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Jim, the marketing manager, approaches Hank, the engineering project leader. "Hey, Hank. When can we get this model ready for display? You know, that sales convention is coming up in two weeks, and Jane claims that if we don't show, the competition is really going to close in." "Sorry, Jim," Hank explains. "We're just not satisfied with the speed of this computer. We need at least six weeks; before that there is just no way. My people won't tolerate getting it out earlier if it's not perfect. They've worked too hard to do that." "Okay, Hank," Jim continues. "How about just a prototype for people to look at with a promise of the increased speed to come later?" "Forget it, Jim," Hank insists. "Engineers don't work that way. You can't just promise, you have to deliver. Besides, sending the prototype would be dishonest. Tell Jane to come down here, and I'll explain it to her." This scenario, which actually occurred, is repeated all the time in literally thousands of bureaucratic settings, not just with engineers but also with health professionals, financial professionals, lawyers, teachers, scientists, and so on. Most professionals insist on doing things "right." In this particular case, not only did Hank and his professional group insist on conformity to technical specifications; they maintained a value system that could not justify a loosening of standards, an easy-out approach. Further, they challenged their corporate executive (Jane was the marketing vicepresident) while demanding to be involved in the final decision. Isn't this insubordination beyond the acceptable limits of corporate practice? How can any organization tolerate this kind of behavior and remain productive? To finish the story, it's necessary to point out that Hank was raised in the 1960s. Although he wasn't a campus radical per se, he did pay heed at a gut level to the protests against the Vietnam War that occurred during his college days. He was sympathetic to that cause and even wrote couple of articles about the Pentagon for his college newspaper. He delayed entering the corporate world for several years after graduating with a degree in engineering, refusing to work for any organization with any connection to war-related mater*ials or processes. Finally, he joined a computer start-up company that became very successful. He turned down several offers to move into higher-paying management positions but eventually agreed to serve as the leader of a high-performance product team. He was known as brilliant but somewhat arrogant. Hank worked his own hours, but he got things done. Jane would come down and talk to him. In this instance, Hank's project team missed the demonstration. Hank convinced Jane that the performance of the machine would outstrip any advantage the competition would derive from being first out. It turned out he was right. There are many Hanks who have infiltrated our modern-day organizations, no longer as protestors, campus radicals, or even troublemakers. Indeed, many of them are serious, devoted, professional employees who are retained, as Hank was, if only for their record of extremely high performance. Yet they're different from nonprofessional employees and even from other salaried professionals. They're still '60s kids. They still believe in full participatory rights in their local society. They're interested in assuming positions of responsibility and autonomy, if not power, but they won't be denied the opportunity to use their individual initiative in solving organizational problems. These are the '60s professionals, and in this article I'll tell you not only who they are and what they're like, but how, like Hank, they can successfully be assimilated into bureaucratic life.

A well-functioning bureaucracy is a precondition for efficient public goods provision. However, bureaucratic decision-making is still largely seen as a black box. We provide novel insights into the preferences of bureaucrats regarding their work outcomes. We focus on a major public sector activity and survey more than 900 real-life procurement officials in Finland and Germany. The questionnaire includes hypothetical choice experiments to study the relative importance of multiple features in tender outcomes. First, bureaucrats state to have substantial discretion at work but no important incentives. Second, our experimental results show that procurers are particularly worried about avoiding negative risks concerning prices and supplier reputation. Third, an avoidance of bidders with prior bad performance appears to be an extremely important factor. Fourth, procurers value a certain degree of competition, while litigation concerns and regional favoritism play only a small role. The striking lack of heterogeneous effects points towards the role of intrinsic motivation among public buyers in countries with high public sector capacity.

Prosecutorial independence is often conceived of in terms of the separation of powers. But it can also be understood from the perspective of mechanisms of accountability for prosecutors. The Anglo-American legal tradition has historically relied on democratic accountability for prosecutors (i.e., their selection by elections or elected politicians, control by grand jury, private prosecution, etc.). By contrast, the Continental European tradition has depended on mechanisms of bureaucratic accountability for prosecutors (i.e., their selection by meritocratic exam, hierarchical supervision, merit promotion, etc.). Comparative analysis of prosecutorial accountability mechanisms, which both establish and set limits on independence, can give us a fuller sense of the concept of prosecutorial independence. This paper examines prosecutorial independence in South Korea. Its prosecutorial institutions are derived from Continental sources, mainly Germany and Japan. The Korean people have become increasingly outraged towards their prosecutors for perceived politicization. In scandal after scandal, for decades, the Prosecutors’ Office has attacked the president’s enemies and protected the president – and his or her friends. By 2020, opinion polls showed that prosecutorial reform had become the second most important political issue for the public, after the global coronavirus pandemic. This paper – based on interviews with Korean prosecutors, judges, lawyers, and law professors – explains how the Korean Prosecutors’ Office experiences politicization, despite its Continental European organizational framework. It focuses on how independence is lost in three key areas: personnel policy, investigations, and charging decisions. The paper demonstrates how mechanisms of bureaucratic accountability for prosecutors can fail to establish prosecutorial independence. To summarize the paper’s conclusion: the centralized, hierarchical system for supervising prosecutors, including bureaucratic promotion, in theory establishes rational management and quality-control over prosecutors. But in reality, these mechanisms allow the upper echelons of the prosecutorial bureaucracy, and the politicians that appoint them, to exercise firm political control over the entire system. This working paper is part of a larger whole. Other parts discuss the history of the Korean Prosecutors’ Office, how reformers have sought to import elements of the Anglo-American independence style, and how Korea’s experience helps in conceptualizing prosecutorial independence in comparative perspective.

How to soften resistance to state-building efforts by reform losers? This paper highlights a strategy of compensation via the bureaucracy, in which the ruler offers meaningful government offices in exchange for elites’ acceptance of state-building reforms. We empirically explore this strategy in the context of the Northern Wei Dynasty (386 - 534 AD), which terminated an era of state weakness in early medieval China that initially resulted from entrenched landowning interests and fragile barbarian kingdoms. Our unique dataset combines geocoded family background and career histories of around 2,600 elites with information on medieval Chinese strongholds, which we use to infer state weakness. Leveraging a comprehensive state-building reform in the late 5\textsuperscript{th} century, difference-in-differences estimates document that the reform led to a sustained, substantial increase in the total number of powerful aristocrats from localities with strongholds recruited into the imperial bureaucracy. Subsequent estimates provide evidence for three mechanisms through which compensation facilitates state-building. First, offices taken by these elites came with direct benefits of power and prestige. Second, by transforming these aristocrats from local powerfuls into national stakeholders, these offices potentially induced the realignment of their interests toward those of the dynasty. Third, bureaucracy provided the regime with institutional tools of power-sharing to mitigate credible commitment problems. Findings in this paper shed light on the causes of the ``First Great Divergence,’’ where similar barbarian invasions at similar times led to political fragmentation in Europe but further state consolidation in China.

