This research note sets out to draw up a research agenda on the role of passive representation and intersectionality for perceived bureaucratic discrimination, emphasizing the need to open the discussion on how to model intersectionality and improve the measurement of subjective discrimination....

The incidence of patronage can vary widely across levels of government within a country. We present evidence of this in the context of Brazil, which has been the focus of most recent research on patronage. In particular, we find that bureaucratic turnover follows political cycles among municipal...

Is work overload a friction to public agencies? Using data on R&D procurements, patents, and contracting units from a US federal agency, we investigate how officer workload impacts innovation procurement outcomes. Unanticipated retirement shifts provide an exogenous source of variation that we...

An important strand of research in macro-finance investigates which factors impede enterprise investment, and what is their aggregate economic cost. In this paper, we make two contributions to this literature. The first contribution is methodological: we introduce a novel framework to calibrate...

While effective bureaucracy is crucial for state capacity, its decision-making remains a black box. We elicit preferences of 900+ real-world public procurement officials in Finland and Germany. This is an important pursuit as they report having sizeable discretion and minimal extrinsic...

An important strand of research in macro-finance investigates which factors impede enterprise investment, and quantifies their aggregate cost. In this paper, we make two contributions to this literature. The first contribution is methodological: we introduce a novel framework to calibrate...

The growing body of research on the relationship between the state and democracy has remained inconclusive both in terms of causal direction and sign. One key factor contributing to this inconclusiveness is the lack of precision in the conceptualization and measurement of democracy and state...

Cover -- Half Title -- Series Information -- Epigraph -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Preface -- 1 Introduction: Governing Street-Level Bureaucracies -- Introduction -- NPM, Post-NPM, and Nested Governance -- Street-level Bureaucracies and...

As issues of social equity and inclusiveness have become increasingly salient to political discourses, they are also more strongly emphasized as dimensions of effective public service delivery. As a consequence, representative bureaucracy has become more significant to the study of public...

This paper provides the first systematic empirical examination of bureaucratic nepotism and anti-nepotism legislation in an entire modern bureaucracy. By linking confidential information on family ties and administrative employer-employee records for the universe of civil servants in Colombia, I...

Policies are typically chosen by politicians and bureaucrats. This paper investigates the e fficiency criteria for allocating policy tasks to elected policymakers (politicians) or non elected bureaucrats. Politicians are more efficient for tasks that do not involve too much specific technical...

As part of this special issue of Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, that assesses the twenty-first-century administrative state in the United States, this Essay argues that the modern regulatory state—and the field of administrative law that studies it—are in...

This paper considers an economy where the macroeconomic equilibrium is the outcome of the conduct of an administration, consisting of a large number of decision makers whose horizon is uncertain, being endogenously determined by their behavior. Limited monitoring enables each decision maker to...

Most models of bureaucracy tend to assume a principal-agent model in which elected politicians delegate policy implementation to bureaucrats. It is generally theorized that shifts from the citizens’ ideal points happen at the agent (i.e. the bureaucrat) level, but recent studies in developing...

Over the last three decades, the psychological process view of bureaucratic red tape has developed significant new insights for human resource management in the public sector. This chapter provides a meta-narrative perspective, drawing upon public management scholarship on the emergence and...

I offer theoretical and empirical observations on the oversight of public sector employees. I argue that it is unreasonable to expect that the solutions typically considered in the literature will be effective with public sector employees, because bureaucrats are especially difficult to monitor....

Recent work in the sociology of economic development has emphasized the establishment of a professional government bureaucracy in place of political appointees as an important component of the institutional environment in which private enterprise can flourish. I focus on the role that internal...

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...

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...

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in whether and how bureaucratic effectiveness contributes to development. Just what makes for an effective bureaucracy and what are the building blocks of state capacity remain subject to debate. This paper reviews the arguments connecting...

In a country with weak institutional constraints on the executive, the real power might belong to the government bureaucracy rather than to an autocratic leader. We combine the Aghion-Tirole definition of formal and real authority with the Barro-Ferejohn model of political agency to study the...

The monopoly position of the public bureaucracy in providing public services allows government employees to acquire rents. Those rents can involve higher wages, monetary and non-monetary fringe benefits (e.g., pensions and staffing), and/or bribes. We propose a direct measure to capture the...