Politics versus Bureaucracy

1
Politics versus Bureaucracy

• Analyze further this tentative chain of
  causality
• (PolAdm) Institutions ?QoG (Corruption) ? Eco
  Growth
• 1) Pioneering cross-country study of What
  Produces QoG
• La Porta et al. 1999 few institutions(culture,
  traditions, geography)
• 2) Politics is what matters
• Tsebelis 1995 a new comparative political theory
  (veto players)
• Andrews and Montinola 2004 apply veto players
  theory ? corruption
• 3) What happens in the apartment upstairs does
  not matter how the Bureaucracy is
  organized/recruited is what matters
• Evans and Rauch 1999

2
Good press for political institutions

• Quality of Government
• Democracy
• Separation of powers
• Veto players
• Checks and balances
• For both scholars and policy-makers

3
Bad press for bureaucracy

• Quality of Government bureaucracy
• Obsolescent, undesirable, and non-viable form of
  administration
• Market gt Bureaucracy
• Niskanen bureaucrats budget-maximizers
• New Public Management gt Bureaucracy
• States steering gt Private actors rowing
• Although the Effects of New Public Management are
  not so clear
• in OECD countries, probably positive
• in developing countries, probably negative

4
Now, Time to Rediscover Bureaucracy (Johan Olsen
2006)

• Is bureaucracy an organizational dinosaur
  helplessly involved in its death struggle?
• No!! Chronology of a come back
• 1980s case studies on the importance of the
  State ? Development in East Asia (Evans 1995)
• 1990s international institutions (World Bank
  1997)
• 2000s expansion of theoretical empirical
  studies
• Bureaucracy seem to matter, specially for
  developing countries

5
La Porta et al. (1999)

• Pioneering first encompassing empirical test of
  what produces good government or QoG
• Necessity to look at Exogenous factors ? QoG
• No Economic Growth
• What could be an exogenous factor?

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Factors ? QoG

• 1) Ethnic heterogeneity mechanisms?
• Governments become more interventionist ? less
  efficient ? less quality of public goods
• Alternative?
• 2) Legal Origin Mechanisms?
• Why Common Law gt Civil Law?
• Civil Law instrument of the state for expanding
  its power
• Socialist Law? It is an extreme civil law
• So, the French, German and Scandinavian Law (as
  part of Civil Law) should be bad, but, wait a
  minute, they say German and Scandinavian are
  goodWhy?
• Is there a problem of endogeneity in legal
  explanations of QoG/Type of State?

7
Factors ? QoG

• 3) Religion mechanisms?
• Max Weber Protestant gt Catholic
• La Porta et al. 1997 hierarchical religions
  worse QoG. Why?
• Are they more interventionist religions (they
  like to tell people what to do) than Protestant?
• Iannacone and the positive effects of
  fundamentalism www.religionomics.com
• In Catholic Muslim countries religions had
  excessive power and bureaucracies have developed
  from religious ranks (clerk come from cleric)
• Is not counter-balancing power good? Arent
  religious good civil servants?

8
Data

• Good description of government indicators
• Interesting approach
• Correlations between dependent variables (T.2).
  Why?
• Correlations between in dependent variables (T.3)
  Why?

9
Results (T.4-6)

• Convincing results for you?
• Some omitted variables? They dont include
  colonial status and continent. Right, wrong?
• Other omitted variables?
• Not much of political institutions (democracy vs.
  dictatorship, veto players..)
• Not many interactions always ethnolinguistic
  heterogenity is bad?
• Generally speaking, very few control variables
• Maybe, better to focus on 1 dep var (instead of
  15?)

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Coming back to political institutions

• New typology of political systems Tsebelis Veto
  Player Theory (1995, 2002)
• Traditional typologies in comparative politics
• Democracy/ Dictatorship
• Presidential/ Parliamentary
• Electoral systems Majoritarian/ Proportional
• E.g. Persson and Tabellini

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Sartori 1984 definition of political systems

• Presidentialism
• Head of State directly elected for a fixed time
  span
• Government not appointed by the Parliament, but
  by the President
• Parliamentarism
• Government is appointed by the Parliament
• One-party or multiple-party coalition governments
• Which one is separation-of-powers system and
  which one power-sharing systems?