This paper develops a new theoretical framework to analyze Chinese regulatory governance by considering the strategic interaction between four key players involved in the regulatory process: the top leadership, the regulators, the firms and the public. By focusing on China’s great reversal in regulating the platform economy, I argue that China’s volatile style of policymaking is deeply ingrained in its authoritarian governance, where power is centralized in the top leadership who also suffers from a chronic information deficit. This often leads to a policy control mechanism that fluctuates between very lax and very harsh enforcement. More specifically, I show how government support, firm lobbying and bureaucratic inertia together contributed to a lag in regulating online platforms. When a crisis loomed, the top leadership quickly mobilized all administrative resources and propaganda to initiate a law enforcement campaign against tech giants. However, without strong judicial oversight, aggressive agency interventions create the risk of over-enforcement and administrative abuse. Thus far, China’s reorientation of its policy control has significantly bolstered its regulatory capacity across various fronts including financial, antitrust and data regulation. By exerting greater oversight over platform governance, the government has pressured tech firms to transfer their wealth to their users and the public to combat income inequality. The government’s heavy-handed approach has also afforded it great leverage to nudge tech firms to prioritize on cutting-edge technologies, and to steer them away from foreign stock markets, thus reducing reliance on the West for both technologies and capital. Despite the campaign’s immediate impact, it remains to be seen whether it will bring about lasting changes, especially in light of the persistent lobbying from tech firms and the risk of regulatory capture. At the same time, the volatile policy swing has itself generated risks and uncertainties for both social welfare and global investment, which in turn could cause turmoil to domestic social and financial stability.

Early support for expert policymaking through administrative agencies was rooted in concerns over political power. In a context of formal universal male suffrage, late 19th-century liberals (typically well-educated, urban professionals) opposed policies to regulate business out of fear of working-class radicalism. Yet by the 1910s, liberals supported redistributive policies---through administrative agencies. We use a formal model to show how potential policy feedback effects made an anti-business coalition between liberals and populists unachievable, and how, by diminishing feedback effects, agencies facilitated a successful progressive-liberal coalition. Because administrative agencies guaranteed a central policymaking role for credentialed urban professionals, liberals could support farmers and industrial workers against big business while no longer fearing the rising power of their coalition partners. In this way, the strategic dilemma created by a changing distribution of power among social groups explains the development of broad political support for bureaucratic agencies.

The period of sustained economic growth started after the second world war continued with ups and downs until 1990: the performance of the Italian economy has been disappointing ever since. Many factors have been called into play to explain this phenomenon. The set of "capital sins" affecting Italy's economy includes problems such as tax evasion, corruption, (slow) justice, (inefficient) bureaucracy, the North-South gap, the demographic decline, the adoption of the Euro, the deficiencies of the education system, the lack of resources (due to high debt), the lack of investments (in digital technologies). We challenge the role played by each one of these alleged factors, and argue that Italy's economic divergence can be traced back to a difficulty in taming the growing complexity of the world, and in particular in building and managing large organisations, in both the private and the public sector. This characteristic could in turn be the by-product of low-level cultural-psychological features.

Pure wage rent, defined as labor pricing that chronically exceeds market-opportunity cost, is an outcome of rational employer-employee interaction in information-challenged workplaces. It is an essential concept, integral to the analysis of important economic phenomena, consistent with available evidence, and rooted in neoclassical tenets of optimization and equilibrium. That PWR is absent from textbooks is indicative of a damaging gap in economic theory, which this paper remedies. The task was daunting, requiring the generalization of rational price-mediated exchange from the marketplace to workplaces restricted by costly, asymmetric information. Rigorous modeling of the second venue was expedited by earlier economic accounts of intra-firm behavior. Most notably, a detailed description of what goes on inside complex, bureaucratic workplaces was provided in the middle 20th century by a school of labor economists that Clark Kerr named “Neoclassical Revisionists”. (For background, see Kerr (1988), Lloyd Reynolds (1949), and Richard Lester (1951).) What follows translates the revisionists’ narrative into a rigorous theory rooted in optimizing behavior organized by general decision-rule equilibrium. The exercise microfounds pure wage rent, opening an exceptionally productive research frontier.

This is an answer to the consultation organised by UK's Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy on designing a new domestic subsidy control regime reflecting UK's strategic interests and national circumstances. We argue that The UK economy would certainly benefit from a stable, effective subsidy regime that creates clear expectations for economic actors with minimal bureaucracy. We provide our detailed opinion on the way in which the notion of subsidy needs to be defined, as well as our view on how to design a robust system for subsidy control respectful to the rule of law and UK's international obligations.

Differences in information between senders and receivers can result in inefficiency due to adverse selection or moral hazard. Therefore, one critical issue of organization design is how to induce truth-telling from the informed but biased agent by restructuring organizational forms. This study examines an important organizational form in terms of informational transmission - the direct and competitive communication structure - and estimates the causal effect of this information structure on organizational performance in a hierarchical organization. We exploit an institutional reform in the imperial bureaucracy of the Qing dynasty, which allowed multiple local officials to report to the emperor directly and independently. Taking advantage of the fact that the direct communication channel was unevenly introduced, we compare the prefectures affected by the reform with prefectures without experiencing the reform based on a difference-in-difference specification. This paper finds that the introduction of a direct communication structure significantly increased government assistance against natural disasters, a critical public good in the pre-modern society; and the increase of public goods provision was mainly attributed to the improvement of information transmission and competitive information supply triggered by the direct communication. Additionally, we find that the effectiveness of the direct communication structure was contingent on the competence of the receiver and could be debilitated by competition-induced information inflation. Furthermore, we find that the decision-maker could alleviate the information bias and resulting misallocation by strategically using the reports sent by more trustworthy informants. This research contributes to the literature by demonstrating that a flattening and competitive information structure could have a causal and conducive bearing on organizational performance.

