the ambiguities of democracy in forging bureaucratic quality1 the ambiguities of democracy in...

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The Ambiguities of Democracy in Forging Bureaucratic Quality

David Andersen, Postdoc

[email protected]

Aarhus University

Agnes Cornell, Assistant Professor

[email protected]

Aarhus University

Draft

Version October 19, 2017.

Abstract

Recent studies find that higher degrees of democracy are related to higher levels of bureaucratic

quality. However, they only offer limited explanations for this pattern based on a unidimensional

understanding of democracy. We argue that future uncertainties as perceived by governments,

oppositions, and voters are important for why bureaucratic reform takes place. Therefore, we expect

no uniform effects of democracy but that the effect depends on the socioeconomic status of the

median voter. Empirically, we examine the separate effects of three dimensions of democracy –

competitive elections, legislative constraints, and suffrage – as well as the degree of government

stability as a general regime trait. Based on a global sample of countries 1790–2016 that adds

historical depth and analytical leverage, the results show that competitive elections and legislative

constraints on the executive are connected with higher levels of bureaucratic quality. Moreover, the

positive effects of competitive elections and legislative constraints decrease in times of great

suffrage extensions.

mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]

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Introduction

Studies examining the impact of political regime attributes on bureaucratic quality1 have shored up

in the last decade. They generally find that higher degrees of democracy are related to higher levels

of bureaucratic quality arguing that democracy implies channels of vertical accountability that

punish governments for politicizing the bureaucracy and engaging in clientelistic practices which

undermine bureaucratic quality. However, these studies are largely based on a unidimensional

understanding of democracy, focusing on competitive elections, and offer limited explanations for

why democracy should raise bureaucratic quality (see e.g. Adserà, Boix, and Payne 2003; Bäck and

Hadenius 2008; Charron and Lapuente 2010, 2011; Carbone and Memoli 2015).2

This paper specifies the theoretical connection between democracy and bureaucratic

quality in three ways: First, instead of a static relationship between variables we propose a dynamic

theory of bureaucratic quality that involves three actors – 1) the governments or presidents and their

party support base, 2) the parliamentary opposition, and 3) the voters – and how the extent of

bureaucratic reform is affected by these actors’ perceptions of future uncertainties. The two first

groups of actors face substantial future uncertainties about their goal of political survival. In short,

these actors are more likely to supply bureaucratic reforms when certain conditions are met that

lower future uncertainties, notably expanding the prospects of political survival beyond the next

election (see Geddes 1994). The third group of actors, the voters, is interested in the payoffs from

electoral participation and thus demands certain goods and controls the government’s ability to

deliver those goods (see Charron and Lapuente 2010: 450-454).

Second, we take into account legislative constraints on the executive and suffrage

changes as alternative dimensions of democracy. Legislative constraints and suffrage are

empirically related to competitive elections in the sense that the existence of the former two rarely

matters without some minimum amount of the latter. However, the three dimensions are

conceptually distinct and have different kinds of effects on bureaucratic quality. We argue that

legislative constraints on the executive should also work to improve bureaucratic quality but, in

1 Extant studies use terms such as ‘administrative capacity’, ‘state capacity’ (e.g. Bäck and Hadenius (2008), or ‘quality

of government’ (e.g. Charron and Lapuente 2010, 2011) as denoting the effective and non-corrupted use of the state to

implement decisions. In this paper, we prefer the term ‘bureaucratic quality’ because it refers more precisely to the

characteristics of implementation processes as originating from bureaucrats rather than the more diffuse group of

‘government officials/representatives.’ 2 Bäck and Hadenius (2008: 19) investigate turnout and newspaper circulation as intervening variables (see also Adserá,

Boix, and Payne 2003: 475); Charron and Lapuente (2010: 462; 2011: 412) interact various regime attributes with

GDP/capita and find the effect of democracy on bureaucratic quality to be positive for high levels and negative for low

levels of economic development; Carbone and Memoli (2015) frame their distinction between degrees and duration of

democracy as capturing different mechanisms (see also Leipziger 2016).

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contrast to competitive elections, horizontal rather than vertical accountability drives this

association. More importantly, we argue that removal of socioeconomic barriers to suffrage should

be negatively related to bureaucratic quality since this aspect of democratization typically implies

that relatively poorer strata of voters become part of the electorate. As these groups demand more

particularistic goods for immediate consumption, the government and opposition parties perceive it

necessary to use the state apparatus to channel jobs and benefits to win the next election. Thereby,

democracy lowers overall bureaucratic quality (see e.g. Shefter 1977). The changes in the electoral

dynamics further have a spillover effect on how parliamentary control works. Being accountable to

new voters with stronger preferences for immediate consumption, the parliamentary opposition

lessens its use of legislative controls that would otherwise punish politicization and clientelism. We

thus propose that changes in suffrage that remove some socioeconomic restriction moderate the

positive effect of competitive elections and legislative constraints on bureaucratic quality.

Third, autocratic and democratically elected leaders alike care for political survival.

Therefore, the typical period of government survival in prior years – what we call ‘government

stability’ – should affect governments’ perception of future uncertainties. When governments are

normally more unstable, the prospect of a future election only adds uncertainty and thus makes the

government secure its own survival by backing down on bureaucratic reform instead engaging in

politicization and/or clientelism (Geddes 1994: 15, 132-133). We therefore propose that the positive

effect of competitive elections is moderated by government instability.

To examine these propositions, we employ disaggregated data on democracy as well

as data on bureaucratic quality from a variety of sources, including the Lexical Index of Electoral

Democracy (Skaaning, Gerring, and Bartusevicius 2015), the Varieties of Democracy project

(Coppedge et al. 2017), and Historical V-Dem (Knutsen et al. 2017).3 As a proxy for bureaucratic

quality we choose the measure of ‘Rigorous and impartial public administration’ from V-Dem and

Historical V-Dem to better distinguish regime- from state-effects than in previous studies.4 The

combined use of the datasets also results in a much longer time series, 1790–2016, with several

advantages. First, including the 19th century increases variation in suffrage between and within

countries by allowing cases of early democratization in Latin America and Europe where, for

3 In future versions of the paper we will also use indicators from Polity IV (Marshall, Jaggers, and Gurr 2010). 4 Recent studies (e.g. Adserà, Boix, and Payne 2003; Bäck and Hadenius 2008; Charron and Lapuente 2010, 2011) rely

on ICRG and/or World Bank data that are temporally restricted back to 1984 but also suffer from conceptual ambiguity

and conflation with regime traits (see Hanson and Sigman 2013). Carbone and Memoli (2015) use the less demanding

indicator of a ‘basic administration’ from the Bertelsmann Transformation Index with scores from 2006, 2008, and

2010.

