Cooking the books: Bureaucratic politicization and policy knowledge

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Borang, Frida; Cornell, Agnes; Grimes, Marcia; Schuster, Christian
• 署名单位: University of Gothenburg; Aarhus University; University of London; University College London
• 刊物名称: GOVERNANCE-AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF POLICY ADMINISTRATION AND INSTITUTIONS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0952-1895
• DOI: 10.1111/gove.12283
• 发表日期: 2018
• 关键词: CIVIL-SERVICE; political governance; state; capacity; ECONOMY; systems; REFORM

摘要

Accurate knowledge about societal conditions and public policies is an important public good in any polity, yet governments across the world differ dramatically in the extent to which they collect and publish such knowledge. This article develops and tests the argument that this variation to some extent can be traced to the degree of bureaucratic politicization in a polity. A politicized bureaucracy offers politicians greater opportunities to demand from bureaucratsand raises incentives for bureaucrats to supplypublic policy knowledge that is strategically biased or suppressed in a manner that benefits incumbents reputationally. Due to electoral competition, we suggest that the link between bureaucratic politicization and politicized policy knowledge will be stronger in democracies than in autocracies. A case analysis of Argentina's statistical agency lends credence to the underlying causal mechanism. Time-series cross-sectional analyses confirm the broader validity of the expectations and show that the relationship is present only in democracies.