Regional Owned Enterprises (from now on referred to as BUMD) is a company in Indonesia. A company that is in the form of a BUMD is one type of company that is a legal entity. Based on Law Number 23 of 2014 concerning the Regional Government, the management of BUMD has not yet been regulated in detail regarding the procedures for managing BUMD. In the management of BUMD, there is the domination of power and authority. BUMD has a dual task of providing public benefits and being in charge of making a profit. Management of BUMD so that it can run by Good Corporate Governance, of course, depends on the appointment of members of the Supervisory Board. The Supervisory Board in BUMD consists of government of icials / SKPD and independent supervisors from the general public's selection. The problems faced by almost all BUMDs in Indonesia are the basis for regulating BUMD and the principles of managing BUMDs that have been contaminated with the bureaucratic system; BUMD operations are inef icient, and BUMD has not been optimal in providing public services and the character of BUMD based on the principles of Good Corporate Governance (GCG). Based on the background above, the formulation of the problem in this article is how the characteristics and limitations of the BUMD Supervisory Board (perumda) in realizing optimal BUMD management. The purpose of this research is to find concepts or ideas regarding the character, authority, rights, obligations, and code of ethics for the Board of Trustees that meet GCG standards or measures. This research uses normative research.

This paper presents evidence from parallel field experiments in China, Germany, and the United States. We contacted the mayor’s office in over 6,000 cities asking for information about procedures for starting a new business. Chinese and German cities responded to 36-37 percent requests; American cities responded to only 22 percent of requests. We randomly varied the text of the request to identify factors that affect the likelihood of receiving a response. American and German cities were more responsive to requests from citizens than foreigners; Chinese cities did not discriminate on this basis. Chinese cities were more responsive to requests from men than women; German cities did not discriminate on this basis and American cities had a slight bias in favor of women. Cities in all three countries were more responsive to requests associated with starting a construction business than a green business, but especially Chinese cities. Chinese cities were more responsive when the mayor was being considered for promotion than after a promotion decision, suggesting the importance of promotion incentives in China, but low responsiveness to green investment suggests limited incentives for environmental improvement. We argue that the response patterns are consistent with simple political economy theories of democracy and autocracy.

In this essay I selectively survey the economic history literature on the rise of regulation in America during the Progressive Era with the goal of identifying how this literature is informed by Austrian economic theory, and how Austrian theory might contribute to our understanding of the origins and growth of the regulatory state. I argue that much of the literature on the origins of Progressive Era regulation is consistent with the positive aspects of Austrian economics, largely because Austrian theory overlaps with public choice theory, the analytical toolkit used by most studies of the rise of regulation. However, the normative implications of Austrian theory regarding the efficiency consequences of regulation are not always supported by the literature on the Progressive Era. I also discuss two ways in which Austrian theory might add to our understanding of the rise of regulation during this period. The first concerns the dynamics of how regulation evolves. The second concerns the role of entrepreneurship within the bureaucracy in shaping the evolution and enforcement of regulation.

This Chapter examines the future of decentralization. While humans who were raised in a centralized world by default turn to centralized solutions for societal problems, decentralized approaches are more effective for global problems. Decentralized networks encourage interoperability through bureaucratic transparency. While the decentralized developer community is moving remarkably fast, inevitable improvements are still necessary. The chapter demonstrates that Bitcoin and Etherneum have provided primitive decentralized versions of currency and business con-tracts. The real task at hand is the construction of decentralized versions of all the rest of the institutions that business and society rely on. The chapter provides a guide for navigating the future decades of decentralization with a view towards the required experimentation with and failure of decentralized structures that help filter out the centralized impurities of a flawed understanding of decentralization.

The established view in textbooks and legal commentary is that the Court’s case law should be viewed as a coherent whole. In this article, we ask whether European human rights law is as unified and European as is often presumed. Based on a citation network of all Chamber judgments from 1998–2018, we argue that the practice of the Court is to some extent split in different strands of case law, where the Court reuses particular factual and legal arguments against the same state without applying those as precedent against other states. We quantify this phenomenon and exemplify it qualitatively. Our data also suggests that the trend is declining. We explain this by the introduction of the Pilot Judgement procedure and an increasing bureaucratization of the Registry, aligning the citation practices of the Court’s five sections. The article situates itself within a broader debate about both legal pluralism and the principle of subsidiarity inherent to the European human rights system and proposals to bring the Court “closer” to the contracting states. We introduce a new and more diversified view on the Court’s practice, understanding it as perhaps less homogenous than has hitherto been thought.

We report findings from a systematic literature review of last two decades of research on postcolonial theory in public administration. Our review points out that postcolonial public administration scholarship provides important insights regarding colonial origins of bureaucracy in many parts of the world; the continuing legacies of colonial governance in postcolonial states; and contemporary neocolonial influences on international public administration in the context of globalization and development. Our review further suggests that despite making significant contributions towards understating bureaucratic traditions, and limitations of policy design and implementation in developing countries, engagement with postcolonial perspectives remains limited within the discipline.

This chapter traces changes in EU-official discourse around EU legitimacy since the 1950s, relating them to the trajectory described by Pierre Rosanvallon in Democratic Legitimacy (2011a). Accordingly, the legitimacy of modern democracies broke down in the 1980s owing to a loss of faith in its two main foundations in elections and bureaucracy. This gave rise to the emergence of alternative modes of legitimation, classed under the ideal types of impartiality, reflexivity, and proximity. This chapter plays Rosanvallon’s analysis, which draws on national experiences, against the EU context. It finds important differences, in particular regarding the balance between electoral and bureaucratic legitimacy in the earlier years of integration - as well as significant similarities and interaction, manifested in a striking resonance between particular strands in EU-official legitimation strategies and Rosanvallon’s ideal types. The ways in which they played out in the case of the EU point to dangers inherent to them; of highlighting proximity over actual influence and control; making democratic forms so complex and ‘reflexive’ that they become unintelligible, and unaccountable; or replicating bureaucratic thinking that obscures choices and judgments behind claims to independence and impartiality. What is more, the discursive history of contests over EU legitimacy illustrates a predisposition of Rosanvallon’s account of democratic legitimacy towards “unpolitical democracy”, rooted in its attempt to contain the threat of populism. His goal is to politicise the indirect institutions of impartiality, reflexivity and proximity rather than democratic procedures such as voting and majority rule, with the effect that deliberation is used strategically as an alternative to electoral and partisan democracy.

