Bureaucratic Sabotage and Policy Inefficiency

Poor public service provision creates an electoral vulnerability for incumbent politicians. Under what conditions can bureaucrats exploit this to avoid reforms they dislike? We develop a model of electoral politics in which a politician must decide whether to enact a reform of uncertain value, and a voter evaluates the incumbent based on government service quality, which anti-reform bureaucrats can undermine. We show that bureaucrats are most incentivized to disrupt service provision for political leverage when voters are torn between the reform and the status quo, leading them to interpret poor service provision as informative of the reform's merit. We also find that resistance deters politicians from enacting unpopular reforms due to electoral risks and prompts them to implement popular reforms by providing bureaucrats as scapegoats. For intermediary values of reform popularity, resistance causes accountability loss by preventing beneficial reforms and inducing ineffective reforms. Our model sheds light on a unique source of political power for bureaucrats and its consequences for public policy.