Bureaucratic Resistance and Policy Inefficiency
Kun Heo & Elisa Wirsching
Abstract
Poor public service provision creates an electoral vulnerability for incumbent politicians. Under what conditions can bureaucrats exploit this to avoid reforms they dislike? We develop a model of electoral politics in which a politician must decide whether to enact a reform of uncertain value, and a voter evaluates the incumbent’s reform based on post-reform government service quality, which anti-reform bureaucrats can undermine. Bureaucratic resistance for political leverage is most likely to occur when voters are torn between the reform and the status quo. Resistance lowers the informational value of government service for voters and can lead to policy distortions and accountability loss. When reform is moderately popular, resistance leads to policy inefficiency by preventing beneficial reforms due to electoral risks and inducing ineffective reforms by offering bureaucrats as scapegoats. Our model identifies a distinct mechanism of bureaucratic power and its implications for policy and accountability.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.