The Bureaucratic Politics of Foreign Economic Policymaking

Abstract

This dissertation studies how bureaucracies shape global economic governance, from both a structural and agent-driven perspective. How do different bureaucratic arrangements condition stakeholder participation and interaction during the policymaking process? What are the mechanisms underlying this relationship? Does this impact foreign economic policy? My dissertation advances the core argument that bureaucratic structure shapes the degree of influence politicians and interest groups exert over foreign economic policy, leading to meaningful variation in outcomes. I provide evidence for this argument in three chapters, each exploring one aspect in the causal chain between bureaucratic actors and policy. The first chapter examines how variation in bureaucratic structure shapes trade policy in the presence of competing demands from interest groups and elected policymakers. I put forth a typology of bureaucratic structures and study how they facilitate or mitigate interest group or political influence over policymaking. I empirically test the argument through cross-national comparison of trade bureaucracies and administered trade protection in WTO member states.

The second chapter examines mechanisms for how politicians and interest groups maneuver within bureaucratic structures to have influence over policymaking. I evaluate my theory in a case study of preferential trade liberalization in Japan. Japan offers a unique opportunity to examine the argument at a more granular level, as a country whose changes in bureaucratic procedures and structure were followed by significant changes in its trade policy. I provide evidence in this chapter that the bureaucratic changes over this time period facilitated this transition. The third chapter (co-authored with Amanda Kennard) departs from these structural explanations of bureaucracy to consider the extent to which individual bureaucrats within these bureaucracies can have an independent effect on policy. We examine credibility of bureaucratic delegation and its consequences on policy in the context of the International Monetary Fund. We show that the only way to make delegation credible is to devolve power to a bureaucrat with discretion over policy, and provide evidence of heterogenous impact of IMF senior staff on policy.