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instance, income and property restrictions on suffrage decreased gradually.5 As a consequence, we

may better capitalize on a long list of comparative-historical analyses that find the opposite of

recent large-n studies, namely that autocracy rather than democracy furthers bureaucratic quality

(see e.g. Shefter 1977; Geddes 1994; Ertman 1997; Piattoni 2001; Kurtz 2013; Soifer 2015).

Second, the data span the entire period of modern democracy, most waves of democratic

progression and regression (Møller and Skaaning 2013: Ch. 5), bureaucratic reform waves in

Western (see Piattoni 2001) and post-colonial states (see Evans 1995: Ch. 3), as well as different

international episodes likely to have affected domestic outcomes of bureaucratic quality (see

Gourevitch 1986: Chs. 3-4; Mann 2012: Chs. 8, 13).6

The paper is organized as follows: First, we revisit the arguments for why democracy

should matter for bureaucratic quality and introduce our framework of three actors and their future

uncertainties, and next, we discuss how competitive elections, legislative constraints, suffrage

extensions, and government instability are related to bureaucratic quality. Then we present the

research design, models, and data, which take into account standard confounders. Third, we present

the results and discuss the broader implications of our findings.

Democracy, future uncertainties, and bureaucratic quality

A core ambition for the modernization of societies is the creation of an effective and impartial state

bureaucracy. However, such successful bureaucratization has far from progressed in a linear

fashion. Rather, bureaucratic quality has experienced ups and downs and remains weak in both

autocracies and democracies of mostly but not exclusively developing countries. Scholars

traditionally connected bureaucratization with war, the size of the economy, and the availability of

resources and human capital (Geddes 1994: 16; Ertman 1997; Rauch and Evans 2000). Political

regime entered as an explanatory factor with Weber (1978) who famously identified bureaucracy as

originating in the 17th to 19th century Prussia, a country that underwent various forms of

authoritarianism and thus testified to the different functional logics between bureaucracy and

political regimes. However, Weber himself (1978: 1002) suggested that democracy could also

underpin bureaucracy. Thus, the relationship between democracy and bureaucracy became the

5 By employing data for the post-WWII period only, recent studies tend mostly to include cases where free and fair

elections coincided with universal suffrage. 6 In future versions of the paper we will explore the possibility of employing the average global democracy level yearly

as an instrument test against the notion that, at the domestic level, bureaucratic quality could affect the degree of

democracy in the first place (see Shefter 1977; Mazzuca and Munck 2014). The long time-period will also make this

test more accurate.

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object of considerable debate within comparative politics and public administration research (e.g.

Etzioni-Halevey 1985: Chs. 1-2; Fukuyama 2014).

Two strands of research have taken up this debate. A group of large-n studies finds

that democracy is positively related to bureaucratic quality because democracy entails greater levels

of electoral competition and press freedom that move political incentives towards supporting

bureaucratic reform, or what is often termed ‘good public policies’, and simply forces politicians to

abstain from corruption and clientelism. The assumption is that the majority of any large electorate

serves the collectively rational goal of impartial and clean administration (e.g. Adserà, Boix, and

Payne 2003; Keefer 2007; Bäck and Hadenius 2008; Charron and Lapuente 2010, 2011; Carbone

and Memoli 2015; Leipziger 2016).7 By contrast, classic comparative-historical analyses find an

autocratic advantage in forging bureaucratic reform and thus that democracy is to some extent

negatively related to bureaucratic quality. Some of these analyses (e.g. Geddes 1994; Grindle 2012)

share the focus on electoral competition but others attribute specific importance to suffrage (e.g.

Shefter 1977; Piattoni 2001).

We set out to explain why, as shown in some studies, democracy may sometimes

hamper bureaucratic quality, while the opposite is most often the case in large N-studies. On a par

with previous research, we explain levels of and developments in bureaucratic quality as a political

choice between bureaucratic reform on the one hand and politicization and clientelism on the other

(forthwith ‘politicization’). The former most notably involves meritocracy but also the introduction

or strengthening of pecuniary incentives and management tools; the latter a pattern of political

hirings and firings and provision of contracts and particularistic goods to favor clients – known as

clientelism (see Olsen 2006; Dahlström, Lapuente, and Teorell 2012).

The theories in recent studies tend to boil down to the dichotomy contrasting the

existence of vertical accountability under democracy as opposed to autocracy. By contrast, we start

more generally by identifying key actors, their preferences, and access to relevant information and

then consider how changes in three different dimensions of democracy and government stability

affect future uncertainties among these actors.

Seen from a bird’s eye view, uncertainties around the distribution of resources in the

future is a relevant parameter for considering bureaucratic reform but typically theorized in less

7 Bäck and Hadenius’ large-n study (2008) takes a mediating position between democracy and autocracy as the more

effective promoter of bureaucratic quality. They find a J-shaped relationship that, however, speaks to the advantage of

democracy: Levels of bureaucratic quality are relatively high in full autocracies, low in semi-democratic or

democratizing countries, and highest in full democracies.

