Frontiers of Research on Bureaucratic Politics and Management Mini-Conference: Accountability

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Part of Mini-Conference

• Frontiers of Research on Bureaucratic Politics and Management

Session Description

How do mechanisms of electoral accountability affect the management and performance of bureaucracies? Do elections provide incentives for politicians to improve the performance of bureaucrats or do elections intensify patronage politics and corruption? How do voters use information about the performance of bureaucracies to hold politicians accountable? This panel features four papers that provide new theoretical arguments and empirical evidence on these questions. The four papers employ a variety of methods and research designs, ranging from formal modeling, natural experiments, to meta-analyses. They draw on country-specific evidence from a regionally varied set of cases (South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia), drawing on highly original, detailed, and comprehensive administrative data from developing country bureaucracies. Berliner and Wehner use municipal audits in South Africa and exogenously timed by-elections to isolate the effects of information about government performance on retrospective voting. Relatedly, Slough formally models the relationship between the quality of bureaucracy and voters’ ability to assess politician performance. Using a meta-analysis of 17 natural and field experiments, structural parameters of the model are estimated. Pierskalla and Toral study the effects of elections on bureaucratic patronage politics in Indonesia and Brazil respectively. Pierskalla argues that electoral competition generates a demand for competent bureaucrats over personal cronies in order to facilitate mass-level machine politics. This simultaneously leads to an increased need to control civil servants, e.g., via the timing of promotions. The argument is tested with comprehensive individual-level data on promotions in Indonesia. Toral uses contract-level data on municipal-level employees in Brazil to trace electoral cycles in hiring and firing. He shows that cycles are most pronounced for temporary and less well educated civil servants and documents detrimental effects on services provision.

Overall mini-conference blurb:
The past several years have witnessed a revival of scholarship on bureaucratic politics. This new work--much of which focuses on the developing world--revisits classic theories employing new methods, often in new settings. While principal-agent theories from political economy inspired insightful scholarship on bureaucratic politics and executive-congressional relations during the 1980s and 1990s, more recently political scientists have begun to draw on a wider set of theoretical traditions to understand the behavior of bureaucracies, as well as how bureaucratic performance and accountability can be improved. Recent work, for example, draws on theoretical approaches from sociology, legal studies, and anthropology, as well as classic theories from political science and economics. It also employs empirical approaches traditionally not used in this field, such as field experiments. This mini-conference provides an opportunity for scholars of political economy working across a range of countries and subfields who are contributing to this innovative research wave to engage with one another’s work. The mini-conference contains panels covering important, emerging research areas, including: (a) the politics of bureaucratic accountability; (b) political patronage and its consequences; (c) bureaucratic politics and service delivery; (d) the politics of bureaucratic decision-making and management; and (e) discretion, incentives, and bureaucratic effectiveness. Please join us for what we hope will be a stimulating, and fun, day.

Sub Unit

• Division 6: Political Economy

Individual Presentations

• Audits for Accountability: Evidence from Municipal By-Elections in South Africa - Dan Berliner, London School of Economics; Joachim Wehner, London School of Economics

• Competence and Control: The Effect of Democratization on the Civil Service - Jan Henryk Pierskalla, Ohio State University

• Bureaucratic Quality and Electoral Accountability: Theory and Evidence - Tara L Slough, New York University

• Bureaucratic Hiring, Firing, and Public Service Delivery in Brazil - Guillermo Toral, Vanderbilt University

Chair

• Alisha Caroline Holland Harvard University

Discussants

• Virginia Oliveros Tulane University

• Anjali Thomas Georgia Institute of Technology