Partisan Politics and Institutional Choice in Public Bureaucracies: Evidence from Sweden

Abstract

Assuring successful delegation from elected representatives to unelected bureaucrats is an essential part of contemporary democratic governance and, to do so, politicians typically rely on administrative institutions that limit the feasible set of policies that bureaucrats can pursue. In this article, I suggest that precisely because administrative institutions are instruments of political control, partisan conflict over public policies often generates partisan conflict over institutional arrangements. To assess the empirical merits of this proposition, I analyze a unique dataset with detailed information on all administrative agencies enacted in the executive administration of Sweden between 1960 and 2014. I find that agencies are considerably more likely to be terminated when there is a conflict of interest between the enacting and sitting coalitions. Consistent with positive political theories of bureaucratic delegation, I conclude that partisan politics colors not only the substantive contents of public policies, but also the organization of the administrative state.