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clear terms in previous research.8 The most clear theorization is arguably found in Barbara Geddes’

(1994) Politician’s Dilemma, studying Latin American bureaucratic reforms, where the initiation of

reforms involves a collective action problem. Together with opposition parties, governments may

initially favor bureaucratic reform. They know that if they could agree on nurturing bureaucratic

reform, this would be the rational choice as it would nurture economic development for the benefit

of society at large. However, their individual interests in gaining votes and ensuring success in the

next election make them all defect from this potential reform coalition. Instead, they engage in a

game of politicization whereby the spoils of political office and bureaucratic control are distributed

between political opponents or brutally competed for. More simply put, the governments and

oppositions in democracies eventually favor short-term vote-buying over long-term economic

development since they find the latter consideration to be more risky for winning popularity among

voters. In turn, democracies on average end up with lower levels of bureaucratic quality than

autocracies (Geddes 1994: 17-18).

As will be explained, we do not find it convincing that competitive elections in itself

should undermine bureaucratic quality but Geddes’ model provides a fruitful starting point for a

theory of regime effects on bureaucratic quality. We thus agree that any effect of democracy

ultimately channels through three actors: 1) the party government or president, 2) the opposition

parties, and 3) the voters. While we level autocratic with democratic politicians’ goal of political

survival, we acknowledge that governments and oppositions in democracies, as opposed to

autocracies, have a short-term incentive to pursue policies that maximize their vote shares in the

next election. Since competitive elections are evidently forthcoming, governments and oppositions

fundamentally lack information about their political destiny. This introduces substantial

uncertainties into their calculations and thus determines their willingness to supply bureaucratic

reforms or, by contrast, patronage (Geddes 1994: 14-18).

However, as the more recent studies point out (Charron and Lapuente 2010: 450-454;

see also Piattoni 2001), one should also take account of the demand for patronage, as determined by

the preferences of the voters. But what complicates matters more than assumed in most large-n

research is that the wealth of the voters affects their demand for bureaucratic reform (see Charron

and Lapuente 2010: 450). When voters are more affluent, their time horizon widens in the sense

8 The recent large-n studies theoretically assume that the positive effect of democracy on bureaucratic quality is static –

democracy works in the short as well as the long run. Some studies (e.g. Keefer 2007; Carbone and Memoli 2015;

Leipziger 2016) suggest the stock of democracy to be particularly, or exclusively, connected to improvements in

bureaucratic quality. However, this does not imply that democracy is negative for bureaucratic quality in the short run.

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that they discount the future less. Thus, voter uncertainty is not a constant but may vary over time

and space. In sum, we contend that any theory of the effect of democracy on bureaucratic quality

should explain how the characteristics of democracy affect future uncertainties and thus make

governments, oppositions, and voters strive for bureaucratic reform.

Our propositions

Competitive elections and legislative constraints on the executive

According to Geddes, competitive elections hamper bureaucratic reforms. The uncertainty that

follows (minimally competitive) elections makes the government and opposition perceive that there

are political opponents of significant strength and that the power owned today can be lost tomorrow

by the ballot. This makes government as well as opposition parties abstain from reforms. The

government wants to be able to politicize now to ensure political survival in the immediate election

and swift implementation of its policies, and the opposition wants politicization to be available

whenever it wins the government seat (Geddes 1994: 18; Katz and Mair 1995: 16; see also Piattoni

2001). By contrast in an autocratic setting without truly competitive elections, the government, or

president, can initiate top-down pressure on central and local agencies to employ more meritocratic

forms of hiring while at the same time micro-managing bureaucratic behavior (Geddes 1994: 12;

see also Huntington 1968; Grindle 2012).

The argument that competitive elections and the constant threat of future electoral

loses involve short-term incentives for politicization that autocracies avoid is compelling as it rests

on a key difference between democracies and autocracies. However, as is rightfully suggested by

the recent large-n studies, voters do not always reward patronage supplies such as pecuniary

payments or job opportunities. Voters are sometimes better able to discard of future uncertainties

and demand society-wide economic development that needs longer-term investments. As a

consequence, voters may judge patronage payments as ‘symptom treatment’ for deeper problems in

their own and the state’s economy and create an external pressure on the politicians and parties to

disclose the use of patronage as corruption and change the state’s hiring procedures to improve

bureaucratic quality more permanently (Charron and Lapuente 2010: 450-454; Mazzuca and Munck

2014: 1236). Voters may also push for reform to the extent that they find transparent, impartial, and

effective administration necessary in order to obtain sustainable economic development (see

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Rothstein 2011).9 In turn, the preferences of governments and oppositions for bureaucratic reform

would change from negative to positive in an effort to please the voters. Instead of competing on

the issue of bureaucratic reforms or not, governments and oppositions would cooperate on the

initiation of reforms to avoid the risk of losing votes and secure themselves from becoming victims

of reversed cycles of bureaucratic discrimination in the future as government power shifts.

However, governments fight for political survival in other ways as they are threatened

by uncertainty from other agents than voters. Whereas political competition in elections transforms

votes into parliamentary seats and thus constitutes the power configuration of parties and, after

government formation, the strength of the opposition, there are formal and informal rules of the

parliament and intra-elite interaction as well as party system dynamics that provide a separate set of

control functions. We term the totality of these rules ‘legislative constraints on the executive’ (i.e.

the parliamentary or oppositional use of monitoring and sanctioning government actions).

Legislative constraints do not work vertically between voters and representatives but horizontally

between representatives or, more generally, elites (including in oligarchic regimes) (see e.g.

Marshall et al. 2010; Lauth 2015).

This should yield a separate effect on bureaucratic quality in the era of modern

democracy. In Latin American oligarchic regimes in the first decades after independence, either

multiple, balanced groups forged consensus around state-building or fragmented, regionally-based

elites did the opposite. Such fragmentation also strengthened local elites’ clientelist strongholds

under conditions of mass elections (Kurtz 2013; see also Soifer 2015). In liberal democracies,

political parties take center stage complementing parliamentary rules in securing oppositional

control of the executive (Folke, Hirano, and Snyder Jr. 2011; Gerring, Thacker, and Alfaro 2012:

3). Over time, if governments are voted in and out and some oppositional control is preserved

between elections, systems for controlling the executive are likely to expand across more policy

sectors and intensify into ever-more fine-grained webs of committees, oversight bodies, and rules

on budgetary discipline and dissemination of information to parliament. This raises the

opportunities for monitoring and sanctioning from occasional and temporary to all-encompassing

and permanent (see e.g. Maravall and Przeworski 2003; Charron and Lapuente 2010; Kurtz 2013;

Mazzuca and Munck 2014; Soifer 2015).

