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[In China, development of building regulations has largely been motivated by a desire to maintain the booming construction industry which has sustained strong economic growth. As a result, the government has fallen behind on ensuring quality and safety in residential housing projects. The devastation left by the Wenchuan and Yushu earthquakes was a grim reminder of this. This essay aims to draw out some of the regulatory mistakes that have been made and proposes solutions to the issues raised. Regulators must refocus their attention on protecting the public and lay the legislative groundwork for healthy development in the sector.]

This paper develops a dynamic theory of the social and political foundations of governance quality. In the model, groups of citizens have different expected needs for a public service, and citizens choose whether to demand service when the need arises. Politicians representing these groups can determine policy benefits and delegate to bureaucrats the ability to invest in long-run service quality. The main feature of the theory is its foundation for citizen–government interactions, which draws from well-known queueing models of organizational service provision. The model provides a framework for characterizing the effectiveness and durability of government programs. A main implication is that politicized bureaucracies improve program survivability and increase the frequency of investment, while insulated bureaucracies increase the intensity of investment; overall service quality trades off between these two factors. Other results examine the implications of cross-group inequality, electoral conditions, and decentralization.

AbstractThis article develops a theory of the administration and effectiveness of government programs. In the model, a bureaucrat chooses a mechanism for assigning a good to clients with uncertain qualifications. The mechanism applies a costly means test to verify the client's eligibility. A politician exercises oversight by limiting the bureaucrat's testing resources and the number of clients to be served. The model predicts the incidence of common administrative pathologies, including inefficient and politicized distribution of resources, inflexibility, program errors, and backlogs. When the politician favors marginally qualified clients, per capita spending is low and error rates are high. When the politician favors highly qualified clients, per capita spending is higher and error rates are lower. In the latter case, the bureaucrat may also use discriminatory testing, which allows the politician to target favored clients. Such targeted programs increase budgets and reduce backlogs, but they also increase error rates.

This article develops a theory of bureaucratic influence on distributive politics. Although there exists a rich literature on the effects of institutions such as presidents, electoral systems, and bicameralism on government spending, the role of professional bureaucrats has yet to receive formal scrutiny. In the model, legislators bargain over the allocation of distributive benefits across districts. The legislature may either "politicize" a program by bargaining directly over pork and bypassing bureaucratic scrutiny, or "professionalize" it by letting a bureaucrat approve or reject project funding in each district according to an underlying quality standard. The model predicts that the legislature will professionalize when the expected program quality is high. However, politicization becomes more likely as the number of high-quality projects increases and under divided government. Further, more competent bureaucrats can encourage politicization if the expected program quality is low. Finally, politicized programs are larger than professionalized programs.

By skipping managers and appealing directly to politicians, whistleblowers can play a critical role in revealing organizational information. However, the protection of whistleblowers can affect managers' abilities to provide employees with incentives to exert effort. This paper explores this tradeoff with a model of agency decision-making under incomplete information. In the game, an employee's effort determines a project's quality, and a manager chooses whether to approve the project and discipline the employee. The employee and politician wish for only "good" projects to be approved. By whistleblowing, an employee reveals the quality to a politician outside of the organization, who may override the manager's decision. A key finding is that from the politician's perspective, the benefits of whistleblower protections depend on the preferences of the manager. If the manager is inclined toward approving projects, then the costs of lower employee effort may outweigh the informational benefits of whistleblowing. The optimal policy may then be to ban whistleblowing. By contrast, when the manager is inclined toward rejecting projects, whistleblower protections prevent him or her from suppressing effort and are unambiguously beneficial.

Do redundant bureaucratic arrangements represent wasteful duplication or a hedge against political uncertainty? Previous attempts at addressing this question have treated agency actions as exogenous, thus avoiding strategic issues such as collective action problems or competition. I develop a game‐theoretic model of bureaucratic policy making in which a political principal chooses the number of agents to handle a given task. Importantly, agents have policy preferences that may be opposed to the principal's, and furthermore may choose their policy or effort levels. Among the results are that redundancy can help a principal achieve her policy goals when her preferences are not aligned with the agents'. But redundancy is less helpful if even a single agent has preferences relatively close to the principal's. In this environment collective action problems may cause multiple agents to be less effective than a single agent. Redundancy can also be unnecessary to the principal if the agent's jurisdiction can be terminated.