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.
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.
Working Papers
Bureaucratic Information in Congress
The ability to cultivate expertise and produce information is a key
source of legitimacy of unelected bureaucracies. However, very little is
known about the extent to which bureaucratic information is actually
used by legislators to shape policy. In this paper, I introduce a novel
measure of legislators’ reliance on bureaucratic information which uses
natural language processing to extract and analyze bureaucratic
information used by members of Congress in 8.6 million congressional
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 bureaucracies from
political control sharply reduces the effect of ideological distance.
These findings have implications for theories of bureaucratic legitimacy
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.
Is Partisanship Bad for the Congressional Oversight of the Bureaucracy?
Congressional oversight of the bureaucracy rests on the ability of
members of Congress to objectively evaluate agency performance. However,
when MCs share the same political party as the President, they may take
a more lenient approach toward bureaucracies, for exposing negative
information about the Executive branch can tarnish their party’s image.
With two studies on MCs’ information acquisition and position-taking
regarding bureaucracies, I show that partisanship triggers selective
oversight. I analyse the transcripts of congressional hearings and
show that MCs co-partisan with the President are less inquisitive
towards bureaucratic witnesses, asking fewer questions. I then use a
transformer-based language model and classify the sentiment of the
universe of statements given by MCs about bureaucracy in Congress and
show that the probability of giving a negative statement about
bureaucracy drops for President co-partisans. A
difference-in-differences analysis reveals that co-partisan MCs respond
more favorably to scandals affecting bureaucracies. These findings are
replicated in three other countries with different political systems and
administrative traditions, suggesting that partisanship plays a
significant role in oversight beyond the United States.
Work in Progress
A Complex Compromise: Ideology and Regulatory Complexity in the US
Federal Bureaucracy
In modern government, policy change often occurs through the rule-making
activity of bureaucratic bodies, and the complexity of a rule – via
exceptions and contingent statements – depends on how much bureaucrats
and their political overseers have similar policy preferences. With data
on campaign contributions made by US bureaucrats responsible for
individual rules, we create a bureaucrat-specific measure of ideological
distance from the President, which we combine with novel measures of
rule-complexity that we derive applying natural language processing
techniques to 57,113 rules issued between 2000 and 2023. Using
presidential transitions as ``shocks” to the bureaucrat-President
ideological distance, we find that the share of sentences with
contingent statements in rules written by misaligned bureaucrats
increases by 2 percentage points. The increased complexity is stronger
under periods of divided government and when the agency of the
bureaucrat is more politicized, suggesting that multiple overseers
exerting tighter control over bureaucrats increase the complexity of the
final compromise.