Nevertheless, competitive elections and legislative constraints in a certain way merely

operate differently and in different arenas but to the same effect: that of punishing governments for

9 Voters may of course also value transparent, impartial, and effective bureaucracy independently of its economic

records (Rothstein 2011).

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politicizing the bureaucracy. To see this, we note that meritocratic reform is a sign of trust between

subsequent governments and opposition parties that neither will be discriminated administratively –

that is, beyond what policies do by nature of being tools for distributing the resources of society.

Yet, this trust typically does not rise from substantial agreement but rather from protracted conflict

around government power by which political forces move in and out of office, develop tools to

control the arbitrary use of power, and thus finally reconcile with the interests of one another.

Conversely, politicization often emerges where control functions have not developed. This makes

political elites mistrust the intentions of one another thus incentivizing top-down politicization and

clientelistic strategies beyond any foreseeable future to safeguard their interests (Weingast 1997;

Cornell and Lapuente 2014). Where control functions exist and are practiced, forging and protecting

meritocratic and impartial administration becomes the rational strategy of governments to hinder a

vote of no confidence or an early election in the short term but also to prevent their own destruction

in the future when government power may have shifted.

Therefore, we expect the following:

Hypothesis 1: The positive effect of competitive elections on bureaucratic quality increases with

higher levels of legislative constraints

Suffrage extensions

Besides the tendency of comparative-historical studies to incorporate future uncertainties more

explicitly than recent large-n studies – to some extent only natural given their respective

methodologies – it is particularly striking that these two sets of literature focus on different

dimensions of democracy. The large-n studies overwhelmingly focus on electoral competition as

operationalized by competitive elections but the comparative-historical work points to other

dimensions, most notably suffrage. In Shefter’s (1977) study, for instance, regulated uncertainty

around the election of the executive is assumed, but the driver of politicization is extensions of

suffrage against a background of low initial levels of bureaucratic quality.

This points out that democracy means more than competitive elections. It crucially

implies the empowerment of ‘the people’ – i.e., the enfranchisement of the population at large, give

or take rules that condition the enjoyment of the franchise (Dahl 1989; Coppedge, Alvarez, and

Maldonado 2008). Our argument regards the kind of suffrage rules that restrict voting rights based

on a citizen’s socioeconomic situation, for example, rules restricting voting rights based on

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property, economic dependence, gross income, or tax payments. There are other kinds of suffrage

restrictions such as on gender, region, religion, or race. However, as these categories do not by

definition discriminate on socioeconomic status, they are not relevant for our argument. For

instance, the granting of suffrage to women only becomes relevant insofar as women also tend to be

poor or represent poor households.

Suffrage without socioeconomic restrictions is a historical exception rather than the

rule. Similarly, a wide and sudden extension from very low to very high levels of suffrage has not

been typical. In the 19th century and the early 20th century, many regimes had competitive elections

to some degree and then expanded suffrage by gradually enfranchising poorer people – suffrage

extended downwards through the income distribution of society. Later democratizations in

postcolonial Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe have tended to be more abrupt with the immediate

installation of universal suffrage but these processes were arguably more externally driven than the

European or Latin American ones (see Przeworski 2009).

As a consequence, suffrage extensions in the empirical setting we are investigating

have typically implied the inclusion of poor masses. As shown by Charron and Lapuente (2010:

450-454), the positive effect of competitive elections is larger in richer countries where voters are

on average more affluent. This means that they become more willing to relinquish patronage goods

and instead demand long-term investments in human capital (education and health care as

facilitated by society-wide economic development), which gives incentives for politicians to make

an effort to increase bureaucratic quality. By contrast, poorer voters are more uncertain about their

own future, which makes them demand goods for immediate consumption such as jobs and

benefits, or more fundamentally, food and shelter, thus incentivizing the supply of patronage (see

also Welzel and Inglehart 2008).

Focusing on income levels or growth alone, however, does not do justice to the

significance of suffrage. Indeed, whether the masses are rich (or poor) has little effect on the

preferences of the political elite if the masses are not enfranchised. Rather, it is the expansion of the

electorate with poor people that determines voter demands for bureaucratic reform and, in turn, the

supply of it by elected leaders. We also stress that it is not the level of suffrage at one point in time

but the scale of the expansion that matters. When suffrage is extended, government and opposition

deem it necessary to use the state apparatus to reach the masses and distribute the spoils of office to

maximize votes in the next election. Only the state has the means and authority to redistribute goods

at such speed and reach the lower classes and the periphery with jobs in and favors from the public

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sector (Shefter 1977; Geddes 1994: 12). This also means that the demand for patronage can be

satisfied at some point. Accordingly, large suffrage extensions should matter more than smaller

ones because the push for patronage is stronger and more enduring, and the marginal effect of any

suffrage extension should decrease over time.

Summing up, the removal of socioeconomic restrictions on suffrage should entail

considerable incentives to initiate politicization that satisfies voter preferences. When suffrage

extensions are absent or small, as in either early competitive regimes with very restricted suffrage

or in many present-day democracies with universal suffrage, no new demands for patronage are

thrown upon the political system. By contrast, when suffrage extensions are substantial, as in some

democratizing countries, elections communicate the demands for patronage and thus contribute to

lower bureaucratic quality. We therefore propose that

Hypothesis 2: The positive effect of competitive elections on bureaucratic quality decreases with

greater (socioeconomic) suffrage extensions

The effect of legislative constraints should be moderated similarly under suffrage extensions. Since

suffrage only makes conceptual sense under some degree of competitive elections, both

governments and oppositions face incentives to court the new and poorer voters by politicizing the

administration. The governments thus face no, if only relatively manageable, sanctions as new

parliaments are formed post-election. We thus expect that

Hypothesis 3: The positive effect of legislative constraints on bureaucratic quality decreases with

greater (socioeconomic) suffrage extensions

Government instability

Across equally competitive regimes, the frequency with which governments are voted out varies

considerably. Government stability works as a sort of institutionalized uncertainty like competitive

elections or legislative constraints. In fact, we argue that government instability endogenizes

legislative constraints very directly. Many democracies, including the liberal, Western ones, have

experienced decades with the same party in government obtaining large seat majorities from several

subsequent elections – not to speak of the voting systems that mechanically tend to produce large

majority governments. This results in a very different competitive situation between the parties in

