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Chapter 2 investigates the ascent of technocrats to key roles in defining the technological foundations of the hydropower nation. The wartime crisis and the active involvement of the state in hydropower development and the training of engineers deepened the connection between hydropower and the Chinese nation. Before the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the National Resources Commission of the Nationalist government conducted studies on China’s hydropower potential. During the war it began constructing hydropower projects in the southwest to mitigate the energy shortage the war produced. By uncovering the many interactions between American and Chinese institutions and individuals, this chapter explores the importance of transnational exchange in strengthening the technological foundations of the hydropower nation. It also delves into the early social and environmental impacts of the nascent hydropower nation. Despite being limited in scale, social and environmental disturbances in the 1940s foreshadowed the significant human toll and ecological changes that would occur in later decades in a fully realized hydropower nation.
This framework chapter for the edited collection begins with a definition of political patronage adopted from existing research: the power of political actors to appoint individuals, using their own discretion, to non-elective positions in the public sector, irrespective of the legality of the decision. These individuals tend to be directly involved in making public policy. The book is about patronage appointments in bureaucracies in Asian countries, some with well-developed civil service systems and minimal patronage, some with high levels of patronage and a weak civil service, and others between these extremes. The framework chapter develops a typology of patronage types based on two primary criteria: basis of trust (political or personal loyalty to: the political party, politician, or a group); and, the major role of political appointees (the extent to which they influence public policy). Each of the countries in the edited collection tests the appropriateness of this typology for individual Asian case studies illustrating the fact that not all patronage is the same and what is important is the tasks being performed by appointees and the nature of the trust relationship.
This article examines the origins of national electrification in Chile, situating its technocratic promoters within a broad trend – unfolding across Latin America – toward the ‘rational’ management and conservation of natural resources by the state. It surveys the early history of Chilean electrification (1890s–1940s) to show how conservationist thinking flowed through discussions and debates among engineers about the proper uses of the country's waters. These ideas eventually shaped the 1943 national electrification plan, which focused on hydropower. The article sheds new light on the history of Chile's technocracy, the relationship between perceptions of the environment and development planning, and the political and economic debates over national electrification. It also shows how the conservationist dilemma of using versus preserving natural resources operated within a utilitarian and highly technical framework for thinking about nature's bounty. The article thus contributes to recent historical scholarship on conservation and environmental technocrats in Latin America.
Multiparty governments are based on delegation and compromises but, at the same time, coalition parties have at their disposal several legislative instruments to keep tabs on their partners. Whereas previous studies focused on policy divisiveness and issue salience as main factors able to explain parliamentary scrutiny, in this article we suggest uncertainty as a complementary factor. In particular, we theorize that the use of parliamentary questions (PQs) is a function not only of policy characteristics but also of actors involved in coalition governance. When ministers increase intra-coalition uncertainty, cabinet parties use PQs to extract information from ministers and to reduce uncertainty in policy implementation. Statistical analyses of all written and oral parliamentary questions in the Italian Chamber of Deputies between 2006 and 2018 support our main hypothesis that when intra-coalition uncertainty increases, coalition parties ask more questions of ‘hostile’ ministers.
Why do parties appoint outsiders and experts to ministerial positions? Extant research offers explanations based on institutional arrangements and external shocks (e.g. political or economic crises). We go beyond such system-level variables to argue that the characteristics of ministerial appointees are a function of the portfolio they are being appointed to. Drawing on theories of political delegation, we argue that outsider and expert appointments to ministerial office are affected by a portfolio’s policy jurisdiction, its financial resources and appointment powers, and the partisan leanings of the ministerial bureaucracy. We test these arguments on all appointments of senior and junior ministers in Austria between 1945 and 2020. The analysis shows that outsiders are more likely to be appointed to ministries with greater party support in the bureaucracy, while experts are more likely appointed to portfolios dealing with high-salience issues.
Although much of this book concerns political dynamics in the Mao Era, the tumults of the Cultural Revolution and the coalition rule that resulted from late-Mao politics indirectly led to an important political outcome by the 2010s, the survival of Xi Jinping as one of the few princelings among political leaders on the civilian side of the CCP. This created one of the preconditions for Xi to dominate the party soon after taking office as the head of the party in late 2012 – the relative absence of competition and oversight from other highly networked princelings. In the 1980s, two forces drove the selection of future leaders in the party. First, founding leaders such as Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping had a genuine desire to promote a new generation of well-educated, loyal potential successors as their health began to fail them. Second, as the rest of the book has argued, the top leadership and even mid-level officials at the ministerial level did not want serious competitors to their power bases, and each pursued a coalition of the weak strategy within his own jurisdiction. Thus, besides a few senior veterans who had placed their children on accelerated paths for promotion, the vast majority of revolutionary veterans resisted the promotion of princelings due to their Red Guard activism during the Cultural Revolution and to fear of interference by well-networked princelings.
