Bureaucrats under Populism

Abstract

We explore the consequences of populism for bureaucrats' incentives by analyzing a model of delegated policymaking between politicians and bureaucrats. Populist politicians prefer a bureaucrat who implements their policy commitment, while non-populist politicians prefer a good bureaucrat with discretion. The presence of populist politicians thus determines replacement of good with bad bureaucrats and creates incentives for good bureaucrats to "feign loyalty". We show that feigning loyalty is more prevalent when the probability of populist leadership in the future is higher and the bureaucrats' pool of potential replacements is worse. 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.

A Costly Commitment: Populism, Government Performance, and the Quality of Bureaucracy

“…Moreover, while the data allows us to prioritise this demand-side mechanism of turnover over a supply-side one based on bureaucrats' self-selection, we cannot rule out alternative ways through which populism undermines bureaucracy. An important one, highlighted in theoretical work, is that those expert bureaucrats who remain in the administration can "pause" their commitment to good-quality policies and feign to be non-expert while waiting out the incumbent government (Sasso and Morelli 2021;Cameron and Figueiredo 2020). Future research could study other facets of performance and examine the conditions under which bureaucrats are willing to compromise on policy today to remain in their post tomorrow.…”

“…Similarly, populist politicians will control and reform the bureaucracy in the attempt to implement the policies they committed to during the electoral race. Sasso and Morelli (2021) formalise these intuitions and show how populists have an incentive to replace expert with non-expert bureaucrats in order to ensure that expert judgement does not undermine the implementation of the policies they committed to.…”

“…Because of such commitments, when populists come to power they implement their agenda with no regard for constraints and expert assessment of the feasibility and consequences of their policies (Dornbusch and Edwards 1991). When facing the resistance of expert bureaucrats', populists will replace them with non-experts in order to ensure the smooth implementation of their policy agenda (Sasso and Morelli 2021). Building of these micro foundations of populists' incentives and behaviour, we derive testable expectations about the consequences of populism for policy-making.…”

Access Denied: How Bureaucrats Shape Politicians' Incentives to Choose Restrictive Asylum Policies

“…Thus, for reasons endogenous to the strategic interaction we consider, anti-refugee politicians' behavior is more extreme whenever the es-tablishment is, in fact, more lenient. Our model, therefore, differs from other models in the formal literature on populism in which the populist politician's concerns with the establishment are assumed (Buisseret and Van Weelden, 2020) or abstracted away from (Serra, 2018;Acemoglu et al, 2013;Sasso and Morelli, 2021;Serra, 2018;Fox and Stephenson, 2015). Yet, our model shares some familiar features with existing models of populism: as in Fox and Stephenson (2015) and Sasso and Morelli (2021), the populist politician in our model has anti-minority attitudes and state-independent preferences.…”

Reversals of Capacity: Norms, Culture, and Institutional Disruption

“…Historical cases of reversals of fiscal capacity, i.e., the ability to collect taxes, in Latin American countries such as Peru and Chile demonstrate that it can take many years for an agency to recover from political disruption (Soifer 2015). More recently, the rise of populist politicians across the globe has been found to both shift the quality of work in the public sector as well as lead many qualified bureaucrats to quit their jobs (Sasso and Morelli 2021;Bellodi, Morelli, and Vannoni 2021;Doherty, Lewis, and Limbocker 2019;Cameron and Figueiredo 2020).…”