Reputation‐Sourced Authority and the Prospect of Unchecked Bureaucratic Power

• Published date: 01 January 2021
• Author: Anthony M. Bertelli,Madalina Busuioc
• Date: 01 January 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13281

38 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium,

provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract: We explore the democratic implications of a reputational account of bureaucratic authority. While an

influential literature has examined the relevance of reputation—and mutual exchange between principals and agents

in public organizations generally—the normative implications of these insights have largely escaped scrutiny. We

discuss how reputation-building impacts both the ability and the motivation of principals to oversee administrative

policymaking. We argue that reputation-sourced authority eschews ex ante incentives through the claims-making and

maneuvering of bureaucrats as they develop reputations with audiences. At the same time, it de-legitimizes ex post

oversight because monitoring and compliance must compete both with reputational authority and with resistance from

the audiences that are the very sources of such authority.

Evidence for Practice

• Reputation-sourced authority (RSA) can weaken accountability in representative government at the same

time that it promotes “good” policymaking.

• When an agency has lots of RSA, politicians are discouraged from oversight of its existing policymaking and

from imposing procedural constraints when delegating new tasks.

• Bureaucratic actors with the most RSA have the potential to override the democratic checks placed on their

power and to escape accountability.

Anthony M. Bertelli

Pennsylvania State University

Reputation-Sourced Authority and the Prospect of

Unchecked Bureaucratic Power

Madalina Busuioc

Leiden University

Research Article

Madalina Busuioc is Associate

Professor at the Institute of Public

Administration, Leiden University, where

she leads a large European Research

Council (ERC) grant investigating public

sector reputation and its effects within the

European regulatory state. Her recent work

draws on reputational approaches to study

and theorize about their implications for our

understanding of public accountability and

theories of political control.

Email: e.m.busuioc@fgga.leidenuniv.nl

Anthony M. Bertelli is the Sherwin-

Whitmore Professor of Public Policy and

Political Science at the Pennsylvania State

University and Professor of Political Science

at Bocconi University. He is the author of

Democracy Administered: How Public

Administration Shapes Representative

Government.

Email: bertelli@psu.edu

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 81, Iss. 1, pp. 38–48. © 2020 The Authors.

Public Administration Review

published

by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of The

American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13281.

It is an axiom of representative government that

power demands accountability (Kam, Bertelli, and

Held2020; Manin1997; Powell2000). Because

powers are delegated, and because bureaucratic agents

have the ability to exercise discretion, political control

is central to understanding public administration.

Exploring this problem has spawned a large literature

over the past 40 years investigating the extent to

which—and under what conditions—representative

political institutions are able to exercise control over

unelected administrative officials (cf. Aberbach,

Putnam, and Rockman1981; McCubbins and

Schwartz1984). We explore the implications of a

recently influential argument about the value of

reputation-sourced authority (RSA) for democratic

accountability. In a principal–agent framework, this

argument claims that by cultivating a reputation

for producing particular policies, agents build

enduring authority in governance (Carpenter2001,

2010), which transforms the relationship between

principal and agent into more of a negotiation than

a delegation of constrained authority (Carpenter and

Krause2015). While the empirical value of RSA

has been established in a variety of contexts (e.g.,

Busuioc2016; Etienne2015; Moffitt2010), its

normative implications remain largely unexplored.

We acknowledge that reputation has many benefits

for policymaking; scholars have seen it as a driver

of “legitimated vigor” for public bureaucracies

(Carpenter2010, 752), a significant force for

state-building (Carpenter2010; Carpenter and

Krause2012), and a catalyst for depoliticizing

decision-making (Krause and Corder2007). Taking

the perspective of sustaining representative government

rather than enhancing policy quality, we reflect on

the implications of RSA for political accountability,

specifically that of elected legislative actors in

representative governments. This essay aims to serve

as a counterbalance to what we call an epistemic

view of RSA, which considers its ability to produce

“correct” policies. In doing so we do not deny that

there are instances in which RSA can yield socially

beneficial innovation, and such benefits have been

documented empirically (Carpenter2000, 2001,

2010; Huber2007). It is also not our intention to

defend or to assess critically representative government

and electoral accountability against other means for

achieving self-rule, impeded as they are by important

considerations ranging from clarity of responsibility

(Powell and Whitten1993) to the overrepresentation

of higher income citizens’ interests (e.g., Carnes2012)

to malapportionment (e.g., Samuels and Snyder2001)