Authoritarian regimes must grapple with a fundamental source of instability that a significant redistribution of power, often unseen or only partially observed, can radically alter the incentives of regime insiders and overturn initially stable equilibria (Acemoglu et al. 2008). Although institutional features such as authoritarian legislatures and a ruling party can alleviate the incentives to usurp the incumbent leader to some extent, especially among lower-level officials (Gandhi 2008; Svolik 2012), they cannot fundamentally remove the incentives to grab power forcefully in the top echelon of these regimes. For one, one-party states by design entrust enormous power in the hands of the top few officials or even in the hands of one person. For ambitious officials just one layer below the very top facing a low probability of ordinary promotion, the reward for achieving an extra step upward can be enormous and can justify a risky gamble, especially if an external shock leads to a significant redistribution of power. Even for those who are already in the top echelon of the ruling party, a gamble to break the existing power-sharing equilibrium can reap enormous rewards as the power and resources of authoritarian colleagues are consolidated into one’s hands. Knowing the dangers of these possibilities, authoritarian leaders also have the incentives to preempt potentially threatening colleagues by removing them from power with coercive measures. In the absence of credible constitutional frameworks or electoral pressure to stop the actions of the top leadership, the stable façade of authoritarian politics can quickly descend into coups, purges, and assassinations.
The reform approved in Peru in 2009 during a right-wing government deviates from similar attempts in the region to expand access to healthcare. Left-wing parties in Peru were extremely weak during the policy-making process and the political parties were non-programmatic. Based on original field research, this article demonstrates how parties that lacked core values uniting their leaders and had no commitment to the health reform did not care for the definition of specifications regarding funding and implementation. Instead, technocrats dominated the process of policy formation, which, accompanied by the lack of commitment from key political actors, led to poorly specified policy and deficient implementation.
More than a half-century of isolation and ideological limits meant theoretical and practical knowledge of market economics was very limited. But the view exemplified by President Kravchuk of Ukraine that before reforms started one needed to train experts and managers was much overstated. In retrospect, it is clear that enough expertise was available to move forward, especially in Central Europe where many academics had exposure to Western economics. In the USSR, the numbers were indeed far lower, but these could be easily supplemented by foreign advisors –some diaspora returnees, others seconded from international organizations. Most important, the numbers of market experts needed was not large – a few ministerial and deputy ministerial positions, and heads of key departments numbered not in the thousands nor even hundreds. The best example of the limited need was the Baltics, which were among the fastest reformers with virtually no experts in market economics; a physicist Einars Repše, heading the Central Bank, was considered by international experts one of the most effective in the entire region. The chapter makes these arguments while providing an inside look at many key individuals involved, including Balcerowicz in Poland, Bokros of Hungary, Gaidar in Russia, and Pynzenyk in Ukraine.
The technocrat, a supposedly apolitical figure who joins government on the basis of technical expertise, looms large in discussions of governance. The empowerment of technocrats has sometimes been taken as a barometer for Africa’s economic and democratic progress. Rejecting this conventional wisdom, this article argues that technocrats are inevitably trapped in a web of politics—politicians leverage the apolitical image of technocrats for political gain, and public debates implicate technocrats as targets of protest. This article pursues this argument through a case study of Nigeria, where technocrats were both politicized and politicizing figures during the rule of the People’s Democratic Party between 1999 and 2015.
This article unveils the continuous and productive relationship that developed between Chile and the IMF during Salvador Allende's presidency (1970–73). This counter-intuitive relationship was made possible by the systematic depoliticisation and technocratisation of the ties between them. By downplaying ideological discrepancies and keeping a high degree of autonomy, the IMF and Chilean technocrats blurred rigid Cold War divides and circumvented the US-imposed embargo against Allende's regime. The examination of this relationship sheds new light on Allende's positioning in the international arena and provides a unique prism to reconsider dichotomist perceptions of the Cold War in Latin America.
Nearly two decades after central bankers began to call for interest rate liberalization, the central bank continues to impose stringent rules on the fluctuation of deposit interest rates. This seems an unlikely outcome given widespread endorsement of liberalization by technocrats and experts both in and out of the government, China's accession to the World Trade Organization, and the technocrats' insulation from popular pressure. To be sure, local interests and central bank lobbying have driven gradual liberalization of interest rates. However, senior Chinese technocrats held on to control over interest rates because of their need to maintain state banks' dominance and to mobilize bank funds in times of economic downturns. As such, progress toward interest rate liberalization only took place during “Goldilocks” phases when the economy enjoyed healthy growth without high inflation.
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