Essays on Bureaucracy in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Bureaucracies in sub-Saharan Africa frequently depart from the Weberian ideal, but how does the politicization of these bureaucracies affect governance and the implementation of public policy? My dissertation explores this question through three essays. In the first essay, I introduce a unique data set that captures the universe of competitive public procurement contracts in Burkina Faso awarded from 2012 to 2021. I demonstrate patterns consistent with a political finance cycle in which political incumbents politicize the procurement process in order to raise financing for their electoral campaigns. I show that, in the months prior to elections, political incumbents are more likely to award procurement contracts -- and especially ones that are unusually large one and indicative of favoritism. In the second essay, I document an important phenomenon that has received scholarly little attention: public sector employees who simultaneously serve as local elected officials. In particular, I show that more than 40% of mayors in Burkina Faso elected in 2016 were bureaucrats. I theorize about the causes and consequences of this phenomenon, providing descriptive evidence of these ideas when possible. In the third essay, together with Mai Hassan and Horacio Larreguy, I study public sector hiring in local bureaucracies in Kenya. When mid-level bureaucrats and local politicians share authority over hiring, we argue that each actor will hire their in-group to their most valued types of positions. We use detailed payroll data to demonstrate that both actors introduce their own unique bias into the hiring process, but the two types of bias are concentrated in different types of government jobs.