Endogenous Bureaucracy

Abstract

By manipulating administrative institutions, political leaders can indirectly control the policy preferences that are carried out and enforced within a polity. In this paper, I suggest that precisely for this reason, partisan conflict over public policies often generates partisan conflict over institutional arrangements. To assess the empirical merits of this proposition, I analyze a unique dataset tracing the survival times of all administrative agencies enacted within the executive administration of Sweden between 1960 and 2011. I find that agencies are significantly more likely to be terminated when accountable to an ideological opponent of the agency designer than when accountable to an ideological ally of the agency designer. In line with reigning theories of delegation, the conclusion is that partisan politics colors not only the substantive contents of public policies, but also the organization of the administrative state.