Bureaucratic Sabotage and Policy Inefficiency

• In Event: Corruption, Bureaucracy, and Policymaking

Abstract

Poor public service provision creates an electoral vulnerability for politicians. Under what conditions can bureaucrats exploit this to avoid reforms they dislike? Using a formal model, this paper explores how an incumbent politician, facing re-election, decides between introducing a new reform or maintaining the status quo, amid opposition from an anti-reform bureaucrat and a challenger. A representative voter judges the incumbent based on the quality of government services, which bureaucrats can influence through sabotage. Sabotage incentivizes politicians to pander to the voter's prior perception. If the status quo is popular, sabotage makes reform electorally risky, causing incumbents to avoid reforms even when beneficial (underreform). Conversely, if the status quo is unpopular, sabotage encourages politicians to enact reforms that are not aligned with voter interests (overreform). Thus, our model accommodates multiple phenomena observed in bureaucratic politics. It can explain how bureaucratic sabotage obstructs desirable reforms via leverage on voters (e.g., police unions mobilizing against police reforms), while inducing politicians to overinvest in other reforms by leveraging anti-bureaucracy rhetoric (e.g., rigid budgets for agencies). Hence, our model sheds new light on the strategic inter-dependencies of politicians, bureaucrats, and voters and helps explain inefficiencies in policy-making due to these relationships.

Authors

• Byeonggeun Kun Heo, New York University

• Elisa Maria Wirsching, Princeton University