Book review written by: Melissa Escalante Góngora
In “Organizing the Leviathan”, the authors Victor Lapuente Gine and Carl Dahlström, explore one of the major problems in countries all around the world: corruption. The authors present a theory on how governments should be organized in order to reduce corruption and other dysfunctions, leading to the main idea and hypothesis of the book:
"...to prove that a separation of the carriers of politicians and bureaucrats creates a low corruption and high efficiency environment, which also is good for the creation of reforms and public policies that impulses efficiency in the public sector."
They establish that governmental institutions and the study of political issues such as democracy, accountability and rule of law may have a very important role in states’ development, but the book aims to contribute to the field literature by introducing the study of bureaucracies in the political agenda since academics have ignored the functioning of executive and bureaucratic branches of the state.
The importance of the relations between politicians and bureaucrats relies on the separation of careers in order to have different professional interests and incentives. In a separated system, politicians will not colonize the administrative environment with public officials loyal to the parties and bureaucrats will not colonize the politic environment with career officials. The channels for accountability should be electors for politicians and professionals for bureaucrats, this will incentivize meritocracy instead of clientelism and open the opportunity for bureaucrats to protest or denounce, because the careers of bureaucrats will not depend on the politicians. In this way, corruption will seem less attractive and efficiency will be a better option.
One of the main strengths of the book is that the treatment of the subject is very objective. They made a study to prove the hypothesis, analyzing different aspects that indicate a good or bad government: types of bureaucracies, corruption, efficiency and flexibility to innovation. Several indicators of the World Bank, International Transparency, global economic forum and statistical data that support the thesis of the book were used. The method is pretty direct and precise, uses dependent variables and control variables for each one of the dependent variables, taking on account cultural, political and economic factors. It compares data of more than 100 countries and provides quantitative and qualitative data about historic and contemporary empiric cases. 1053 experts of 135 countries make the evaluation of the countries and the results of 107 countries evaluated by at least 3 experts were considered. So, in my opinion there are not facts and evidence that have been omitted.
The writing style is clear and effective transmitting the main idea of the book, but while it is useful to reinforce their point of view, it is important to mention that the authors are quite repetitive, because they mention some of the most important ideas a lot of times in each one of the chapters. Nevertheless, the quality of the content is very high and appropriated for the intended audience.
Another important point is that the book raises topics for discussion. One specific line in chapter 3: “in Napoleonic law countries a career in public administration is a necessary step for any political career” makes you question how integrated careers are in our state’s organization, considering that as completely identifiable feature in Mexico. This led us to some questions like: How could the ideas of Lapuente and Dahlström be implemented in México? How viable would be the application of this model in Mexico, where there are such serious problems of corruption? Which are the limitations of this theory?
Finally, the purpose of the book was achieved because through statistical analysis it is shown how the relation between bureaucrats and politicians in countries like Spain, Venezuela, Dominican Republic and México have an impact in corruption, efficiency and reforms. Also, the authors show historic evidence of separation of careers to fight systemic corruption in countries like United States, United Kingdom and Sweden with satisfactory results, being currently countries with high quality governments.
In my opinion, the book gives us the opportunity to understand corruption from a different point of view, letting us know the importance of a balance in every branch of the organization of the state to avoid power concentration and achieve accountability. It is an excellent book, and I liked it and recommend it a lot because I think that corruption is the worst problem in México and its necessarily to solve it. Lapuente and Dahlström show us an innovative way to eradicate such a big problem.
References:
Dahlström, Carl, and Victor Lapuente. 2017. Organizing Leviathan: Politicians, Bureaucrats and the Making of Good Government. Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Excelente artículo, muy interesante!!!!!!! 👏