I use a formal model to analyze the effect of civil service protections on bureaucratic performance. In a two-period model, a public manager observes a bureaucrat's actions for a period and decides whether to retain or attempt to remove the bureaucrat. Bureaucrats vary in terms of their intrinsic motivation and choose between careers in government or the private sector. I show that bureaucratic performance is greater in any separating equilibrium in which motivated bureaucrats choose government than in all equilibria in which they do not. Stronger civil service protections reduce the amount of effort that motivated bureaucrats must exert to distinguish themselves from their unmotivated peers in order to ensure retention. This strengthens incentives for motivated bureaucrats to choose careers in government.Stronger civil service protections, however, also reduce the ability of public managers to remove unmotivated bureaucrats. These competing effects yield a non-monotonic and discontinuous relationship between civil service protections and bureaucratic performance. I use the model to analyze recent reforms to U.S. state and federal personnel management that have significantly rolled back traditional job protections.
An influential theoretical literature studies a single executive's electoral incentives to knowingly pursue bad policies because they are popular. I develop a model to study pandering in a legislative setting where multiple politicians, each accountable to their own constituency, are responsible for policymaking. Individual politicians receive private information about the best policy for achieving outcomes that citizens value. Politicians then privately deliberate to select a policy. Under certain conditions, politicians face electoral incentives to misrepresent their private evidence during deliberation in order to convince their colleagues to adopt a popular policy. I find that these perverse incentives become weaker as the number of politicians involved in policymaking increases. In larger groups, politicians share more responsibility for their policy choices. Individual politicians therefore have less to gain electorally from pandering. This result suggests that in addition to giving politicians more information about which policies are in citizens' best interest, larger groups provide stronger incentives for politicians to use this information when policymaking is non-transparent.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine found itself in possession of the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal. By 1994, Ukraine had surrendered its entire nuclear arsenal to its historical enemy, Russia. This phenomenon has largely escaped scrutiny. At a time in world history when the question of nuclear proliferation and disarmament has again come to the forefront of international politics, it is important to reexamine the case of Ukrainian disarmament in which standard paradigms of international relations fail to satisfactorily explain historical events. Only by applying the underutilized individual level of analysis can Ukrainian disarmament be clearly understood.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.