Law or Environment? The Historical Origins of the American Bureaucracy (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Statebuilding and Consolidation

Abstract

The institutions of public bureaucracy—including recruitment systems, regulatory mechanisms, and opportunities for the external monitoring of bureaucratic activity—differ widely across the American states. To what extent are these substantial differences related to historical conditions? In this paper, we examine the long-term impact that different colonial legal systems and varying environmental conditions had on the design of bureaucratic institutions across America. The strong divergence between colonial civil and common law systems created fundamentally different relationships of executives, legislatures, and judiciaries that had a lasting influence on the institutional design and development of a professionalized and independent bureaucracy. Similarly, variations in environmental conditions affected the occupational heterogeneity of elites, a development with possible historical implications in terms of the extent to which the state apparatus could be used by these elite groups for particularistic purposes. We empirically assess the relative explanatory power of both arguments in the context of American state-level bureaucracies.

Authors

• Rachel Augustine Potter, University of Virginia

• Jan P. Vogler, University of Konstanz