Reputation and Capture (Under Review)

 

​​Presidents rely on their political appointees to manage the bureaucracy on their behalf. Appointees often know more about their organizations than the president and, therefore, may be better positioned to generate bureaucratic support for the president’s agenda. Yet, bureaucratic cooperation may be easier for appointees to sustain the more policy reflects the views of careerists tasked with implementation. I consider a model in which an appointee dictates a policy that a bureaucrat exerts effort to implement. The president is uncertain of both her appointee’s management skill and the difficulty of the management problem her appointee faces. Instead, the president must infer the appointee’s skill by observing his policy choice and whether implementation was successful. In equilibrium, both talented and weak appointees may give additional policy concessions to bureaucrats to ensure bureaucratic cooperation and improve their reputation with the president. This incentive exists even when the appointee shares the president’s policy preferences. The results highlight fundamental strategic limitations of administrative tools to preserve presidential control over the bureaucracy.

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The Persistence and Fragility of Bureaucratic Capacity

with Sean Gailmard

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Political manipulation of bureaucratic agencies can undermine their performance. Yet, the dynamic effects of political management on bureaucratic capacity are not well understood. To address this question we develop a formal model that represents bureaucratic output as a team production process, and considers self-selection into bureaucracy by overlapping generations of agents. The model shows that transitory periods of poor management can have a persistent effect on selection into government and, as a result, bureaucratic performance. Further, high capacity bureaucracies are more vulnerable to persistent undermining through bad management—demonstrating the fragility of bureaucratic capacity—whereas medium capacity bureaucracies are insulated from management shocks—demonstrating the persistence of capacity in spite of interference.

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