It examines the effect of bureaucratic and humanistic management styles on the organizational citizenship behaviour, It has been reviewed and approved for publication

We study the consequences of populism on bureaucratic expertise and government performance. We use novel data on about 8,000 municipalities in Italy, over a period of 20 years, and we estimate the effect of electing a populist mayor with a close-election regression discontinuity design. We find that the election of a populist mayor leads to (1) higher turnover among top bureaucrats; (2) an increase in the probability of replacing expert with non-expert bureaucrats; (3) a decrease in the percentage of highly educated bureaucrats; (4) and lower performance overall. Moreover, we find evidence that the increased inefficiency of the bureaucracy is accompanied by proliferation of council and executive resolutions, in line with the recent literature on overproduction of laws and bureaucratic inefficiency.

A long intellectual tradition starting with Max Weber views an ideal bureaucracy as a completely rule-based system. However, the net effect of discretionary appointment compared with a rule-based approach is theoretically ambiguous. Exploiting a unique setting in China’s imperial bureaucracy, where a personnel reform shifted the appointment method for prefecture governors from the lottery rule to a discretionary system, we show that discretionary appointment improved the quality of governors and led to an increase in public goods provision and a reduction in social unrest. The positive effects are more pronounced when the appointers had a larger stake in the organization.

In just over two decades technology has fundamentally changed our society and will continue to do so. The increased reliance on automation due to the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the nation to the era of artificial intelligence. Between the signing of the National AI Initiative Act in 2020 and the tremendous amount of AI planning among countries around the world, it is time the United States takes the necessary actions to prepare for the implementation of AI into federal agencies. The United States government is currently far behind the private sector in AI funding, research and development, and implementation. If reforms are not implemented soon, the public sector will struggle to keep up with the rapid advancement of technology in years to come. Recent political discourse about AI has been slow and advising reports fail to address important factors in the implementation of AI such as logistics surrounding the federal workforce. People must be at the forefront of the federal agenda in order to create and maintain effective AI systems within the government. There must be changes made to contracting and hiring practices, worker incentives, and training programs. Decisions about AI implementation must account for worker diversity, ethics training, and inequality. As our country makes the transition towards the implementation of this powerful technology it is imperative that the federal workforce is prepared for the obstacles ahead and that AI is seen as an opportunity for the government to improve the lives of civilians and the functioning of bureaucracy.

Between 1900 and 1930 typhoid fever and other waterborne diseases were largely eradicated from U.S. cities. This achievement required a mix of technological, scientific, economic, and bureaucratic innovations. This article examines how the interaction of those forces influenced water and sanitary infrastructure provision during the 19th and early 20th centuries. I document a sharp link between infrastructure investments and declines in waterborne disease and discuss how that relationship informs the methodological approaches one should use to assess the impact of sanitary investments on urban development. Finally, I review the literature on the social returns to eliminating the threat of waterborne disease. The evidence suggests the benefits of infrastructure investment far exceeded the costs.

Bureaucracies create rules and routines that are an important source of organizational capabilities. But these rules and routines also, for a number of reasons, become difficult to change and inhibit organizational innovation. We discuss how an organization in Denver local government, Peak Academy, encourages frontline civil servants to develop innovations. We present the background and content of innovations that have been developed and present an account of how bureaucracies can be innovative, and of what distinguishes innovations by bureaucracies. Many of the innovations we observed are mundane process innovations rather than more dramatic changes in features of programs. We call these “microinnovations.” We urge scholars interested in government innovation to give more attention to such innovations, which have hitherto been ignored in the literature.

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated need for remote work has required organizations to adapt and demonstrate resiliency in order to continue to deliver on their purpose. Since employee engagement is key to organizational effectiveness and adaptation, in this study, we examine whether there are differences in the financial performance during the pandemic across firms with different levels of pre-pandemic employee engagement. Using novel machine learning methods on Glassdoor.com reviews of leading software industry firms to create measures of employee engagement and their perception of their firm’s remote work practices, we show that firms with higher levels of pre-COVID employee engagement exhibited significantly higher financial performance during the critical months of the pandemic. Additional analysis of post-pandemic reviews revealed that employees of firms with higher levels of pre-pandemic engagement reported an alignment of their firms on strong leadership and customer focus, while employees of firms with lower levels of pre-pandemic engagement reported concerns regarding bureaucracy and lack of consistency in management and work practices.

This paper investigates the worldwide phenomenon of "political divergence'' between the East and the West. During the 8th to 10th centuries, Western Europe and China both achieved political stability, but they did so through dramatically different routes. Western Europe developed parliamentary representation on the basis of a power balance between the aristocracy and the crown, whereas China consolidated absolutism based on a state bureaucracy and an exam-based meritocracy. This paper provides empirical evidence to document this great political divergence, and it proposes a theory to understand the relationship between institutions and the monarchy-aristocracy power balance and the implications for political stability and long-run political development.

International direct-to-participant (DTP) genomics research involves the use of mobile technology to recruit, consent, and study participants remotely. This model can facilitate research across broad geographies and many countries, but must also comply with the norms of multiple recruitment jurisdictions, with each jurisdiction typically requiring at least one local research ethics review. Each additional research ethics review increases bureaucratic hurdles without necessarily strengthening the protection of participants’ rights and interests. For DTP genomic research, obtaining a review may in fact be impossible in the absence of a local research partner. This paper proposes an “adequacy” approach, inspired by data protection law, to coordinate the regulation and oversight of international DTP genomics research. This involves one country voluntarily assessing whether another country’s research ethics reviews are equivalent to its own, in terms of objectives and effectiveness. Ethics-approved projects led by researchers from countries recognized as adequate are deemed to comply with local norms, eliminating the need for a duplicative local review. Adequacy preserves the sovereignty of countries to determine their own regulatory aims and which other countries to trust. It therefore provides a voluntary, incremental path towards greater global coordination of health research oversight.

From intro: The events of January 6, 2021, are a Rorschach test for longstanding debates surrounding the efficacy of the separation of powers. Scholars have endlessly debated whether the federal branches of government operate as the set of checks and balances that the framers intended, and whether the President is constrained by law. The role of the executive branch bureaucracy in both constraining and entrenching presidential power is increasingly an essential component of these inquiries, and it is the focus of this chapter. It will consider these dual roles through the lens of two very different case studies: the insurrection of January 6, 2021, on the one hand, and the long-term interpretation and practice of presidential war powers, on the other. The focus of one of these case studies, the attack of January 6 on the U.S. Capitol, is a fantastical, extraordinary snapshot of time. It was an event fostered by a once in our nation’s history President. That President and the attack he inspired represented such a shock to the nation’s fundamentals that they threaten to divide the very party that brought him to the Oval Office. The other study, the longstanding practice of war powers inside the executive branch, is a story of business as usual. The executive branch’s process for wartime decision-making, its expansive claims to unilateral power, and even most of its wartime acts fly so far beneath the radar that if you plucked a person from the street and said, “how concerned are you about the President’s claims to unilateral war powers?” they might easily respond, “what war?” The events of January 6, extreme as they were, bring into stark relief how essential the institutional constraints and normal operation of the executive branch bureaucracy are to the continued functioning of our democracy. The executive branch practice of war powers demonstrates how these institutional constraints and norms of governance also promote a lopsided tilt of ever-increasing power to the executive branch itself, an executive branch run by a President who might once again seek to abuse that power. These two features of the bureaucracy are symbiotic. The existence of one creates space for the other. The knowledge that bureaucratic constraints exist permits the other branches to delegate and defer to the President as an entity even when they fear the President as a person.

