Politics versus Bureaucracy

1
Politics versus Bureaucracy

• What matters for Quality of the Government and
  Economic Growth?
• The political level?
• Tsebelis 1995
• Andrews and Montinola 2004
• The bureaucratic level?
• Evans and Rauch 1999
• (Rothstein and Teorell 2005)

2
Good press for political institutions

• Quality of Government
• Democracy
• Separation of powers
• Veto players
• Checks and balances
• For scholars and politicians

3
Bad press for bureaucracy

• Quality of Government bureaucracy
• Obsolescent, undesirable, and non-viable form of
  administration
• Market gt Bureaucracy
• Policies to reduce bureaucracy
• Most OECD countries

4
Time to Rediscover Bureaucracy

• Is bureaucracy an organizational dinosaur
  helplessly involved in its death struggle?
• No!! At least in developing countries..
• 1980s case studies on the importance of the
  State ? Development in East Asia
• 1990s also international institutions (World
  Bank 1997)
• Bureaucracy seem to matter as well

5
Coming back to political institutions

• New typology of political systems Tsebelis Veto
  Player Theory (1995, 2002)
• Traditional typologies
• Democracy/ Dictatorship
• Presidential/ Parliamentary

6
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
• Separation-of-powers systems
• Parliamentarism
• Government is appointed by the Parliament
• One-party or multiple-party coalition governments
• Power-sharing regimes

7
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

8
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

9
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

10
AMs game-theory model

• Canonical PD payoff structure

11
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!
• 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

12
Any problems with the test?

• 35 emerging democracies in around 20 years
  354 observations?

13
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

14
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)

15
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

16
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?

17
Mechanisms through which WB affect economic growth

• More Efficient
• Longer time horizons
• Signal to the private sector

18
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)

19
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

20
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

21
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?

22
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?