Taming bureaucracy? Policy instruments, trade-offs and cross-country patterns

Since Weber, how elected politicians might control bureaucracy has been a major theme in delegation theory and bureaucratic politics. While there is consensus about the difficulties encountered in achieving this goal, in principle, there is a wide range of policy instruments suitable for the purpose – for example administrative procedure acts, notice and comment procedures, freedom of information, etc. In practice, however, there are economic and political limitations in deploying the full arsenal of control tools. In this paper, we explore the implications of the cost of control by examining cross-country patterns. We identify and categorise a set of control instruments and their rationale by using explanatory typologies. We then measure the presence or absence of different types by drawing on our original dataset of 14 instruments in a sample of 17 European countries. To compress the property space, we use qualitative comparative analysis. We generate super-conditions that are then used as a new data-set to analyse the procedural and substantive dimensions of control. In the conclusions, we reflect on the patterns identified, their implications for controlling bureaucracy in advanced democracies, and how our empirical findings may be used to extent the analysis to outcome conditions, party patronage and clientelism.