The Size of Government Bureaucracy: Theory and Evidence

Abstract: This paper studies a size of bureaucracy subject to various political regimes and political institutions' performance. We review such reasons of enlarging bureaucracy as patronage, welfare state requirements and rent-seeking behavior. The results help to understand why regimes of higher accountability have larger government bureaucracies. Further, using a panel data on government administration employment from the International Labor Office ``Laborsta'' we find some evidence for a non-monotonic relationship between the level of political accountability and the size of government, which could be explained by the dominance of different incentive mechanisms between politicians and bureaucrats.