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Numerous studies assess how politicians control and shape bureaucracy. Yet, how politicians' behavior affects the norms and behaviors of bureaucrats through role modeling has not been studied. This is a curious omission, in light of evidence that social norms shape bureaucratic behavior. Through a lab experiment with over 900 bureaucrats in Bangladesh, we explore whether political corruption affects bureaucrats' pro‐social behavior and whether this effect is particularly pronounced for corruption of the current government, as a particularly relevant social norm referent. Using a political corruption prime, we present evidence that those bureaucrats who recall episodes of the current government's political corruption when prompted to think about political corruption donate significantly lower real monetary amounts to charity. By contrast, we do not find clear effects of political corruption by other actors. Our findings underscore the importance of political leaders as role models for bureaucrats and the damage that political corruption may inflict on pro‐social behavior in bureaucracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frontline workers who are confronted with crises need enormous resilience and the ability to deal with stress from crisis‐related increases in demands and risks. Simultaneously, populist governments with an illiberal agenda may undermine the work of street‐level bureaucracies for political reasons. Little is known about how deconstruction of the administrative state by populist government—through lacking government support when it is needed the most—affects frontline work. Thus, this article asks: how does lacking support by a populist government affect frontline workers' self‐efficacy when they face a crisis? Based on unique data from an online survey of 3229 Brazilian frontline workers during the early COVID‐19 pandemic, when the Bolsonaro government denied the existence of the pandemic, we test the relationship between government support, demands, and resources on frontline workers' perceived self‐efficacy. Results show that lacking government support from the federal and local government are negatively associated with frontline workers' self‐efficacy. At the same time, resources and managerial support exhibit positive associations—but they cannot always compensate for a lack of government assistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of limited state capacity and a politicized public administration, democratic backsliding tends to exploit preexisting deficiencies in the functioning of the public sector. Whereas staffing managerial positions with regime supporters is well‐documented, less attention has been paid to the structuring and staffing of street‐level bureaucracies under a spoils system. In this article, we use document analysis and in‐depth interviews to analyze the case of Mexico's "Servants of the Nation" —a group of more than 19,000 former party members and sympathizers hired by the government to perform street‐level tasks— as an example of "parabureaucracy": an auxiliary street‐level organization designed to perform a wide variety of tasks directly related to the executive's political agenda. We argue that parabureaucracies are designed to sideline formal administrative command structures for the benefit of the government in power but may also serve as a means to bypass stifled and dysfunctional traditional bureaucracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freedom of information (FOI) laws are known to expose governmental weaknesses, but do they improve the structural workings of public administration, professionalizing governance? This study examines FOI's effect on a cornerstone of effective governance—bureaucratic hiring. Using coarsened matching methods to compare over 5400 municipalities in Brazil—approximately half possessing FOI regulations and half without—we identify significant reductions in discretionary patronage‐based appointments. Municipalities with FOI regulations reduce both higher level "political control" and lower‐level "electoral rewards" hires. Our explanation, tentatively supported by a comparison of early versus late FOI adopters, centers on sequencing: in the short term, leaders view FOI as a supplement to administrative control and thus reduce higher‐level hires. As FOI becomes more institutionalized and exposures more probable, leaders reduce lower‐level hires. Contributing to scholarship on transparency and bureaucracies, our results enjoin policymakers to double‐down on commitments to FOI policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a framework for understanding how the design of administrative judicial review can circumscribe the discretion of different bureaucratic actors. The framework proposes that bureaucratic discretion is limited to a great extent if courts can (i) overturn bureaucratic decisions on substantive grounds, (ii) review decisions associated with high economic costs, and (iii) issue detailed instructions for how rulings are to be implemented. Applying the framework to the Swedish case, we first show that the legislative design of the judicial review process allows administrative courts to greatly limit the discretion of senior officials and street‐level bureaucrats. Second, we show that Swedish courts defer to the expertise of bureaucratic actors in the welfare sector by sparingly overturning decisions. However, when courts actually overturn decisions, they frequently limit bureaucratic discretion by issuing detailed judgments in high‐cost cases, possibly undermining the conditions for good governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When do unelected officials respond to citizen complaints, and what are the implications for service delivery? In the formal complaint system for Mumbai's water sector, bureaucrats addressed 44% of the roughly 20,000 complaints lodged from 2016 to 2018. In line with literature on distributive politics, responsiveness to marginalized citizens is lower. Yet in interviews, officials emphasize that programmatic goals and capacity constraints lead to prioritization by what the complaint is about. In fact, once controlling for complaint content, the relationship between complainant identity and responsiveness disappears. Initial patterns of differential responsiveness by complainant identity arise from the fact that citizens from marginalized groups experience lower levels of service