The Effects of Partisan Polarization on the Bureaucracy

Abstract

This essay reviews the law and political science literature addressing how polarization affects administrative agencies, and suggests opportunities for new scholarly inquiries that might help us fill in our understanding of the effects of polarization on the bureaucracy. While this scholarship has not yet generated consensus conclusions about the effects on the bureaucracy of increasingly polarized parties, we can make a couple of observations about its lessons so far. The first is that the early evidence suggests that agencies are neither as paralyzed nor as prone to ideologically extreme positions as are their political overseers, even if they sometimes have more ideological room to operate than they once did. The second observation is that polarization (particularly, congressional gridlock) nevertheless places increasing strain on agencies and courts, as the former face new problems within their jurisdiction without (or with less frequent and helpful) input from Congress, and the latter struggle to review those agency decisions. These struggles have important implications for the place of administrative agencies in the American constitutional design, implications that courts and scholars are beginning to address. The task here - tracing the effects of partisan polarization on administrative agencies - implicates age-old debates about the political control of agencies by politicians, and the extent to which agencies can (or should) evade political control. The academic literatures within which those debates are waged have long been fragmented, both substantively and methodologically. Within political science, these questions are taken up by scholars who occupy a variety of subfields, including bureaucratic politics, public administration, Congress, and the presidency. Each frames the problem from the perspective of a different institutional actor, and brings different methodological norms and preferences to the task. Among legal scholars, these questions fall mostly within administrative law scholarship, but administrative law scholars borrow selectively from social scientific analyses, all the while addressing the normative dimensions of this question more directly (and transparently) than most social scientists do. This essay explores how these frames influence the scholarship addressing the effects of polarization in a variety of ways, both analytical and normative.