Abstract:Accurate knowledge about societal conditions and public policies is an important public good in any polity, yet governments across the world differ dramatically in the extent to which they collect and publish such knowledge. This article develops and tests the argument that this variation to some extent can be traced to the degree of bureaucratic politicization in a polity. A politicized bureaucracy offers politicians greater opportunities to demand from bureaucrats—and raises incentives for bureaucrats to sup… Show more
“…Linsi and Mugge (2017) study the IMF’s Balance of Payments data and suggest that measurement quality may have deteriorated over time, and the measures themselves are subject to large errors. Boräng et al (2018), using the same HRV measure as used here, suggest that domestic data collection is often politicized. Similarly, Hollyer, Rosendorff, and Vreeland (2014) show that data are not missing at random but correlated with political variables.…”
Autocratic governments hold a preference for opacity. Autocracies are less transparent than democracies and a closed informational environment preserves autocratic regimes from mass unrest. Yet, autocracies vary widely in the extent to which they disclose economic information. In this article, we offer an explanation for why some autocrats choose to disclose. We contend that, paradoxically, some autocratic leaders may benefit from increasing the capacity of the populace to mobilize. In so doing, autocratic leaders threaten rival members of the elite, reducing the risk of elite challenges and increasing their freedom of maneuver. We contend that transparency acts as one mechanism toward these ends. We formalize these intuitions and demonstrate empirically that leaders in transparent autocracies enjoy a reduced hazard of removal via coup relative to their opaque counterparts. Personalistic dictators and entrenched autocrats—who suffer the smallest risk of sanctioning by their elites—are particularly unlikely to disclose information.
“…Linsi and Mugge (2017) study the IMF’s Balance of Payments data and suggest that measurement quality may have deteriorated over time, and the measures themselves are subject to large errors. Boräng et al (2018), using the same HRV measure as used here, suggest that domestic data collection is often politicized. Similarly, Hollyer, Rosendorff, and Vreeland (2014) show that data are not missing at random but correlated with political variables.…”
Autocratic governments hold a preference for opacity. Autocracies are less transparent than democracies and a closed informational environment preserves autocratic regimes from mass unrest. Yet, autocracies vary widely in the extent to which they disclose economic information. In this article, we offer an explanation for why some autocrats choose to disclose. We contend that, paradoxically, some autocratic leaders may benefit from increasing the capacity of the populace to mobilize. In so doing, autocratic leaders threaten rival members of the elite, reducing the risk of elite challenges and increasing their freedom of maneuver. We contend that transparency acts as one mechanism toward these ends. We formalize these intuitions and demonstrate empirically that leaders in transparent autocracies enjoy a reduced hazard of removal via coup relative to their opaque counterparts. Personalistic dictators and entrenched autocrats—who suffer the smallest risk of sanctioning by their elites—are particularly unlikely to disclose information.
“…In the latter (“patrimonial”) administrations, bureaucrats have few incentives to develop their expertise. Empirical results corroborate that meritocratic-based recruitment contributes to better overall competence and performance of the bureaucracy (Krause et al, 2006; Lewis, 2008; Rauch & Evans, 2000), lower corruption (Dahlström et al, 2012), and less biased public policy knowledge (Boräng et al, 2018). Competent bureaucracies could also spur growth because they “can help individual entrepreneurs overcome coordination problems .…”
We revisit the hypothesis that a Weberian bureaucracy enhances economic growth. Theoretically, we develop arguments for why such a bureaucracy may enhance growth and discuss plausible counterarguments. Empirically, we use new measures capturing various Weberian features in countries across the world, with some time series extending back to 1789. The evidence base from previous large- N studies is surprisingly thin, but our extensive data enable us to move beyond the problematic cross-country correlations used in previous studies. Hence, we conduct tests that control for country-specific characteristics while ensuring sufficient variation on the slow-moving bureaucracy variables to enable precise estimation. Our analysis suggests that previous cross-country regressions have vastly overstated the strength of the relationship. While this casts uncertainty on the proposition that there is an effect of Weberian bureaucracy on growth, our further analysis suggests that—if an effect exists—it may operate in the short term and be stronger in recent decades.
“…The association between merit recruitment and employee voice due to the independence from political influence on employees’ career is also found in contemporary scholarship (Boräng et al , p. 10; Dahlström and Lapuente , p. 9). For instance, Campbell and Wilson claim that:A major supposed advantage of the Whitehall model had been the ability of civil servants to give advice to politicians without fear that their careers would be harmed if that advice contained unwelcome truths.…”
Section: Theory: Merit Recruitment and Employee Voicementioning
confidence: 66%
“…While recent research has improved our understanding of the positive relationship between merit recruitment and high levels of quality of government, more attention needs to be paid to the criteria being prioritized when merit is low, and whether different categories of non‐merit criteria affect employees’ willingness to voice dissenting opinions differently. Some case study research, for instance (Mulgan ; Boräng et al ), has tied partisan politicization to the willingness of bureaucrats to distort information in order to cast the government in a favourable light. Accordingly, one possibility worth exploring is whether a selection process prioritizing political partisanship (‘patronage as corruption’) reduces employee voice more than a process prioritizing compatibility with the government's policy agenda (‘patronage as governance’).…”
Recruiting civil servants on the basis of merit is believed to improve the quality of governance because it increases the bureaucracy's expertise, leads bureaucrats to develop distinct preferences and encourages them to candidly voice their opinions to others. Yet, to date, the reason why merit recruitment positively affects employee voice remains theoretically vague and has received little empirical scrutiny. This article advances this research by theoretically specifying why merit recruitment positively affects employee voice, and by empirically testing this association with survey data measuring the perceptions of federal civil servants in Canada. Controlling for several additional factors believed to influence employee voice, the results from various multivariate regression models show a robust and statistically significant association between merit recruitment and fear to voice a dissenting opinion. The more civil servants believe that merit recruitment is high, the less they fear reprisal for expressing a dissenting opinion to their superiors.
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