While the volume of adjudication by federal agencies far outstrips the volume of cases decided by the federal judiciary, researchers have devoted relatively little attention to agency adjudication and political control thereof. We study three mechanisms of presidential control of immigration adjudication: capacity-building, selection, and precedential rulemaking. First, consistent with work on bureaucratic capacity, the Trump administration achieved its goal of increasing removals of noncitizens through an unprecedented increase in total hiring of immigration judges. Second, contrary to expectations from the literatures on judicial behavior and bureaucratic politics, we find little evidence of partisan effects in immigration judge selection. Third, we demonstrate the substantial power of what we call “precedential rulemaking” – the power by the Attorney General to select cases in which to issue binding precedent. These results illustrate the importance of incorporating mechanisms of supervisory and legal control into the study of administrative courts.

Culture exists prior to governance. Conflicts come and pass away. Governance is a process and it also comes and passes away. But the culture remains. Conflicts may reappear and resolved and the cycle goes on ever. The responsibilities assumed by the administrative class remain significant and desirable as the political process implies problematic or overplays the governance with vested interests. Yet the governance is unavoidable combination of politics and administration. The concept of administrative culture is forced to take experiments in the prevailing social and political structure and behaviour. Tamil Nadu remains a fertile field of study in understanding the nexus between culture and governance the position of bureaucracy to mediate the process. The recent trends show a friction between culture and governance. It is overtly created by the BJP and its ruling ally ADMK and the DMK and its allies constantly resist. At the same time the former encounters the later as they stood for the Tamils embedded in language and culture. Despite the Hindutva policies, BJP and its allies tries to build an image that it is not against the interests of Tamil culture. Its image building is an instrumental exercise. The Dravidian ideology implies that Hindutva and Tamil culture are two parallel developments where the intersection would be resulted in friction rather assimilation. As far as the BJP keeps its allies intact and dominates the administrative class it has agenda to enforce but up to the time when the opposition regains the power.

An independent bureaucracy has carried out automated redistricting processes in Mexico since 1996. However, the process of “fine-tuning” the plans that are initially produced by formula is conducted behind closed doors where parties and experts are allowed to offer proposals. This raises questions about the necessary conditions required for a bureaucracy to operate in a transparent, consistent, and accountable manner. Our research examines this question through the analysis of private records that trace the bargaining process that takes place between parties and bureaucrats. Our results uncover substantial gaps in consistency. We highlight the strengths of the process and offer policy recommendations that can help improve the quality of redistricting in Mexico and in countries cyclically renewing their electoral geography.

Without any doubt, management is a very necessary subject in any type of organization where the pre-planned aim is impossible to achieve if there is no appropriate management. In Management different tasks are performed with the effort of many employees. There are many different types of management theories which are divided into situational, classical, and behavioral theories. The well-known classical management theories are of three types i.e. ( administrative, scientific, and bureaucratic) have been talked about in this particular paper. The management theory of science (with respect to some other type of factors) are the main and important demand for the managers of any company or an organization, in order to deal with many other challenges so that it can show negative and positive outcomes for management type of theories with the respective science of management and definitely also with the managers. Some of the common characteristics of the classical type of management theory are series of management of authoritarian style, commands, and forecasting of behavior. In spite of these types of facts, these theories are out of date, different shapes of these types of theories are executed in many countries.

The machinery of mass incarceration in America is huge, intricate, and destructive. To understand it and to tame it, scholars and activists look for its levers of power—where are they, who holds them, and what motivates them? This much we know: legislators criminalize, police arrest, prosecutors charge, judges sentence, prison officials confine, and probation and parole officials manage release. As this Article reveals, jailers, too, have their hands on the controls. The sheriffs who run jails—along with the county commissioners who fund them—have tremendous but unrecognized power over the size and shape of our criminal legal system, particularly in rural areas and for people accused or convicted of low-level crimes. Because they have the authority to build jails (or not) as well as the authority to release people (or not), they exercise significant control not merely over conditions but also over both the supply of and demand for jail bedspace: how large they should be, how many people they should confine, and who those people should be. By advocating, financing, and contracting for jail bedspace, sheriffs and commissioners determine who has a say and who has a stake in carceral expansion and contraction. Through their exercise of arrest and release powers, sheriffs affect how many and which people fill their cells. Constraints they create or relieve on carceral infrastructure exert or alleviate pressure on officials at the local, state, and federal levels. Drawing on surveys of state statutes and of municipal securities filings, data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, case law, and media coverage, this Article tells overlooked stories—of sheriffs who send their deputies out door knocking to convince voters to support a new tax to fund a new jail, and of commissioners who raise criminal court fees and sign contracts to detain “rental inmates” to ensure that incarceration “pays for itself.” It also tells of sheriffs who override the arrest decisions of city police officers, release defendants who have not made bail, and cut sentences short—and of those who would rather build more beds than push back on carceral inertia. A spotlight on jails and the officials who run them illuminates important attributes of our carceral crisis. The power and incentives to build jail bedspace are as consequential as the power and incentives to fill it. Expanding a county’s jailing capacity has profound ramifications across local, state, and federal criminal legal systems. Sheriffs have a unique combination of controls over how big and how full their jails are, but this role consolidation does not produce the restraint that some have predicted. Their disclaimers of responsibility are a smokescreen, obscuring sheriffs’ bureaucratic commitment to perpetuating mass incarceration. State courts and federal agencies have increasingly recognized and regulated public profiteering through jail contracting, and advocates have begun to hold jailers accountable, challenging expansion in polling booths and budget meetings.

