Bureaucratic Responsiveness Research Articles

Federal Institutions, State Agency Bias, and Unequal Bureaucratic Responsiveness in the U.S. OSHA Enforcement

This research demonstrates the importance of the mediating role of agency preference distributions that differentiate the influence of political institutions on bureaucratic agencies. A spatial model is developed in the context of U.S. regulatory federalism to posit that the responsiveness of state agencies to federal institutions will be greater as state agencies exhibit a stronger policy bias by enforcing regulatory rules at an either extremely low or high level. The results of Quantile Regression analysis of state enforcement of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Act show that bureaucratic responsiveness to the preferences of the federal institutions is unequal across different state agencies.

Modes of Bureaucratic Responsiveness in India

Modes of Bureaucratic Responsiveness in India

Bureaucratic Response to Human Tragedy: American Consuls and the Jewish Plight in Vienna, 1938 1941

In the period following the German annexation of Austria, the American consulate in Vienna found itself in the difficult position of responding to a refugee crisis while facing pressure from the Department of State to enforce restrictive immigration policies. Under the leadership of Consul General John Wiley, American consuls worked to maintain the letter of the law while providing as many qualified applicants as possible with immigration visas. Wiley's “middle ground” allowed consuls to fulfill their bureaucratic tasks and advance in their careers as Foreign Service officers while displaying compassion in their interactions with visa applicants. Despite frequent tensions between the Department of State and the Vienna consulate, and an institutional “mindset” that discouraged sensitivity to local conditions, American consuls consistently filled their visa quotas.

Political Control and Bureaucratic Autonomy Revisited: A Multi-Institutional Analysis of OSHA Enforcement

The proper role of bureaucracy in democratic governance has long been a matter of controversy. One part of the debate involves the argument that democratic control and bureaucratic autonomy are dichotomous opposites: if there is democratic control, there cannot be bureaucratic autonomy, and vice versa. This article develops a spatial model of bureaucratic policy choices that reveals that conditions of democratic control and bureaucratic autonomy are not incompatible: the interactions among political institutions not only create the condition in which government agencies must respond to the will of the elected officials but also provide the opportunity for the agencies to reflect their own preferences in policy outcomes. Empirical analyses of occupational safety and health enforcement between 1982 and 2000 provide support for the general argument that bureaucratic responsiveness and bureaucratic autonomy together constitute the behavioral characteristics of bureaucracy under institutional influence.

Toward a Relevant Agenda for a Responsive Public Administration

The relevance of the concept “bureaucratic responsiveness” has been questioned in recent years. One reason for the questioned relevance is the apparent environmental changes that are occurring in public administration. Globalization and devolution have infiltrated the halls of bureaucracies. Public agencies are being asked to collaborate with actors in other sectors of society, including, and especially, citizens and citizen associations. In addition to these environmental changes, administrators are being confronted with potentially competing ethical obligations that make decisions regarding responsiveness challenging. This article uses these evolving environments and competing ethical obligations to formulate a set of six variants of bureaucratic responsiveness: dictated, constrained, purposive, entrepreneurial, collaborative, and negotiated. It is argued that to be relevant, writers and researchers in public administration need to consider each of these variants and how they potentially collide with each other to shape administrator thought and behavior, particularly in the collaborative context. In conclusion, it is suggested that calls for the abandonment of “responsiveness” as a central concept in public administration are premature, and emerging research questions are offered.

Assessing Inter-Institutional Attention to and Influence on Government Regulations

The US federal bureaucracy implements the nation's laws while juggling its own preferences and the preferences of numerous stakeholders. This article begins to unpack the conditions under which the bureaucracy responds to its stakeholders during rule making, and it is argued that bureaucratic responsiveness is conditioned on the level of attention provided by Congress and the President. This argument is tested with a dataset of forty rules and 1,444 interest group comments. Interest group influence is found to be constrained by congressional – but not presidential – attention to rule making. The results also shed light on Wilson's interest group theory of politics and suggest that the fragmentation of group preferences is less important than the central message sent by groups.

Stakeholder approach to bureaucratic responsiveness: A network-based framework to analyze public administrator value preferences

The environment in which public administrators are working is increasingly becoming one that is based on network relationships and expectations for active collaboration. Within this evolving environment the value preferences of administrators are subject to challenge and possible change. This article offers an approach to understand the dynamics of value preferences of public administrators through the lenses of stakeholder theory and bureaucratic responsiveness. A set of propositions are offered for future empirical study and to begin a discussion on the relationship between responsiveness, value creation, and the ultimate achievement of successful collaboration

Compliance, Competition and Communication: Different Approaches of European Governance and their Impact on National Institutions

This analysis focuses on the relationship between supranational regulatory policy and national administrative change. We argue that the potential for change and cross-national convergence varies with the particular governance pattern employed, namely coercion, competition and communication. We identify the behavioural rationalities that guide the national bureaucratic responses and point to certain paradoxes with regard to the extent and direction of change.

