Strategic promotion, reputation, and responsiveness in bureaucratic hierarchies
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629819850638 |
| Published date | 01 July 2019 |
| Date | 01 July 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2019, Vol.31(3) 286–307
ÓThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0951629819850638
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Strategic promotion,
reputation, and
responsiveness in
bureaucratic hierarchies
Xinyu Fan
Cheung Kong GraduateSchool of Business, China
Feng Yang
Department of PoliticalScience, 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 officerin 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 pro-
motion in the future. Thus, strategic promotions decrease government responsiveness. Counter-
intuitively, such a decrease is more severe when intra-bureaucracy information is more transpar-
ent. In other words, transparencymay do more harm than good. We conduct a case study of the
Chinese bureaucracy and provide supportive evidence.
Keywords
Authoritarian regimes; government responsiveness; reputation concerns; strategic promotion;
transparency
Corresponding author:
Feng Yang, Department of Political Science, Universityof California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 4289 Bunche Hall,
Los Angeles, California, CA 90095, USA.
Email: soyang@ucla.edu
1. Introduction
Bureaucratic appointment, removal, and promotion are central to both democratic
and authoritarian politics. Within the bureaucratic hierarchy, a personnel decision
in one tier could have far-reaching impacts on another. Existing studies have
revealed a rich set of factors that a superior may consider when making a person-
nel decision, which include, among others, subordinate competence, efforts, loy-
alty, and networks (e.g., Egorov and Sonin, 2011; Lewis, 2011; Li and Zhou, 2005;
Shih et al., 2012). Although specific findings may vary, these studies share a similar
framework of analyzing personnel decisions as a bilateral relationship between a
superior and a subordinate, i.e., two tiers rather than the whole hierarchy. In other
words, they assume away the complex impacts from the rest of the hierarchy.
It is not, however, uncommon that the superior is also under third-party influ-
ences. In particular, this is because third-party observers, be they higher-ranking
bureaucrats or an important audience outside of the hierarchy, may infer informa-
tion about the promoter from her promotion decisions, which raises reputation
concerns. For instance, while making a promotion decision, a mid-tier bureaucrat
may worry about how the decision gives away information about her to higher-
ranking officers in the hierarchy. Similar reputation concerns also apply to politi-
cians, even those at the top of the organization. Unsurprisingly, politicians in
democracies care about public support because it translates into electoral votes.
Even in authoritarian regimes, rulers care about their popularity because they live
under the shadow of mass political unrest and electoral defeat (Geddes et al.,
2014).
1
Departing from previous studies, we ask how a promoter should promote her
subordinates in a way that increases her reputation in the eyes of a significant third
party when the latter is sophisticated enough to infer information from promotion
decisions. Additionally, we investigate the consequences of such strategic promo-
tions. Intuitively, a promoter with reputation concerns tries to act like a ‘good’ offi-
cer, by adopting the same promotion strategy that a good officer would choose. An
immediate consequence is that of promotion inefficiencies, which serves as a salient
example of how ‘bad’ governance can be made out of ‘good’ politics. Furthermore,
if the manipulation of reputation through personnel control is successful, the pro-
moter has extra incentives to shirk when the subordinate is competent, knowing
that information manipulation is always an option in the future. Our analysis thus
demonstrates that strategic promotion decreasesgovernment responsiveness.
We build a game-theoretic model to study an organizational structure in which
observable performance reflects joint efficacies of the superior and the subordinate,
in which the superior cares about her reputation among the audience outside the
organization and determines the subordinate’s career prospects. This structure
resembles the relationship between a popularity-minded authoritarian ruler and her
appointed local agent, or between an elected politician and her appointed bureau-
crat. Citizens outside the government form the third-party audience. The superior’s
reputation is the public’s perception of her efficacy to deliver good performance.
Citizens measure ability based on desirable attributes, such as competence and non-
Fan and Yang 287
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