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Strategic promotion, reputation, and responsiveness in bureaucratic hierarchies

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  • Xinyu Fan

    (Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, China)

  • Feng Yang

    (Department of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles, USA)

Abstract

While existing studies usually model promotion as a bilateral interaction between promoter and promotee, it is not uncommon that the promoter is under the influence of a third party. For instance, authoritarian rulers may consider how their interactions with local agents change the way that citizens view them. Similarly, a mid-tier officer in a bureaucratic hierarchy often concerns herself with her image in the eyes of her superior when managing her subordinates. In this paper, we construct a game-theoretic model to investigate promotion strategies when promoters have reputation concerns. We show that promoters can use promotion as a signaling tool, where she can deliberately postpone promoting the subordinate to enhance her own reputation. Furthermore, the promoter has extra incentives to shirk, knowing that she can manipulate promotion in the future. Thus, strategic promotions decrease government responsiveness. Counter-intuitively, such a decrease is more severe when intra-bureaucracy information is more transparent. In other words, transparency may do more harm than good. We conduct a case study of the Chinese bureaucracy and provide supportive evidence.

Suggested Citation

  • Xinyu Fan & Feng Yang, 2019. "Strategic promotion, reputation, and responsiveness in bureaucratic hierarchies," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 31(3), pages 286-307, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:jothpo:v:31:y:2019:i:3:p:286-307
    DOI: 10.1177/0951629819850638
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Borzino, Natalia & Fatas, Enrique & Peterle, Emmanuel, 2023. "In transparency we trust an experimental study of reputation, transparency, and signaling," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 106(C).
    2. Torun Dewan & John W Patty, 2019. "Editors’ Introduction to JTP issue 31.3," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 31(3), pages 283-285, July.

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