Bureaucracy

This paper asks whether patrimonial hiring in colonial contexts can originate with local bureaucrats rather than political principals. Using newly digitized personnel records from six decades of British rule in Ghana, the authors examine patterns of hiring for African staff and assess whether meritocratic or patrimonial rules prevailed. The study contributes to debates about early state-building by highlighting bureaucrats’ potential agency in shaping personnel choices, especially where political leaders were socially distant from governed communities.

What explains why some Amazon municipalities lose more forest than others? This study shows that local electoral competition causally increases deforestation — especially where private commercial actors stand to profit from forest clearing — and it identifies a specific political strategy behind that outcome.

Personnel records were combined with vital-statistics data spanning 1910–1925 to measure mortality outcomes across 1,271 Indian towns during the 1918 influenza pandemic.

Migrants in rapidly urbanizing developing-country cities vote far less than local-born residents. Three potential explanations were tested: strong socioeconomic ties to origin regions, administrative hurdles to enrollment that hit newcomers harder, and political ostracism by antimigrant elites.

New data on 16 former British and French African colonies' cabinets (1960-2010) reveals systematic regional political inequality. Historical Dataset Analysis Analyzed cabinet composition across these countries Key Findings Regional disparities stem from colonial administrators' education policies, specifically favoring literacy-based recruitment practices Bureaucratic Structures & Elite Recruitment This targeted approach influenced who became post-colonial ministers and how power was distributed Geospatial Data Integration Combined historical records with geospatial information to isolate the role of colonial-era education from broader development factors Post-Colonial Political Economy Implications The study demonstrates a specific pathway through which colonial legacies impact contemporary Africa: by establishing unequal access points for future governance. This nuanced understanding extends beyond prior research on general distributive politics.

This letter asks whether a "state-first" approach—where a strong state promotes democratic development—holds up when the concept of state strength is disaggregated. Using new Varieties of Democracy data covering 1789–2015, the authors specify eight versions of the state-first argument and test them across the modern democratic era. Their central contribution is to separate bureaucratic quality from broader measures of state capacity and to evaluate their distinct associations with democratic survival and deepening.

New scholarship argues for recentering interest groups in American politics research. This paper explores their influence through bureaucratic boards governing public pensions, which have significant financial consequences for states, public workers, and taxpayers.

Economic reforms aimed at reducing state roles vary widely across regions. This study examines privatization effectiveness in postcommunist Russia, focusing on regional variation in public administration size. Using a multilevel design that controls for pre-reform selection, we analyze the relationship between state bureaucracy and firm productivity post-privatization.