After the Second World War, countries across occupied Europe were faced with the challenge of restoring political stability at home and peace abroad. Although extremist sentiment had not disappeared, moderate elites resolved to choke it off at the source by building robust bureaucratic parties that could incorporate the masses. Christian democratic parties on the right and moderate social democratic parties on the left took power all across the continent, ushering in an unprecedent period of stability. Yet with the economic stagnation of the 1970s, this consensus began to unravel, giving rise to the emergence of populist alternatives. This chapter departs from existing explanations for this turnaround. It shows that the populist strategy was always most effective in the patronage-based party systems of southern Europe. In northwest Europe, in contrast, bureaucratic parties have adapted, substituting professionalized service provision for mass membership and participation.

Based on immersive and extensive participant observation across six Islamic funeral homes in Berlin, this chapter focuses on the mediating role that Muslim undertakers play between immigrant families and the German state. As intermediaries, undertakers guide minority families through the cultural, religious, political, and legal landscapes structuring the transitions from life to death. In reconciling competing sets of administrative and cultural norms, they preside not only over end-of-life decisions and their theological implications, but also over pedagogical moments of sociocultural integration in contemporary Germany. Undertakers teach lessons about the state to minoritized citizens but also offer lessons to the state about its own citizenry, often by countering negative stereotypes about Islam and Muslims in Germany.

Populism is a political strategy that relies on the use of a personalistic political organization and mass communication to mobilize support in the quest for power; it will be most successful when it is more cost-effective than the alternatives of programmatic political party building or the distribution of patronage. The costs involved in this trade-off come in two forms: direct costs and indirect (or transaction) costs. In politics, very often transaction costs – search, bargaining, and enforcement costs – are the higher ones. Populists lower the costs of mobilizing support by communicating directly with voters instead of working through intermediaries such as party professionals or political brokers. The populist strategy will be most effective when two conditions are met. First, potential voters or supporters must be available for direct mobilization. This means that they must be relatively free of existing party attachments. Second, the opposition should be divided. Most populists win with the backing of a mere plurality rather than a majority. The more the opposition is split between multiple contenders, the more economically viable is the populist strategy.

Sixteenth-century Spain was at the vanguard of European collegiate bureaucratic rule and imperial governance. This chapter argues that although in the 1490s to 1540s council ministers’ operations were considerably patrimonialist, determined largely by each member’s family interests, by the 1540s to 1590s the Council became substantially more impartial. This occurred in large part due to the influence of women. Vassals’ attempts to shape ministers’ decisions via female connections prompted the council’s fundamental 1542 and 1571 guidelines. Subsequently, Madrid’s anxieties about women’s sway, and surfeits of Indies commodities, stirred misogynistic treatises, royal scrutiny, and an increasingly explicit masculine ministerial ethos. More concretely, monarchs and ministers feared that some of their colleagues and subalterns would become the playthings of court women, who themselves had connections with vassals seeking their cases’ resolution. The actions of indigenous artisans here were particularly notable, as subjects regaled female courtiers with their exquisite goldwork. The resulting backlash against powerful women ensured that gobierno petitioning did not become the domain of the powerful few in the 1500s, and the fiction of the council as mere instruments for the monarchs persisted strongly throughout the second half of the century.

Chapter 7 concludes Making International Institutions Work. It opens with a brief review of the main findings and the role of each stage of the empirical investigation in establishing them. I then discuss the book’s contributions to international relations, international political economy, and political science as well as other fields of social science. The third section draws out lessons for policy and practice. I identify a variety of stakeholder-specific strategies for safeguarding policy autonomy and promoting accountability reforms, contributing to a lively ongoing debate among academics and practitioners over how to achieve an effective and accountable global institutional architecture. Finally, I reflect on the book’s implications for some notable emerging issues in global governance – including responding to international crises and challenges to the modern liberal order – outlining promising avenues for further research.

This chapter elaborates the book’s theoretical framework. It proceeds in three stages. First, based on a microfoundational analysis of the incentives facing states and international bureaucrats, I make the case that the former are more liable than the latter to engage in opportunistic behavior that imperils institutional performance. Second, I flesh out the concept of policy autonomy, explaining how its different components provide the basis for gains in performance and why it cannot be reliably established and maintained through institutional design. Third, I explore the true origins of policy autonomy, elaborating the causal mechanisms by which (certain types of) operational alliances and governance tasks insulate bureaucrats against state capture. The chapter concludes by summarizing the framework’s observable implications at the macro and micro levels.

This chapter considers the theory’s implications for the significant issue of accountability in global governance. My reasoning may appear to suggest a fundamental tension between performance and accountability: If avoiding the thorniest obstacle to performance requires curtailing state influence in the policy process, international institutions presumably cannot be both effective and accountable. I argue, however, that if we embrace a more expansive understanding of how accountability may be institutionalized, no such tradeoff arises. This is because the same factors that nurture policy autonomy make institutions more likely to adopt a variety of modern accountability structures – what I call second-wave accountability (SWA) mechanisms – that primarily benefit and empower non-state actors. Once in place, moreover, SWA mechanisms can themselves deliver performance gains by revealing operational problems, improving the quality of decision-making, and boosting policy compliance. I provide two forms of empirical support for these claims: (1) statistical evidence based on novel data on the spread and strength of SWA mechanisms; and (2) a qualitative plausibility probe focusing on institutions in the issue area of economic development, where many SWA mechanisms were pioneered.

