Rediscovering Bureaucracy: Bureaucratic Professionalism, Impartiality, and Innovation

Abstract

This study examines an empirical link between bureaucratic structures and country-level innovation outputs. Although there has been growing scholarly attention to public sector innovation, we still have a limited understanding of the relationship between the structures of public bureaucracies and country-level innovation. This paper emphasizes the importance of bureaucratic structure in ex-plaining cross-national variations in country-level innovation outputs. It hypothesizes that countries where bureaucrats’ careers are determined by merit-based recruitment rather than political appoin-tees tend to record higher innovation outputs, controlling for other confounding factors. Countries with higher levels of impartiality of bureaucracies in decision-making also tend to have higher inno-vation outputs. Utilizing cross-national data from the Quality of Government Institute Expert Sur-vey and Global Innovation Index, findings show that levels of innovation outputs are significantly higher in countries that have higher levels of professional and impartial bureaucracies. The results suggest the importance of administrative designs to promote innovative activities. Key Words Innovation; Weberian bureaucracy; Bureaucratic structure; Professionalism; Impartiality; Comparative public administration