Bureaucrats and Policies in Equilibrium Administrations

We develop a model of policy making with an endogenous bureaucracy. Parties choose platforms and ideologically differentiated citizens decide whether to enter the public sector, anticipating the platforms that they may be asked to implement. Bureaucrats prefer to work on policies closer to their ideal, and voters judge the performance of an administration taking both politicians’ and bureaucrats’ actions into account. The model provides an equilibrium framework to study the emergence of partisan or neutral bureaucracies and their consequences for government performance. It shows how bureaucratic partisanship can develop in modern civil service systems; why political polarization and bureaucratic partisanship reinforce each other; why bureaucratic neutrality is associated with competitive elections; and why partisanship lowers government efficiency and increases output fluctuations. Our results yield a number of policy implications regarding political appointments, public sector wages, seniority benefits, and recruiting measures that raise the intrinsic motivation of bureaucrats.