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parliament as when compared to, for instance, consensus democracies or, more generally,

parliaments where parties have relatively similar shares of seats (Lijphart 1999). However, the

connection between competitive elections and government instability is less clear-cut. Indeed,

government instability exclusively affects governments’ perception of future uncertainties – it does

not involve a popular pressure to abstain from politicization. For instance, governments in

unconsolidated democracies, hybrid regimes, or closed autocracies face the risk of being ousted by

oppositional moves or a military coup (Geddes 1994: 15, 132-133). Thus, we expect that

government instability moderates the effect of competitive elections in the following way:

Hypothesis 4: The positive effect of competitive elections on bureaucratic quality decreases with

higher levels of government instability

The next section presents the statistical models and data that we use to examine our

propositions.

Research design and data

We employ country fixed effects and lag all independent variables one year. Since we have a long

time period from 1800s and onwards, we run models with different time periods. Most importantly,

we interact our key variables with a dummy distinguishing the periods before and after 1946. This

controls for separate dynamics of the postcolonial era when democratization came suddenly with

universal suffrage. We also take time into account by introducing year dummies to the models.

Bureaucratic quality

To measure bureaucratic quality, new data from the V-Dem project (Coppedge et al. 2017) enables

us to alleviate the problems of existing data sources which are limited in spatial or temporal

coverage (e.g. the ‘Weberianness Scale’ developed by Rauch and Evans 2000) or suffer from

serious validity issues (e.g. the bureaucratic quality measure by the Political Risk Services Group

2014 - for reviews, see Hanson and Sigman 2013; Saylor 2013). In any case, these measures cover

only countries back to 1984, and even with Hanson and Sigman’s possible extensions back in time

to the 1960s, we are left with insufficient variation, exclusively after World War II.

By contrast, the V-Dem project’s indicator of ‘Rigorous and impartial public

administration’, which has been extended to the 19th century in the Historical V-Dem (Knutsen et

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al. 2017) is a time varying, cross-national, continuous indicator that covers our analytical time

period. The variable scores countries from 0 to 4 by asking: “are public officials rigorous and

impartial in the performance of their duties?” It is thus consistent with the manifestations of

bureaucratic quality as we expect them to rise from bureaucratic reforms toward meritocracy (see

(Dahlström, Lapuente, and Teorell 2012). This definition also resembles the core understanding of

bureaucratic quality in recent and classic studies alike (e.g. Shefter 1977; Geddes 1994; Ertman

1997; Adserà, Boix, and Payne 2003; Bäck and Hadenius 2008; Charron and Lapuente 2010;

Leipziger 2016).

The coding of this variable is expert-based, and the ordinal-level scores are subject to

extensive reliability and measurement biases. The V-Dem team has mitigated these biases by

assigning five experts (1 expert in the historical version of the dataset) to code each country and

aggregate coding decisions into point-estimates employing Bayesian item response theory (IRT)

modelling techniques, which they assume to be latently interval. In consequence, inter-coder

reliability checks and uncertainties are used to convert the ordinal into an interval scale (see

Coppedge et al. 2015: 25-29).

Competitive elections and legislative constraints

To measure competitive elections, we use the indicator of competitive elections from the Lexical

Index of Electoral Democracy (Skaaning, Gerring, and Bartusevicius 2015). We use the category

measuring minimally competitive elections coded as a dummy in a given year. To measure

legislative constraints, we use the index of legislative constraints on the executive from the V-Dem

and Historical V-Dem data.

**FIGURE 1**

To get a blunt impression of empirical associations, Figure 1 shows yearly world

averages on the variables of bureaucratic quality and competitive elections. First, we see that the

two lines follow one another quite neatly after 1946 but not before 1946, although the overall trend

points in the same direction. There is thus reason to believe that the post-1946 period is special.

World War II not only delegitimized fascism and inspired a new wave of democratization and

decolonization. It also renewed focus on civil rights and the rule of law thus issuing a new era of

rule-bound, impartial administration. Second, zooming in on year-to-year trends, it is clear that

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bureaucratic quality and competitive far from co-varies perfectly. On many occasions, most

pronounced in the 19th century, increases in bureaucratic quality coincided with decreases or

stagnation in competitive elections and vice versa.

**FIGURE 2**

As seen in Figure 2, much the same can be said of the association between legislative

constraints and bureaucratic quality although the discrepancy in development trends is less dramatic

and exists in a shorter period, the latter half of the 19th century.

We thus have good reasons to believe that there is a genuine, non-trivial relationship

between bureaucratic and competitive elections and legislative constraints, respectively. Yet, the

direction of the effect varies between periods and years.

Suffrage extensions

For changes in suffrage we use a variable collected by researchers in the V-Dem team based on

secondary sources. Suffrage is measured as the percentage in the voting age population that has the

legal right to vote. As we are interested in the change in suffrage we calculate the percentage

change in suffrage extensions. We only take into account suffrage extensions and code all

retractions in suffrage as 0. Moreover, as we think that suffrage changes are not only events

happening in one year with effects in that year only, the variable is first coded as the suffrage

change in the corresponding year. For the years following the change, we then calculate a

depreciation rate of 1% of the percentage change in suffrage. The depreciation rate starts all over

whenever there is a new extension in suffrage and stops whenever there is a retraction in suffrage

rates (coded as 0). However, this data does not take into account whether the extension in suffrage

is due to abolishment of socioeconomic restrictions. Therefore, we also use suffrage data from

Bilinski, which differentiates between male and female suffrage. By only including extensions for

male suffrage we get rid of all extensions that are due to gender and thus not necessarily attached to

the socioeconomic situation. The results for the Bilinski data are reported in the Appendix.