provision, which leads them to make complaints that are more difficult to address. The paper sheds light on the role of bureaucracy in e‐governance and service delivery, showing administrative priorities in responding to complaints may perpetuate inequalities in service provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have identified individual and organizational factors that influence the turnover intentions of bureaucrats. However, they have overlooked how the type of national bureaucracy influences turnover intention. Combining data sets on macro‐level bureaucratic structures and individual civil servants, we examine how bureaucratic politicization and closedness are associated with the turnover intentions of bureaucrats in 36 countries. Our analysis indicates that there is large cross‐national variation in turnover intention, and that bureaucratic structures matter as one of the predictors of turnover intention. Public servants working in more closed and regulated bureaucracies exhibit lower turnover intention. We also find that public servants working in more politicized bureaucracies (in which personnel decisions are made via political connections) have lower turnover intention than those working in more merit‐based systems. Such low turnover intention in politicized bureaucracies may be explained by the characteristics of patronage appointments in which public jobs are distributed based on personal or political loyalty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study experimentally examines the effect of gender representation of a police organization responsible for handling domestic violence, and how this impacts Korean citizens' views toward the police. Findings show that male participants gave the highest ratings of legitimacy and fairness when the organization is equally represented by men and women, while gave low ratings of legitimacy and efficacy to the organization where women are over‐represented. This implies that achieving gender balance in job assignments helps ensure the effectiveness of representative bureaucracy. On the other hand, female participants rated organization with equal representation positively only when they also demonstrated a high level of active representation for female victims. Given heightened gender conflict within Korean policing, female citizens might try to maintain objectivity about female officers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under freedom of information (FOI) regulations, public officials are pressured to grant citizens access to public information by responding to citizen information requests. However, despite FOI regulations, information requests are treated with varying bureaucratic attention, resulting in a high number of ignored or overdue requests by public organizations. Focusing on this bureaucratic discrimination, this study aims to explain the determinants of varying bureaucratic responsiveness to citizen information requests. Responsiveness in this case is therefore either a successful response to the request, a refusal to respond to the request, or no response at all (i.e., the request is ignored). By drawing on public accountability, and thus a citizen‐driven model of bureaucratic responsiveness, we shed light on the human aspect behind responsiveness to information requests. This research argues that the request's topic as an accountability‐seeking indicator and the communication tone as an indicator for underlying emotions influence responsiveness. The results from applying text mining and text analysis techniques, such as topic modeling and sentiment analysis, on over 100,000 citizen information requests filed via a German online FOI platform support these assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Countries are facing the deterioration of democratic institutions under a process named democratic backsliding. In this context, political attacks on public organizations become more frequent and intense. While previous studies have examined how civil servants counteract and resist political attacks, their ultimate impact on civil servants' well‐being remains underexplored. To shed light on this phenomenon, we conducted an exploratory sequential mixed methods design with civil servants from Brazil. The first phase of the study is qualitative and exploratory. The second is quantitative and we tested if perceived political attacks was associated with higher levels of emotional exhaustion, which, in turn, would lead to a greater incidence of physical health symptoms. Both studies provide compelling evidence of the negative impact of political attacks on civil servants' emotional and physical health, which may have significant consequences for the performance of public organizations and the effective functioning of the democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examines bureaucrats facing administrative architectures that are multiple, overlapping, ambiguous and sometimes incompatible. It makes two main contributions. Firstly, by an organizational approach it derives fine‐grained predictions on how bureaucrats maneuver when taking part in integrated multilevel administrative orders. Secondly, benefitting from a large‐N data‐set (N = 4285) from 16 ministries and 47 government agencies in Norway, the study demonstrates how organizational factors systematically 'moderate' and bias behavioral perceptions among government officials. Moreover, to probe the robustness of explanatory models, the study specifies patterns of moderation by outlining multiple interaction models as well as illustrating how interaction effects unfold. The study finds that few moderators make dramatic effects by profoundly weakening relationships. Moderating variables either strengthen or attenuate already apparent effects, thus probing the empirical robustness of the models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Challenging the assumptions of the principal‐agent theory, the recent bureaucratic politics literature contends that politicians do not necessarily have weaker capacities and bureaucrats are not necessarily bad apples. What this means for the delegation decision remains underexplored, particularly regarding how legislative capacity and bureaucratic reputation jointly affect delegation. We examine this issue with a trust perspective and a survey experiment of city mayors. Treating bureaucratic reputation as individual trustworthiness and perceived legislative capacity as institutional trustworthiness, we