Organisation, information processing, and policy change in US federal bureaucracies

Abstract

We examine the shape of policy change in the US federal bureaucracy. Punctuated equilibrium suggests institutional friction and limited attention as prime influences on policy change. We build on this literature by exploring how organisational forms shape policy change. We also conceptualise the key difference between budgets and laws as measures and use this distinction to motivate our new approach to modelling the shape of policy change. We use the considerable organisational variation in the US federal bureaucracy as the empirical foundation for the analysis, collecting a new data set on the regulatory agenda containing 63,289 items from 2008 to 2016. We use an innovative points-over-threshold approach to show how to move from typical descriptive analysis of policy change distributions to models of tail behaviour. This approach is more amenable to textual data than previous approaches based on percentage change distributions. The findings suggest that departmental bureaucracies, independent boards and commissions, and government corporations experience different patterns of policy change. We relate organisation and delegation to adaptability and resiliency in institutional and policy-system design. Larger organisations exhibit smoother, less disjointed policy dynamics, while smaller organisational forms exhibit fatter tails and less adaptive policy change. Our findings suggest that larger bureaucracies may handle change in task environments and problem definitions more easily than smaller organisations. The findings challenge the typical view that smaller, nimble organisations handle change better.