Upon assuming the presidency, Joe Biden is likely to enjoy limited congressional support for his legislative agenda. Democrats believe they have a good playbook for this situation: “presidential administration.” Coined by now–Justice Kagan, presidential administration endorses the use of unilateral executive action to advance the president’s policy priorities. We argue that presidential administration is unlikely to be successful. More to the point, we fear it may prove dangerous, further legitimizing practices that enable and embolden future authoritarians far more adroit with the tools and language of power than Donald Trump. We propose that Biden instead practice (and preach) “civic administration,” diffusing authority away from the office of the president in ways that empower the federal bureaucracy, state, local, and tribal officials, and civil society. These other institutions and actors would serve as (1) partners in advancing social and economic policy and (2) potential counterweights if and when the White House pushes reckless initiatives. Biden should of course lead federal administrative agencies to take lawful action on the major issues of the day, from the pandemic, to climate change, to social inequality. But these and other actions should be taken in ways that recalibrate executive power, amplify and leverage the talents and resources of any number of competent actors outside of the West Wing and Cabinet, and remain mindful of the dangers of presidential unilateralism.

To what extent does a more competent public bureaucracy contribute to better eco- nomic outcomes? We address this question in the context of the US federal procurement of services and works, by combining contract-level data on procurement performance and bureau-level data on competence and workforce characteristics. We use the death occurrences of specific types of employees as instruments and find that an increase in bureau competence causes a significant and economically important reduction in: i) time delays, ii) cost overruns, and iii) number of renegotiations. Cooperation within the office appears to be a key driver of the findings.

This paper examines the role of prisoner voice in criminal justice reform in the US. Previous research has attributed reform of criminal justice institutions to either political elites or the public. This research has not considered the role of prisoner voice in influencing reform. This paper fills that gap. I argue that prisoner voice—through the avenues of prison journalism and prisoner litigation—serves as an information channel in state criminal justice bureaucracies, holding bureaucrats accountable to their superiors. I conclude that prison journalism is the only avenue for prisoner voice that influences reform in ways that aligns with voters’ interests. Prisoner litigation and prison riots result in reform that drives the growth of state prison systems and loss of prisoner privileges.

This paper argues that the BRICS are status quo powers concerning two core norms of the international society: sovereignty and hierarchy, what conditions both the scope and depth of their security cooperation. On the one hand, this enables cooperation, as they can use the group to protect these norms and reinforce state control on transnational flows. In addition, this facilitates the formation of ties among foreign policy and bureaucratic elites across the BRICS who share a preference for protecting these norms. On the other hand, the importance attached to these norms constrains cooperation: differences of regime type are associated to higher levels of distrust; and intragroup power asymmetries raise fears of potential unequal agreements. The paper then applies these ideas to indicate the potential for cooperation on anti‐drug and cybersecurity policies. On the one hand, different regime types and power inequalities are likely to hinder cooperation. On the other hand, interests from foreign policy, political and bureaucratic elites in protecting norms, as well as in increasing state control on transnational flows and expand repression against new threats are likely to facilitate cooperation.

India has massive poverty partly due to poor policies and partly due to inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy. There is a need to encourage social entrepreneurs and encourage public participation in poverty removal. A range of initiatives are required to create the right set of policies, practices and innovations.

We survey recent theoretical and empirical literature on political economics of non-democracies. Dictators face many challenges to their rule: internal, such as palace coups or breakdown of their support coalition, or external, such as mass protests or revolutions. We analyze strategic decisions made by dictators — hiring political loyalists to positions that require competence, restricting media freedom at the cost of sacrificing bureaucratic efficiency, running a propaganda campaign, organizing electoral fraud, purging associates and opponents, and repressing citizens — as driven by the desire to maximize the regime's chances of staying in power. We argue that the key to understanding the functioning and ultimately the fate of a nondemocratic regime is the information flows within the regime, and the institutions that govern these information flows. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

A bureaucracy representative of disadvantaged groups in a society has been linked to better outcomes for those groups in a wide variety of policy areas. Most of the empirical work identifying this link has used United States data, a highly conducive case for representation. Would the same relationship be seen in more challenging organizational and environmental contexts? Using the K-12 education context in India as a proxy for a challenging environment, this paper examines how and when gender representation in K-12 schools leads to enhanced outcomes. We find a modest relationship between the presence of female teachers in a school and the academic outcomes of female students. Contextual factors both within the organization (more class days, longer teacher hours, and a smaller student to teacher ratio) and related to the external environment (infrastructure, rural location) enhance this association between teacher gender and student performance.

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has managed to expose the longstanding inadequacies and the fragmented states of government and socio-economic institutions worldwide. COVID-19 is an indiscriminating threat. Thus, for both developed and developing countries, the pandemic, and the challenges it surfaced, meant a protracted test of resilience for governments and the existing world order. For the Philippines, the COVID-19 health crisis has managed to exacerbate the deep-rooted societal issues of inequality, corruption, and injustice. Yet, it also seems that the pandemic has somehow managed to trigger both public officials and Filipino citizens to question and to think more deeply about the capabilities and the readiness of a highly centralized bureaucracy to shift to a federal or more decentralized form of government. This unease is heightened even further in the face of the current administration operating within an almost absolutely centralized and uniform policy and governance framework during this pandemic as prescribed by the “Bayanihan to Heal as One Act of 2020.” This law essentially enabled the President to have almost absolute control over all government machinery and more. More importantly though, the handling of the crisis also uncovered signs of disconnect across the different levels of the Philippine government, especially as tensions between local government units and the national government unfold. As such, this paper will attempt to describe these centralization-decentralization tensions and provide an explanation of its sources to understand and assess the current decentralization context of the Philippines using the government’s COVID-19 crisis response as the frame of reference. Overall, using the case of the Philippines, the analysis will explore possible policy recommendations that can assist the government in navigating or finding a balance between the policy intricacies and implications presented by centralization and decentralization in government. More importantly, the analysis also hopes to contribute to the ongoing discourse on decentralization and federalism especially in the case of the Philippines.

Lockdown measures enacted across the US due to the Covid-19 pandemic have severely curtailed personal and economic liberty. Although a growing body of research estimates the benefits and costs of these restrictive measures, significantly less research examines the role of deregulation in expanding healthcare capacity. This paper examines the impact of the FDA and CDC's deregulation on Covid-19 testing. I find laboratories and test developers greatly expanded Covid-19 testing availability and expanded the variety of tests after deregulation occurred. My findings provide critical and timely implications for research in public health and pandemic response policy more broadly.