find they interact in complex ways in influencing delegation. When bureaucratic reputation is high, perceived legislative capacity is not associated with delegation. Perceived legislative capacity matters only when bureaucratic reputation is low, and high capacity relates to greater delegation willingness than when capacity is not considered. The findings have implications for studies on delegation, discretion, and bureaucratic reputation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the proposition that the characteristics of ministerial advisers are shaped by specific settings of the politicization of ministerial administration. Four types of politicization settings are identified, resulting from variation in the scope of formal political appointments and appointments into bureaucracy. Using data from an original expert survey and semi‐structured expert interviews, the contribution analyses eleven cases from Central and Eastern Europe. It documents that the functional differentiation of advisers from other administrative actors, and their political and policymaking roles, are conditioned by the politicization settings in which they operate. The political roles of advisers are most pronounced where they do not face other formal political appointees, and appointments into bureaucracy are low. Policymaking roles are strongest where formal political appointees manage high politics, and bureaucratic appointments are limited. The article also identifies "invisible" advisers as a new type of player unknown in established Western bureaucracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how configurations of bureaucratic autonomy, policy complexity and political contestation allow international public administrations (IPAs) to influence policymaking within international organizations. A fuzzy‐set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 17 policy decisions in four organizations (FAO, WHO, ILO, UNESCO) shows that all IPAs studied can be influential in favorable contexts. When policies are both contested and complex, even IPAs lacking autonomy can influence policy. If either complexity or contestation is absent, however, it is the variant of autonomy of will that helps the IPA exploit procedural strategies of influence. Low autonomy of will, among other factors, explains why IPAs cannot exert influence. Conversely, the variant of autonomy of action appears largely irrelevant. The study provides new insights into the role of bureaucracy beyond the state, exemplifying how research of bureaucratic influence can yield more systematic results in various empirical settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When do politicians respond to individuals' public service complaints? Technological solutions—termed e‐governance—have been shown to help increase responsiveness in some developing nations where they serve to connect individuals, politicians, and bureaucrats for the first time. I argue that in country‐contexts like India, where personal connections to bureaucrats and politicians are common, politicians are less responsive to complaints registered with e‐governance systems than to complaints delivered via personal connections. Using data from public complaints, complaint responses, and field interviews in Delhi, I show that politicians are not responsive when complaints submitted to e‐governance systems increase, but that they are responsive to complaints submitted to them through personal connections. This result suggests that the introduction of an e‐governance system does not necessarily increase government performance. Politicians are incentivized to be more responsive to complaints registered directly with them because those complaints are more likely to generate electoral benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New political regimes stemming from revolutions eventually find themselves confronted with the imperative to build upper bureaucratic apparatuses geared towards facilitating regime stability. This article examines the process of "re‐bureaucratization" in the Islamic Republic of Iran, whereby institutions are designed and reworked over time to accommodate distinct features of the reshuffled bureaucratic elite initially incongruous in a deregulated revolutionary environment. Precisely, it examines state institutions established to recruit and train postrevolutionary Iranian diplomats following the purges of state bureaucracies. Relying on qualitative and quantitative data, the article shows how such institutions allowed to outstrip loyalty‐driven politico‐administrative arrangements that are essentially short‐sighted, as once their aim fulfilled—asserting regime elites' control over the state—, they channel policy‐making deficiency. Conversely, their very designs craft a "Public Service Bargain" that concomitantly fosters diplomats' loyalty, expertise, and representativeness—which, for to the revolutionary canon, commingles diplomats' plebeianization and provincialization—into stabilized institutional arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the changing nature of the English and Swedish states between 1800 and 2020 from the perspective of ordinary citizens. We identify 13 typical life situations and then describe the types of citizens who interacted with the state, the number and types of public officials with whom they interacted, and where those interactions took place. We distinguish among three typical social groups: the poor, the middle, and the rich. We find, among other things, that the poor became objects of government policy much earlier than other groups, but they also remained in a world of parochial poor relief even as the middle and the rich began to interact with a more functionally differentiated, professional bureaucracy. These findings have important implications for scholarly debates on when the state began to interact directly with the civilian masses and the unevenness of state activities and capacities within countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of representative bureaucracy frequently reference the need for a critical mass before an underrepresented group can influence policy outputs or outcomes, but the empirical literature is modest and presents mixed findings. This article presents a theoretical exploration to illustrate how critical mass can link individual behavior to organizational contexts. By examining both active representation and symbolic representation at both the individual and organizational