Prueba Diagnóstica 2-Final

The dissertation project relies on data collected entirely through field work in Turkey, Taiwan and Pakistan. By doing so, my intention was to ensure that the information I was gathering was firsthand and nuanced. To study an insular epistemic community like senior bureaucratic elites, I deemed it necessary to rely on in person interactions that included formal interviews as well as informal discussions with various stakeholders in multiple locations. I also spent considerable time at government departments observing the inner workings of crucial departments like Ministry of Finance, Internal Affairs and National Security Councils to better understand the process of policy formulation, crisis management and the points of contestation.

My fieldwork was assisted by the Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Taiwan Fellowship that allowed me to be based in Taiwan for a period of three months while I conducted interviews and held interactions with senior bureaucrats. In Pakistan, I was facilitated by Forman Christian College’s Center for Public Policy and Governance (CPPG) in Lahore. I also arranged informal discussions and interviews based on my personal network in Pakistan. Similarly, in Turkey, I was based out of the Public Administration Institute for Turkey and Middle East (TODAIE)2, the elite bureaucrat training institution in Ankara. The institute helped me arrange

2 _{TODAIE has since been shut down by the Turkish Government. As the elite training institution}

for bureaucrats in the country, TODAIE was instrumental in maintaining the high-quality professionalism in the Turkish Bureaucracy for decades. Unfortunately, in the aftermath of the Presidential Elections in 2018, the AKP Government chose to shut down the institution in favor of making political appointments and revamping trainings under individual institutions rather than a central body.

interviews, provided data sources with access to their databases as well as helping me logistically travel around the country. Lastly in Taiwan, the Taiwan Fellowship based me out of the National Sun Yat – Sen University in the southern city of Kaohsiung. I was simultaneously associated with the Center for Chinese Studies at the National Central Library in Taipei. Both institutions assisted me in arranging interviews with senior current and former members of the bureaucracy. In addition to that, my personal network in Taiwan helped me get access to the National Security Council as well as the Ministry of Labor, both of whom are critical points of data for the purposes of this project.

The data I collected through these discussions and interactions was qualitative full of rich insights into the interactions between different stakeholders in national governance including politicians, military elites as well as business elites. Instead of synthesizing this data in to the traditional numeric values and running a correlation test using software like STATA, I chose to employ a network analysis approach that turns the information rich data in to visualization that illustrated the responsibilities, importance and centrality of the bureaucratic elites in the governance structure of the country.

Based on information collected during interviews and fieldwork, I drew up a list of key members in the national governance structure. This included politicians, bureaucrats and even the military. Each one of these individuals was assigned numbers based on their connections, for instance, the President of Turkey is connected to all ministers and top bureaucrats in each ministry, the number assigned to him is the number of connections he has in the system. Using the software Gephi, I can map out these connections into a network and analyze that by calculating the centrality of the nodes i.e. individual players, based on how many connections they have. This gives me the eigen vector centrality number i.e. how central the node is in the system. Without a political crisis,

the President would have the highest eigen vector centrality. Similarly, the quality of connections i.e. how central the other connections are to a node gives me the HUB Score. For instance, if a node in the system has only five connections but all of those connections are people like the President, Vice President and Ministers, they might have low eigen vector centrality, but they will have a high HUB score. Essentially, that shows how much they matter in the system based on the nodes they are connected to. The last measure is that of authority. Similar to the eigen vector measure, authority number indicates the kind of information a node holds. For instance, a senior bureaucrat in the system holds high authority because they have access to a lot of information by the virtue of being well connected and having high level connections i.e. high eigen vector and HUB scores.

The interviews I conducted in each of the three cases allowed me to populate the information of who is connected to whom, how many connections and interaction are individuals responsible for governance having with each other and how the general policy process flows in a country. This meant that when I was discussing things like economic policy in Pakistan, I had to take in to account that when it comes to key issue governance like finance in the country, the military does have a role in it and it at least provides feedback. I could account for that by illustrating how that information is communicated by linking the Chief of Army Staff to the Principal Secretary of the Prime Minister. That connection between the two nodes is not highlighted in formal documentation or organograms. But I account for it based on the information gathered during interviews as those provide nuance beyond formal relationships.

Doing so allows the reader to see how a country’s governance structure operates and what players are involved in figurately ensuring how the lights are kept on. Each country case has two network analyses to present a before and after political crisis governance structure to document

how bureaucratic governance stability plays out in practice. This is why it was necessary to choose country cases that not only provided variance on the independent variables but had genuine political crises.

I detail my methodological choices further in the next chapter along with explanation of how the interviews were conducted, how the information I collected was turned from qualitative data into empirical data for the purposes of creating network analyses for various country cases. Most importantly, the next section describes how to read these network analysis illustrations as evidence for the theory being tested.

2 TESTING THE THEORY: METHDOLOGIES, CASE SELECTION &

LIMITATIONS

This chapter addresses the causal arguments and methodologies used throughout the dissertation to test the hypothesis laid out in the last chapter. I discussed the case selection logic and data collection briefly in the last chapter, I go into much deeper detail regarding that in this chapter to provide a detailed context for those decisions. The intention here is to provide detailed information to the reader to help them visualize the process I went through to test the hypotheses and the conclusions I reach at the end of each case study.

The theory I am testing in this dissertation is built on two independent variables; quality of bureaucracy and institutional autonomy. As mentioned earlier, institutional autonomy refers to the insulation from political influence and ability to design policy interventions in an unbiased objective manner. Quality of bureaucracy refers to how capable the bureaucracy is based on the definitions laid out in the last chapter and highlighted in Table 1. Figure 2 simplifies the causal argument; institutional autonomy and quality of bureaucracy impact the stability of governance.

Figure 2. Independent and Dependent Variable

But how does one study this impact of the two independent variables? How can we figure out whether an institution is autonomous or at least most of the institutions in a state are enjoying autonomy? How can we conclusively state whether senior bureaucratic elites are of “high quality” or “low quality”? What kind of data needs to be analyzed in order to provide evidence of for this theory and how is that data processed? These are the questions this chapter intends to address before taking a deep dive in to the three country cases. I have already explained the logic of selecting these three case studies in the previous chapter, but I will provide more details on that as a start. That will be followed up by details of the field work I conducted to collect data, what kind of data was collected during the field work and lastly I conclude by explaining how that data was used and processed to provide evidence for the theory of bureaucratic governance stability in this dissertation.