Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: The Delegation of Bureaucratic Policymaking Authority in Latin America

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

How do politicians in Latin America achieve successful policy outcomes with oftentimes bloated and inefficient bureaucracies? Why do some policies, like Brazil's conditional cash-transfer program Bolsa Familia, achieve success while similar programs in the same places falter? Political Science has rigorously studied the ways in which laws are made, but has focused far less on how they are carried out, especially in the developing world. This is a salient topic inside and outside of academia. As recently democratized countries overcome political and economic instability, policymakers and citizens alike are increasingly concerned with the quality of public policy. Constructing effective policy is impossible, however, without first understanding the gap between how policy is supposedly implemented, and how it is actually implemented. This project seeks to address this lacuna through use of a novel theory, original data on presidential delegation and administrative capacity, and an in-depth examination of policy success in various Latin American countries. Specifically, the project examines policy delegation decisions and policy success across 18 Latin American democracies to understand how governments increase the odds of success for their favored policies. It argues that politicians in low capacity environments often employ "bureaucratic circumvention" for politically important legislation, bypassing existing government agencies in favor of creating new agencies, delegating policies to the military, or outsourcing. These circumventing agents possess higher capacity or can be more easily managed, and thus increase the chances of successful policy implementation. The project can be divided into three parts: 1) development of a formal model of bureaucratic circumvention applicable to a wide range of countries; 2) empirical tests of the determinants of circumvention with an original database of over 50,000 executive decrees from Latin America; and 3) controlled comparisons of twelve policies in Brazil, Venezuela, and Ecuador to test the effect of delegation strategy on policy success. The results should offer evidence as to how politicians can improve the provision of public services across political systems, even when faced with poorly performing bureaucracies. Beyond the theoretical and analytical contributions of this research, two practical elements stand out: 1) the size and detail of the decree database, and 2) the valuable research experience gained by four undergraduate assistants. The database--which will include over 50,000 Latin American executive decrees, including myriad characteristics of each policy--will be an instrumental resource for other scholars of comparative politics, public administration, and public policy. These data will be publicly available upon completion of the project via the Dataverse Network Project. Additionally, the project offers four undergraduate research assistants the opportunity to gain experience in collecting data, reading a codebook and coding those data, and then systematizing and interpreting the aggregated data. In sum, this project seeks to make theoretical and empirical contributions to the understanding of comparative executive and bureaucratic politics, while offering learning opportunities for undergraduate students and providing valuable data for other scholars.