The notion of administrative tradition represents one way of discussing the issue of whether and to what extent a number of countries (polities/jurisdictions) have a significant array of traits in common concerning their public administration. The notion of administrative tradition may enable the pursuit of a range of purposes, like the framing of comparison for purposes of advancing knowledge and the assessment of capacities for reforming and change. The notion of Napoleonic administrative tradition can be substantiated by identifying a distinct configuration along four dimens(ions: an organic conception of the state, with limited role for societal, non-co-opted actors in public policy-making; a career civil service, distinct from other occupations, furnishing a general-purpose elite for the state; a predominance of law over management in defining the fundamental tasks of administration, and uniformity of treatment of citizens as a basic value guiding administrative action; and the preeminence of law and a system of courts in enforcing public accountability. Jurisdictions that may be ascribed to the Napoleonic administrative tradition encompass five countries in Europe (France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) as well as, more problematically, a number of countries which inherited the French model during the colonial period.
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The Napoleonic Tradition in Public Administration
Edoardo Ongaro
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Bounded Rationality and Cognitive Limits in Political Decision Making
Brooke N. Shannon, Zachary A. McGee, and Bryan D. Jones
Bounded rationality conceives of people engaging in politics as goal oriented but endowed with cognitive and emotional architectures that limit their abilities to pursue those goals rationally. Political institutions provide the critical link between micro- and macro-processes in political decision-making. They act to (a) compensate for those bounds on rationality; (b) make possible cooperative arrangements not possible under the assumptions of full or comprehensive rationality; and (c) fall prey to the same cognitive and emotional limits or canals that individual humans do. The cognitive limitations that hamper individuals are not only replicated at the organizational level but are in fact causal.
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The Politics of Domestic Taxation
Lucy Barnes
All governments require revenue, and domestic taxes are the primary means for generating it. Yet both the size and shape of taxation vary significantly across countries and have been transformed over time. What explains variation in domestic taxation? To answer this question, recent scholarship on taxation has focused on the politics of taxation as a tool for redistribution. This has led to a wide body of research on the fiscal impact of taxation and on the introduction, evolution, and variation in direct and progressive tax regimes, particularly the income tax. Yet the focus on taxation as a redistributive tool yields a puzzle, as more progressive tax systems tend to be found where redistribution is in fact the lowest. Explanations of this paradox often center on the impossibility of high and progressive taxes on capital in the context of international economic integration. Not as well studied are taxes other than the taxation of income, and the deliberate politics of nonfiscal, regulatory, and incentive effects of different tax choices. Methodologically, problems of endogeneity are ubiquitous in the study of tax policy choices, but more sophisticated experimental work is well underway in research on individual preferences for taxation.
