Slackers and Zealots: Civil Service, Policy Discretion, and Bureaucratic Capacity

In this paper we investigate how “civil service” personnel management interacts with bureaucratic discretion to create high capacity, expert bureaucracies populated by policy-motivated agents. We build a model in which bureaucrats may invest in (relationship specific) policy expertise, and may be either policy-motivated or policy-indifferent. We show that under specific conditions on the nature of expertise and bureaucratic discretion over policy choices, merit system protections for job tenure encourage the development of expertise and problem solving capacity in the bureaucracy. In addition, we identify conditions under which typical civil service rules encourage policy-motivated bureaucrats to enter and remain in public service, and policy- indifferent bureaucrats to leave it.Bureaucracy, Expertise, Discretion, Civil Service

Whose Ear (or Arm) to Bend? Information Sources and Venue Choice in Policy Making

Important conceptualizations of both interest groups and bureaucratic agencies suggest that these institutions provide legislatures with greater information for use in policy making. Yet little is known about how these information sources interact in the policy process as a whole. In this paper we consider this issue analytically, and develop a model of policy making in which multiple sources of information – from the bureaucracy, an interest group, or a legislature’s own in-house development – can be brought to bear on policy. Lobbyists begin this process by selecting a venue – Congress or a standing bureaucracy – in which to press for a policy change. The main findings of the paper are that self-selection of lobbyists into different policy making venues can be informative per se; that this self-selection can make legislatures willing to delegate more authority to ideologically distinct bureaucratic agents; and that delegation of authority, while it takes advantage of agency expertise, can nevertheless lead to an increase in the legislature’s own in-house information gathering (e.g., hearings). Changes within the Federal Trade Commission during the 1970s are reinterpreted in the context of our model.Delegation, Lobbying, Bureaucracy, Venue Choice, Discretion

Multiple Principals and Oversight of Bureaucratic Policy-Making.”

ABSTRACT I examine a model in which multiple legislative principals monitor a bureaucratic agent's implementation of a project. The principals can each perform oversight of the implementation to limit information asymmetries exploited by the agent. Oversight is costly to perform and due to information leakages between principals, oversight by one principal reveals information to all principals. Thus for some values of the audit costs, there is a collective action problem in monitoring among the principals: the multiplicity of principals can cause the level of this form of oversight to be underperformed relative to the principals' joint interests. Notably, the multiplicity of principals reduces their collective control over the agent even though they have common interests about the agent's actions, i.e. conflicting preference about agent actions are not necessary to attenuate accountability when there are multiple principals. Overall the results point out that the institutional structure of the overseeing body has an important effect on accountability, independent of the institutional structure of the overseen

Enforcement missions: targets vs budgets

Enforcement of policy is typically delegated. What sort of mission should the head of an enforcement program be given? When there is more than one firm being regulated the firms’ decision problems—otherwise completely separate—become linked in a way that depends on that mission. Under some sorts of missions firms compete to avoid the attention of the enforcer by competitive reductions in the extent of their non-compliance, in others the interaction encourages competitive expansions. We develop a general model that allows for the ordering of some typical classes of missions. We find that in plausible settings ‘target-driven’ missions (that set a hard target in terms of environmental outcome but flexible budget) achieve the same outcome at lower cost than ‘budget-driven’ ones (that fix the enforcement budget). Inspection of some fixed fraction of firms is never optimal

Policy Environment and Public Service Motivation

This article analyzes whether and to what extent the policy environment of civil servants has an impact on their level of Public Service Motivation (PSM). It hypothesizes that public employees working in different policy domains and stages of the policy cycle are diversely motivated by four PSM orientations (Compassion, Commitment to the public interest, Self-sacrifice and Attraction to politics). The empirical results are based on a survey of 6885 Swiss civil servants. They show that those in charge of Welfare State policies are inclined to have higher levels of 'Compassion', whereas those performing core state functions report lower levels. Furthermore, employees whose main tasks are related to policy formulation display high levels of the 'Attraction to politics' dimension of PSM. This study questions the generalization of previous findings on PSM that are based on heterogeneous survey populations

Theoretical frontiers in representative bureaucracy: new directions for research

The notion of a representative bureaucracy has generated a great deal of research although many issues are yet to be resolved and some have not been addressed. This theoretical essay uses a contingency theory approach to address a set of key questions relevant to representative bureaucracy. It discusses who is represented and what values get represented at the aggregate level, why bureaucrats represent, who they represent, and which bureaucrats represent at the individual level, and the empirical issues of critical mass, intersectionality, and how representation might change as a minority becomes a majority. The essay proposes 15 testable hypotheses and four modeling recommendations for empirical analysis

Candidate positioning and voter choice.

T his article examines a fundamental aspect of democracy: the relationship between the policy positions of candidates and the choices of voters. Researchers have suggested three "A key characteristic of democracy," Dahl (1971, 1) noted, is the "responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens." Two mechanisms play central roles in promoting responsiveness, thereby fostering congruence between the preferences of voters and the policy positions of candidates. Voters in a democracy can select candidates that represent their views, and candidates can compete for votes by strategically taking positions that appeal to the electorate. Both mechanisms are important; each depends on the criteria voters use to judge politicians on the issues. A lively debate has focused on three theories about how voters judge the policy stances of candidates. The first, proximity theory, assumes that citizens prefer candidates whose positions are closest to their own. For example, a voter who favors a 5% increase in government spending on health care will be happiest with a candidate who advocates the same level of spending. The more a candidate's position diverges from the voter's, the less satisfied the voter will feel. The presumed positive relationship between proximity and satisfaction, Michael Tomz is Associate Professor