level and specifying the different microprocesses of active representation, a series of testable hypotheses are presented. The logic suggests that the concept of critical mass might also be a useful contextual variable to examine other aspects of administrative behavior. Based on the theory, two empirical illustrations from China are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some bureaucrats engage in corruption for personal gain, yet others for political gain? We show that these forms of corruption frequently do not coincide and offer an explanation: bureaucrats hired based on political and personal connections have different identities and incentives which compel them to engage in corruption for political and personal gain respectively. List experiments with a unique sample of 6400 bureaucrats in five countries in Africa and Asia support our argument. As theoretically expected, effects are strongest for bureaucrats whose political patrons remain in power (for corruption for political gain) and who do not need corruption gains to sustain their households (for corruption for personal gain). We also find that personal connections matter more than political connections for bureaucratic recruitment across surveyed countries. Our findings underscore the importance of studying varieties of bureaucratic corruption and of supplementing the politicization literature with studies of personal connections in bureaucracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What drives organizational commitment in local government? Despite the growth of decentralization initiatives in many developing countries and concurrent investments by international donors to build public sector capacity, there thus far has been little consideration of what drives bureaucrats to stay committed to local government service. This paper addresses this question by drawing on original survey data with more than 150 bureaucrats across 16 district councils in Zambia. The findings show that along with education, key factors that shape commitment include alignment with the mission of local government service, clear job objectives provided by supervisors, and placement in a city council. By contrast, extrinsic rewards and political interference play a more important role when examining drivers of job satisfaction. The results underscore the need for nuanced and multi‐modal policy interventions in developing country contexts to retain skilled staff in local government and improve the delivery of services to local communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do frontline workers implement policy when it is politically contested and they face strong pressure from politicians and the media? Based on original data and a multi‐method analysis of juvenile justice policy and child protection policy in Switzerland, we show that political conflict can change policy implementation when frontline workers adapt their implementation practices in response to political and media pressure. We demonstrate that frontline workers seek to limit the influence of political pressure on policy implementation to safeguard their professional autonomy and reputation. However, we observe that they may also occasionally engage in what we call "blame‐avoiding policy implementation." While formally complying with the policy mandate, frontline workers exploit their street‐level discretion to make policy implementation less scandal‐prone and blameworthy, thereby lowering the likelihood of blame attacks. The findings have important implications for our understanding of policy implementation and the functioning of bureaucracy in more conflictual times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the diffusion of meritocratic practices as a potential instance of policy transfer by scrutinizing the introduction of open and competitive examinations during the mid‐nineteenth century in the British Civil Service. Scholars have argued that British reformers were inspired by meritocratic practices in British‐ruled India. In order to assess this claim, we combine qualitative analysis of archival material documenting the interdepartmental debates on meritocratic reforms in the British Home Civil Service as well as in the Indian Civil Service with quantitative analyses of unique data on the implementation of examinations with open competition in British public offices and the India experience of Heads of Departments. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses largely reject the idea that the Indian Civil Service was a key source of inspiration for British merit reforms. While our quantitative analyses show some, albeit weak, evidence, no such evidence was found in the qualitative analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of involving citizens in the early stages of public sector innovation and bottom‐up governance arrangements for collaboration has been proposed in a number of theoretical papers. However, to date, few empirical studies are evident in the literature. To deepen our understanding of collaborative public sector innovation, our exploratory article analyses: (i) the actors of collaboration, (ii) collaboration across the innovation stages, (iii) the perceived aspects of collaboration for innovative outcomes, and (iv) the governance of collaboration. Our analysis covers 99 innovations from Italy, Japan, and Turkey. We reveal that collaboration still largely occurs within the bureaucracy of public sector organizations. Attempts to include civic and private sectors are evident, depending on the country context. Further, we uncover that a mutual understanding and shared goals are crucial for success, which is accomplished through top‐down governance as opposed to self‐governed bottom‐up networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite government commitments to mitigate corruption and strengthen mechanisms of accountability in state security sectors, reform efforts frequently fail to curb illegal practices by state agents. Scholars offer explanations that range from deeply embedded societal norms of appropriate behavior to rational accounts emphasizing the individualized benefits corruption can offer. Using a case study of the Service Standing Orders in Kenya's National Police Service however, we build on the work of Persson et al.'s analysis to show how corrupt practices on the part of street‐level agents are reinforced within organizational hierarchies, through institutionalized—rather than personalized—incentives