Publications

Frontline workers who are confronted with crises need enormous resilience and the ability to deal with stress from crisis‐related increases in demands and risks. Simultaneously, populist governments with an illiberal agenda may undermine the work of street‐level bureaucracies for political reasons. Little is known about how deconstruction of the administrative state by populist government—through lacking government support when it is needed the most—affects frontline work. Thus, this article asks: how does lacking support by a populist government affect frontline workers' self‐efficacy when they face a crisis? Based on unique data from an online survey of 3229 Brazilian frontline workers during the early COVID‐19 pandemic, when the Bolsonaro government denied the existence of the pandemic, we test the relationship between government support, demands, and resources on frontline workers' perceived self‐efficacy. Results show that lacking government support from the federal and local government are negatively associated with frontline workers' self‐efficacy. At the same time, resources and managerial support exhibit positive associations—but they cannot always compensate for a lack of government assistance.

Could imperial rule affect state institutions at the national, regional, and local level differently? No systematic theory to answer this question exists, which is surprising given the importance that is attributed to foreign rule for political-administrative organization around the world. The effectiveness of imperial rule may differ along the administrative hierarchy because empires are often subject to financial constraints, limits on organizational capabilities, and informational asymmetries. Therefore, a commonly used approach—aggregation at the national level—may yield erroneous findings about colonial legacies by ignoring vital nuances. To address this gap, I develop a novel theory of imperial pervasiveness and test it through a number of statistical analyses. Leveraging an original dataset of citizen perceptions of state institutions in Romania, this study reveals vastly different long-term effects of historical Habsburg rule at the regional and local levels. The results indicate that we need to rethink the study of colonial origins.

What explains the emergence and persistence of institutions aimed at preventing any ruling group from using the state apparatus to advance particularistic interests? To answer this recurring question, a burgeoning literature examines the establishment of power-sharing institutions in societies divided by ethnic or religious cleavages. Going beyond existing scholarly work focused on these specific settings, we argue that political power-sharing institutions can also be the result of common disputes within the economic elite. We propose that these institutions are likely to emerge and persist when competition between elite factions with dissimilar economic interests is balanced. To address the possibility of endogeneity between elite configurations and public institutions, we leverage natural resource diversity as an instrument for elite configurations. We show that, where geological resources are more diverse, competition between similarly powerful economic groups is more likely to emerge, leading ultimately to the establishment of power-sharing mechanisms that allow elite groups to protect their diverging economic interests.

For centuries, European history was characterized by a fundamental asymmetry. While interpolity relations on the continent were often relatively balanced — without any dominant power being able to permanently establish a hierarchical relationship to the other major powers — the relations between European states and polities in other world regions were generally hierarchical and exploitative, as manifested in colonialism and imperialism. How can we explain this difference? I argue that the symmetrical character of relationships among major European powers, particularly in the form of sustained and intense military and economic competition, was partly constitutive of the hierarchical relationships between those same powers and other parts of the world. Specifically, three mechanisms connect sustained rivalries to imperialism: (1) political elites' desire to improve their relative status/prestige through territorial gains, (2) pressure from public budget deficits that incentivized colonial exploitation, and (3) the creation of powerful interest groups in the form of navies and armies that favored imperialism. Moreover, when territorial conflict over colonies escalated, imperial expansion could ultimately feed back into interpolity competition in Europe. I demonstrate these dynamics through systematic analyses of the rivalries between England and France (1689–1815) and between Imperial Germany and Great Britain (1871/1897–1918).

Do pandemics have lasting consequences for political behavior? The authors address this question by examining the consequences of the deadliest pandemic of the last millennium: the Black Death (1347–1351). They claim that pandemics can influence politics in the long run if the loss of life is high enough to increase the price of labor relative to other factors of production. When this occurs, labor-repressive regimes, such as serfdom, become untenable, which ultimately leads to the development of proto-democratic institutions and associated political cultures that shape modalities of political engagement for generations. The authors test their theory by tracing the consequences of the Black Death in German-speaking Central Europe. They find that areas hit hardest by that pandemic were more likely to adopt inclusive political institutions and equitable land ownership patterns, to exhibit electoral behavior indicating independence from landed elite influence during the transition to mass politics, and to have significantly lower vote shares for Hitler’s National Socialist Party in the Weimar Republic’s fateful 1930 and July 1932 elections.

Does EU funding improve local state capacity? We focus on two specific types of state capacity, namely (a) the ability to provide information to third parties and (b) to discriminate between different kinds of inquiries. Because the EU’s structural funds are distributed through a competitive mechanism and incentivize expansions in administrative personnel, our theory predicts that high levels of EU funding bring about a higher bureaucratic capacity equilibrium. Empirically, we analyze the effect of structural funds on local government capacity in the largest recipient country: post-communist Poland. Through a randomized survey with more than 2400 municipal administrations, we find that administrations that have benefited more from EU funding, have developed higher levels of discrimination capacity. Yet we find no evidence for higher information provision capacity.

Significant variation in the institutions and efficiency of public bureaucracies across countries and regions are observed. These differences could be partially responsible for divergence in the effectiveness of policy implementation, corruption levels, and economic development. Do imperial legacies contribute to the observed variation in the organization of public administrations? Historical foreign rule and colonization have been shown to have lasting effects on legal systems, political institutions, and trade in former controlled territories. Imperial legacies could also explain variations in the performance of public administrations. The author uses the case of Poland to investigate the long-term effects of foreign rule on bureaucratic systems. Historically, Poland was split between three imperial powers with very different public administrations: Prussia, Austria, and Russia. Statistical analyses of original data collected through a survey of more than 650 Polish public administrations suggest that some present-day differences in the organization and efficiency of bureaucracies are due to imperial legacies.

dc.title:

dc.contributor.author: Beck, Andrea; Vogler, Jan P.