The Emperor’s clothes and the Pied Piper: Bureaucracy and scientific productivity

For some scholars, bureaucratic contracts (i.e. low-powered and highly regulated) mitigate problems of time inconsistency between public employees who have undertaken costly asset-specific investments, and potentially opportunistic governments. For others, bureaucratic contracts exacerbate information asymmetries between bureaucratic experts and political dilettantes. This paper aims to reconcile these views by proposing two testable propositions: while bureaucratic impartiality has a positive effect because it reduces time inconsistency problems in the relationship between principals (governments) and agents (public employees), a bureaucratic career has, on the contrary, a negative effect because it reduces incentives. We test these hypotheses with three samples of countries (worldwide, OECD and EU) using scientific productivity as a proxy for public employees’ performance that can be compared across countries. The results show how, controlling for levels of development and investment, proxies for bureaucratic impartiality show a significant positive effect on scientific productivity while the existence of bureaucratic careers significantly diminishes scientists’ performance.