Previous research has described both theoretically and empirically, the negative consequences of having a politicized civil service, recruited on political instead of professional merits. However, we know fairly little ...

Scholars have emphasized the importance of having a “Weberian bureaucracy” for the socio-economic development of a country, but few attempts have been made to measure public administrations according to their degree of ...

It is often stated that the public sector should be separated from politics and that an isolated bureaucracy, in this sense, is less prone to corruption. The cornerstone of such propositions is that the activities of ...

This paper presents data on corruption and impartiality from a unique survey with local politicians in Sweden, which includes answers from about 78 percent of the 13 361 politicians active in the 290 Swedish municipalities. ...

Why do officials in some countries favor entrenched contractors while others assign public con-tracts more impartially? According to the research, such variation responds to differences in political institutions, economic ...

By manipulating the screening and selection of executive bureaucrats, political leaders can indirectly control the policy preferences that are carried out and enforced within a polity. In this article, we argue that ...

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between political control of agency decision-making and the size of agency budgets. Scholars of bureaucratic and distributive politics have respectively highlighted how political ...