Since the mid-fifteenth century, the enrolment of the Ming Imperial Academy had kept increasing and the Confucian students eligible for official appointments had far outnumbered the vacancies with the bureaucracy. Despite oppositions to the seniority system in making official appointments in Chinese history from the fourth century onwards as Qiu Jun adduces texts to show, he proposed that it was crucial for the Ming emperor to adopt such a system for the fairness of selection on the grounds that the problem of too many candidates for too few offices needed to be resolved and that historical circumstances required changes in institutions rather than a strict adherence to received historical wisdom.

This chapter examines the relationship between a politicized public sector and democratic backsliding. It is argued that politicization of public employment is an important, if understudied, component of the institutional landscape that makes democracy vulnerable. Bureaucratic politicization increases the likelihood that backsliding becomes endogenous by generating electoral advantages for incumbents and by raising the stakes of control over government. Politicization of the state administration allows incumbents to dole out patronage jobs; introduce political loyalty tests as a precondition for accessing basic government services; press public employees into campaign-related work; and utilize state funds for political purposes. Building on this volume’s aim of untangling the relationship between institutional subversion and backsliding, particular attention is given to the timing and sequencing of these processes. Evidence from Eastern Europe and a global sample shed light on how governments in countries that once seemed to be the front-runners of democratization concentrated political power by extending the economic reach of the state and subverting public sector independence. This study contributes to research on the illiberal political economy that supports backsliding regimes and their capture of key levers of political power.

Nearly fifty years have passed since the federal government adopted its policy of tribal self-determination, and tribes remain subject to extensive federal regulations. For example, the United States still holds land in trust for tribes. The federal government holds title to trust land, so tribes and Indians cannot engage in activities on trust land without prior federal approval. Obtaining the requisite federal approval can take more than a year. Apart from the bureaucracy, trust land is inalienable, making it difficult to use for collateral. Indian trader laws are another uniquely Indian country regulation. The laws were originally enacted in 1790 on the theory Indians were too incompetent to trade with whites. To this day, the laws forbid “white persons” from trading with an Indian without first obtaining federal permission. The federal regulations extend to virtually all economic activity in Indian country, from natural resource development to Indian gaming.

In the post-World War II era, international lawyers have occupied the front seat in the study of international organisations (IOs). During the past decade, this disciplinary hierarchy has grown to feel increasingly unsatisfying. This chapter offers an anthropological take on the study of IOs building both on the past decade of anthropological work and my ethnography at the UN Human Rights Committee. IOs are frequently accused of ineffectiveness embedded in endless paper-pushing techniques. In this chapter, I engage with these criticisms and ask: can we find another perspective from which to assess effectiveness? What happens if we stop investing our analytical attention in what we think IO operations and their desired ‘impacts’ should be and instead engage in non-normative inquiries into what IOs actually do? I explore what can we learn about IOs’ visions for world improvement by focusing on the legal technicalities and material forms that define their operations. I propose that, instead of a hindrance or distraction, these forms embody ‘standards for a better world’ that are an essential component of IOs’ civilising mission.

This chapter examines the relationship between the administrative state and constitutional values and structures with reference to German and American legal and political theory. It recovers from these intertwined traditions three analytical approaches to the administrative state. The first analytical approach understands the administrative state to implement the constitution. The second understands the administrative state to generate new constitutional structures and values. The third understands the administrative state to displace the constitution with patterns and practices of rule that lie outside of the existing governance framework. These frameworks foreground normative analysis of how the administrative state ought to relate to general democratic principles and the specific constitutional rules that institutionalize them. I argue for a differentiated and developmental understanding of the relationship between democracy, constitution, and administration. The concrete administration of democratic values should allow constitutional rules to shift in light of social and historical context. The administrative state should not be strictly limited by, but rather should facilitate critical interrogation of, the constitution’s current instantiation of democratic values. The administrative state can and should hold the constitution open for the introduction and proliferation of new institutional configurations and forms of public life.

