum

It isn't right that unelected bureaucrats in Brussels impose taxes on the poorest and elected British politicians can do nothing. (Vote Leave)1The debate about sovereignty in the Brexit referendum ...

International Negotiations in the Shadow of National Elections

AbstractThis study examines the role elections play in negotiations between states and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Although loans made by the IMF often require countries to introduce painful austerity measures that provoke a backlash from angry citizens, some governments are able to negotiate more favorable terms than others. Original data on the substantive content of IMF loans show that governments leverage imminent elections to obtain more lenient loan terms. Conditions that require labor market reforms in exchange for IMF financing are relatively less stringent in loans negotiated within six months before a pending democratic election, all else equal. The further away elections are from loan negotiations, the more stringent the labor conditions included in countries’ loan programs. Elections give governments leverage in their international negotiations and this leverage is effective even when states negotiate with unelected bureaucrats during times of economic crisis.

The Unfinished Architecture of Europe's Economic Union

The Unfinished Architecture of Europe's Economic Union

The Taliban, Women, and the Hegelian Private Sphere

THE society created by the Taliban in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001 constantly evoked outrage and reactions of openmouthed disbelief in the Western press. Even the ayatollahs in Tehran issued a statement condemning the Taliban for defaming Islam by confusing it with medieval obscurantism. Since the Islamic Republic of Iran had long been called “medieval” itself by political opponents, this criticism of the Afghan government has a delicious irony. One key to comprehending the somewhat strident bewilderment that the Taliban provoked in many observers is their reconfiguration of the public and the private in their quest for a pure Islamic countermodernity. I use the phrase countermodernity rather than antimodernism because the Taliban adopted some key motifs from high modernism and depended on modern techniques for their power (the state, radio, mass spectacle, tank corps, and machine guns mounted on Toyotas). They put these tools, however, to purposes very different from the goals of the industrialized democracies, especially with regard to the private sphere. The public/private divide as drawn by modern liberalism affects everything from how power is attained and exercised to how women are treated. Did the Taliban strike outsiders as bizarre in part because they drew those lines very differently than most other contemporary societies? The German sociologist Jürgen Habermas argues that the divide between public and private is a feature of modernity. He SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 3 (Fall 2003) The Taliban, Women, and the Hegelian Private Sphere* JUAN R. I. COLE *Many thanks to Jamil Hanifi, Shah Hanifi, Najeeb Jan, Rob Gleave, and Jon Anderson for comments that much improved the final draft. reports that the word privat, derived from the Latin, can only be found in Germany from the late sixteenth century, and that it initially referred to someone who was not an officer of the state. He says that institutionally, “a public sphere in the sense of a separate realm distinguished from the private sphere cannot be shown to have existed in the feudal society of the High Middle Ages.” The power of the kings and aristocrats was “public,” not in the sense of a sphere of society but in that of a status position. The lord “displayed himself, presented himself as an embodiment of some sort of ‘higher’ power.” The arena in which power was represented to a wide audience was public, but was not characterized by public participation—it was public the way a stage play is, for a passive audience. The church was likewise “public” in this sense of open display of ritual and authority until proponents of the Enlightenment increasingly coded it as private from the eighteenth century forward (Habermas, 1993: 7, 11). Joan Landes draws attention to Habermas’s emphasis on “features of visibility, display and embodiment, that is, an “aura” that surrounded and endowed the lord’s concrete existence.” She argues that “staged publicity” was fundamental to absolutist society in the early modern nationstates . This re-presentative performance of kingly authority by a royal subject before an audience was not dependent on having a permanent location or on the development of a public sphere of communication (Landes, 1998: 138). Habermas’s use of a binary opposition between the “medieval” and “modernity” and his concentration on select areas of Western Europe create a teleological natural history of the public sphere that remains highly Eurocentric. His account obscures the ways in which power as representation, and religion as public, continued to characterize many societies in modernity. Rather than being conceived of as medieval throwbacks, such societies must be viewed as forms of alternative modernity. Even in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, Lenin’s vanguard theory allowed power to be exercised in the twentieth century by unelected bureaucrats, in part through massive military parades 772 SOCIAL RESEARCH and other spectacles. In Bolivia and Greece, religion remained public, even as it was privatized in Turkey and Mexico. What of the private sphere? Seyla Benhabib notes three meanings of the private sphere in modern political thought. She says, “first and foremost, privacy has been understood as the sphere of moral and religious conscience,” referring to the separation of religion and state and the granting to the...