and obligations. As a result, policy innovations that do not explicitly identify the countervailing incentives created through internal command structures are likely to miss potentially fruitful avenues for institutional reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments face a fundamental dilemma when asking expert groups for advice. Experts possess knowledge that can help governments design effective and legitimate policies. However, they can also propose different policies than those preferred by government. How do governments solve this conundrum? Through a mixed‐methods study, the article examines politico‐administrative control with expert advisory commissions in Norway. Arguing that both politicians and bureaucrats can take interest in limiting the gap between political/administrative policy preferences and expert group output, the article examines by what means they seek to control expert groups and how control varies across policy portfolios. It finds that while politicians rely on control by design, bureaucrats use both design and interventions. Moreover, political and bureaucratic controls are stronger in the area of financial/economic policy than elsewhere. The article makes a novel contribution to scholarship at the intersection of public administration and knowledge and policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Often a pitfall of institutionalist scholarship is the need for more politics in the causal chain.[2] Yet Ma's work does an excellent job of bringing politics back in. Finally, in articulating his contributions to the power-sharing literature, Ma views the bureaucracy in a large, decentralized country like China as a distorter, or even a I decelerator i , of the ruler's agenda. In I Localized Bargaining, i Xiao Ma addresses an important yet understudied question in Chinese politics and the political economy of development more generally: how does distributive politics take place in a non-electoral context?. [Extracted from the article]

There are many compelling reasons for bringing insights from political science (PS) into public administration (PA) and vice versa (Peters et al., 2022). THE FIELD OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION Before we dive into the relation between PA and PS, it is relevant to consider briefly what PA is about, where it comes from, and what its ambitions are. THE WAY FORWARD FOR THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PA AND PS Given current developments in the literature, what are the prospects for greater mutual engagement between PA and PS scholarship? In general, PA scholars collaborate widely with public organizations, and Hustedt et al. (2020, p. 131, see also Bauer, 2018) find that PA is more linked to government practice than PS is. [Extracted from the article]

Do 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional reform processes can be contested. The more so by those working in the affected institutions. Bureaucracies, in particular, can be resistant to change. To better understand such processes, we study the regional reform in Norway. This reform is interesting as it mixes "voluntary" and "forced" dynamics. Indeed, Norwegian regions (fylkeskommuner) can remain unchanged, merge voluntarily, or be forced to merge by central government. This provides an opportunity to better understand support for coerced change. Through a survey of regional bureaucrats, we test different explanations of support for forced mergers. We find that two logics are at play. A "logic of discipline" which appeals to right‐wing bureaucrats, advocates larger units, and streamlined bureaucracies, even if this is against the wishes of the main actors involved. And an "identity logic" which recognizes that feelings of attachment are powerful shapers of preferences beyond what efficiency and functionality dictate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preexisting political institutions influence governments' responses to public health crises in different ways, creating national variations. This article investigates how state capacity, a country's fundamental ability to organize bureaucracy and allocate societal resources, affects the timing and configuration of governments' COVID‐19 policy responses. Through comparative case study analysis of five of China's neighboring countries early in the COVID‐19 crisis, the paper shows that more‐capable states (Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan) initiated crisis response faster, mobilized national resources more extensively, and utilized diverse policy tools when the virus risk level was still low. In contrast, low‐capacity states (Thailand and Indonesia) were more reactive in handling the crisis, limited their focus to border‐related measures, and were more constrained in the types of tools they could employ. The paper points to the importance of studying the COVID‐19 response process rather than the outcome (i.e., confirmed cases/deaths) when unpacking the impacts of political institutions in public health crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do governments fail to implement policy commitments in contractual agreements with international organizations? While scholars have scrutinized domestic factors as obstacles to compliance, we argue that reform programs may be unimplementable by design. We study this hypothesis in the context of International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs, in which borrowing countries must commit to far‐reaching economic policy reforms for access to credit. We collect detailed compliance data on individual policy conditions to assess the determinants of compliance failures of IMF programs from 1980 to 2009. Controlling for a host of borrower‐specific variables, features of the loan, unexpected shocks during implementation, donor influence, and bureaucratic interest, we find that the number of conditions is a robust predictor of implementation failure. Our theoretical explanation for these findings is that over‐ambitious program designs are the result of intra‐organizational bargaining within the IMF bureaucracy. While an area department within the IMF drafts the initial reform program, functional departments use their amendment power to include policy conditions that they care about, without due consideration of local circumstances, which leads to over‐ambitious programs. These findings have important implications for theories of compliance as well as for policymaking