Scholars have emphasized the importance of having a “Weberian bureaucracy” for thesocio-economic development of a country, but few attempts have been made tomeasure public administrations according to their degree of Weberianism. This paperpresents the study and questionnaire design of a web survey covering 58 countries,which embodies the largest cross-national dataset on the structure of publicadministrations up to date. It also provides the main findings from the dataset: Thefeatures often associated with a Weberian bureaucracy can neither theoretically norempirically be collapsed into a single dimension (Weberian versus a patronage-basedadministration). Instead two distinct dimensions are identified, in the paper referred toas professionalism (i.e. up to which extent bureaucracies are “professional” vis-à-vis“politicized”) and closedness (i.e. up to which extent bureaucracies are more “closed”or public-like vis-à-vis “open” or private-like). Finally, the paper validates thesedimensions with information from other available data sources, and demonstrates thatthe results have not been produced by respondent perception bias.
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