12
Tsebelis Veto Players Theory I

• Veto players individual or collective actors
  whose agreement is necessary for a change of the
  status quo of policies
• Prediction the More Veto Players a country has,
  the More Policy Stability

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Tsebelis Veto Players Theory II

• Instead of comparing political systems according
  to their formal classification as Presidential
  or Parliamentary, we should look at their number
  of veto players
• Italy (where two or three parties must agree for
  legislation to pass) the US, where the
  agreement between several institutions is needed
  to pass a law
• UK (all power in hands of one party) a
  presidential regime where the President and the
  Legislature are in hands of the same party

14
Andrews and Montinola 2004

• Prediction More Veto Players ? More Rule of Law
• Theoretical inspiration Madison (The Federalist
  Papers)
• Institutions must be divided and arranged so that
  each may be a check on the other
• The more checks (e.g. veto players) ? the less
  incumbents may misuse their power

15
AMs game-theory model

• Canonical Prisoners Dilemma payoff structure

16
Empirical test

• How would you test this theory?
• What should be shown in an empirical test of this
  theoretical model?

17
Interesting empirical test

• Faithful codification of the number of veto
  players in every country following Tsebelis
  theory
• Very good control variables among others,
  Economic Development! (distrust those who dont)
• Each vp ? 0.16 increase in the 1-6 index of
  rule of law
• They test which classification of political
  systems works better the traditional
  Presidential/Parliamentary regimes or the new
  Veto Players one
• Presidential regimes lt Parliamentary. Why?

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Problems with the test?

• 35 emerging democracies in around 20 years
  354 observations?
• Other variables?
• Legal origin? E.g. veto players only necessary in
  civil law countries
• Time of democracy?

19
More Veto Players ? Better QoG?
20
More Veto Players ? Better QoG?
21
Party institutionalization in ten Latin American
democracies.
22
Evans and Rauch 1999

• What makes QoG are not the characteristics of the
  political system (Pres, Parl, VPs), but features
  of the Public Administration
• Move the focus from the Executive and Legislature
  to the State Administration

23
The Bringing the State Back In School

• 1980s case studies on the importance of the
  State ? Development in East Asia
• 1990s also international institutions (World
  Bank 1997)
• Lack of coherent theory and of broad empirical
  analysis (e.g. Evans 1995 Embedded Autonomy)

24
Evans Rauch 1999 a double advance

• Theoretically show the mechanisms that connect
  the State Administration with Economic Growth
• Empirically an original dataset on bureaucracies
• 35 developing countries
• Methodology experts survey

25
Weberian Administration ? Economic Growth

• Weberian Bureaucracy
• Max Weber Patrimonial Administrations vs.
  Bureaucratic (Weberian) ones
• Bureaucracy meritocratic recruitment
  predictable long-term career rewards
• Why is it good?

26
Mechanisms through which WB affect economic growth

• More Efficient (better types, more competent)
• OK, but why Microsoft does not use them?
• Longer time horizons (Rauch 1995 US cities)
• Signal to the private sector (impartiality)

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Empirical analysis

• 35 semi-industrialized countries
• High correlation between Weberianess Scale and
  GDP/cap 0.67 !!
• Regression WS trumps out or reduces the effect
  of traditional variables explaining economic
  growth (human capital, domestic investment)

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Need for more data on bureaucracies

• More within country and cross-country variations
• Problems neglect of comparative datasets on
  bureaucracies by political scientists, public
  administration scholars and international
  organizations

29
Rothstein Teorell 2005

• Quality of Government matters, but we lack a
  definition
• Economists use good governance
  good-for-economic-development
• Definition of QoG Results of Government ? the
  Procedures of government

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QoG impartial government institutions

• Impartiality in policy implementation
• Focus not on how decisions are taken in a
  country (dem, dict..), but on if policies are
  provided in an impartial way
• Does policy implementation favour some people
  over others? Or is impartial?

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Comments

• Which are the differences between (the new)
  Impartiality and (the traditional) Rule of Law?
• Are professional norms impartial?
• A faithful implementation of a discriminatory law
  is impartiality?
• Do you prefer Evans Rauch 1999 or Rothstein
  Teorell 2005 approach to good administration?