in international organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Punishment‐oriented policy can undermine confidence in government institutions among those who collectively share unfavorable social constructions of the policy's target group, even without having personally experienced negative bureaucratic encounters. As an empirical test, this study investigates the effect of the passage of Arizona S.B. 1070 and copycat immigration enforcement laws in five additional states on confidence in the local police. Using multi‐year survey data from the Pew Research Center, the difference‐in‐differences analyses demonstrate that these laws had a substantially more negative influence on confidence in police effectiveness and police use of force among Hispanics/Latinos compared with the rest of society. Given that the implementation of these laws were delayed and ultimately either blocked or restricted by the courts, the findings suggest that ethnic minorities' skepticism toward government institutions may be due not only to poor street‐level procedural justice, but also to the unfavorable social constructions embodied in high‐profile policy shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While women are underrepresented in politics, recent improvements in women's representation in legislative and executive bodies have spurred academic interest in the effects of electing women on a wide array of outcomes. Effects on bureaucracies, however, have received less attention. Do women mayors reform local bureaucracies differently than their men counterparts? We take advantage of rich administrative data from Chile to explore the effects of having a woman mayor on the size and gender composition of municipal bureaucracies. Using a regression discontinuity design in close electoral races, we find that women mayors reduce the size of local bureaucracies while simultaneously increasing the share of women public employees. Our findings thus show that women mayors' approach to bureaucratic reform once in office differs from that of their men counterparts, and contribute to existing research on the consequences of electing women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do regimes employ information to govern society and maintain control? Recent scholarship argues that legibility is a fundamental component of state capacity, but the politics of information collection and use remain incompletely understood. This article examines how the local state in China uses information to amplify legibility and bolster social control. Extant literature focuses largely on information collection, but Chinese officials have adopted high‐tech information management platforms to solve a different issue: inadequate information integration across bureaucracies ("information islands"). Information integration platforms strengthen the local state's ability to govern by enhancing intra‐bureaucratic accountability and improving the local state's ability to demobilize contention. At the policy level, adoption of these platforms has implications for the Chinese party‐state's ambitions for social stability; their global spread could affect trends in governance worldwide. Theoretically, our findings indicate that legibility depends not just on the state's ability to collect information, but to integrate it as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, B. Guy Peters, Jon Pierre, Eva Sorensen, and Jacob Torfing asked to bring political science back into public administration research and theory. I Democracy Administered i reminds scholars and advocates of governance and administrative structures of their democratic influence and provides fundamental lessons in democratic theory for public administration. [Extracted from the article]

Henry Sardaryan, dean of the School of Government and Politics at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and a well-known political analyst who appears frequently on Russian television, has written a book that simultaneously serves as an introduction to Public Administration as a scientific discipline and is also a vehicle through which he expresses his objections regarding the totalizing perspectives that conceive public management as a task that can be carried out following universal guidelines. We could say that Sardaryan is in favor of a particularist public administration, that is, with cultural sensitivity, to the extent that it adopts a critical distance with respect to the eminently Western and universalist theorization of state action. Sardaryan ends by pointing out that Samuel Huntington's ([2]) civilizational theory offers an interesting perspective not only for thinking about public administration and developing comparative research, but also for putting public management into practice. [Extracted from the article]

Economists are by many accounts the most influential group of experts in contemporary political decision‐making. While the literature on the power of economists mostly focuses on the policy ideas of economic experts, some recent studies suggest that economists also hold particular technocratic ideas about the policy process. The article systematically tests this argument. Focusing on economists within government bureaucracy, the study is based on a quantitative analysis of a large‐scale survey of Norwegian ministerial civil servants. It finds that economists are more likely to hold technocratic role perceptions than officials with other educational backgrounds only if they work in the finance ministry or in higher administrative grades. The findings contribute to scholarship on the political sway of economists and to debates about technocracy and the technocratic views of civil servants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the political‐institutional determinants of bureaucracy quality among a group of newly industrialized countries in Latin America and East Asia democratized in the Third Wave. Four causal conditions are examined for the occurrence of higher levels of bureaucratic "weberianess" in the selected cases: historical sequence, political parties' institutionalization, electoral competition, and ethnic politics. The study employs the fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis to explore the expectation that each of these conditions' implications depends on other conditions' presence or absence. The findings disconfirm claims about the critical role of party system institutionalization for Weberian bureaucracies in new