The Organization of Political Parties and the Politics of Bureaucratic Reform

Bureaucratic reform is a priority of
donor organizations, including the World Bank, but is
notoriously difficult to implement. In many countries,
politicians have little interest in the basic financial and
personnel management systems that are essential to political
oversight of bureaucratic performance. To explain this, this
paper presents a new perspective on the political economy of
bureaucracy. Politicians in some countries belong to parties
that are organized to allow party members to act
collectively to limit leader shirking. This is particularly
the case with programmatic parties. Such politicians have
stronger incentives to pursue public policies that require a
well-functioning public administration. Novel evidence
offers robust support for this argument. From a sample of
439 World Bank public sector reform loans in 109 countries,
the paper finds that public sector reforms are more likely
to succeed in countries with programmatic political parties.