Bureaucratic structures, politicization, and bureaucratic behavior

Readings and class materials for Thursday, October 3, 2024

Readings

•  Christopher A. Cooper, “Encouraging Civil Servants to Be Frank and Fearless: Merit Recruitment and Employee Voice,” Public Administration 96, no. 4 (December 2018): 721–35, https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12548.

•  Jørgen Grønnegård Christensen and Niels Opstrup, “Bureaucratic Dilemmas: Civil Servants Between Political Responsiveness and Normative Constraints,” Governance 31, no. 3 (July 2018): 481–98, https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12312.

•  Virginia Oliveros and Christian Schuster, “Merit, Tenure, and Bureaucratic Behavior: Evidence From a Conjoint Experiment in the Dominican Republic,” Comparative Political Studies 51, no. 6 (May 2018): 759–92, https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414017710268.

•  Kohei Suzuki and Hyunkang Hur, “Bureaucratic Structures and Organizational Commitment: Findings from a Comparative Study of 20 European Countries,” Public Management Review 22, no. 6 (June 2020): 877–907, https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2019.1619813.

Article discussion reminder

How to discuss an article in a seminar

• Who wrote the article? What’s their background?
• General summary of the article
• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• How does it connect to other readings?
• How does it connect to the broader course themes?
• How does it connect to current events?
• What does it add to our Global Bureaucracy Toolkit^™?

Plan for the day

• Bureaucratic structures, politicization, and governance outcomes (from last week’s session, since it was canceled because of Hurricane Helene)

  • María del Carmen Pardo, “Civil Service,” in International Encyclopedia of Political Science, ed. Bertrand Badie, Dirk Berg-Schlosser, and Leonardo Morlino (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2011), 255–59, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412959636.n68.
  • Carl Dahlström and Victor Lapuente, Organizing Leviathan: Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Making of Good Government (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316822869.
  • Agnes Cornell, “Why Bureaucratic Stability Matters for the Implementation of Democratic Governance Programs,” Governance 27, no. 2 (April 2013): 191–214, https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12037.

• Crash course in quantitative methods (i.e. how to draw lines through points)

  • Governance and regression Posit.cloud project

  • Governance and regression project .zip file

  • Data we’ll play with (it’s already included in the .zip file above too)

    • vdem_2015.csv (for any program)
    • vdem_2015.rds (for R)
    • vdem_2015.dta (for Stata; you can do all this marginal effects stuff in Stata if you use the margins command)

• Bureaucratic structures, politicization, and bureaucratic behavior

  • Cooper, “Encouraging Civil Servants to Be Frank and Fearless.”
  • Christensen and Opstrup, “Bureaucratic Dilemmas.”
  • Oliveros and Schuster, “Merit, Tenure, and Bureaucratic Behavior.”
  • Suzuki and Hur, “Bureaucratic Structures and Organizational Commitment.”