Party Government, Patronage, and the Regulatory State

During the past decades, the public sector has undergone a massive transformation in most advanced industrial democracies. Outsourcing, privatization, and a re-orientation towards market principles have significantly reshaped the structure of the state apparatus. One of the most severe implications of this process is that elected politicians increasingly struggle to control public policy outcomes. The link between the preferences of politicians and the actions of bureaucrats becomes weaker, thus potentially undermining the foundations of responsive party government. This research proposal outlines a research framework to examine one of the possible ways in which politicians may counter their loss of formal influence. It draws on theories of bureaucratic delegation to hypothesize that politicians have strong incentives to strategically employ patronage appointments in order to (informally) exert control over policy in those parts of the public sector that have formally been removed from their sphere of influence. The empirical focus is on appointments to the management of 94 regulatory agencies in 17 Western European countries. The contribution that this research proposal makes is twofold. On a theoretical level, it integrates the European- centered research on party government and party patronage with the largely Americanist literature on bureaucratic delegation. More specifically, it draws on the ally principle (the notion that principals give more discretion to agents with preferences similar to their own) to argue that patronage appointments to top-level positions in regulatory agencies are more likely the higher an agency`s degree of independence. The core theoretical argument thus strengthens one of the most important themes in current research on party patronage: the growing importance of control over reward motivations for political appointments. The empirical strategy envisages the collection of biographical information on several hundred appointees to the management boards of 94 regulatory agencies in Western Europe since 2000. Official agency reports and websites, government press releases, biographical encyclopedias, media databases, and other online sources will be used to determine the party affiliations of these individuals based on their prior careers. Existing measures of agency independence will be used as the key explanatory variables in the statistical analysis. In order to demonstrate the plausibility of this research design, the proposal presents preliminary data on a subset of all appointees, suggesting (1) that the data collection strategy is feasible and (2) that the hypothesized relationship is, in fact, conceivable. The goal of this proposal is to conduct this research project during a 15-months stay at Leiden University (Netherlands) and a 9-months return phase at the University of Vienna (Austria) that will also be used to plan further research on a substantively related question.

The central motivation for the project Party Government, Patronage, and the Regulatory State is the observation that governments and states have during the past decades retreated from many sectors of the economy through processes of privatization and liberalization.In order to organize these newly liberalized markets, states have created regulatory agencies that are placed outside the traditional bureaucracy and thus often enjoy high formal independence. Independent regulatory agencies have indeed become the standard organizational model in the public sector, from utilities and competition, finance and the environment to education and food safety. Yet while there are good arguments for the creation of such agencies (e.g. higher credibility, greater technical expertise), this trend clearly comes at the expense of governments capacity to control policy and produce their preferred outcomes.The central hypothesis of this project is therefore that elected politicians will attempt to compensate this loss of formal influence by appointing party-affiliated candidates to lead positions in those independent regulatory agencies. The higher the level of formal independence, the greater the probability of partisan appointments.To test this proposition about 700 appointments made to top-level jobs at around 100 regulatory agencies in 16 European countries were examined. Through extensive archival research biographical information on the appointees was collected, which was then examined for evidence of ties to a political party (e.g. having served in a political office, working on a ministers staff, or standing as a party candidate in an election).The results suggest that there is a substantial link between the formal independence of an agency and the probability of partisans being appointed to high-level positions. However, it is notable that formal independence is correlated not only with higher odds of government-affiliated appointments but also opposition-affiliated nominations. Further analysis shows that, once appointed, opposition-affiliated individuals are protected from early removal by higher levels of formal agency independence.These findings suggest that political actors respond strategically to the challenges posed by the fragmentation of the public sector and the formal loss of governing capacity by using their political and party networks to retain influence in policy sectors removed from their direct control.