Holders of the purse strings: Political control and bureaucratic capacity

Delegation processes are crucial in the policy process of contemporary democracies. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the last chain of delegation – from ministers to civil servants, as it has been recognized that shaping, developing and maintaining policies are increasingly bureaucratic activities, not least due to the gap that exists between policy formulation and implementation. Despite the impressive research on delegation and policy-making processes, many questions remain unanswered. First, theoretical and empirical tests on delegation processes are dominated by analysis of politicians’ strategies to control the bureaucracy. Rarely the perception of bureaucrats on their leeway in managing organizations and implementing public policies has been questioned. Second, delegation studies have devoted little empirical attention to the extent to which the career patterns of senior civil servants are an explanatory variable of bureaucratic quality and bureaucratic autonomy. This article seeks to address these questions. The study of bureaucratic capacity is considered essential for understanding delegation processes. However, the ability of the bureaucracy to ensure the implementation of politicians’ policy preferences and to provide policy advice to decision-makers is no longer an unquestioned feature of government machinery. Recognizing the perils of delegation processes, ministers have reinvented strategies to mitigate principal-agent problems, and research on the enactment of such strategies has grown like Topsy. While both ex-ante or ex-post instruments can reinforce political control over the bureaucratic machinery, they do not necessarily explain how much policy-making authority is delegated to senior civil servants and the extent to which bureaucrats' autonomy is dependent upon bureaucratic capacity. This article seeks to explore whether bureaucratic capacity explains top civil servants’ perceptions of autonomy in management and policy-making processes. It seeks to do so by building a bureaucratic capacity index, which not only reflects top civil servants’ educational background, but also their individual career paths and measures of politicization. Then, we seek to understand the extent to which this bureaucratic capacity index is an explanatory variable of how much leeway ministers grant to top civil servants. Empirically, this article is based on the results of the COCOPS survey of senior public executives applied in eight countries with different administrative traditions.