While the federal government has adopted a policy of tribal self-determination, paternalism remains. The Moapa Band of Paiute Indians’ attempt to open a brothel is a prime example. Prostitution is legal in the surrounding state of Nevada; nevertheless, the Secretary of the Interior prohibited the tribe from doing so despite acknowledging it “is a profitable economic enterprise for non-Indians.” Though the federal government was supposed to ensure the Navajo Nation received a fair return on its natural resources, the United States Secretary of the Interior assisted in a private company in swindling the Navajo Nation. Similarly, the United States mismanaged Indian assets for more than a century. When Eloise Cobell sued the United States, the United States removed a federal judge who was ruling in favor of the Indian plaintiffs. The case was settled soon after. Additionally, the National Labor Relations Board imposes regulations on tribes that it does not impose on other governments. The United States also prohibits tribes from accessing the bonds other governments use to fund infrastructure projects.

Territorial jurisdiction will require tribes to further develop their legal systems. People often assume tribal law is exotic, based upon ancient customs. While tribal law often includes customs, many legal systems do. Moreover, tribal law is often indistinguishable from state law. This is not assimilation; rather, this is to be expected. Many laws are universal because people generally want the same basic things. For example, theft and murder are prohibited everywhere. Likewise, tribes banned these offenses long before Europeans arrived on the continent. Though tribal law can deviate from standard Anglo-American law, different does not necessarily mean bad. Additionally, tribal courts usually resemble state and federal courts. Despite negative stereotypes, studies show tribal courts treat non-Indians fairly. Nevertheless, lack of funding – largely due to state taxation – inhibits tribes’ ability to develop bureaucracy. Lack of funding also prevents some tribes from publishing their laws. A possible solution to tribal institutional capacity is the creation of intertribal business courts. The intertribal nature of the tribunal will provide more resources to increase administrative capacity and help eliminate perceptions of bias.

Ottoman imperial administration could not have functioned efficiently without the documents produced by the central secretarial service, from everyday registers of appointments, orders resolving disputes, and financial records, to imperial correspondence at the highest levels. To be a katib (secretary) in the imperial council was a crucial role. From a surprisingly small, relatively inconspicuous number in the early sixteenth century, the central secretarial body grew in size and significance until by the eighteenth century the bureaucracy had become a recognized third arm of government, alongside the military and the judiciary; it provided essential ministerial leadership in the nineteenth-century reform movement. Focusing on a critical period of change from the mid sixteenth to the mid seventeenth centuries, this chapter introduces aspects of secretarial recruitment, training, and output, concluding with a comparison of two major letter collections, one compiled c. 1574 by the reisülküttab (chief secretary) Feridun Bey, the other c. 1640 by a later reis Sarı Abdullah (d. 1660).

Around Nicomachus, the alleged son of a public slave, who became the collector and transcriber of the city’s laws, a group of men in the service of Athenian institutions takes shape. Radically distinct from that of the magistrates, their activity was well and truly outside the political field, as described in Plato’s Statesman. It brought together slaves and free men, whether they played the role of assistant to the archons or of undersecretaries to certain magistrates. Reading the prytany inscriptions suggests that, within it, the distinction between free men and slaves prevented the formation of a collective identity based on a specific skill and professional dignity. The chorus of bureaucrats that surrounds Nicomachus, in short, is only a mirage. Trapped by the city’s self-representation, such a reading would, however, be erroneous. It undoubtedly underestimates the existence of an administrative culture of which these men, whether they were free or slaves, could be the guardians, and about which our sources are admittedly tenuous. Above all, it ignores the opportunities public slaves were given to accede, if not during their lifetime, then possibly via the intermediary of descent, to the society of free men. Nicomachus, after all, was perhaps the son of a dēmosios, and, if this was the case, it allows us to suggest, on the one hand, that service to the city could lead some of these slaves to see their descendants acquire citizenship and, on the other hand, that citizenship could be acquired through the transmission of professional skills from father to son, which were put to service for the common good. Therefore, it is perhaps through the transmission, over several generations, of a skill used in the service of Athens that the chorus of the bureaucrats of the city came into being, which transcended the distinction between free men and slaves.

This chapter explores the disconcertedness of tax inspectors when performing their job of inspecting businesses’ tax compliance. It shows how a group of tax inspectors experience their focus in work being distorted due to the implementation of a new strategic direction set by the tax authority. To analyse this situation, I draw parallels with Graeber’s work on bureaucracy and dead zones to argue that tax inspectors are engaged in jobs that they cannot make sense of, which lowers their job satisfaction and creates opaque success criteria. Methodologically, the chapter is based on in-depth, qualitative interviews with tax inspectors from the Danish Tax Authority, who all express concerns about their new work. Building on this analysis, the chapter also includes a reflexive part where I present material that shows my own previous interpretation of this state-of-affairs and demonstrates how I was exposed to some of the same challenges as the tax inspectors. The chapter explores a core area for the anthropology of tax, that is, that of the changing strategies in tax administration and the effects that this has on the tax inspectors’ work.

