Why Bureaucracy? Political Power and the Emergence of Autonomous Bureaucracies

Abstract

Why some bureaucracies are autonomous regarding personnel policies? New Political Economy approaches to public administrations tend to explain bureaucratic autonomy as a result of the political exchange between citizens (or interest groups) and rulers. The general prediction is that bureaucratic autonomy increases with the degree of diffusion of political power among different agents. Nevertheless, administrative history shows us that many political systems with very restricted interactions between citizens and rulers created highly autonomous bureaucracies. Using developments from organizational theory, this paper focuses on an interaction that one can observe in all polities: the relationship between rulers and public employees. The main hypothesis is that polities where powers are highly concentrated tend to develop more autonomous bureaucracies as a way to craft credible commitments towards public employees. Only when rulers are exclusively concerned about civil servants’ loyalty, systems with high diffusion of political power lead to highly autonomous bureaucracies. Empirical examples from contemporary developing countries and narratives from the historical development of bureaucracies in Europe illustrate these hypotheses.