Partisan Politics and Institutional Choice in Public Bureaucracies: Evidence from Sweden
研究了瑞典1960-2014年间行政机构存续情况，发现当制定政策的执政联盟与当前执政联盟利益冲突时，机构更可能被终止，表明党派政治不仅影响政策内容，也影响行政组织设计。
Assuring successful delegation from elected representatives to unelected bureaucrats is an essential part of contemporary democratic governance and, to do so, politicians typically rely on administrative institutions that limit the feasible set of policies that bureaucrats can pursue. In this article, I suggest that precisely because administrative institutions are instruments of political control, partisan conflict over public policies often generates partisan conflict over institutional arrangements. To assess the empirical merits of this proposition, I analyze a unique dataset with detailed information on all administrative agencies enacted in the executive administration of Sweden between 1960 and 2014. I find that agencies are considerably more likely to be terminated when there is a conflict of interest between the enacting and sitting coalitions. Consistent with positive political theories of bureaucratic delegation, I conclude that partisan politics colors not only the substantive contents of public policies, but also the organization of the administrative state.