The Broken Link: How Weak Political Oversight of Bureaucrats Undermines Service Delivery and Electoral Accountability

Incumbents in low- and middle-income countries around the world are reelected despite poor service delivery. Why? This book project combines data from a survey of experts on local governance in 80 low- and middle-income countries, a field experiment conducted in collaboration with a government partner, survey experiments, qualitative interviews, and in-depth case studies to show that one important yet to date understudied reason for this pattern is weak accountability links within governments: between politicians and bureaucrats.

“The difference between flying a plane and running a country is that on a plane when you press a button, something happens,” Rajiv Gandhi, former Prime Minister of India, allegedly once said in exasperation. Elected representatives rely on the bureaucracy to get anything done. We can think of governance as a nested principal-agent problem, where voters monitor politicians, and politicians in turn monitor bureaucrats. Bureaucrats then provide services to voters, who on this basis decide whether to reelect politicians. We have a rich literature on the first part of this nested principal-agent problem, between voters and politicians. But the second part – politicians’ control over their bureaucracies – is often simply assumed in theories of accountability. It is critically important for translating policy decisions by elected politicians into implemented policies. Without political oversight of the bureaucracy, it is not clear how voter preferences would translate into realized policy. Yet in reality, these oversight relationships are complex and often tenuous. Already Max Weber noted that “political masters” often find themselves in the role of “dilettantes” who have a hard time controlling bureaucratic “experts”. Or, as a Ugandan councilor put it: bureaucrats “keep telling us it’s above us and that we should do things as per our level.” This creates a trade-off. On the one hand, for electoral accountability to function, politicians – the elected representatives of the people – must exert some control over, and provide oversight of, the government apparatus. This is a basic principle of democratic delegation. On the other hand, the literature on pandering, clientelism, and patronage suggests that some degree of bureaucratic insulation – for example, through a professional civil service – is conducive to government performance. Indeed, especially in low- and middle-income countries, local politicians are often perceived as corrupt and as part of the problem rather than the solution. This book manuscript complicates that view. Finding the right balance between these two forces is nontrivial.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, I argue that in many places in the Global South, the bureaucracy is too insulated from political oversight, especially at the local level: the link between politicians and bureaucrats is weakened or broken. Such limited political oversight can then hinder, first, service provision and, second, electoral accountability. First, when elected representatives have too little influence over the actions of the bureaucracy and thus the services it provides, an important oversight mechanism is hampered, and service quality and targeting can suffer. Second, limited political oversight can undermine voters’ ability to hold their elected officials to account. Voters face a difficult inference problem: determining whether a politician acts in their best interest. When the quality of public services is only a noisy indicator of incumbent performance because politicians have little or no control over the bureaucracy, it becomes very difficult to choose and hold politicians accountable on programmatic grounds. In the limiting case, it may even be rational for voters not to fault incumbents for inadequate services and instead to base their votes on, for example, ethnic or clientelistic considerations.

The logic laid out here has implications not just for scholars of accountability, but also for policymakers and foreign donors, who seek to improve (or at least not undermine) local governance. Efforts to strengthen state capacity – such as new buildings, cars, equipment, and training; all popular strategies in the foreign aid tool kit – often target local bureaucrats, thus shifting the relative power balance in their favor. In places where the bureaucracy is already too insulated from local political oversight, this can further undermine electoral accountability and the quality-of-service delivery.