Bureaucratic organisations are inertial, incremental, and dispiriting. In a bureaucracy, the power to initiate change is vested in a few senior leaders. When those at the top fall prey to denial, arrogance, and nostalgia, as they often do, the organization falters. That’s why deep change in a bureaucracy is usually belated and convulsive. Bureaucracies are also innovation-­phobic. They are congenitally risk averse, and offer few incentives to those inclined to challenge the status quo. In a bureaucracy, being a maverick is a high-­risk occupation. Worst of all, bureaucracies are soul crushing. Deprived of any real influence, employees disconnect emotionally from work. Initiative, creativity, and daring—requisites for success in the creative economy — often get left at home. (Hamel and Zanini, 2020) The main purpose of this research paper is to understand ethical leadership and humanocracy, a word coined by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini in 2020. Ethical leaders possess diverse thinking about long term consequences, limitations and benefits of the decisions they are required to make within the organization. The main job of the ethical leaders is, they should take into consideration, norms, principles, values, standards and ethics, when they are carrying out various job duties and convey the same to the other members. Ethical leaders set high standards and carry out tasks and activities in accordance to them. They convey to the other members, how to implement ethics in their work, hence, they themselves need to be professional and skilled in their conduct. They influence ethical values of the organization through their behaviour. Leaders serve as role models for their followers and show them the behavioural boundaries set within an organization. They are perceived as honest, truthful, trustworthy, responsible, reliable, courageous, fair and authentic. In this paper, thankfully, bureaucracy isn’t the only way to organize human activity at scale. Around the world, a small but growing band of post-bureaucratic pioneers are proving it’s possible to capture the benefits of bureaucracy — control, consistency, and coordination — while avoiding the penalties — inflexibility, mediocrity, and apathy. When compared to their conventionally managed peers, the vanguard are more proactive, inventive, and profitable. These companies were built, or in some cases rebuilt, with one goal in mind — to maximize human contribution. This aspiration is the animating spirit of humanocracy, and stands in stark contrast to the bureaucratic obsession with control. Both goals are important, but in most organizations, the effort spent on ensuring conformance is a vast multiple of the energy devoted to enlarging the capacity for human impact. This gross imbalance is dangerous for organizations, a drag on the economy, and ethically troubling. Bureaucracy as Hamel and Zaninin (2020) put it is particularly problematic for large companies. As an organization grows, layers get added, staff groups swell, rules proliferate, and compliance costs mount. Once a company hits a certain threshold of complexity — around two hundred to three hundred employees, by experience, bureaucracy starts growing faster than the organization itself. That’s why big companies have more bureaucracy per capita than small ones, and why they’re burdened with managerial diseconomies of scale. The link between girth and “bureausclerosis” would be less worrying if large organizations weren’t so dominant and managers lack ethical leadership. Despite all the talk of the gig economy, a greater percentage of the US labor force works for large companies than ever before. In 1987, 28.8 percent of US employees worked in companies with more than five thousand employees. Thirty years later, the percentage was 33.8. Today, the number of employees working in companies with more than ten thousand employees exceeds the number who work in businesses with fifty or fewer employees. Defenders of the status quo will tell you that bureaucracy is the inevitable correlate of complexity, but our evidence suggests otherwise. The vanguard companies prove that it’s possible to build organizations that are big and fast, disciplined and empowering, efficient and entrepreneurial, and bold and prudent. The paper will show how humanocracy and ethical leadership can bring an end to bureaucracy.

תקציר בעברית: הדגם השכיח לקריירה שיפוטית בישראל אינו שגרתי במבט השוואתי. הוא משלב מיסודו מאפיינים השכיחים הן במדינות המשפט המקובל והן מאפיינים השכיחים במדינות המשפט הקונטיננטלי. עם זאת, בשלושים השנים האחרונות נצפתה תופעה חדשה: עלייתם של שופטי המערכת. עורכות דין – מרביתן נשים – שבשלב מוקדם בקריירה המשפטית החלו לעבוד במסגרת מערכת השפיטה, כסגל עזר שיפוטי או/ו כרשמות, טרם בחירתן לשופטות מן המניין. המאמר הנוכחי מבקש לעמוד על שלושה היבטים של תופעת שופטי המערכת: היקפה ומאפייניה, הגורמים המרכזיים בעיצובה, ומשמעויותיה. ההיבט הראשון נוגע למגמות בדפוסי המינוי. בהתבסס על מחקר אמפירי מקיף ראשון מסוגו, המכסה את כלל השופטים שכיהנו בישראל מהקמת המדינה ועד לסוף שנת 2016, המאמר מבקש להראות את הדפוסים השונים במינויים שהם חלק מהתופעה. זאת, לרבות הירידה במספר ובשיעור השופטים המתמנים לערכאות הבכירות, הגידול בהיקף מערך הרשמים ושיעור השופטים שמשרתם האחרונה טרם מינוי היה כסגל עזר שיפוטי. ההיבט השני נוגע לגורמים המרכזיים המעצבים את התהוותו של דגם שופטי המערכת. התגבשותו של דגם זה לא הייתה תוצאה של החלטה סדורה אלא של סדרת החלטות טכניות לכאורה, המצטברות לכדי דגם של ממש. החלטות אלו התקבלו באתרים שונים, בכנסת, בממשלה, בוועדה לבחירת שופטים, ובמנהלת מערכת השפיטה. על אף ריבוי השחקנים והאתרים שבהם התרחש השינוי, המאמר מצביע על שני גורמים מרכזיים בהתרחשותו: מעבר מערכת השפיטה לתפיסה של ניהול סכסוכים והפרויקט של שיפוט כמקצוע. שני פרויקטים אידיאולוגיים אלה הם מרכזיים בעיצובו של הדגם, ובהתאם המנהלה של מערכת השפיטה והוועדה לבחירת שופטים הם אתרים משמעותיים שבהם הדגם התהווה. לבסוף, המאמר מבקש לעמוד על ההשלכות והמשמעויות של אימוץ הדגם. העמידה על השלכות אלו חשובה כבסיס לדיון עתידי בתופעה ובהסדרתה על ידי המערכת הפוליטית, שצפויה להתממש כחלק מהמאבקים הבין-מוסדיים המתרחשים בישראל בין שלושת הרשויות. המאמר מתמקד בשתי השלכות: בכך שדגם שופטי המערכת מקבע באופן מוסדי את "התסריט המוסדי" של הרשות השופטת; והפיכת הדגם לדרך כניסה משמעותית למערכת השפיטה עבור נשים שנעדרו ממנה בעבר: נשים ערביות, נשים יהודיות בעלות רקע דתי, ונשים יהודיות שגדלו בפריפריה החברתית-כלכלית של ישראל. שתי ההשלכות גם יחד – לרבת המתח שבניהן – מדגישות את מורכבות התופעה והשפעותיה, ועל כן את הצורך בהמשך מחקר ודיון ציבורי-מקצועי בעיצובה העתידי. English Abstract: The Israeli path to the judiciary is unusual from a comparative perspective. It incorporates properties common both to common law and civil law systems. In the past thirty years, this hybrid stance was further intensified by the emergence of a new phenomenon: the rise of system judges. These are lawyers—predominately women—who early in their legal careers began working in the judiciary, as law clerks and/or registrars, and were appointed to be judges from those positions. These judges are not recognition judges, nor are they strict career judges with a separate career path. This article presents this phenomenon and explores it. It traces its contours through the biographies of the judges. Based on an empirical study that covered the biographies of all judges appointed from between 1948 and 2017, it presents the different patterns in judicial appointments, such as a decline in the direct appointment of lawyers to appellate courts; the growth of the judicial staff, and the gradual rise of system judges across the judiciary. The article further elaborates on the central factors that shaped the system judges pathway. It argues that it has emerged not as the result of a premeditated plan, but rather through a series of seemingly technical reforms pushed by different actors in the judicial nomination committee, the Knesset, the government, and the director of the courts. Even though the process was promoted by different actors and in different arenas, the article demonstrates the central role played by the managerial shift of the judiciary in the past decade, and by the attempts to promote judgeship as a separate profession. Finally, the article discusses two possible implications that the emergence of system judges may have for the judiciary as a whole: the potential of system judges to institutionally solidify the voice of the judiciary, and the potential of system-judgeship as a pathway for marginalized groups.