From Passive to Active Representation: The Case of Women Congressional Staff

From Passive to Active Representation: The Case of Women Congressional Staff

From Passive to Active Representation: The Case of Women Congressional Staff

Missing from most studies of congressional staff is the insight gained from the representative bureaucracy literature that descriptive characteristics may affect the behavior of unelected bureaucrats. In considering congressional representation as an activity mediated by staff, we ask: Does descriptive representation of congressional committee staff lead to substantive representation? We explore this question, using gender as our descriptive characteristic of interest. We produce a typology of staff roles developed through in‐depth interviews about two cases that illustrate how institutional factors affect and constrain women staffers' contributions as substantive representatives for issues concerning women. We posit that passive representation translates into the active representation only when: 1) interest groups hold expectations for passive representation on an issue and then in turn demand some level of active representation; 2) a staff member possesses the necessary resources of interest, expertise, and status, and 3) the opportunity structure of member‐staff relations, staff autonomy, and political salience coincide. When these conditions are less than optimal, active representation will not occur.

The Budget‐Minimizing Bureaucrat? Empirical Evidence from the Senior Executive Service

In a representative democracy, we assume the populace exerts some control over the actions and outputs of government officials, ensuring they comport with public preferences. However, the growth of the fourth branch of government has created a paradox: Unelected bureaucrats now have the power to affect government decisions (Meier 1993; Rourke 1984; Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman 1981).In this article, I rely on two competing theories of bureaucratic behavior‐representative‐bureaucracy theory and Niskanen's budget‐maximization theory‐to assess how well the top ranks of the federal government represent the demands of the citizenry. Focusing on federal‐spending priorities, I assess whether Senior Executive Service (SES) members mirror the attitudes of the populace or are likely to inflate budgets for their own personal gain. Contrary to the popular portrayal of the budget‐maximizing bureaucrat (Niskanen 1971), I find these federal administrators prefer less spending than the public on most broad spending categories, even on issues that fall within their own departments' jurisdictions. As such, it may be time to revise our theories about bureaucratic self‐interest and spending priorities.

Regulating the Internet

The Internet is one of the most remarkable products of the 20th century and not least among the remarkable things about it is that it is the only electronic medium not regulated. Yet. Despite a lot of rhetorical assurances of elected public officials and unelected bureaucrats, the unregulated character of the Net will change; it is just a matter of how and how soon. The focus of this brief essay is on classic forms of regulation. The Internet is now somewhere between two heavily regulated media--mass media and telecommunications media. However, it is a commonplace that these other media are converging, and it appears they are converging around the Internet technology and architecture. As this happens, as the Internet becomes both our telephone and our television, it naturally invites questions about whether and how traditional regulatory policies will be extended to Internet communications. The current posture of Internet exceptionalism in regard to regulatory policies does not appear to be sustainable. The pressures to regulate are particularly prominent in the economic area. Issues such as open access to broadband facilities (being pressed by independent ISPs) and local access charges (being pressed by local telephone companies) are creating a climate for regulation. In part this simply follows the old siren song of maintaining a level playing field between new and old media--a song that always seems to result in leveling up rather than leveling down the (regulated) playing field. If this happens again here (I predict it will), we will have lost one of the most important charms of the Internet--the chance to use it as an occasion for rethinking some of the old regulatory models.

Politics, Bureaucracy, and Farm Credit

A central issue in public administration is the conflict between democracy and the bureaucratic demands of governance (Redford, 1969). The predominant view in the literature is that bureaucracy is best subjected to political control through overhead democracy where elected politicians (usually Congress or the president) use a variety of hierarchical controls to influence the policy activities of bureaucrats. Various models are commonly used to explore these relationships with the principal-agent model predominating. Within this context McCubbins and Schwartz (1984) have suggested using the metaphors of and to explain legislative oversight. In this paper we focus on farm credit policy and suggest three points for consideration. First, another type of oversight suggested by Khademian (1995), bottom-line governance, best explains the oversight relationship with respect to farm credit policy. Second, bottom-line governance and the principal-agent approach are variations of overhead democracy rather than distinctive governing phenomena. Third, a third metaphor, that of a detector, enhances our understanding of bottom-line governance. We focus on two major distributive policy issues relating to agricultural debt policy: the acquisition of debt and the institutions that possess that debt. Re-examining the relationships between bureaucracy and political institutions in the area of agricultural credit is worthwhile for four reasons. First, the characteristics of this policy area differ from those assumed by the predominant theory, the principal-agent model. Second, these characteristics generate a different set of relationships that can best be described as bottom-line oversight (Khademian, 1995; Behn, 1992). In such circumstances bureaucracies are given vast discretion but held to a specific performance standard that is relatively easy to measure even if the day-to-day operations of the bureaucracy are not. Third, such policy areas encourage a different style of congressional oversight. Here is where we add smoke alarms to police patrol and fire alarm oversight. Fourth, agricultural credit policy is important in its own right. The food and fiber industries are economically powerful (adding $800 billion in value to the U.S. gross domestic product annually) and politically powerful (Browne, 1988; Jones, 1961; Talbot and Hadwiger, 1968; Tweeten, 1979; Ulrich, 1989). Agricultural debt totals approximately $140 billion dollars with about two-fifths of the total held by U.S. government-sponsored enterprises. Theory A fundamental tenet of democratic theory is that public policy should reflect a direct link between the governed and the governors; that is, public policy should be made by officials who are accountable to the people. Thus, a direct relationship is needed between unelected bureaucrats, who may exercise policy control, and the elected representatives of the people. Not surprisingly, research into the control of bureaucracies by political institutions is a growth industry (Moe, 1982; 1985; Scholz and Wei, 1986; Wood, 1988; Aberbach, 1990; Wood and Anderson, 1993; Wood and Waterman, 1991; 1994; Woolley, 1993). Much of this research uses the principal-agent model. Principal-agent models assume that bureaucrats and politicians disagree over the goals and means of public policy and, further, that political control over the bureaucrats is made more difficult because bureaucrats have access to policy-relevant information that politicians do not (Moe, 1985, 1098). In this context of goal conflict and information asymmetry, political principals are hypothesized to control bureaucratic agencies through a combination of monitoring, dispensing rewards, and meting out punishments. The research generally investigates this relationship by analyzing how bureaucratic outputs respond to changes in presidential administrations, changes in congressional partisanship or ideology, or changes brought about by periodic political events. …

