Manipulating Personnel for Power, with Mai Hassan

Our guest today is Dr. Mai Hassan, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Mai is the author of a recent book, Regime Threats and State Solutions, about how leaders manipulate the bureaucracy to maintain their hold on power.

Imagine a political system in which the president has the power to hire, fire, and shuffle bureaucrats in the most important state agencies. How would the leader strategically choose to wield this authority? Perhaps she would decide to pack the state with her own supporters -- for example, with members of her ethnic group -- to ensure loyalty and to maximize the chances that presidential edicts will be faithfully carried out.

However, holding power often means striking bargains with rival elites. Usually the best way to do that is to give those rival elites a foothold in the state and to hand out jobs to their supporters. A leader who packs the state has fewer spoils to share.

Mai’s book delves into this core dilemma of power-maintenance: how can leaders keep their friends close and their enemies closer? When do executives opt to share power, and when do they choose to hoard it by staffing the state with loyalists?

In today’s episode, we talk with Mai about her theory of bureaucratic control. It’s an argument in which leaders don’t merely choose bureaucrats based on their loyalties; they also manipulate civil servants’ loyalties and attachments, by strategically placing them and shuffling them across regions of the country.

We also talk about how Mai tests her argument by using a vast original dataset on decades of Kenyan administrative appointments, spanning both the country’s autocratic and democratic periods. And Mai tells us how she stumbled onto the puzzle of bureaucratic manipulation while digging through archival data for an altogether different project.

You can find references to all the academic works we discuss on the episode page on our website.