Bureaucratic structures, politicization, and bureaucratic behavior

Readings and class materials for Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Readings

  • Christopher A. Cooper, “Encouraging Civil Servants to Be Frank and Fearless: Merit Recruitment and Employee Voice,” Public Administration 96, no. 4 (December 2018): 721–35, https://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12548.

  • Jørgen Grønnegård Christensen and Niels Opstrup, “Bureaucratic Dilemmas: Civil Servants Between Political Responsiveness and Normative Constraints,” Governance 31, no. 3 (July 2018): 481–98, https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12312.

  • Virginia Oliveros and Christian Schuster, “Merit, Tenure, and Bureaucratic Behavior: Evidence From a Conjoint Experiment in the Dominican Republic,” Comparative Political Studies 51, no. 6 (May 2018): 759–92, https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414017710268.

  • Kohei Suzuki and Hyunkang Hur, “Bureaucratic Structures and Organizational Commitment: Findings from a Comparative Study of 20 European Countries,” Public Management Review 22, no. 6 (June 2020): 877–907, https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2019.1619813.

Article discussion reminder

How to discuss an article in a seminar

  • Who wrote the article? What’s their background?
  • General summary of the article
  • Strengths
  • Weaknesses
  • How does it connect to other readings?
  • How does it connect to the broader course themes?
  • How does it connect to current events?
  • What does it add to our Global Bureaucracy Toolkit?

Plan for the day

  • Crash course in quantitative methods (i.e. how to draw lines through points)

  • Bureaucratic structures, politicization, and bureaucratic behavior

    • Cooper, “Encouraging Civil Servants to Be Frank and Fearless.”
    • Christensen and Opstrup, “Bureaucratic Dilemmas.”
    • Oliveros and Schuster, “Merit, Tenure, and Bureaucratic Behavior.”
    • Suzuki and Hur, “Bureaucratic Structures and Organizational Commitment.”