Why Do Bureaucrats Work Together? Micro Explanations for Cooperation

• In Event: Research in Five (Graduate Students) Session I

Abstract

Strengthening the capacities of governments and public officials is widely praised as leading to better governance, and has been promoted as an effective way to improve the provision of public goods around the world. Evidence suggests that individual abilities of bureaucrats might be linked to better policy performance.

Nevertheless, there are few studies that analyze the micro foundations of bureaucratic cooperation at the national or sub-national level. Bureaucrats are constantly interacting with citizens and most seek to deliver quality goods and services. Cooperation can play a major role in achieving this goal. While we know cooperation takes place, our understanding of why bureaucrats engage in cooperative behavior in the first place and how it is sustained over time is lacking.

This proposal asks the following question: Why do bureaucrats cooperate in the first place and how is cooperation sustained over time? In order to answer this question, I develop an Agent – Agent model as a novel approach to understanding how bureaucrats’ cooperation is initiated and sustained. In these settings, I hypothesize that activation of cooperation occurs when bureaucrats share culturally-based identities (gender and race), professionally-based identities (professional background and job status) and/or geographically-based identities (geographic jurisdiction), and it is sustained when bureaucrats have cooperated in the past (reciprocity).

I will present the evidence from a mixed-methods case study with bureaucrats in Colombia conducted in 2019. Through interviews and surveys, I track cooperation patterns in bureaucrats’ daily routines in order to test how the existence of similar social identities and reciprocity as “pro-cooperation mechanisms” affects who bureaucrats cooperate with and how cooperation is sustained.

Author

• Nathalie Mendez, Universidad de los Andes