Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: The Delegation of Bureaucratic Policymaking Authority in Latin America

拉丁美洲的政治家们是如何在经常臃肿和效率低下的官僚机构中取得成功的政策成果的？ 为什么有些政策，如巴西的有条件现金转移计划Bolsa Familia，取得了成功，而在同一地区的类似计划却步履蹒跚？ 政治科学已经严格研究了法律的制定方式，但对法律的执行方式关注得少得多，特别是在发展中国家。 这是学术界内外的一个重要话题。 随着最近民主化国家克服政治和经济不稳定，决策者和公民都越来越关注公共政策的质量。 然而，如果不首先了解政策应该如何实施与实际如何实施之间的差距，就不可能制定有效的政策。 本项目旨在通过使用一种新的理论、关于总统授权和行政能力的原始数据以及对拉丁美洲各国政策成功的深入研究来解决这一空白。具体而言，该项目考察了拉丁美洲18个民主国家的政策授权决定和政策成功，以了解政府如何增加其青睐的政策的成功几率。 它认为，在低能力环境中的政治家经常使用“官僚规避”的政治重要的立法，绕过现有的政府机构，有利于创建新的机构，委托政策的军队，或外包。 这些规避行为者拥有更高的能力或更容易管理，从而增加了政策成功执行的机会。 该项目可分为三个部分：（1）制定一个适用于许多国家的官僚规避正式模式;（2）利用拉丁美洲50 000多项行政法令的原始数据库，对规避的决定因素进行经验性测试; 3）巴西，委内瑞拉，和厄瓜多尔测试授权策略对政策成功的影响。结果应该提供证据，说明政治家如何能够改善跨政治体系的公共服务提供，即使面对表现不佳的官僚机构。 除了本研究的理论和分析贡献之外，还有两个实际因素突出：1）法令数据库的大小和细节，以及2）四名本科生助理获得的宝贵研究经验。 该数据库将包括5万多项拉丁美洲行政法令，其中包括每项政策的无数特征，将成为比较政治学、公共行政和公共政策的其他学者的工具性资源。 这些数据将在项目完成后通过Dataverse网络项目公开提供。 此外，该项目还为四名本科生研究助理提供了机会，使他们能够在收集数据、阅读码本和对这些数据进行编码以及对汇总数据进行系统化和解释方面获得经验。 总之，本项目旨在为理解比较行政和官僚政治做出理论和实证贡献，同时为本科生提供学习机会，并为其他学者提供有价值的数据。

How do politicians in Latin America achieve successful policy outcomes with oftentimes bloated and inefficient bureaucracies? Why do some policies, like Brazil's conditional cash-transfer program Bolsa Familia, achieve success while similar programs in the same places falter? Political Science has rigorously studied the ways in which laws are made, but has focused far less on how they are carried out, especially in the developing world. This is a salient topic inside and outside of academia. As recently democratized countries overcome political and economic instability, policymakers and citizens alike are increasingly concerned with the quality of public policy. Constructing effective policy is impossible, however, without first understanding the gap between how policy is supposedly implemented, and how it is actually implemented. This project seeks to address this lacuna through use of a novel theory, original data on presidential delegation and administrative capacity, and an in-depth examination of policy success in various Latin American countries.Specifically, the project examines policy delegation decisions and policy success across 18 Latin American democracies to understand how governments increase the odds of success for their favored policies. It argues that politicians in low capacity environments often employ "bureaucratic circumvention" for politically important legislation, bypassing existing government agencies in favor of creating new agencies, delegating policies to the military, or outsourcing. These circumventing agents possess higher capacity or can be more easily managed, and thus increase the chances of successful policy implementation. The project can be divided into three parts: 1) development of a formal model of bureaucratic circumvention applicable to a wide range of countries; 2) empirical tests of the determinants of circumvention with an original database of over 50,000 executive decrees from Latin America; and 3) controlled comparisons of twelve policies in Brazil, Venezuela, and Ecuador to test the effect of delegation strategy on policy success.The results should offer evidence as to how politicians can improve the provision of public services across political systems, even when faced with poorly performing bureaucracies. Beyond the theoretical and analytical contributions of this research, two practical elements stand out: 1) the size and detail of the decree database, and 2) the valuable research experience gained by four undergraduate assistants. The database--which will include over 50,000 Latin American executive decrees, including myriad characteristics of each policy--will be an instrumental resource for other scholars of comparative politics, public administration, and public policy. These data will be publicly available upon completion of the project via the Dataverse Network Project. Additionally, the project offers four undergraduate research assistants the opportunity to gain experience in collecting data, reading a codebook and coding those data, and then systematizing and interpreting the aggregated data. In sum, this project seeks to make theoretical and empirical contributions to the understanding of comparative executive and bureaucratic politics, while offering learning opportunities for undergraduate students and providing valuable data for other scholars.