Impartial Decision Making

Beyond internal factors, such as the quality of management and skills of administrators, external influences can play an important role in the performance of the bureaucracy. The most common source of influence in decision-making in the bureaucracy is the political elite (Acemoglu & Robinson 2007). The politician-bureaucrat nexus is central to the functioning of the bureaucracy, particularly the selection and motivation of public employees.  Clientelism, or the provision of jobs, contracts, welfare support, money, and so forth in exchange for political support, is a common feature of the public sector across countries in all regions and income groups (Bold et al. 2018; Anderson et al. 2014; Keefer 2007).  Political interference in personnel management can be disruptive to the effective functioning of the administration and of schools (Berenschot 2018; Bruns & Luque 2014). It can also impact the performance of the bureaucracy indirectly by lowering the motivation and satisfaction of civil servants affected by the clientelistic practices (Meyer-Sahling et al. 2018).  

Beyond personnel management, policy outcomes are often sub-optimal when clientelistic politics are predominant. In India, for example, the effectiveness of digitally-enabled monitoring of health workers for improving attendance was conditional on local politics as many local governments did not use the data to sanction absent workers because they were protected by politicians (Dhaliwal & Hanna 2017).  In Pakistan, smartphone-based monitoring of district health supervisors in rural clinics doubled inspections of health facilities and reduced medical worker absenteeism, but the results were highly contingent on the severity of patronage politics in a locality (Callen et al. 2015).