Carl Dahlström

The Merit of Meritocratization: Politics, Bureaucracy, and the Institutional Deterrents of Corruption

Comparative studies of corruption focus on the selection and incentives of policymakers. With few exceptions, actors who are in charge of implementing policies have been neglected. This article analyzes an original data set on the bureaucratic features and its effects on corruption in fifty-two countries. Two empirical findings challenge the conventional wisdom in literature. First, certain bureaucratic factors, particularly meritocratic recruitment, reduce corruption, even when controlling for a large set of alternative explanations. Second, the analysis shows that other allegedly relevant bureaucratic factors, such as public employees’ competitive salaries, career stability, or internal promotion, do not have a significant impact.

The immigration issue and anti-immigrant party success in Sweden 1970-2006 A deviant case analysis

Electoral success of anti-immigrant parties varies considerably across Western Europe. This article contributes to research on this important matter by analysing which current theories that accounts for the failure of anti-immigrant parties in one national context, Sweden. It draws on an unusually rich set of data to trace important processes from the 1970s up to 2006. It shows that the failure of anti-immigrant parties is not explained by low citizen demand for anti-immigrant policies. The article does however find clear support for party strategy theories. More specifically, in accordance with important strands of this literature, it is found that a dismissive issue strategy has been effective in reducing support for anti-immigrant parties. There is also support for the expectation that established parties to the right are more inclined to pursue anti-immigrant policies than parties to the left.

Careers, Connections, and Corruption Risks: Investigating the Impact of Bureaucratic Meritocracy on Public Procurement Processes

Why do officials in some countries favor entrenched contractors, while others assign public contracts more impartially? This article emphasizes the important interplay between politics and bureaucracy. It suggests that corruption risks are lower when bureaucrats’ careers do not depend on political connections but on their peers. We test this hypothesis with a novel measure of career incentives in the public sector—using a survey of more than 18,000 public sector employees in 212 European regions—and a new objective corruption risk measure including over 1.4 million procurement contracts. Both show a remarkable subnational variation across Europe. The study finds that corruption risks are indeed significantly lower where bureaucrats’ career incentives exclusively follow professional criteria. In substantial terms, moving EU regions so that bureaucrats’ merit and effort would matter as much as in, for example, Baden-Wüttemberg (90th percentile) could lead to a 13–20 billion Euro savings per year.

Corruption, Bureaucratic Failure and Social Policy Priorities:

This article argues that bureaucratic capacity – the competence and reliability of the national bureaucracy – matters to the allocation of public spending among welfare state programmes since it is difficult for governments to justify high levels of spending on programmes that require bureaucrats to make case-by-case decisions, on a discretionary basis, if the bureaucracy is incompetent, corrupt or both. We expect bureaucratic capacity to have a positive effect on programmes that involve bureaucratic discretion, but weak or no effects on programmes that are more straightforward to implement. In order to test these hypotheses, we analyse public spending on active labour market programmes (which involve a lot of discretion) and parental leave benefits (which involve less discretion). Relying on data for twenty advanced democracies from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, we find that high bureaucratic capacity does have a positive effect on active labour market policy spending, but not on parental leave benefits.

The Political Dynamics of Bureaucratic Turnover

This Research Note explores the political dynamics of bureaucratic turnover. It argues that changes in a government’s policy objectives can shift both political screening strategies and bureaucratic selection strategies, which produces turnover of agency personnel. To buttress this conjecture, it analyzes a unique dataset tracing the careers of all agency heads in the Swedish executive bureaucracy between 1960 and 2014. It shows that, despite serving on fixed terms and with constitutionally protected decision-making powers, Swedish agency heads are considerably more likely to leave their posts following partisan shifts in government. The note concludes that, even in institutional systems seemingly designed to insulate bureaucratic expertise from political control, partisan politics can shape the composition of agency personnel.

Rhetorical Objectives and Program Efficiency in Swedish Policy about Immigrants

This paper explains differences in the policy objectives and policy programs of Swedish immigrant policy as a consequence of the fact that policy objectives tend to be evaluated in public political debates whereas policy programs are evaluated through administrative reviews within government. Given contrasting contexts, different questions are important for policy legitimacy. The public debate focuses on questions of moral values, while the audit within government deals with issues of efficiency. Policy objectives and policy programs therefore respond differently to criticisms that separate rhetoric and practice. As a result, Swedish immigrant policy rhetoric and practice were from the outset only loosely joined and have failed to converge over time.

Policy Effects of Anti-Immigrant Party Representation on Aid to Vulnerable European Union/European Economic Area Citizens:

While anti-immigrant parties have been electorally successful in European parliaments, it is still unclear whether they have influenced policies. This article contributes by investigating the anti-immigrant party policy impact on a previously unexplored welfare policy area, that concerning the mobility of vulnerable European Union/European Economic Area citizens. In Sweden, the aid offered to these citizens varies a great deal in different municipalities. Furthermore, the largest anti-immigrant party (Sweden Democrats) has, unlike the mainstream political parties, preferences for a strict policy in line with so-called welfare chauvinism. Taking advantage of this subnational variation, our data give us a unique opportunity to investigate whether anti-immigrant party representation impacts welfare policy outcomes. The empirical findings show a negative correlation between Sweden Democrats’ representation and the aid offered and indicates that municipalities where Sweden Democrats holds a pivotal position offer less aid to vulnerable European Union/European Economic Area citizens. The hypothesis that these effects are conditional upon the ideology of the ruling coalition is, however, not supported.

Democratic and Professional Accountability

Democratic accountability is often seen as an essential institutional underpinning for the prosperity of nations. Democracies with well-established mechanisms of electoral accountability provide more secure property rights (Clague et al., 1997), implement policies with a higher economic rate of return (Isham et al., 1997) and perform better in areas such as rule of law, bureaucratic quality and school enrolment, as well as provide minimal levels of corruption (Keefer, 2007). These dividends of democracy probably help us understand why it is also claimed that “democracy does cause growth” (Acemoglu et al., 2014, p. 1).

Mayors and Corruption in Spain: Same Rules, Different Outcomes

ABSTRACT In Spain, there has been widespread corruption in the area of public procurement at the local level, although corrupt practices have not affected all municipalities to the same extent. By comparing two municipalities with ‘clean’ and ‘rotten’ corruption records, this article shows that relatively independent bureaucrats—so-called trustees—can act as a check to prevent political moral hazard. Yet, in order to transform their de jure supervisory powers into de facto powers, the trustees must be supported by merit-based human resources policy, rules and standard operating procedures, transparency and independent watchdogs.

How Institutions Constrain Elites from Destructive Behavior

After decades of research on corruption and other aspects of government quality, it is clear that the top echelon of a society is of fundamental importance. To a large extent, elite politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen hold the fortunes of their societies in their hands, not only because of their direct influence on politics, administration and economy but also since their behavior indirectly signals the norms of that society. By implication, where elites behave in a self-serving manner there is no reason to believe that the rest of the population will be any better, while if elite behavior honors and adheres to the institutional framework there may ensue positive spirals toward higher quality of government (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012; Fukuyama 2011, 2014; North et al. 2009; Rothstein 2011).