Bending Bureaucracy from Within

Partisan capture—when a political party or faction influences a public agency’s staffing, policy outputs, or resource allocation—poses critical challenges to democratic accountability from within the administrative system. This study opens the black box of partisan capture and investigates how partisan interests co-opt bureaucratic officials’ motivations and lead to policy distortions or compromised public service. It advances the study of bureaucratic politics in three ways: 1. Theoretically, it integrates Downs’s typology with capture scholarship, highlighting internal dispositions as a critical factor in partisan influence. 2. Methodologically, it employs ABMs to rigorously render how Down’s bureaucratic types respond to partisan pressures, and how these responses modify public agencies’ functioning. 3. Empirical: it demonstrates Italy as a compelling case, generating insights for broader debates on public agency independence, legal design, and democratic governance.