Public Provision of Goods and Services under Cost Uncertainty: The Government’s Bureaucratic Organization

The digital transition is a challenge that developed countries are currently facing. The transition process is associated with different degrees of uncertainty, which are particularly relevant for changes that have to do with the provision of goods and services produced by public administrations. Our paper uses a partial equilibrium model to study the effects of uncertainty on the public provision of goods and services produced by bureaucratic agencies, including the incentive of the government to consolidate production. We assume that bureaucratic agencies may play either a cooperative game with each other and a non-cooperative game against the government (i.e., a consolidated bureaucracy) or a non-cooperative game with each other and against the government (i.e., competing bureaus). Both the government and the bureaus face tradeoffs between maximizing the electorate preferences and extracting some political and/or bureaucratic rents. We find that a cooperative (competitive) bureaucratic solution depends on the nature of the goods produced. We find that costs’ uncertainty affects the level of public production and the way the policymakers extract their rents.

Implementing presidential particularism: bureaucracy and the distribution of federal grants

Do agencies implement the president's particularistic goals uniformly? This paper clarifies the presidential particularism literature by explicitly considering the mechanism through which the president pursues their policy goals: executive agencies. The constellation of bureaucratic agencies responsible for allocating grants plays a key role in facilitating or frustrating presidential policy priorities. Using a dataset of 21 agencies over 14 years, I find that only agencies ideologically proximate to the president engage in particularism benefiting the president. I find no evidence that politicization influences agency implementation of particularism. Critically, the moderating effect of the bureaucracy on particularism only occurs for distributive programs over which agencies have discretion. When disbursing formula grants written by Congress but administered by the bureaucracy with little or no discretion, ideological distance between agencies and presidents has no effect on particularism.

Locking-in Neoliberalism

This chapter focuses on the locking-in of exchange rates and industrial policies in institutional frameworks, including the constitution that reduced partisan influences and made future changes and reforms more difficult. It formulates and tests the operation of locking-in neoliberal policy alternatives through constitutionalization and the embeddedness of exchange rates and industrial policies in institutional frameworks. It also discusses the delegation of policymaking authority to nonelected bureaucratic agencies that lies at the heart of constitutionalized lock-in. The chapter emphasizes the importance of support creation and opposition blockade in reducing both representation and the agency of unelected bureaucrats in policymaking. It examines countries that attempted to lock-in neoliberalism through the establishment of independent central banks and fiscal policy rules.

China’s Foreign Policy Making Process

China’s foreign policy must rely on opaque and behind-the-scenes coordination organs to work through a large number of bureaucratic agencies of the state, party, and military, whose primary roles are information gathering and the implementation and recommendation of policy. In addition, some new players, such as think tanks, media, local governments, and transnational corporations, have played a variety of roles to influence China’s foreign policy. This chapter examines the evolving role of the paramount leader, the foreign policy coordination and elaboration organs, the bureaucracies, and the new players in the making and transformation of China’s foreign policy. Providing a historical overview, it also observes how President Xi Jinping has centralized and personalized foreign policy making power in the name of strengthening a unified party leadership.

Bureaucracy in Latin America

The bureaucracy is a central body in the effective functioning of democracy and oversight of the rule of law, and knowledge of how public agencies interact with politics and effect policy implementation is crucial in understanding the “black box” of the state. However, this body of non-elected officials can only fulfill its mandate and achieve good governance if it meets certain conditions, such as technical expertise, a clear organizational hierarchy, meritocratic recruitment for personnel staffing, as well as political support, resources, and the autonomy to devise solutions based on expertise. Unfortunately for Latin America, its bureaucratic agencies have seldom enjoyed these conditions. Instead, public administration in the region has been characterized by patronage appointments, patrimonialism, and a weak capacity to execute public policies. Yet this blanket depiction of the Latin American bureaucracy obscures a great deal more diversity—as well as the fact that Latin American bureaucrats and public agencies are more dynamic and responsive than they are often portrayed. To begin, the size and role of the public administration have evolved constantly throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, growing under statist development policies of the mid-20th century before shrinking under neoliberalism in the 1990s and again growing during the 2000s in some countries. Moreover, the quality of the bureaucracy to efficiently provide services and implement policy varies by country, over time, and even within countries among agencies. This means that there is also variation in the scope and quality of the bureaucracy’s chief functions of policymaking, regulation, and implementation. In fact, politicians and bureaucrats in the region have found a number of creative solutions to agency weakness. Moving forward, politicians can guarantee even better bureaucratic performance by addressing some enduring challenges, such as public sector corruption and an institutional setup that favors short-term policymaking.