Patronage is typically studied following government terminations when political parties appoint their nominees into the state administration. However, patronage is understudied in cases when a change of minister takes place without government termination. Taking individual government ministers as the units of analysis, we identify four modalities of ministerial alterations: replacing, successive, incumbent, and switching ministers. We show that politicization occurs under “replacing ministers” following government termination, but the bureaucratic turnover is equally high under “successive ministers.” That suggests that patronage can be seen as an individualized power resource of autonomous ministers who exercise influence independently of their political parties.

“A company’s responsibility is to increase profit.” This idea has motivated a lot of entrepreneurs towards company formation. However, for a business to be successful, a person or group of persons must invest time, money, assets, and/or personal skill towards the development of the business idea. As businesses expand and become more profitable, it will be fair for these persons who have invested towards the success of the business to have the absolute freedom to control the business as they wish. For registered companies, this is not the case. The mode of structuring and organising of a company is defined by the French Commercial Code, the French Civil Code and the bylaws of the company . This means that regardless of how much a person has invested, such a person is still subject to rules and guidelines for the running of the company. Arguably, this could be the reason for the growing popularity of other forms of business as compared to registered companies. This paper analyses the bureaucracies associated with the structuring and organising of companies under the French Legal system. It is divided into two parts. The first part of this paper discusses business formation and the corporate standards that affect the running of the business while the second part discusses the purpose of government-imposed regulations to the corporate structure.

In the depths of the Great Depression, R.B. Bennett’s Conservative government appointed W.J. Reilley as Canada’s first Superintendent of Bankruptcy. Reilley’s experience made him eminently qualified. He had trained as a lawyer and had been the Registrar of the Bankruptcy Court of Ontario at Osgoode Hall for many years. The creation of the federal Superintendent’s office in 1932 is one of the major milestones in the legislative history of Canadian bankruptcy law. In the bankruptcy law literature, there is a broad recognition that the 1932 reforms were vital. These accounts are incomplete. This article seeks to provide a fuller understanding of these reforms by examining sources of opposition to the establishment of the Superintendent’s office. Not all accepted the new regulatory approach and the prospects of a bankruptcy bureaucracy during the Depression. Within months of Reilley taking office, critics called into question his qualifications and demanded his resignation. Little is known about the 1932 reforms as the creation of the Superintendent’s office has largely been overshadowed in the insolvency field by the enactment of corporate reorganization legislation in 1933 and farm credit legislation in 1934.

This paper studies when and why firms prefer more direct forms of state capture (i.e. without intermediaries, such as patronage or appointments to the bureaucracy) to more indirect ones (e.g. lobbying). Using a novel database on contractual arrangements between politicians, political brokers and businessmen in Benin, we find that an increase in political uncertainty is associated with an increase in direct forms of capture. We rationalize our findings through a principal-agent model under political uncertainty. Firms induce market distortions by making transfers to incumbents. Direct capture acts as an insurance for the firm, guaranteeing that its paid for distortions are kept in place even when the incumbent is displaced. We structurally estimate our model and show that policies thought to decrease state capture, such as improved bureaucrat selection, can have little to no effect once substitution towards indirect control is accounted for.

In 1994, Reginald McFadden’s sentence of life without the possibility of parole was commuted by the governor of Pennsylvania, and he was shipped to New York to be supervised by a bunch of amateurs. Within roughly 90 days, he murdered two people, raped and kidnapped a third, and possibly murdered a fourth. McFadden proved to be Lieutenant Governor Mark Singel’s “Willie Horton.” Singel, who had voted for McFadden’s release as a member of the Board of Pardons, lost the gubernatorial election to his Republican opponent who ran on a “life-means-life” platform. Compounding the tragedy of McFadden’s actions, the Pennsylvania Constitution was amended to require a unanimous vote of the pardon board for the commutation of life sentences. In the last 25 years, only 25 lifers have won commutation, 19 of whom were freed by the current chief executive, Governor Wolf. Drawing on materials culled from the state archives and right-to-know requests, this article, which has the makings of a serial podcast, explores the bureaucratic blunders and biased judgments that have left a large number of aging rehabilitated lifers to await death by incarceration. The Article ends with proposals for reform the commutation process to counter the fear of the “Willie Horton Effect” experienced by public officials involved in pardon decisions.

Economic theory suggests that relative payoff scheme in a society might govern the allocation of talent to productive and unproductive activities. This paper provides empirical evidence by showing how China’s recent anti-corruption campaign reshapes people’s preference for bureaucratic jobs by affecting the relative payoff scheme. Employing the National Civil Service Exams data from 2012 to 2017 and using central inspections as quasi-natural experiments, our results, based on a difference-in-differences analysis, suggest that the campaign against corruption discourages people from applying for bureaucratic positions. The estimates are robust to several checks. We also carefully examined three underlying mechanisms behind the decline in applicants, which are income, privilege, and uncertainty. We found that the decrease is driven by the increasing political uncertainty, while the effects of income and privilege are not remarkable.