State Capacity, Bureaucratic Politicization, and Corruption in the Brazilian State

2016/03/21 by Katherine Bersch, Sérgio Praça, Matthew M. Taylor · 3 citations
Social Sciences · #Corruption and Economic Development #Local Government Finance and Decentralization #Politics and Society in Latin America

paper · doi:10.1111/gove.12196

openalex publication_date 2016/03/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31

Abstract

Responding to recent articles in Governance highlighting the need for improved measurement of bureaucratic characteristics, this article describes efforts to map Brazil's federal agencies on three dimensions—capacity, autonomy, and partisan dominance—derived from data on more than 326,000 civil servants. The article provides a “proof of concept” about the utility of agency‐level measures of these variables, demonstrating how they relate to an output common to all agencies: corruption. The article provides a first step in the direction of building a comparative research program that offers objective evaluation of bureaucracies within nation‐states, with the intent of better disentangling their impact on governance outcomes.

Citations

• Government Coalitions and Legislative Success Under Presidentialism and Parliamentarism
• Unpacking the Black Box of Causality: Learning about Causal Mechanisms from Experimental and Observational Studies
• Is the Brazilian State “Patrimonial”?
• The moderator–mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: Conceptual, strategic, and statistical considerations.

Cited by

• Between Merit and Patronage: Hybrid Appointments of Top Civil Service
• Systemic Corruption as a Meso-Level Phenomenon: Severe Abuse and Strategic Gain
• Inside the Black Box: Uncovering Dynamics and Characteristics of the Chilean Central Government Bureaucracy with a Novel Dataset

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