Politics versus Bureaucracy

1. Politics versus Bureaucracy • Analyze further this tentative chain of causality: • (Pol+Adm) 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 > Bureaucracy • Niskanen: bureaucrats = budget-maximizers • New Public Management > Bureaucracy • States = ”steering” > 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?

6. 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 > 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 good…Why? • Is there a problem of “endogeneity” in legal explanations of QoG/Type of State?

7. Factors  QoG • 3) Religion: mechanisms? • Max Weber: Protestant > 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? Aren’t 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 don’t 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?)

10. 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…

11. 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

13. 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. A&M’s 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 don’t…) • 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 < Parliamentary. Why?

18. 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. SQ FOX PRI PRD Low revenues High revenues Expected outcome under VP model Actual outcome More Veto Players  Better QoG?

20. Median Legislator SQ Cardoso Less reform More reform Expected outcome under VP model Actual outcome 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)

27. 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)

28. 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

30. 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?

31. 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”?