The Governor’s Dilemma is a bold and original book on the pervasive practice of indirect governance. All political arrangements entail elements of indirect governance: emperors, monarchs, theocratic figureheads, army generals, and even democratic leaders and international organizations rely on intermediaries to achieve their goals. None govern directly in the sense that they are able to tightly control each step of the process to its conclusion, whether in an overseas territory, on the battlefield, in international markets, or at the local office. Rather, all govern indirectly by relying on local administrators, governing councils, platoon leaders, bureaucrats, and other intermediaries. In each case, governors face trade-offs, notably between expending resources to control the behavior of intermediaries and encouraging their autonomous competence.
The Governor’s Dilemma greatly expands the theoretical and empirical scope of indirect governance studies. Superbly edited by Kenneth W. Abbott, Philipp Genschel, Duncan Snidal, and Bernhard Zangl, it moves beyond principal-agent (PA) theory, which has dominated more than a generation of research on indirect governance in comparative politics and international relations. Although the editors acknowledge a significant debt to PA theory, they contend that it has blinded scholars to other modes of indirect governance, including scenarios where authority is enlisted rather than compelled and where parties operate as relative equals rather than on opposite ends of a hierarchy. Empirically, the volume also departs from prevailing indirect governance studies, which often are limited to one type of organization, political system, issue-area, or period. In The Governor’s Dilemma, readers are instead treated to a great variety of cases that reveal how governors have reconciled control-competence trade-offs in different national and international contexts, across democratic and authoritarian systems, in security and economic affairs alike, and in the past and present.
The book opens with an introduction that is nothing short of a masterclass in institutional theory. In taut, accessible, interdisciplinary language, the editors detail the benefits of shifting from PA to what they succinctly term CC, or control-competence theory. They argue that PA captures only one mode of indirect governance, which is that of delegation in which hierarchical relations prevail and authority is “granted” to intermediaries. In such models, the latter are portrayed as relatively powerless, except perhaps for their ability to shirk responsibilities. Meanwhile, Abbott et al. underscore that intermediaries often have significant leverage over governors and that they may exercise it in ways that challenge and undermine the governors’ control. Therefore, governors face a dilemma, which is that they can opt to enhance their control over intermediaries but only at the cost of seeing the latter’s competence reduced. Or if governors opt to strengthen the competence of intermediaries, their control will decline as intermediaries acquire more power through a combination of greater organizational capacity, legitimacy, credibility, and expertise.
The volume contrasts delegation with three other modes of indirect governance. Co-optation is also based in hierarchical control, but the authority of intermediaries is “enlisted” rather than “granted”—meaning that the consent of intermediaries is voluntary rather than compelled. This significantly alters how governors resolve the trade-off because they are more vulnerable to having their control challenged by intermediaries. Delegation and co-optation are contrasted with two modes of nonhierarchical governance. In trusteeships, authority is granted to relative equals (rather than superiors), whereas in scenarios of orchestration authority must be elicited. The distinction may seem subtle, but the book makes clear that there are big differences between models of indirect governance in which intermediaries are legal equals but lack resources and those situations where intermediaries have significant resources and governors must find ways to elicit their cooperation.
The book’s two middle parts study the indirect governance of “violence” and “markets.” Part II features six deeply researched chapters about governors who use the four modes of indirect governance to regulate violence in diverse historical and contemporary contexts. Paul MacDonald leads off with a sharp analysis of colonial empires and how metropolitan officials manage efforts by local administrators to expand their power at the expense of the former. Henry Thompson queries why the scope of secret police activity varies across authoritarian regimes and finds that differences in the East German and Polish Communist regimes can be traced to the threats that elites perceived from competent secret police forces. A powerful chapter on multilateral weapons inspections by Alexander Thompson details the incentive states have to support competent multilateral agencies. Idean Salehyan importantly documents the long process by which the Iraqi state, with assistance by the United States, overcame capability deficits by enlisting paramilitary groups to control insurgencies. Henning Tamm carefully explains why invaders enlist rebel groups to seize foreign territory. The part concludes with Andreas Kruck’s expert analysis of the indirect ways by which private military and security companies are governed.
How markets are governed through varied modes of indirect governance informs five complementary chapters in part III. Jack Seddon and Walter Mattli lead with a trenchant account of how competence-control trade-offs have changed over 150 years in capital market governance to arrive at a place of instability where somewhat empowered state governors regulate markets through intermediaries of middling competence. In their nuanced analysis of the European Union, a bastion of multiple direct and indirect modes of governance, Felix Biermann and Berthold Rittberger find that arrangements that combine features of delegation and orchestration are critical to securing consistent and durable levels of control and competence. Thomas Rixen and Lora Anne Viola masterfully use indirect governance theory to reveal the reasons behind the support of Group of 20 governments for more powerful yet constrained regulation of global financial markets. Pointing to limitations in the capacity of the European Union to enforce structural adjustment in crisis-ridden countries, Manuela Moschella solves the puzzle of why the EU enlisted the International Monetary Fund in the early stages of the Eurozone crisis. The section concludes with a compelling analysis of autocratic regimes by Johannes Gerschewski, who leverages a comparison of China and North Korea to explain how practices of indirect governance both stymied and propelled transitions to market-oriented policies.
The final part is a conclusion by Mark A. Pollack, who expands on his trailblazing contributions to PA analysis by embracing CC theory to dissect how the Trump administration asserted control over federal agencies. CC theory helps Pollack powerfully capture how Trump sought to control information that could undermine his presidency. By challenging the expertise and operational capacity of the Environmental Protection Agency and the State Department, and simultaneously attempting to undermine the legitimacy and credibility of national intelligence and law enforcement agencies, Trump aimed to alter the trade-off between control and competence to his political advantage. Although Pollack acknowledges that only the future can tell what the long-term consequences of Trump’s efforts will be, his effective use of CC theory underscores that it offers an essential foundation in the present with which to begin such inquiries.
The Governor’s Dilemma successfully combines cutting-edge theory with deeply sourced empirical studies to inaugurate new avenues of research. It will be an indispensable resource for future studies of indirect governance, whether their purpose is to uncover legacies of international cooperation and intervention, document how major security and economic challenges are resolved by governors who are far removed from local affairs, or determine what long-term consequences populist leaders may have in the world’s democracies, small and large. The Governor’s Dilemma deserves to be read widely in all corners of political science.
