What do good governments actually do?: An analysis using European procurement data

Abstract

This article looks at what good and bad governments do when performing one of their most central functions, namely public procurement. Some 1.5 million public contracts from across Europe are analyzed through statistical models that compare contracting patterns between good- and poor-governance regions. At the most basic level, the results can be interpreted as a rejection of a conventional view of the relation between governance and institutional choices and outcomes. It isnotthe case that poorly governed jurisdictions allow more discretion to public officials, that they impose more limits on access to markets, or that they clearly feature more competition, and in fact the opposite often holds. Going beyond this negative finding, the article argues that an alternative view of institutional choice and its connection with governance, in which some discretion and flexibility is desirable, can provide a better explanation of observed patterns, and can have important implications for institutional design.

Another One Bites the Dust: Recurrent Procurement Contracts in the Czech Republic

“…Another negative motive may be corrupt behavior, which is characteristic for the public sector; Fazekas & Toth, 2018; Ochrana & Stehlik, 2015; Owusu & Chan, 2019; Popa, 2018; Stehlík, 2018; Verhelst, 2018).…”

Disarmed principals: institutional resilience and the non-enforcement of delegation

“…We distinguish between two sets of drivers of non-enforcement that political science scholars have identified. Principals may be incapable of enforcing delegation contracts, for example, due to imperfect information about agents as well as collective action problems (Miller, 2005;de Bièvre et al, 2013;Popa, 2018). Principals may also be unwilling to enforce delegation contracts because, for instance, sanctions would erode the agent's competence to accomplish the delegated task (Abbott et al, 2019;Becker, 2019).…”

“…We demonstrate the plausibility of our argument by tracing the political process that led to the non-enforcement of the rules governing the development and production of a military transport aircraft, the A400M program. Arms procurement is one of the governments' core tasks which they regularly contract out to private companies (Popa, 2018) and thus belongs to the so-called commanding heights of the economy (e.g. Weiss, 2020).…”