International Influences on Policymaking in China: Network Authoritarianism from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao

Previous research has credited China's top leaders, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, with the social policies of their decade in power, arguing that they promoted these policies either for factional reasons or to achieve rational, problem-solving goals. But such arguments ignore the dominant “fragmented authoritarian” model of policymaking in China that centres on bargaining among bureaucratic agencies. This article asks whether top leadership factions, rational problem solving, or “fragmented authoritarianism” can explain the adoption of one of the Hu and Wen administration's flagship policies, New Rural Cooperative Medical Schemes. Based on a careful tracing of this policy's evolution, it finds little evidence for these explanations, and instead uncovers the role played by international events and organizations, and ideas they introduced or sustained within policy networks. The article highlights some of the effects that China's international engagement has had on policymaking and the need to go beyond explanations of the policy process that focus solely on domestic actors. It proposes a new model of policymaking, “network authoritarianism,” that centres on policy networks spanning the domestic–international, state–non-state, and central–local divides, and which takes account of the influence of ideas circulating within these networks.

Governing multisectoral action for health in low-income and middle-income countries: unpacking the problem and rising to the challenge

Multisectoral action is key to addressing many pressing global health challenges and critical for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, but to-date, understanding about how best to promote and support multisectoral action for health is relatively limited. The challenges to multisectoral action may be more acute in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) where institutions are frequently weak, and fragmentation, even within the health sector, can undermine coordination. We apply the lens of governance to understand challenges to multisectoral action. This paper (1) provides a high level overview of possible disciplines, frameworks and theories that could be applied to enrich analyses in this field; (2) summarises the literature that has sought to describe governance of multisectoral action for health in LMICs using a simple political economy framework that identifies interests, institutions and ideas and (3) introduces the papers in the supplement. Our review highlights the diverse, but often political nature of factors influencing the success of multisectoral action. Key factors include the importance of high level political commitment; the incentives for competition versus collaboration between bureaucratic agencies and the extent to which there is common understanding across actors about the problem. The supplement papers seek to promote debate and understanding about research and practice approaches to the governance of multisectoral action and illustrate salient issues through case studies. The papers here are unable to cover all aspects of this topic, but in the final two papers, we seek to develop an agenda for future action. This paper introduces a supplement on the governance of multisectoral action for health. While many case studies exist in this domain, we identify a need for greater theory-based conceptualisation of multisectoral action and more sophisticated empirical investigation of such collaborations.

Who Polices the Administrative State?

Scholarship on oversight of the bureaucracy typically conceives of legislatures as unitary actors. But most oversight is conducted by individual legislators who contact agencies directly. I acquire the correspondence logs of 16 bureaucratic agencies and re-evaluate the conventional proposition that ideological disagreement drives oversight. I identify the effect of this disagreement by exploiting the transition from George Bush to Barack Obama, which shifted the ideological orientation of agencies through turnover in agency personnel. Contrary to existing research, I find ideological conflict has a negligible effect on oversight, whereas committee roles and narrow district interests are primary drivers. The findings may indicate that absent incentives induced by public auditing, legislator behavior is driven by policy valence concerns rather than ideology. The results further suggest collective action in Congress may pose greater obstacles to bureaucratic oversight than previously thought.

Institutional Deliberation

Advocacy of new forums for democratic deliberation should take into account the deliberative functions of the regular policymaking institutions of representative democracies. In view of the important consequences for citizens, research on institutional deliberation focuses mainly on the ability to produce intelligent decisions. It employs a wide range of approaches to assess that ability. We review diverse literatures on institutional deliberation, with attention to legislatures (especially the US Congress), chief executives, bureaucratic agencies, courts, and popular referendums. These institutions employ a variety of distinctive processes and routinely assess voluminous and detailed information. Deficiencies in institutional deliberation often arise from imbalanced or uninformed constituency pressures. Thus institutional deliberation appears to benefit from moderate insulation from public and interest-group demands. Popular referendums have mixed effects on the intelligence of policymaking. In some circumstances, regular policymaking institutions can create opportunity for more deliberative popular forums to play effective roles in policy development.