Coercive Capacity and The Politics of Implementation

Why are some bureaucracies in highly coercive policy fields able successfully to implement controversial policies whereas others bow to political opposition? This article challenges the common argument, based on a principal-agent model, that bureaucratic nonimplementation is the result of the absence of effective legislative oversight. Instead, the article argues that in coercive policy fields where the state imposes significant costs on its targets, nonimplementation can in fact be understood as the result of control efforts by elected officials. The article empirically tests this argument by comparatively examining the politics of implementation in the policy field of migration control. Drawing on interview data from Germany and the United States, the article identifies significant cross-national and subnational variation in the capacity of bureaucrats to implement contested deportation orders. The article argues that this variation can be accounted for primarily by institutionally determined differences in the degree of political insulation of bureaucratic agencies.