Figure 3 illustrates the empirical association between yearly world average suffrage

extensions (% depreciated changes) and bureaucratic quality. As expected, we see sharp increases

in suffrage rights after World War II, coinciding with decolonization in Asia and Africa and

democratizations in Latin America. Again, from an overall perspective there seems to be a positive

15

association across the whole period but zooming on yearly variation often reveals the opposite, such

as from the early to mid-19th century or the late 20th century. Suffrage extensions and bureaucratic

quality thus seem to be genuinely related but in different ways across periods and years.

**FIGURE 3**

Government instability

To measure government instability we code government stability from the V-Dem data on heads of

state and heads of government. We construct a variable that calculates the number of years

governed by the same head of government, or alternatively, in the cases in which heads of state

have more power than the heads of government, the variable indicates the number of years

governed by the same head of state.

Control variables

The preliminary analyses include the one control variable that is most important, namely economic

development measured with GDP/capita (logged) taken from Miller which mainly use the

Maddison data (Bolt and van Zanden 2013).10

Results

Table 1 presents the results for competitive elections. The results for this variable are similar across

the different specifications. The variable is positively and significantly related to bureaucratic

quality irrespective of time-period and controls included in the model.

Moreover, our control for economic development is, as expected, positively related to

bureaucratic quality (but not significant in the model with a restricted time-period, 1821–1945).

**TABLE 1**

Table 2 presents the results for legislative constraints. Legislative constraints is

positively and significantly related to bureaucratic quality in all models with different time-periods

and with the inclusion of a control for economic development. The result for economic

10 More control variables will be added in future versions of the paper.

16

development is similar to Table 1, with a positive and significant relationship with bureaucratic

quality in the whole time-period and for the model with a time-period from 1946 and onwards.

**TABLE 2**

We hypothesize that the effect of legislative constraints is conditioned on competitive

elections. Table 3 reports the results. We can see that the interaction term is significant for all three

period specifications. Next, we proceed to plot the marginal effects of competitive elections at

different levels of legislative constraints. Figure 4 shows that the marginal conditional effect of

competitive elections increases at higher levels of legislative constraints for all three time period

specifications. Thus, the results indicate support for hypothesis 1 that the positive effect of

competitive elections on bureaucratic quality increases with higher levels of legislative constraints.

**TABLE 3**

**FIGURE 4**

Table 4 presents the results for suffrage extensions. The table shows that suffrage

change is positively related to bureaucratic quality in the models with the whole period and in the

models with the later time-period. However, there is no significant relationship in the period prior to

1946. If we use the Bilinski data on male suffrage changes, the results are quite similar except for

suffrage change not being significant in the first model without the control for economic

development in the whole period (see Appendix Table A4).

**TABLE 4**

This seems at odds with our expectations of a negative relationship between suffrage

extensions and bureaucratic quality. However, according to our theoretical propositions the more

important effect of suffrage extensions is moderation. First, the effect of competitive elections

should be less positive when there are larger extensions of suffrage. We therefore proceed to

interact suffrage with competitive elections. Models 7–9 in Table 4 show that there are interesting

differences between the different time-periods. We can see that the interaction goes in different

17

directions depending on the time-period and that the interaction term is significant for all three

model specifications.

We plot the conditional marginal effects of competitive elections at different levels of

suffrage change in Figure 5. The differences across the time-periods are clearly illustrated in the

figure. We can see that there is a slight increase in the conditional marginal effects of competitive

elections with higher levels of suffrage change in the whole period and in the period after 1945.

However, in the period prior to 1946, suffrage change conditions the effect of competitive elections

so that competitive elections has negative effects at larger extensions of suffrage. Figure 5A in the

Appendix shows the graphs with the Bilinski data on male suffrage. The models with the Bilinski

data show similar results for the period prior to 1946, but with this data the marginal conditional

effects of competitive elections are positive at all levels of suffrage change. Moreover, the Bilinski

data, for which we only use changes in male suffrage, show that the positive effect of competitive

elections decreases as suffrage change increases for the whole period. There is no significant

interaction effect for the period after 1946. Thus, overall, we get some support for hypothesis 2 that

the positive effect of competitive elections on bureaucratic quality decreases with greater

(socioeconomic) suffrage extensions. The fact this moderation is mainly valid for the period before

1946 should come as no surprise as the major bulk of gradual suffrage changes took place before

1946.

**FIGURE 5**

Unfortunately, we cannot discern exactly from this data whether suffrage extensions

are connected to the socioeconomic positions of voters. However, as indicated above, by restricting

it to only males, we do at least get rid of the extensions that are only about gender.

We also hypothesize that legislative constraints will be conditioned by suffrage in the

same way as competitive elections. Table 5 reports the results for these interactions. The results

show that the interaction term is significant for the whole period and for the period prior to 1946.

Plotting the marginal conditional effects, we can clearly see how the effect of legislative constraints

decreases as suffrage change increases in the models for these two period specifications (see Figure

6). In the period prior to 1946, the conditional marginal effects of legislative constraints on the

executive even become negative at higher levels of suffrage change. The analyses with the Bilinski

data show similar results for the whole period and for the period before 1946, but the marginal

18

conditional effects are not negative at high levels of suffrage change. However, in the Bilinski data

the results for the period after 1946 indicate that the conditional marginal effects of legislative

constraints increase as suffrage change increases (see Appendix Table A5 and Figure A6). Thus, we

have some support for hypothesis 3 that the positive effect of legislative constraints on bureaucratic

quality decreases with greater (socioeconomic) suffrage extensions but, again, only valid for the

period prior to 1946.

**TABLE 5**

**FIGURE 6**

Table 6 presents the results for government stability. We can see that the results differ

between the time-periods. The models including the whole time-period show a negative and

significant relationship with bureaucratic quality. This is also the case for the later time-period. But,

the effect is positive and significant for the earlier time-period without control for economic

development. Once we include a control for economic development, there is no significant effect

and the sign changes. However, we hypothesize that government stability will only be positive for

countries that have competitive elections. We do not expect government stability to be positive for

countries with no competition. Therefore, we proceed to interact government stability with

competitive elections. The results for the whole period show a significant interaction term and we

can see that the effect of government stability is negative in countries without competitive elections.