Relationship‐based practice and reflective practice: holistic approaches to contemporary child care social work

ABSTRACTThe renewed interest in relationship‐based practice can be understood in the child care social work context as a response to the call to re‐focus practice in this field. Relationship‐based practice challenges the prevailing trends which emphasize reductionist understandings of human behaviour and narrowly conceived bureaucratic responses to complex problems. In so doing practitioners engaged in relationship‐based practice need to be able to cope with the uniqueness of each individual's circumstances and the diverse knowledge sources required to make sense of complex, unpredictable problems. This paper argues that if relationship‐based practice is to become an established and effective approach to practice, practitioners need to develop their reflective capabilities. An outline of contemporary understandings of relationship‐based and reflective practice is offered and findings from doctoral research drawn on to identify how reflective practice complements relationship‐based practice. The product of this complementary relationship is enhanced understandings across four aspects of practice: the client, the professional self, the organizational context and the knowledges informing practice. The paper concludes by acknowledging the inextricably interconnected nature of relationship‐based and reflective practice and emphasizes the importance of practitioners being afforded opportunities to practise in relational and reflective ways.

Over my dead body

Dead bodies have not always generated the sort of bad press, hysterical overreaction, and frenzied bureaucratic response that has become typical of early 21st century western society. Ancient Egyptians were quite calm about the issue. Their dead were methodically packaged for the afterlife on an industrial scale, and those trusted with the task were awarded an exalted position in society. The Incas went one step further. Not content with letting their mummified ancestors rest in peace, they regularly retrieved them from storage to play an active part in ceremonial occasions.

Formal Procedures, Informal Processes, Accountability, and Responsiveness in Bureaucratic Policy Making: An Institutional Policy Analysis

This study examines the role of public notice and comment in the development of 42 rules. These procedures can provide useful information to policy makers about the preferences of those who stand to be affected by agency actions. More importantly, they serve as cues for the accommodation of interests and the resolution of conflict through processes that are grounded in agencies' accountability to political officials. Yet, an examination of the interrelationship between formal, procedural constraints and the informal processes surrounding them reveals that the effects of notice and comment in promoting bureaucratic responsiveness are limited in ways that have received little systematic analysis. A consideration of the tension between the instrumental goal of procedural accountability and the political tasks that often dominate bureaucratic policy making suggests that it is desirable to return to the original use of notice and comment as a device for exposing agencies to the views of affected interests.

From Victim to Victimhood: Truth Commissions and Trials as Rituals of Political Transition and Individual Healing

The victim has been put at the centre of states' post‐atrocity strategies to reform governance, rehabilitate state authority and promote reconciliation. This paper explores the role of the victim in the truth commissions and trials aimed at reconciliation and justice and their experiences of the outcomes. The successor state's focus on recovering victims after mass atrocity ritually inverts the former regime's project of producing them. In both truth commissions and trials the state seeks to manipulate the ‘spectacle’ of the victim's pain and suffering to publicly project the power of the state for different ends. Whereas the repressive state seeks to deepen the effects of violence as a strategy of rule, the successor state seeks to reverse the social and political effects of violence. These strategies of transitional justice have sought to reverse the effects of exclusion, to reverse the direction of state power from producing victims towards redeeming victims, from injuring to healing.Because of the problems of mass criminality and widespread impunity, truth commissions have become widely adopted in preference to trials as a bureaucratic response to bureaucratic murder. They set about producing a ‘democratising truth’ through a process of public inquiry located outside the state in the people. On the whole, the process, the public testimony and the witnessing has been better received than the product, the reports and the reparations. By contrast, trials seek to produce a societal consensus based on the recovery of the law. But in both cases the victim is redeemed through the individualising discourse of law or the polarising logic of trials which establishes the guilty and innocent. The truth of atrocity is found in affirming gross human rights abuses in victims, in transacted violence rather than the deeper structures of violence. Thus, victimhood is built on a universalising human rights discourse which overly individualises the origins of atrocity.

Bureaucratic Responsiveness to the News Media: Comparing the Influence of The New York Times and Network Television News Coverage on US Foreign Aid Allocations

This study compares the influence that The New York Times coverage and network television news coverage have on the bureaucracies responsible for the allocation of U.S. foreign aid. While previous research has demonstrated a clear correlation between variations in coverage, and the allocation of aid, it is not clear exactly which indicator should be used to measure that coverage and there are plausible arguments that either could produce a more substantial and robust correlation with government action. The results presented in this article demonstrate that both news outlets can reasonably be used as indicators of news media salience as an influence on bureaucracies. However, the levels of The New York Times coverage consistently perform slightly better in the statistical analyses, suggesting that scholars with no theoretical or conceptual preference may wish to choose The New York Times as an indicator of salience in the news media.

