A Dynamic Measure of Bureaucratic Reputation: New Data for New Theory
2022, American Journal of Political Science
Bureaucratic reputation is one of the most important concepts used to
understand the behaviour of administrative agencies and their
interactions with multiple audiences. Despite a rich theoretical
literature discussing reputation, we do not have a comparable measure
across agencies, between countries, and over time. I present a new
strategy to measure bureaucratic reputation from legislative speeches
with word-embedding techniques. I introduce an original dataset on the
reputation of 465 bureaucratic bodies over a period of forty years, and
across two countries, the US and the UK. I perform several validation
tests and present an application of this method to investigate whether
partisanship and agency politicisation matter for reputation. I find
that agencies enjoy a better reputation among the members of the party
in government, with partisan differences less pronounced for independent
bodies. I finally discuss how this measurement strategy can contribute
to classical and new questions about political-administrative
interactions.
A Costly Commitment: Populism, Government Performance, and the Quality
of Bureaucracy
We study the consequences of populism for economic performance and the
quality of bureaucracy. When voters lose trust in representative
democracy, populists strategically supply unconditional policy
commitments that are easier to monitor for voters. When in power,
populists try to implement their policy commitments regardless of
financial constraints and expert assessment of the feasibility of their
policies, worsening government economic performance and dismantling
resistance from expert bureaucrats. With novel data on more than 8,000
Italian municipalities covering more than 20 years, we estimate the
effect of electing a populist mayor with a close-election regression
discontinuity design. We find that the election of a populist mayor
leads to smaller repayments of debts, a larger share of procurement
contracts with cost overruns, higher turnover among top bureaucrats –
driven by forced rather than voluntary departures – and a sharp decrease
in the percentage of graduate bureaucrats.
Under Review
Polity Size and the Congested Budget: Evidence from Italian
Municipalities
Once in office, politicians propose policies aimed at winning the
support of their constituencies. While this form of political activism
increases with polity size – i.e., the number of politicians in
government – it can also clash with capacity constraints, leading to a
congestion effect whereby politicians’ plans are not enacted in
practice. With novel data on Italian municipalities, we estimate the
causal effect of polity size on a battery of planned and actual budget
outcomes. We leverage a reform that introduced a new temporary
population threshold where polity size changed discontinuously and
estimate local treatment effects with a difference-in-discontinuities
design. We document a congestion effect. Municipalities with larger
polities have a larger planned budget which does not translate
into a larger actual budget. The congestion effect decreases
when bureaucratic capacity is high, proving how administrative capacity
can be a binding constraint for politicians’ incentives and behavior.
Selective Oversight
The congressional oversight of the bureaucracy rests on the ability of
members of Congress (MC) to monitor the behavior of bureaucratic
agencies, but existing scholarship argues that oversight may clash with
President co-partisans’ incentives to protect the image of their party.
However, tests of this proposition face significant limitations with
respect to data, measurement, and inference. I remedy these limitations
with two studies on MCs’ information acquisition and evaluation of
bureaucracies and show that partisanship triggers selective
oversight. First, I analyze the transcripts of congressional
hearings with natural language processing techniques and show that
President co-partisans are less inquisitive towards bureaucratic
witnesses. Second, I use a difference-in-differences design to show that
President co-partisans respond less negatively to scandals affecting
bureaucracies. These findings bring novel data on how oversight is
performed and have implications for theories of separation of powers and
the partisan nature of Congressional oversight.
Digging Up Trenches: Populism, Selective Mobility, and the Political
Polarization of Italian Municipalities
We study the effect of local exposure to populism on net population
movements by citizenship status, gender, age and education level in the
context of Italian municipalities. We present two research designs to
estimate the causal effect of populist attitudes and politics.
Initially, we use a combination of collective memory and trigger
variables as an instrument for the variation in populist vote shares
across national elections. Subsequently, we apply a regression
discontinuity design to estimate the effect of electing a populist mayor
on population movements. We establish three converging findings. First,
the exposure to both populist attitudes and policies, as manifested by
the vote share of populist parties in national election or the
closeelection of a new populist mayor, reduces the attractiveness of
municipalities, leading to larger population outflows. Second, the
effect is particularly pronounced among young, female, and highly
educated natives, who tend to relocate across Italian municipalities
rather than internationally. Third, we do not find any effect on the
foreign population. Our results highlight a foot-voting mechanism that
may contribute to a political polarization in Italian municipalities.
Working Papers
Bureaucratic Information in Congress
Due to their expertise, bureaucratic agencies produce a wealth of
information that can be used by politicians when making policies.
However, little is known about the extent to which members of Congress
rely on bureaucratic information and what factors they consider when
they do so. In this paper, I introduce a novel measure of politicians’
reliance on bureaucratic information which uses natural language
processing to extract and analyze bureaucratic information used by
members of Congress in 8.3 million floor and committee speeches given
over the past 40 years. I find that legislators make greater use of
information coming from ideologically similar bureaucracies. However,
statutory features insulating agencies from political control sharply
reduce the effect of ideological distance. These findings have
implications for theories of separation of powers and for the use of
evidence in policy-making. Institutional features granting independence
to bureaucracy can depoliticize the role of bureaucratic information in
policy-making.
The Shift to Commitment Politics and Populism: Theory and Evidence
The decline in voters’ trust in government and the rise of populism are
two concerning features of contemporary politics. In this paper, we
present a model of commitment politics that elucidates the interplay
between distrust and populism. Candidates supply policy commitments to
mitigate voters’ distrust in government, shrinking politicians’ levels
of discretion typical of representative democracies. Alongside
commitments, candidates rationally choose the main strategies associated
with populism, namely anti-elite and pro-people rhetoric. We match novel
data on voters’ distrust towards the U.S. federal government with the
Twitter activity of more than 2,000 candidates over five congressional
elections and show that distrust is strongly associated with candidates’
supply of commitments and populist rhetoric, which are also effective
strategies at mobilizing distrustful voters. We also show theoretically
that the shift to commitment politics determines greater aversion to
checks and balances, and hence even illiberal populism can emerge.