Why do some international institutions succeed and others fail? This opening chapter introduces the subject of Making International Institutions Work. It begins by describing the motivation behind the book, presenting striking examples of differences in the performance of international institutions, explaining why such variation is puzzling for conventional theories of international cooperation, and highlighting its growing substantive importance. I then define the book’s two central concepts – international institutions and institutional performance – clarifying the precise scope of my analysis. This is followed by a brief review and critique of relevant literature. The last three sections provide an overview of the book’s argument, research design, and structure.

Chapter 7 investigates how bureaucratic norms change, analyzing recent institutional reforms in Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Bihar. I first examine Mahila Samakhya in UP, a women’s empowerment program initiated by the central government. Challenging legalistic bureaucratic norms, Mahila Samakhya fostered a subculture of deliberation that inspired frontline worker commitment to institutional activism. Frontline workers countered village caste and patriarchal structures to mobilize Dalit women's associations, a process rife with social conflict. Deliberation with target households supported the integration of disadvantaged girls into school. In Bihar, by contrast, committed state leadership worked to strengthen law and order, encouraging a broad shift toward legalism. Bureaucratic commitment to rules supported the growth of school enrollment and infrastructure provision. However, state initiatives to improve education quality through innovative teaching practices faltered, as they conflicted with administrative rule-following. The findings suggest the difficulties of securing frontline worker commitment to quality reforms on the back of legalistic bureaucracy.

Chapter 1 introduces the central puzzle of implementing primary education in northern India, a least likely setting for programmatic service delivery. Despite having the same formal institutions and national policy framework for primary education, implementation varies remarkably across northern Indian states. After reviewing existing explanations, the chapter outlines the main argument, anchored around variation in informal bureaucratic norms, and foreshadows the theoretical contributions to comparative politics and development. It then presents the research design and methods, based on multilevel comparisons in four Indian states (Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Bihar). Using multiple field research methods, I trace the implementation process from state capitals down to the village primary schools, drawing on two and a half years of field research: participant observation inside bureaucracies; village ethnography; and 853 interviews and 103 focus group discussions. I conclude with an overview of the book’s remaining chapters.

Chapter 4 embarks on Part II of the book, the first of four empirical chapters analyzing implementation in northern India. It examines primary education in Uttar Pradesh (UP), a state that exemplifies the dynamic of legalistic bureaucracy theorized in Chapter 2. Rural UP is among the least likely setting. First, I trace the historical origins and persistence of legalistic bureaucracy in UP from the colonial era onward, but focusing on the recent period of lower caste mobilization and multiparty competition. Next, I present evidence from multilevel comparative fieldwork demonstrating how legalistic bureaucracy drives implementation over a range of administrative tasks, including school infrastructure and enrollments and provision of the Midday Meal program. I then bring the analysis down to the village-level. Taking a citizen-centric view of the state, I trace the evolution of village collective action around primary schooling over time, demonstrating how bureaucratic norms interact with citizen oversight.

Chapter 9 concludes the book by outlining its contributions to scholarship in comparative politics, development and public administration. The theoretical framework centered on bureaucratic norms brings institutionalist perspectives on the state and social policy together with insights on street-level bureaucracy and local collective action. The conceptual interweaving of meso-level state institutions with the micro-politics of frontline service delivery gives rise to a new understanding of bureaucracy and its relationship to human development. The chapter also explores the study's policy implications for the reform of bureaucracy, public services and primary education in developing countries.

Chapter 3 sets the stage for the book's study of implementation. It explores the policy and institutional terrain of primary education in India, examining the political currents beneath India's sluggish expansion of primary education policy. It also presents the legal and administrative architecture for policy implementation. Based on interviews and archival materials, I find that the adoption of universal primary education policies was driven by elite politics inside the state. Committed state officials gradually expanded their authority, using administrative levers to institutionally layer reforms on top of the existing education system. As the Indian economy liberalized in the 1990s, reformers drew on World Bank fiscal and technical assistance to scale up reforms across the country. The argument builds on theories of gradual institutional change, highlighting the agency of committed state elite. The findings also suggest the limitations of institutional layering in India's education system, which failed to address weak administrative capacity and problems of local accountability.

Chapter 6 studies primary education in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. It offers a matched-pair comparison with the previous chapter's study of Himachal Pradesh (HP). Despite similar geography, agrarian economies and sociocultural norms, Uttarakhand's school system performs far worse. I trace the underperformance to the persistence of legalistic bureaucratic norms. Drawing on historical and ethnographic materials, I explore the political process behind Uttarakhand’s political separation from UP in 2000, a critical juncture that offered a window for state elites to reshape bureaucratic norms. Field-based evidence from interviews with state and societal actors showcases how legalism persists inside the state bureaucracy. Next, I analyze how legalism influences the state's management of teachers and monitoring of education services. I find that village collective action gets thwarted due to administrative burdens posed by local agencies, which induces households to exit and seek private substitutes. The findings suggest that legalistic bureaucracy weakens societal coproduction of public services over time, even in settings of high social capital.

Chapter 8 extends the book's argument to cases beyond northern India. It considers how bureaucratic norms shapes the delivery of primary education in four cases--the southern Indian state of Kerala, along with country cases of China, Finland and France, based on a close reading of secondary literature on bureaucratic development and education. The Kerala case demonstrates how deliberative bureaucracy has emerged in the historical context of social movement politics and private provision of schooling, yielding higher quality government services within India. The study of China offers insights on deliberative bureaucracy operates in a nondemocratic context, highlighting the adaptative capabilities of Chinese bureaucracy. The comparison of school education in Finland and France offers suggestive evidence for the divergent impacts of deliberative and legalistic bureaucracy across these advanced economies. Although the chapter's findings are provisional, the study of bureaucratic norms and services across a wide spectrum of sociopolitical contexts suggests the wider reach of the book's theoretical framework.