The Political Dynamics of Bureaucratic Turnover

Dahlström, Carl; Holmgren, Mikael

doi:10.1017/s0007123417000230

Cited by 64 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…The demand for loyalty may be especially important when there is a partisan shift in government (e.g., Boyne et al ; Dahlström and Holmgren ; Meyer‐Sahling ; see also McCabe et al ). For instance, Dahlström and Holmgren () show that agency heads are considerably more likely to leave their posts following partisan shifts even in the presence of institutional systems designed to insulate the bureaucracy from political influence. In such circumstances, newly elected political principals may regard political patronage relationships with the previous political principal as a sign of disloyalty (i.e., a sign of misalignment with their visions, ideologies, and programs).…”

Section: Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Unlike in the U.S. system, in which the incoming president can remove holdover political appointees from the previous regime at will upon entering office (Lewis ), many Western European democracies have adopted meritocratic recruitment regulations and stringent labor laws that insulate bureaucratic expertise from political control (Dahlström and Holmgren ; Huber ; Peters and Pierre ; Pollitt and Bouckaert ). The Korean system has implemented several measures resembling the European model.…”

Section: Institutional Background and Empirical Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Loyalty or Competence: Political Use of Performance Information and Negativity Bias

Hong

Kim

2019

Public Administration Review

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This article explores how political principals weigh loyalty and competence in public personnel decisions. Exploiting the abrupt shift in political leadership following the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye of Korea, the authors examine how the newly elected president made the decision to retain or dismiss 118 agency heads appointed by the previous administration. The evidence shows the importance of loyalty in managerial survival: those who had a political patronage relationship with the ousted president were less likely to survive in the new administration. However, the authors also demonstrate the relevance of competence, as measured by the outcomes of agency performance evaluation. Further, the article shows the existence of negativity bias: the punishment for low performance is greater than the reward for high performance. Finally, the authors provide support for the idea that political principals reward loyalists, but only if they show acceptable levels of competence. Evidence for Practice• This study explores how political principals weigh loyalty and competence in public personnel decisions. • Political principals' punishment for low performance is greater than their rewards for good performance. • Political principals reward loyalists, but only if they show acceptable levels of competence.• The availability of performance information may protect bureaucratic expertise from political opportunism.

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Section: Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Institutional Background and Empirical Strategymentioning

confidence: 99%

Loyalty or Competence: Political Use of Performance Information and Negativity Bias

Hong

Kim

2019

Public Administration Review

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“…What is sacrificed in scope is compensated for in internal credibility. Presidential transitions provide critical variation in agency preferences driven by turnover in both appointed and career personnel (Chen and Johnson 2014;Bolton, de Figueiredo, and Lewis 2017;Dahlström and Holmgren 2017), whereas the preferences of legislators within that narrow window are likely to be stable. 3 It also provides an important secondary contribution, since agency ideology is often thought of as a function of both an agency's "mission" and personnel.…”

Section: Interview With Authormentioning

confidence: 99%

Who Polices the Administrative State?

Lowande

2018

Am Polit Sci Rev

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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.

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“…More recently, scholars have started to systematically investigate the drivers of executive politicians' decisions to hire or fire senior officials in parliamentary contexts (Boyne et al 2010, Christensen, Klemmensen, and Opstrup 2014, Kopecký and Mair 2012, Kopecký et al 2016, Petrovsky et al 2017 as well as in the US (Hollibaugh, Horton, and Lewis 2014, Lewis and Waterman 2013, Ouyang, Haglund, and Waterman 2017. However, this research has two blind spots: First, as elaborated above, most scholars of parliamentary systems focus on partisan loyalty as dominating criterion for the (de)selection of officials (Dahlström and Niklasson 2013, Dahlström and Holmgren 2017, Ennser-Jedenastik 2014, 2016a, whereas only few authors consider other criteria such as professional qualifications or intra-governmental mobility (Fleischer 2016, Skans and Brösamle 2011, Veit and Scholz 2016).…”

Section: Theoretical Framework and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many existing studies find empirical support for the ally principle according to which executive politicians will prefer to work with bureaucrats with similar ideological preferences as they can delegate more discretion to them (Dahlström andHolmgren 2017, Huber andShipan 2006): For instance, affiliation with a governing party significantly increases the tenure of managers in Austrian state-owned enterprises (Ennser-Jedenastik 2014). An analysis of toplevel appointments in 16 West European countries revealed that politicians use partisan appointments to gain control over independent regulators (Ennser-Jedenastik 2016b).…”

Section: Partisan Loyaltymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Determinants of Promotion to High Public Office in Germany: Partisan Loyalty, Political Craft, or Managerial Competencies?

Bach

Veit

2017

Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory

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The politicization of bureaucracy is a widespread strategy to increase the political control of ministerial departments in parliamentary democracies. It is, however, largely unknown why executive politicians promote some officials rather than others to high public office. Based on a unique dataset of all senior officials in German federal ministries and agencies that held office in the period 1997-2015, this article investigates whether partisan loyalty, political craft, and managerial competencies influence the chance of promotion to the highest civil service position in Germany (state secretary). We apply event history modelling to draw inferences on the relative importance of different selection criteria used by ministers when recruiting state secretaries from a candidate pool of senior officials. A key finding is that ministers consistently prefer politically loyal to non-loyal candidates. Although ministers also consider candidates' political craft and selected managerial competencies, they are likely to trade-off partisan loyalty against those qualifications. The article contributes to the literature on politicization in the public sector by comparing potential and actual office holders and by including a broad set of selection criteria, moving beyond the literature's dominating focus on partisan loyalty. The methodological approach developed in this article may well be transferred to other institutional contexts and used for comparative studies in this area.

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The Political Dynamics of Bureaucratic Turnover

Cited by 64 publications

References 23 publications

Loyalty or Competence: Political Use of Performance Information and Negativity Bias

Loyalty or Competence: Political Use of Performance Information and Negativity Bias

Who Polices the Administrative State?

The Determinants of Promotion to High Public Office in Germany: Partisan Loyalty, Political Craft, or Managerial Competencies?

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