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2007 Leonard D. White Award
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For the best doctoral dissertation in the field of public administration.
Award Committee: Mark Cassell, Chair, Kent State University; Marissa Martino Golden, Bryn Mawr College; Robert C. Lieberman, Columbia University
Recipient: Daniel W. Gingerich, University of Virginia
Title: "Corruption in General Equilibrium: Political Institutions and Bureaucratic Performance in South America"
Dissertation Chair: Jorge Dominguez, Harvard University
Citation: Daniel Gingerich’s dissertation, “Corruption in General Equilibrium: Political Institutions and Bureaucratic Performance in South America,” stood out from a strong field in terms of its breadth and richness. In its theoretical structure, empirical methods, and data collection it is a remarkably sophisticated piece of work that displays a level of scholarly maturity not often evident in a dissertation.
In this work, Gingerich explores the link between the design of democratic institutions and political corruption in the bureaucracies of three South American countries. Typical accounts of corruption portray it as a cost of the principal-agent relations between political officials (the principals) and civil servants (the agents). These approaches generally predict that as democratic political institutions take hold, corruption among civil servants should decline because elections place limits on the opportunistic, self-seeking behavior of both elected officials and bureaucrats. But such a clear-cut empirical link between democracy and declining corruption has been hard to find.
Gingerich argues, however, that not all democracies are alike in their propensity to dampen political corruption. He shows that an important distinction between electoral systems accounts for variation in the level of corruption in democratic systems. In open-list systems, in which voters choose individual candidates from a party list system, the potential demand for corruption is relatively high because of the need for electoral resources by individual candidates; these individual candidates, however, are relatively less able to extract resources from state officials because they have little to offer civil servants in return. By contrast, in closed-list systems, in which voters choose among lists of candidates selected by party leaders, parties are more able to deliver career-enhancing benefits to politically-minded civil servants, thus loosening the potential flow of corruption. Gingerich derives this relationship through a general-equilibrium model of political corruption, in which the electoral and bureaucratic arenas are linked by a network of incentives and behavioral feedback effects, so that institutional change in one arena can affect the behavior of actors in the other. He shows this relationship empirically through a careful study of corruption in the public sectors of Bolivia, Brazil, and Chile.
In essence, what Gingerich has done in this work is to “bring bureaucracy back in” to the study of the state in Latin America. He argues that we cannot understand electoral reforms or their impact without acknowledging the role played by civil servants as the on-the-ground actors who either behave corruptly or professionally. Based on both a unique empirical data set and the application of a variety of formal methods, Gingerich makes a convincing case that the type of electoral reform enacted affects the amount of corruption observed among career civil servants. He also finds that the degree of professionalism in the bureaucracy varies not only across countries but across agencies within the same country. Thus the nature of electoral institutions influences not only the behavior of parties and politicians, as previous scholars have observed, but also the development (or nondevelopment, as the case may be) of Weberian bureaucracies and professional as opposed to corrupt bureaucrats. Moreover, New Public Management reforms seem to have the opposite effect—without other types of institutional reforms they may make state bureaucracies more, not less, susceptible to corruption.
This dissertation thus has implications beyond the Latin American context. It has implications both for newly developing democracies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere and for adherents of the New Public Management everywhere, and it makes a strong case for the importance of the link between bureaucracy and political processes and institutions.
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