However, the interaction term is not significant when we divide the sample into different time-

periods.

**TABLE 6**

We proceed to plot the interactions to show how government stability conditions the

effects of competitive elections (Figure 7). From the plot for the whole period, we can see that

government stability strengthens the effect of having competitive elections. It should be noted that

competitive elections is positively related to bureaucratic quality at all levels of government

stability but the conditional marginal effects of competitive elections increases with a more stable

government. Thus, this gives some support for our hypothesis 4 that the positive effect of

19

competitive elections on bureaucratic quality decreases with higher levels of government instability.

However, we stress that the interaction is not significant in the models with separate time-periods.

**FIGURE 7**

Conclusion

In this paper, we have critically reviewed the growing literature of regime effects on bureaucratic

quality. From the classic studies, we integrated the perspective of time for governments considering

bureaucratic reform. Then, with the use of new, disaggregate data on democracy as well as the

indicator of a rigorous and impartial public administration from the V-Dem and Historical V-Dem

projects, we have reassessed the impact of democracy on bureaucratic quality in a more

comprehensive way by incorporating three dimensions of democracy: competitive elections,

legislative constraints, and suffrage, back to around 1800 until today.

Our theoretical argument contributes more generally to the literature about regime

effects on bureaucratic quality by showing that regime change away from autocracy toward

democracy is not just important because of the introduction of competition over government power.

Our preliminary empirical analyses show that we have some support for (at least) parts of our

arguments. The positive effects of competitive elections seem to be strengthened by legislative

constraints on the executive. However, the positive effects of legislative constraints and competitive

elections are both restricted by extensions of suffrage in the period prior to 1946. Theoretically, we

should thus distinguish sharply between democratization as competition for political power and

empowerment of the masses in forging bureaucratic quality.

20

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24

Figures and tables

Figure 1. Competitive elections and bureaucratic quality

25

Figure 2. Legislative constraints and bureaucratic quality

Figure 3. Suffrage (depreciated % change) and bureaucratic quality

26

Figure 4. Legislative constraints and competitive elections in interaction (marginal conditional effects of competitive

elections)

Figure 5. Competitive elections and suffrage change in interaction (conditional marginal effects of competitive elections)

27

Figure 6. Legislative constraints and suffrage change in interaction (conditional marginal effects of legislative constraints)

Figure 7. Competitive elections and government stability in interaction (conditional marginal effects of competitive elections)

28

Tables

Table 1. Competitive elections and bureaucratic quality

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

The whole

period

The whole

period 1801–1945 1821–1945 1946–2016 1946–2005

Competitive electionst-1 0.860*** 0.847*** 0.549*** 0.539*** 0.891*** 0.984***

(0.0196) (0.0223) (0.0331) (0.0363) (0.0220) (0.0253)

Log (economic development)t-1

0.464***

0.0714

0.495***

(0.0209)

(0.0508)

(0.0239)

Constant -0.996*** -3.861*** -0.671*** -1.072** -0.319*** -3.941***

(0.160) (0.216) (0.132) (0.375) (0.0783) (0.192)

Number of observations (country years) 16221 12291 6668 4972 9553 7319

R2 0.298 0.318 0.140 0.136 0.228 0.284

adj. R2 0.280 0.298 0.109 0.102 0.208 0.262

Note: Standard errors in parentheses. Year dummies and fixed country effects included in all models. * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p <

0.001

Table 2. Legislative constraints and bureaucratic quality

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

The whole

period

The whole

period 1790–1945 1821–1945 1946–2016 1946–2005

Legislative constraints t-1 1.806*** 1.906*** 0.965*** 1.301*** 1.842*** 2.072***

(0.0343) (0.0415) (0.0615) (0.0865) (0.0408) (0.0453)


0.454***

0.0330

0.444***

(0.0215)

(0.0540)

(0.0233)

Constant -1.309*** -4.228*** -0.766*** -1.080** -0.708*** -4.025***

(0.176) (0.226) (0.137) (0.400) (0.0712) (0.186)

Number of observations (country years) 18320 11913 7696 4643 10624 7270

R2 0.310 0.347 0.183 0.140 0.227 0.323

adj. R2 0.294 0.327 0.154 0.104 0.209 0.302

Note: Standard errors in parentheses. Year dummies and fixed country effects included in all models. * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p <

0.001

Table 3. Legislative constraints, competitive elections and bureaucratic quality

(1) (2) (3)

The whole period 1821–1945 1946–2005

Legislative constraints t-1 1.271*** 1.126*** 1.386***

(0.0511) (0.0876) (0.0620)

Competitive electionst-1 -0.0487 -0.00413 0.305***

(0.0531) (0.103) (0.0588)

Legislative constraints t-1 * Competitive electionst-1 0.881*** 0.653*** 0.406***

(0.0802) (0.147) (0.0981)

Log (economic development)t-1 0.407*** -0.0248 0.437***

(0.0212) (0.0522) (0.0230)

Constant -3.765*** -0.738 -3.895***

(0.227) (0.389) (0.186)

Number of observations (country years) 11636 4410 7226

R2 0.385 0.198 0.356

adj. R2 0.366 0.163 0.336 Note: Standard errors in parentheses. Year dummies and fixed country effects included in all models. * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001

29

Table 4. Suffrage change and bureaucratic quality

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9)

The whole

period

The whole

period 1790–1945 1821–1945 1946–2014 1946–2005

The whole

period 1821–1945 1946–2005

Suffrage %

change

(depreciated) t-1

0.0000214*** 0.0000659*** -0.00000707 0.0000204 0.0000320*** 0.0000578*** 0.0000710*** 0.0000292** 0.0000638***

(0.00000397) (0.00000638) (0.00000692) (0.0000109) (0.00000574) (0.00000928) (0.00000606) (0.0000106) (0.00000845)

Log (economic

development)t-1 0.599*** 0.159** 0.536*** 0.464*** 0.0792 0.470***

(0.0220) (0.0519) (0.0264) (0.0212) (0.0509) (0.0244)