democracies. Besides, the analysis did not declare a professional public administration's prior existence before democratization as a necessary or sufficient condition for the outcome of interest. Finally, although the electoral competition was declared necessary for the outcome occurrence, it does not imply the same result if combined with ethnic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The representation of specific groups and social interests within (or by) the civil service has long been a concern of public administration scholarship. Yet, much of this literature focuses on representation at a single point in time. In this article, we propose a more dynamic perspective. In terms of theory, we postulate specific temporal relationships between triggering cues (e.g., a crisis event) and the representation decisions of civil servants. We specify two complementary mechanisms underlying these relationships: that is, a sensemaking process whereby the perceived meaning and relative salience of distinct groups and interests changes over time; and a shift in bureaucrats' discretion to represent specific groups or interests changes over time. We illustrate these time‐dependent processes using interview and survey data from the European Commission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, building on the emerging theoretical corpus of "reputation theory" provides an alternative explanation about how successful policies are obtained in contexts of bureaucratic weakness and volatile politics. The argument is that politicians choose to intervene in delivering successful policies based on how contributable such policies are to construct their political reputations. The findings suggest that in both countries, less tenured politicians face higher incentives to build their reputations, so they choose to deliver better policies to accumulate "successful experiences" as vitae for electoral purposes. Tenured politicians, in turn, opt for inaction or strategic delivery, to preserve their already won political reputations. The present article brings evidence from the education sector of Peru and Bolivia, a sector that has been at the core of these countries' priorities for decades. Through a mixed methods approach involving a panel regression and in‐depth interviews, results obtained largely confirm this article's claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between politicians and bureaucrats is an enduring concern in political science. Central to this debate, Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman (APR) in 1981 developed four images to characterize political‐bureaucratic relations. We argue that the one‐dimensional focus on roles in their images comes with important limitations. To deal with these limitations, we collect survey responses from 3,384 local politicians from four countries on seven dimensions of the political‐bureaucratic relationship. We then use cluster analysis to develop six images bottom‐up. Five of our images are largely consistent with APR's image II and III. Yet, they differ in the extent to which politicians trust the bureaucracy, consider them loyal, and see them as an important source of information. A sixth image is not consistent with any of APR's images. We find that both systemic (country, municipality size) and individual factors (ideology, position, seniority) contribute to differences in images. Overall, our images suggest that political‐bureaucratic relations vary more between and within political systems than suggested by APR's images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the bureaucracy's political principals hold different preferences for policy, does this increase the bureaucracy's policymaking autonomy? Existing theory strongly suggests "yes." We, however, argue that this pattern will materialize only when the bureaucracy's principals are all on the same side of the political divide. (i.e., unified government). Using data gathered from the American states at two time points, we capture preference divergence by measuring the ideological distance between the bureaucracy's key political principals—legislators, governors, and courts—on the common left–right dimension. We measure policymaking autonomy through multi‐faceted surveys of state agency leaders. In keeping with our argument, we demonstrate that greater preference divergence across the bureaucracy's principals is associated with increased agency policymaking autonomy under unified—but not under divided—government. The results shed new light on when, and why, the bureaucracy's political principals may provide an oversight check on the policymaking power of the modern administrative state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to college is critical for social mobility in China. Using a detailed college admission database that includes essentially all four‐year public universities from 2005 to 2013, we demonstrate that Chinese universities preallocate more admission seats to provinces that happen to fall under the leadership of their alumni. Moreover, we demonstrate that the identified admission favoritism constitutes a political exchange between public universities and their powerful alumni in the sense that (a) universities and the connected provinces tend to sign formal partnership agreements; and (b) university leaders who sign formal partnership agreements receive indirect personal gains in terms of career advancement in the party‐state bureaucracy. Our article provides causal evidence that social connections facilitate powerful government insiders' collusion and capture of public resources in a weak institutional environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite taking the citizen experience of policy implementation as starting point for analysis, the literature on administrative burdens has mostly portrayed citizens as passive victims of burdens. Based on a literature review, three hypotheses are formulated regarding citizens' capacity to ease the impact of administrative burdens through behavioral adjustment, use of social and human capital, and strategic behavior. Evidence for these strategies is found in a case study of beneficiaries' behavior in a Mexican social program, where even the most vulnerable citizens have resources to reduce the impact of administrative burdens, even if the actual causes of those burdens remain out of reach. The findings contribute to understanding (a) variance in people's experience of administrative burdens, (b) the