Coercive Capacity and The Politics of Implementation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why are some bureaucracies in highly coercive policy fields able successfully to implement controversial policies whereas others bow to political opposition? This article challenges the common argument, based on a principal-agent model, that bureaucratic nonimplementation is the result of the absence of effective legislative oversight. Instead, the article argues that in coercive policy fields where the state imposes significant costs on its targets, nonimplementation can in fact be understood as the result of control efforts by elected officials. The article empirically tests this argument by comparatively examining the politics of implementation in the policy field of migration control. Drawing on interview data from Germany and the United States, the article identifies significant cross-national and subnational variation in the capacity of bureaucrats to implement contested deportation orders. The article argues that this variation can be accounted for primarily by institutionally determined differences in the degree of political insulation of bureaucratic agencies.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it