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Explaining variations in bureaucratic human capital. A new type of analysis with evidence of federal countries.

Fri, May 27, 9:45 to 11:15am, TBA

Abstract

Variations in the quality of democracy and of policy performance are strongly linked with the accumulated human capital of bureaucrats. The educational attainment, experience and other features of bureau personnel are paramount to explain the performance of governments at the national, local and agency levels (Evans and Rauch 1999, Gingerich 2014, Brech-Praca and Taylor 2013). However, in order to assess these features, the majority of studies have employed indirect, perception measures of bureaucratic quality rendering a rather imprecise and partial portrait of the subject.

To contribute to fill this gap the goal of this article is twofold. First, we propose a novel approach for studying bureaucracies analyzing information from large household surveys conducted by national census offices (Moscovich 2015) in Argentina and Mexico, for doing so we map the variations in bureaucratic capacity using multidimensional scaling techniques. Second we estimate a statistical model to identify its most important determinants.

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