Collaborative Research: The Instruments for Political Control of Bureaucracy in Parliamentary and Separation of Powers Systems

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Bureaucratic expertise, if harnessed effectively, can play a crucial role in helping elected officials to achieve their goals. The political environment, however, can make it difficult for elected officials to influence bureaucratic behavior, thereby creating the possibility that this expertise will go to waste or be used by bureaucrats against elected officials. In order to understand how the preferences of elected officials get reflected in public policy, it is crucial to explore the mechanisms that facilitate or inhibit political control of agency policymaking. The project begins by developing an explicitly comparative theoretical explanation of political control. The basis for this theory is the expectation that politicians respond rationally to their political environment when deciding whether and how to control bureaucracies. If there is variation in the relevant features of this political environment across time or place, then there should be systematic variation in the institutions that politicians adopt to facilitate control. The theoretical arguments (which are developed as formal models) and the empirical tests focus on interactions between factors affecting incentives to control vureaucrats (that is, factors affecting the degree of conflict betwseen politicians and bureaucrats) and those affecting the costs of ex ante and ex post control strategies. Political and institutional factors that should affect the degree of conflict include the specific form of divided government in separation of powers systems, the heterogeneity of governing coalitions in parliamentary systems, and the institutions that govern the selection and promotion of civil servants. The form of divided government, the nature of the governing coalition, and the extent of legislative professionalism should affect the cost of ex ante control. Electoral volatility, cabinet instability, and institutional arrangements regarding the choice of judges, the prerogative of courts vis-a-vis agencies, and the ability of legislatures or parliaments to review or veto agency decisions should influence the cost of ex post control. The data for the empricial tests consist of instruments for control as dependent variables and information about the political and institutional environment as explanatory variables. Data are collected to permit analysis of variation in the instruments of control within separation of powers systems (through an analysis of control across advanced parliamentary democracies), and variation across parliamentary and separation of powers systems (through a comparison of control processes in the two types of systems). For each type of system, the project examines how political and institutional variables affect conflict of interest, ex ante strategies for control, and ex post strategies for control. This project promises several benefits. First, by examining the impact of the political environment on strategies for control, the project lays the foundation for a broadly comparative understanding of how politicians respond to their political environment when making decisions about how to delegate authority to bureaucrats. In so doing, the study refines existing debates about not only the logic of delegation, but also the limits and possibilities of control over the state in different types of political systems. Second, the study involves the creation of a number of novel datasets of use to a wide range of scholars. Students of state and comparative politics benefit from data that systemtically code institutional and political differences among states and countries. Students of institutions and policy are able to use data that systematically demonstrate differences in control across policies, states, and countries.