Bank Supervision and the Limits of Political Influence over Bureaucracy

The relationship between elected officials and unelected bureaucrats is one of recurring interest to students of government. It is widely asserted (albeit incorrectly, see Rabin and Bowman, 1998; Svara, 1998) that the first generation of administration scholars (e.g., Wilson, 1887; Goodnow, 1900) believed that bureaucrats could and should be absolutely controlled by elected officials. Politicians made policy, and civil servants applied their neutral, nonpartisan expertise to carry out the wishes of their elected superiors in the most efficient manner possible. This politics/administration dichotomy, however, later gave way to decidedly less optimistic theories about the ability of elected officials to the bureaucracy. According to this literature, bureaucrats enjoyed considerable, if not almost complete, independence from the macropolitical system. Congress as a whole, the president, and appointed officials played minor roles, at best, in the day-to-day operations of the bureaucracy (Cater, 1964; Freeman, 1965; McConnell, 1966). Moreover, bureaucrats were primarily interested in maximizing their budgets (Downs, 1967; Niskanen, 1971; 1975), and they possessed numerous advantages (e.g., longevity, superior information and expertise, civil service protections, and over the flow of information) relative to elected officials such that they had substantial discretion to pursue their own interests (Redford, 1969; Rourke, 1976; Heclo, 1977; Loci, 1979). Meanwhile, the literature on Congress argued that the members of that institution were more concerned with satisfying their electoral constituencies than with monitoring the bureaucracy. Congressional oversight, where it occurred, was criticized as uncoordinated, episodic, ad hoc, and ineffectual (Bibby and Davidson, 1972; Derthick, 1990; Dodd and Schott, 1979; Ogul, 1976; Scher, 1960; Sundquist, 1981). Thus the policy process had come to be dominated by an iron triangle of bureaucrats, interest groups, and congressional subcommittees that generated policies that benefitted themselves and ignored the concerns of the at large (Lowi, 1979; McConnell, 1966; see also, Ripley and Franklin, 1991). By the 1980s, however, theories of political of the bureaucracy had come almost full circle, back to a view that espoused great faith in the ability of political officials to the bureaucracy. A growing body of theoretical and empirical research--much of it grounded in the principal-agent theory of political/bureaucratic relations--claimed to demonstrate numerous instances of effective political of the bureaucracy (e.g., Moe, 1984; Wood and Waterman, 1991). According to this public literature, methods of included the creation of carefully structured procedural and reporting requirements, direct intervention with an administrative agency, or the granting of legal standing to select interest groups. At the same time, a number of empirical studies found that agency outputs were associated with such factors as the activities of oversight committees, the political ideology of the oversight committees, the shared powers of political appointments and the budget, the ideology of the president, and court decisions. (For a good review of the choice literature referenced above, see Bendor, 1990; Wood and Waterman, 1991; Worsham, Ringquist, and Eisner, 1997.) The empirical evidence for political of the bureaucracy appeared so robust that Wood and Waterman (1991, 822) concluded, We believe this evidence for active political is so strong that controversy should now end over whether political occurs. Future research should turn toward exploring the determinants of political control (emphasis in the original). A final explanation for political/bureaucratic relations is the so-called bureaucratic culture model, which assumes that bureaucrats possess substantial policy-making discretion, and that they use this discretion in a manner that best meets their prior construction of what good policy should look like. …