In this chapter the “Pashtun Borderland” – a key concept throughout the book – is framed as a distinct physical and geopolitical space. This space, it is argued, is shaped by the complex interplay of imperial aspiration by larger polities claiming their authority over this space and ethnic self-ascriptions arising as a consequence. The heavy ideological baggage both practices pivot on is somewhat disenchanted by significant lines of conflict which traverse the region and its communities: between lowland and upland communities, between local elites and subalterns and between urban and rural communities. It is claimed that the persona of the discontent, or troublemaker, is a systemic result of these complex constellations, heavily fuelled by the agendas of successive imperial actors and the making and un-making of temporary pragmatic alliances typical for this kind of environment, ideal-typically cast here as “Borderland pragmatics”.

This chapter contributes a decolonising analysis of tax primarily in the Canadian settler colonial context. I examine the legal constitution of the First Nations Financial Transparency Act in relation to its attempts to reform First Nations’ governance. I demonstrate how the federal government looked to organise a ‘taxpayer’ ethos amongst First Nations citizens through publicising First Nations band salary details and audits. This taxpayer ethos was meant to simultaneously encourage citizens to critique their governments rather than the Canadian federal government, but also to promote private property on reserves. I make a theoretical argument for the necessity of thinking through tax with a decolonising lens that both specifically respects the sovereignty of Indigenous nations and offers a critique of how tax operates to erode that very sovereignty.

This chapter investigates tax payments and self-making amongst Romanian migrants in London. Vicol demonstrates how taxation is a mode of anchoring oneself in a moral order premised on self-sufficiency. Although the UK’s mainstream media cast Romanian migrants through tropes of welfare dependency, Romanian self-narrations as hard working, taxpaying subjects enabled interlocutors to constitute themselves as good migrants. However, becoming a taxpayer in practice was also an exercise in a particular type of bureaucratic literacy. A host of digital barriers, language deficiencies, and unhelpful bureaucrats drove many to seek out private consultants who made a business of helping their co-nationals decode their obligations to HM Revenue and Customs. Thus, this chapter also explores taxpaying as a technical exercise of making oneself legible through the language of the fiscal authority. Taxation becomes part of the making of the migrant subject. It is about the paradoxical ways in which a digitising state premised on self-reliance prompts affirmations of independence at the level of discourse, while simultaneously generating new networks of dependency in practice.

As its name indicates, algorithmic regulation relies on the automation of regulatory processes through algorithms. Examining the impact of algorithmic regulation on the rule of law hence first requires an understanding of how algorithms work. In this chapter, I therefore start by focusing on the technical aspects of algorithmic systems (Section 2.1), and complement this discussion with an overview of their societal impact, emphasising their societal embeddedness and the consequences thereof (Section 2.2). Next, I examine how and why public authorities rely on algorithmic systems to inform and take administrative acts, with special attention to the historical adoption of such systems, and their impact on the role of discretion (Section 2.3). Finally, I draw some conclusions for subsequent chapters (Section 2.4).

This chapter is about how police officers engage with sex workers when they are not enforcing anti-prostitution laws against them. By focusing their enforcement efforts on low-tier sex workers, the police help create a space for the middle tier of China’s sex industry – entertainment venues and their hostesses—to thrive. I find that law enforcement officers engage actively and in myriad ways with the sex industry when they are not focused on arresting sex workers. Some of their actions are purely extractive interactions. Yet other police behavior, while still self-serving, also benefits sex workers. Making sense of police actions in this context requires shifting our framework from exclusively viewing police as powerful figures in relation to sex workers to also viewing them as street-level bureaucrats who are accountable to the local government and the vast police bureaucracy of which they are at the forefront. This approach provides a different perspective on police officers, underscoring their weakness within China’s bureaucratic system rather than their strength in relation to the sex workers. Their vulnerability vis-à-vis the state even affects how they engage with sex workers and underscores conditions under which the job security of frontline police officers in fact depends on a cooperative local sex industry.