I would also expect some combination of: putting in the minimum effort, playing it safe, and optionally moral-maze behavior, and some form of rent seeking (e.g. taking bribes).
Pure blame minimization would motivate bureaucracies to reduce their jurisdiction, but expanding the jurisdiction provides more opportunities for rent seeking… if there is a standard way to make decisions about many things and yet carry no responsibility for their failure, I would expect bureaucracy to optimize for this.
Something like: Someone else is responsible for the success, but at every step they need to ask the bureaucracy for a permission; if the project fails because they didn’t get the permission, the person responsible is fully blamed regardless, because they should have found another solution.
(Now that I wrote this, it kinda reminds me of education, where the teachers are blamed for everything, and yet if they try to do anything differently, it is not allowed. Or rather, people complain about how private schools have unfair advantage because some of the rules do not apply to them, e.g. they are allowed to fire disruptive students, but the reasoning never goes towards relaxing the rules for public schools, too.)
I think the UK and other Western European countries have relatively little direct rent-seeking behaviour, but I agree with your hypothesis for any country that doesn’t have a strong anti-corruption culture. (Here, the rent-seeking goes more through political parties rather than non-political bureaucracies.) And I think the analogy with education is a very good one.
I would also expect some combination of: putting in the minimum effort, playing it safe, and optionally moral-maze behavior, and some form of rent seeking (e.g. taking bribes).
Pure blame minimization would motivate bureaucracies to reduce their jurisdiction, but expanding the jurisdiction provides more opportunities for rent seeking… if there is a standard way to make decisions about many things and yet carry no responsibility for their failure, I would expect bureaucracy to optimize for this.
Something like: Someone else is responsible for the success, but at every step they need to ask the bureaucracy for a permission; if the project fails because they didn’t get the permission, the person responsible is fully blamed regardless, because they should have found another solution.
(Now that I wrote this, it kinda reminds me of education, where the teachers are blamed for everything, and yet if they try to do anything differently, it is not allowed. Or rather, people complain about how private schools have unfair advantage because some of the rules do not apply to them, e.g. they are allowed to fire disruptive students, but the reasoning never goes towards relaxing the rules for public schools, too.)
I think the UK and other Western European countries have relatively little direct rent-seeking behaviour, but I agree with your hypothesis for any country that doesn’t have a strong anti-corruption culture. (Here, the rent-seeking goes more through political parties rather than non-political bureaucracies.) And I think the analogy with education is a very good one.