When Policy Fails by Design: The Strategic Use of Bureaucracy in Preemptive Policy Sabotage

This thesis develops a formal model of bureaucratic sabotage to examine how incumbents strategically leverage the bureaucracy to influence policy outcomes and constrain their successors. In the model, an incumbent chooses whether to implement a reform or maintain the status quo, while bureaucrats, observing both their own capacity and the proposed policy, decide whether to sabotage. I show that high bureaucratic quality is a necessary condition for effective resistance and that the incumbent may optimally encourage sabotage when the expected policy gains exceed implementation costs. Extending the model to incorporate uncertainty about future political preferences, I demonstrate that bureaucrats are more likely to resist when opponents’ policies are uncertain. Comparative statics further reveal that administrative structures and political polarization shape the feasibility of sabotage: under the spoils system, party loyalty reduces bureaucratic resistance, whereas polarization amplifies both bureaucratic incentives to sabotage and the incumbent’s strategic leverage. The model identifies a distinct mechanism of bureaucratic influence and its implications for policy outcomes.