Regime threats and state solutions. Bureaucratic loyalty and embeddedness in Kenya. By Hassan Mai, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics). 2020. pp. 309. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108858960
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Author | Guillaume Beaud |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.1998 |
DOI: 10.1002/pad.1998
BOOK REVIEW
Regime threats and state solutions. Bureaucratic loyalty and
embeddedness in Kenya
By Hassan Mai, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Studies
in Comparative Politics). 2020. pp. 309. https://doi.org/10.1017/
9781108858960
Guillaume Beaud
Centre for International Studies (CERI), Sciences Po, Paris, France
guillaume.beaud@sciencespo.fr
Scholars of authoritarianism have long hypothesized that conflicts
arising between state elites posed a central challenge to regime
durability (Gandhi & Przeworski, 2007; Svolik, 2012). They have
therefore sought to identify mechanisms cementing elite cohesion
despite diverging interests, ranging from patronage and co‐optation
strategies (Albrecht, 2015; Bellin, 2012), to shared perception of
mass threat (Slater, 2010). In Regime threats and state solutions.
Bureaucratic loyalty and embeddedness in Kenya, Mai Hassan in-
vestigates how bureaucratic management ‐civil servants' strategic
appointments, transfers, and promotions by regime leaders ‐is uti-
lized to enhance regime longevity. Selective staffing strategies of the
state's provincial bureaucratic apparatus can ensure that the multiple
threats faced by regime elites ‐either posed by rival elites or society
groups ‐are matched by appropriate state capacities to pursue rele-
vant policy responses, ranging from coercion to co‐optation. In that
way, weak states could strategically redeploy variation in state ca-
pacity in their favor via efficiently managing the public sector, in order
to concurrently neutralize elite challenge and ensure social control.
The authoritarian regime scholarship's emphasis on single‐party
states has led to the empirically unbacked assumption that authori-
tarian state apparatuses tend to be homogeneously staffed with loyal
bureaucrats, as they would be geared towards maximizing bureau-
cratic responsiveness to leaders' policy demands. Hassan however
decides to leave aside the issue of regime type, stressing that if regime
types frame the nature of threats faced by leaders (for instance,
electoral regimes imply prospects of rival elites' challenge via elec-
tions), bureaucratic management strategies in Kenya display sub-
stantial consistency across political regimes. This allows her to
revalorize the conceptual distinction between the political regime and
the state, crucial to examining how political executives strategically
manage the public sector by resorting to heterogeneous strategies.
Hassan's theoretical contribution successfully convinces the need to
depart from the regime scholarship to better grasp mechanisms
through which the state is manipulated to serve regime interests, in
light of recent scholarly works on Russia (Buckley & Reuter, 2019;
Reisinger & Moraski, 2013; Reuter & Robertson, 2012) or China
(Landry, 2008; Li & Zhou, 2005).
Hassan contends that the politicization of the public sector has
imposed itself as a permanent feature molding the design of the
Kenyan state in both periods of single‐party (1978–1991) and elec-
toral regimes (1963–1978, 1992–2013). Presidents' demographic
impossibility to forge ethnically homogenous ruling coalitions, com-
bined to the weakness of party structures, have left political execu-
tives with no choice than sharing state spoils to rival elites via
providing them with positions in the state bureaucracy. Thus, even in
Kenya's autocratic years, the upper bureaucracy was not circum-
vented to the president's co‐ethnics. Hassan tests her case by
examining provincial administrators in independent Kenya (1963–
2013). Provincial administrators have historically played a pivotal
role to regime enhancement: while being historically subjugated by
political executives, they concentrate in their hands the state means
of both coercion as well as resource distributions throughout Kenya's
territorial units.
Hassan's strong argument is that in order to ensure coercive
control while sharing state spoils with rival elites, regime leaders
resort to maximize bureaucratic compliance selectively. She shows
that strategic staffing of upper bureaucratic positions across prov-
inces, designed to minimize principal‐agents problems, is defined by
three variables: (1) the loyalty of a given bureaucrat to the president,
as a measure of horizontal elite challenge, (2) the degree of society
alignment towards the president in a given administrative unit, as a
measure of the degree of threats from below, (3) bureaucrats'
embeddedness in a their territorial jurisdiction, which Hassan as-
sumes to be both positively correlated to ensuring the programmatic
delivery of public goods and, conversely and crucially, negatively
correlated to their propensity to enforce coercion. Each relational
Public Admin Dev. 2022;42:305–307.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pad© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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