Regime Effects on Government Attention in Agenda Disruptions

Abstract

Agenda disruptions happen when politicians seek to alter how attention is allocated by bureaucrats. We argue that democrats and authoritarians run into different challenges in signaling and enforcing new policy agendas to the bureaucrats. Authoritarians are more likely to redirect bureaucratic attention through extensive restructuring because they are less likely to face open resistance than democratic leaders, who are often institutionally re- quired to contend with highly mobilized opposition in the policy process. While authoritarians face fewer open challenges over agenda changes, the impact of their efforts to redirect bureaucratic attention may be limited by opportunistic behaviors in the bureaucracy. Bureaucrats in authoritarian regimes use extreme enforcement to signal commitment to the leader’s new agenda, which creates long-run instability in attention levels. The urge to do so is reduced in democracies because bureaucratic commitment can be reliably observed. Moreover, agenda disruptions leave less durable impact on bureaucratic attention in authoritarian regimes because centralization con- strains agenda space; more accessible and inclusive political processes can accommodate different or even competing issues. We compare food safety policy of the city governments of Beijing, Hong Kong, and Taipei to explore these propositions.