Politics of administrative design
Short description
In this project, we examine the relationship between partisan politics and the design of administrative agencies. A central insight from recent research on delegation is that politicians become more inclined to delegate and grant discretion to an agency the closer the agency´s policy preferences are to those of the legislative floor. Of course, precisely because bureaucrats have interests of their own, politicians tend to make use of administrative institutions that promotes compliance before rather than after an agency has opportunity to defect.
Our hypothesis is that by structuring bureaucratic incentives in their favour ex ante, however, the ruling political elite also alters the incentives of subsequent governing coalitions to intervene in agency decision-making ex post. Specifically, subsequent governing coalitions become more inclined to punish agencies inherited from coalitions with conflicting interests and reward agencies inherited from coalitions with common interests.
To evaluate this proposition, we will assemble a unique dataset charting the core characteristics of all administrative agencies in Sweden between 1960 and 2014 and model the effects of partisan shifts in government using advanced statistical methods. In so doing, the project will contribute both with a set of unusually rigorous tests of one of the most salient theories of administrative design in the international literature as well as novel information about the particularities of the Swedish case.
Publications
Dahlström, Carl and Mikael Holmgren (2023). “Loyal Leaders, Affluent Agencies: The Budgetary Implications of Political Appointments in the Executive Branch”. Journal of Politics 85(2): 640-653.
Dahlström, Carl and Mikael Holmgren (2019). “The Political Dynamics of Bureaucratic Turnover”. British Journal of Political Science 49(3): 823-836.
Holmgren, Mikael (2018). ”Partisan Politics and Institutional Choice in Public Bureaucracies: Evidence from Sweden”. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 28 (3), 355-370.
Holmgren, Mikael (2017). Partisan Politics and Institutional Choice in Public Bureaucracies. Doctoral Theses. University of Gothenburg: Department of Political Science.