Bureaucrats under Populism

Abstract

We explore the consequences of populism for bureaucrats' incentives by analyzing a model of delegated policy-making between politicians and bureaucrats. Populist leaders prefer loyalist bureaucrats over competent ones, and this leads competent bureaucrats to engage in strategic policy-making: they sometimes feign loyalty to the current incumbent; and they sometimes implement the correct policy even at the cost of being fired. We show that feigning loyalty becomes more likely as the probability of a populist-loyalist combination increases. We also show that bureaucratic turnover is higher under populists when the bureaucracy is strong and higher under non-populists when the bureaucracy is weak.

How politics influence public good provision

“…Another channel through which the presence of populist parties could influence efficiency is the turnover of public officials. Sasso and Morelli (2020) show that the turnover of public officials is higher under populists when bureaucracy is strong. Assuming that to be an efficient bureaucrat one needs experience, a higher turnover is likely to be associated with lower efficiency.…”

“…Populist parties appear to attract less managerially skilled public servants and the turnover of public officials is shown to be higher under populists (Kane and McCulloch, 2017;Sasso and Morelli, 2020). Education provision (and other policy domains) may be demanding in terms of skilled public servants, and thus, one might expect a negative association of the share of councillors from populist parties on all councillors with the efficiency of education provision.…”

“…2 There is a number of papers that study the recent wave of populism (see e.g. Guiso et al, 2017;Guiso and Sonno, 2020;Heinisch, 2003;Kane and McCulloch, 2017;Sasso and Morelli, 2020). These papers are not concerned with the efficiency implications of populism, however, they often study determinants of this rise in attractiveness of populists.…”

“…For details, see https://en. frankbold.org/sites/default/files/tema/briefing-civil\_service\_act-2015-10-09\_0.pdf.7 For a more detailed discussion about the extent and the reasons of the rise of populism (seeHeinisch, 2003;Sasso and Morelli, 2020).8 See, for instance, https://www.belltower.news/2019-european-parliament-election-farright-parties-in-czech-republic-84491/.9 Titl and Geys (2019); also exploit the changes in political landscape to study the implications of political campaign donations on the allocation of public procurement contracts.10 Czechia is ranked 38 th , South Korea 45 th and Italy 52 nd in 2018 of the Corruption Perception Index(Transparency International, 2019).…”