impact of prolonged street‐level interactions on people's ability to ease administrative burdens, (c) the importance of studying informal street‐level interactions, and (d) the relevance of studying state‐citizen interactions in developmental contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Countless studies have shown that local officials are less responsive to ethnic minority citizens. Surprisingly, we find no similar pattern of discrimination by Taiwanese local officials. In an online contacting experiment, we send citizen service requests to the websites of 358 township and district chiefs, randomly varying the name of the putative citizen to reflect an indigenous or an ethnically Chinese identity and collecting data on officials' responses. We find that officials are equally responsive to both identities. Drawing on in‐depth interviews and nonparticipant observation in government service centers, we attribute this surprising finding to institutional elements of Taiwan's local bureaucracy that limit the impact of individual‐level bias. However, our research provides preliminary evidence that local governments are generally less responsive in indigenous areas. While clearly defined procedures may prevent discrimination against indigenous individuals, interregional differences in local state capacity can nonetheless produce unequal experiences with local governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bureaucratic representation theory holds that civil servants are not "neutral" in a Weberian sense. Bureaucrats are thought to "actively" represent their communities by trying to make them better off. This article proposes an alternative understanding of individual behavior in representation that emphasizes knowledge sharing instead of patronage, but leads to similar outcomes: Their societal background provides officials with advanced social knowledge about the group(s) they represent, including both informational knowledge (facts about culture, history, politics) and relational knowledge (how people interact). Bureaucratic knowledge linkage is the process of sharing information and managing relations internally and with citizens. An extreme case serves to illustrate knowledge linkage empirically: Survey data from an international organization yield high levels of knowledge asymmetries within staff bodies and subsequent observation of knowledge linkage mechanisms. In generalizing findings, the risks (knowledge distortions) and benefits (attaining public value) of knowledge linkage are discussed for both international and domestic administrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International organization (IO) study is dominated by scholars focusing on IOs with legally binding Charters or Articles of Agreement. Informal IO creation with independent agency impetus from a powerful IO-creating OECD state may enable non-OECD states to create or empower their own independent agencies to participate in such informal IOs. It is unclear whether the regulatory state's rise in non-OECD states will also lead to further informal IO creation at the regional and subregional level, or whether powerful OECD states and their domestic constituencies will dictate future informal IO creation. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the structural diversity of intraministerial organization over time. Based on organization theory, it proposes a generic typology for intraministerial units applicable to any hierarchically structured government organization. We empirically investigate the critical case of the German federal bureaucracy. By classifying its subunits, we analyze the longitudinal development of structural differentiation and its correspondence to denominational variety. The data stem from a novel international dataset, covering all ministries between 1980 and 2015. We find that intraministerial structure differentiates over time, across and within ministries. A stable core of traditional Weberian structure is complemented by structurally innovative intraministerial units. We conclude that the German federal bureaucracy is more diverse than suggested in previous literature. Our findings indicate that less Weberian bureaucracies are at least as structurally diverse and that more reform‐driven bureaucracies will have experienced at least as many changes in structural diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade, China has increasingly resorted to top‐down, "blunt force" solutions to environmental problems; officials forcibly shutter or destroy factories to reduce pollution, at immense cost to local growth and employment. Why would a high capacity state like China resort to such a costly method of pollution control? I argue that blunt force enforcement is targeted at overcoming principal–agent problems in the bureaucracy. When institutions are too weak to hold bureaucrats accountable, political leaders increase oversight by drastically reducing the number of steps and resources required to produce a regulatory outcome—resulting in blunt force measures. I illustrate this logic through case studies from China's multiyear war on pollution. Using original data on blunt force measures, I then show how localities with lower bureaucratic compliance face greater blunt force pollution enforcement. These findings reveal that when bureaucratic accountability is weak, states pay a very high cost for cleaner air. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the subnational determinants of descriptive representation. Agency managers may be hesitant to hire women uniformly across all localities if they perceive geographic variation in role congruence, or the degree to which a position's duties match gender roles. We expect managerial perceptions to affect hiring patterns even after the adoption of a gender quota intended to improve descriptive representation, as managers will differentially hire women to meet the quota in localities where they perceive role congruence to be highest. Evidence from Kenya's most important security agency after the adoption of a gender quota supports the theory. Broadly, this article shows that aggregate quotas are at risk of being implemented in a way that undermines the spirit of the law. Slack in oversight pushes implementation to subnational areas where managers perceive the quota will be least disruptive, and ultimately, have the smallest effects on passive, let alone active, representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]