Chapter 8 explores how incentives influence the behavior of providers. The first part of the chapter is an application of personnel economics, discussing how different pay schemes create incentives for different types of effort. The chapter goes on to discuss the latent variable problem when looking at pay schemes and behavior and covers literature that helps to unpack the causal story. The second half of the chapter discusses demand inducement and its variants (fee splitting and self-referral) from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. The end of chapter supplement gives a brief introduction to behavioral economics and how cognitive biases can also be used to influence provider behavior.

Populism challenges our democracies. And populists in governments attempt to transform public administration systems in manifold illiberal ways. This chapter outlines an analytical frame for systematic comparative research on determining how populists attempt to convert public bureaucracies, what are their motivations, and what are their chances of succeeding.  It bridgesdifferent strands of scholarship that have remained rather insulated so far. It complements the debate on system transformation and democracy systematically with administrative aspects. The chapter thus offers a path to integrate public administration scholarship in system transformation research by eliciting the role of bureaucracies in reform projects of populist governments.

This chapter looks at three types of decisions businesspeople must make once they decide to run for office. First, I take advantage of Russia’s mixed-member electoral system to develop and test hypotheses about when businesspeople run in single-member districts rather than on party lists. Using the same dataset presented in Chapter Two, I find evidence that the autonomy offered by an SMD seat is more highly valued since it provides for uninhibited and open lobbying of firm interests. Next, I investigate how businesspeople approach the issue of party alignment, showing how firm characteristics such as ownership and asset specificity (which require different types of benefits from the state) increase the appeal of aligning with the ruling party. I also show that rivals join opposing political parties in order to push for their own individual interests. At least with regard to businessperson candidates, politics is just another arena for direct competitors to protect their interests against one another. Finally, I investigate why some firms send employees other than their firm directors into public office. A final set of analysis tests this set of hypotheses linking the decision to delegate candidacy to the degree of politician shirking experienced.

This chapter develops the main argument to explain businessperson candidacy. As a direct strategy, businessperson candidacy gives interest groups unmediated access to policymaking, in contrast to indirect strategies, such as lobbying and making campaign contributions, which require politicians to work as intermediaries. Why do firm directors invest resources into occupying elected office, rather than use the more conventional indirect approaches? At heart is a commitment problem: there is no guarantee that money given to a politician will be returned in-kind with policy. Firms cannot specify quid pro quo arrangements with politicians where policy influence is traded for contributions such as money, information, and/or votes. Businesspeople then run for elected office when (1) they cannot trust that the politicians they lobby will represent their interests and (2) their firms have the resources available to contest elections. This theory predicts the probability of politician shirking (reneging on their promises) depends on the extent of economic competition and presence of political parties capable of enforcing informal quid pro quo agreements. When politicians are untrustworthy and unresponsive to special interests, directly occupying a legislative seat becomes the only viable legal avenue for a firm achieving desired political influence.

Chapter 4 examines the idea of the ‘forgotten army’. Whether in the Middle East or Macedonia, soldiers during the war were absolutely certain that their part in the conflict – their suffering, as explored in Chapter 1, and their contribution to the wider war effort, such as the liberation of Palestine or Mesopotamia, as shown in Chapter 3 – had gone unnoticed by the home front. In some ways worse was their fear that those at home had badly misrepresented the war outside the Western Front, recognising the only ‘real’ war as the one being fought in France and Flanders while those in the Middle East and Macedonia were on a ‘picnic’. Again, the Western Front was foremost in the minds of soldiers away from it. This fear became more serious in the war’s final two months, as soldiers in the British Salonika Force (BSF), alongside their French, Greek, and Serbian allies, forced the surrender of Bulgaria, while the Egyptian Expeditionary Force’s (EEF) northwards drive to Aleppo knocked out the Ottomans. In both cases, soldiers in Macedonia and the Middle East argued that it was their campaign that had set in motion the downfall of the Central Powers and, ultimately, the armistice with Germany and an end to the war.