Competitive

electionst-1 0.848*** 0.600*** 0.969***

(0.0231) (0.0398) (0.0267)

Competitive

electionst-1 *

Suffrage %

change

(depreciated) t-1

0.0000341* -0.000317*** 0.0000381**

(0.0000151) (0.0000845) (0.0000143)

Constant -0.871*** -4.783*** -0.654*** -1.541*** 0.00608 -4.014*** -3.917*** -1.138** -3.793***

(0.114) (0.225) (0.0848) (0.383) (0.0625) (0.212) (0.217) (0.376) (0.196)

Number of

observations

(country years)

23501 12500 12315 5192 11186 7308 12191 4927 7264

R2 0.172 0.231 0.098 0.086 0.073 0.127 0.324 0.141 0.287

adj. R2 0.157 0.209 0.074 0.051 0.052 0.099 0.304 0.106 0.265

Note: Standard errors in parentheses. Year dummies and fixed country effects included in all models. * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001

30

Table 5. Legislative constraints on the executive, suffrage change and bureaucratic quality

(1) (2) (3)

The whole

period Prior to 1946 After 1945


(0.0427) (0.0888) (0.0473)

Suffrage % change (depreciated) t-1 0.0000532*** 0.0000829*** 0.0000842***

(0.00000872) (0.0000211) (0.0000106)

Legislative constraints t-1 * Suffrage % change (depreciated) t-1 -0.0000578** -0.000370*** 0.0000307

(0.0000211) (0.0000576) (0.0000204)

Log (economic development)t-1 0.456*** 0.0480 0.445***

(0.0216) (0.0538) (0.0235)

Constant -4.298*** -1.203** -4.121***

(0.226) (0.399) (0.188)

Number of observations (country years) 11904 4643 7261

R2 0.349 0.149 0.331

adj. R2 0.329 0.113 0.310


31

Table 6. Government stability and bureaucratic quality

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9)

The whole

period

The whole

period 1790–1945 1821–1945 1946–2016 1946–2005

The whole

period 1821–1945 1946–2005

Government

stability t-1 -0.00651*** -0.00955*** 0.00206* -0.000325 -0.0149*** -0.0148*** -0.00445*** 0.00212 -0.00727***

(0.000868) (0.00108) (0.000972) (0.00158) (0.00116) (0.00127) (0.00108) (0.00156) (0.00125)

Log (economic

development)t-1 0.597***

0.172**

0.521*** 0.467*** 0.0697 0.483***

(0.0219)

(0.0526)

(0.0260) (0.0212) (0.0521) (0.0240)

Competitive

electionst-1 0.758*** 0.534*** 0.950***

(0.0262) (0.0423) (0.0294)

Government

stability t-1 *

Competitive

electionst-1

0.0211*** 0.00369 0.00245

(0.00379) (0.00781) (0.00378)

Constant -0.888*** -4.649*** -0.670*** -1.641*** 0.0473 -3.800*** -3.854*** -1.089** -3.816***

(0.119) (0.224) (0.0866) (0.387) (0.0625) (0.209) (0.217) (0.382) (0.193)

Number of

observations

(country years)

23398 12428 12260 5157 11138 7271 12119 4892 7227

R2 0.175 0.236 0.096 0.086 0.086 0.143 0.320 0.138 0.288

adj. R2 0.160 0.214 0.072 0.051 0.065 0.116 0.300 0.103 0.265


32

Appendix

Figure 5A: Male suffrage change in interaction with competitive elections (Bilinski)

Figure 6A: Male suffrage change in interaction with legislative constraints (Bilinski)

33

Table 4A: Suffrage and bureaucratic quality with Bilinski data on male suffrage

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9)

The whole

period

The whole

period Prior to 1946 Prior to 1946 After 1945 After 1945

The whole


Suffrage % change (depreciated)

(Biliniski) t-1 -0.00000258 0.00000655** -0.00000543 0.00000557 0.0000166*** 0.0000246*** 0.00000446 0.00000630 0.00000747**

(0.00000203) (0.00000222) (0.00000304) (0.00000335) (0.00000252) (0.00000265) (0.00000238) (0.00000357) (0.00000268)


0.534***

0.0899

0.518*** 0.416*** 0.0450 0.480***

(0.0222)

(0.0517)

(0.0264) (0.0214) (0.0523) (0.0243)

Competitive electionst-1

1.058*** 0.759*** 0.910***

(0.0325) (0.0492) (0.0416)


(Biliniski) t-1*Competitive

electionst-1

-0.0000437*** -0.0000627*** 0.00000892

(0.00000468) (0.00000852) (0.00000567)

Constant -1.085*** -4.236*** -0.646*** -1.001** -0.0340 -3.890*** -3.495*** -0.843* -3.830***

(0.143) (0.228) (0.113) (0.380) (0.0800) (0.212) (0.221) (0.385) (0.196)

Number of observations (country

years) 16053 12224 7114 5014 8939 7210 11998 4804 7194

R2 0.213 0.218 0.107 0.071 0.093 0.139 0.314 0.126 0.287

adj. R2 0.193 0.195 0.075 0.034 0.069 0.112 0.294 0.090 0.265


34

Table 5A: Suffrage, legislative constraints and bureaucratic quality with Bilinski data on male suffrage

(1) (2) (3)

The whole



(0.0540) (0.0893) (0.0639)


(Biliniski) t-1 0.00000929** 0.0000180** -0.00000187

(0.00000340) (0.00000602) (0.00000376)


(Biliniski) t-1* Legislative

constraints t-1

-0.0000311*** -0.0000815*** 0.0000673***

(0.00000698) (0.0000134) (0.00000817)

Log (economic development)t-1 0.389*** -0.0623 0.429***

(0.0217) (0.0536) (0.0235)

Constant -3.756*** -0.425 -3.790***

(0.229) (0.396) (0.189)

Number of observations (country

years) 11569 4449 7120

R2 0.347 0.150 0.336

adj. R2 0.326 0.112 0.315


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