Comparing Post-Communist Governance: A Case Study

Comparison of the social democrat regime that ruled Romania during the period 1992-96 and its successor, the Christian Democrat regime of 1996-2000, in terms of their decision-making efficiency and bureaucratic responsiveness reveals different levels of performance in terms of efficiency and responsiveness. Analysis of key central governmental institutions, using indicators ranging from cabinet stability and turnover of party members at the ministerial, deputy ministerial and prefect level to statistical information services and economic and foreign policy, suggests that both regimes failed to meet their electoral promises, but that the later regime did so to a greater extent than its predecessor.

Designing Bureaucratic Responsiveness: Administrative Procedures and Agency Choice in State Environmental Policy

AbstractElected politicians can manage government agencies using administrative procedures that either enhance agencies' political responsiveness or their autonomy. Rational politicians will delegate autonomy when the benefits of agency decision-making are high, such as when the policy problem is technically complex. This article tests this hypothesis by investigating how state politicians design the institutional features of state clean air agencies and how these agencies perform under different administrative procedure regimes. I find that when a state's air pollution problem is complex, politicians eschew administrative procedures that enhance political control, and these agencies respond by choosing policies from a broader range of options.

Leadership and Discretionary Decision-Making in a Technocratic Administration: Confronting a New Praxis

The argument of the paper is that the pervasive nature of information technology in today’s work environment, though instrumental for organizational efficiency, engenders serious implications for organizational leadership and administrative discretion. It challenges our traditional perceptions of the institutional prerogatives imposed on leaders with regard to hierarchical accountability, decision-making, and bureaucratic responsiveness. As administrative discretion is overtaken by technological precision, and as we rely more and more on numbers and esoteric jargons to make mundane administrative decisions, the human element in both public and private administration is eroded. How to understand the administrative implications of these changes and accommodate them as well as facilitate the three doctrines of public service-efficiency, equity, and due process-poses a daunting task for public service administration both in theory and practice. The core values of administrative leadership must be made to transcend and overcome the unfolding implications of the triumph of technology over discretionary decision-making.

What motivates bureaucrats?: politics and administration during the Reagan years

Acknowledgments1. Bureaucratic Responsiveness and the Administrative Presidency2. A Framework for Analysis3. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: Car Nuts and Caution4. The Food and Nutrition Service: Limited Opportunity, Limited Resistance5. The Civil Rights Division: Lawyers Who Love to Argue6. The Environmental Protection Agency: A Tale of Two Reagan Administrations7. Lessons from the Reagan YearsPostscript: Looking to the FutureAppendix A. Sample Interview ScheduleAppendix B. Sample Federal Employee QuestionnaireNotesReferencesIndex

One Government, Multiple Systems: Hong Kong Public Administration in Transition

This study addresses the impact of a transformative political event—the reversion of sovereign authority—on the policy-making roles of public organizations and public administrators in Hong Kong. With the transfer of sovereignty, the environment of public administration in Hong Kong became increasingly politicized. Civil servants now encounter pressures and conflicting demands from Beijing, from pro-democracy forces, from the Chief Executive, from members of the Legislative Council, and from the business community. Although the public bureaucracy retains its policy-making preeminence, its authority no longer is unquestioned and unchecked. The Central Government exerts hidden influence. Members of the Legislative Council are striving to become respected players in the policy-formulation process. The Chief Executive aims to introduce means of ensuring heightened bureaucratic responsiveness. The result has been a fragmented and volatile political-administrative environment. In the ongoing transition from colonial to reunited polity, the Special Administrative Region's one government is composed of competing systems of governance superimposed uncomfortably and inconclusively upon one another. The most probable governance outcome, at least until the possible popular election of a Chief Executive and Legislative Council on a competitive political-party basis in 2007, is for fragmentation, role conflict, and interest-accommodation to continue to characterize the policy-making process in the SAR.

Regulatory Reform and Bureaucratic Responsiveness to Firms: The Impact of User Fees in the FDA

Regulatory Reform and Bureaucratic Responsiveness to Firms: The Impact of User Fees in the FDA

Regulatory Reform and Bureaucratic Responsiveness to Firms: the Impact of User Fees in the FDA

This paper examines the impact of user fees on the speed of new-drug review and on the responsiveness of FDA reviewers to pharmaceutical firms. User fees are expected to alter FDA behavior and responsiveness to pharmaceutical firms because they give regulators a financial incentive to process more new-drug applications and because they convey information to regulators that may reduce type I error. The analysis examines the variation in FDA review times for new drugs approved between 1990 and 1995 as a function of differences that exist among firms and drugs. Specifically, it compares estimates of regulator responsiveness to several firm and drug characteristics before and after the introduction of user fees. The results show that user fees produced a significant change in FDA behavior. Regulators have become less responsive to the differences among firms since the introduction of user fees, which suggests that the reform has led to more equity in the new-drug review process. In addition, the FDA has expedited the review of new drugs, especially the most therapeutically novel drugs, which suggests that politicians have been fairly successful in designing a reform to realign regulatory incentives in the FDA.