Political Principals Research Articles

Making Bureaucracies Think Distributively: Reforming the Administrative State with Action-Forcing Distributional Review

This Article proposes that agencies analyze the distributional impacts of major regulatory actions, subject to notice-and-comment procedures and judicial review. The proposal responds to the legitimacy crisis that the administrative state currently faces in a period of widening economic inequality. Other progressive reform proposals emphasize the need for democratization of agencies. But these reforms fail to address the two fundamental pitfalls of bureaucratic governance: the “knowledge problem”—epistemic limitations on centrally coordinated decision making—and the “incentives problem”—the challenge of aligning the incentives of administrative agents and their political principals. A successful administrative reform must address both problems. Looking to the environmental context, this Article proposes adapting the approach taken in the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) to confront the contemporary administrative legitimacy crisis. It considers a hypothetical “Distributive Impacts Review Act,” explaining what the statutory scheme would look like and detailing how it would work. The Article concludes by reflecting on potential distributional review’s appeal both to the progressive egalitarians, and to champions of efficient government.

Inter-Agency Learning in United States Regulatory Policymaking

While a number of scholars have evaluated the strategies driving congressional decisions to delegate regulatory authority to administrative agencies, the literature has been largely restricted to evaluating the relationship between Congress and its administrative agent. I argue that this presents an incomplete picture of implementation given that it is typically carried out by multiple administrative actors that interact in multiple contexts and that share political principals. Such arrangements for overlapping jurisdiction and interagency organizations provide opportunities for agencies to learn from one another about the constraints of the political environment within which they are operating. This paper provides a preliminary examination of the extent to which administrative agencies can learn from other agencies the preferences of shared political principals and use that information to reshape their regulatory strategies. Using original data on Court of Appeals litigation directed at administrative agencies from the 93rd to the 113th Congress, as well as congressional delegation to administrative agencies within the text of the Statutes at Large, I provide preliminary evidence that when an agency observes a closely-linked agency facing legal constraints, it reshapes its own regulatory strategy so as to provoke less costly litigation. The results pave the way toward further, more in-depth examination of the spillover effects of bureaucratic punishment and the ways in which this inter-agency learning takes place over time.

Understanding Public Sector Debt: Financial Vicious Circle under the Soft Budget Constraint

The article explains why debt of public sector organizations grows beyond the sustainable level by focusing on the principal-agent relationship under the soft budget constraint. Specifically, this article explores the extent to which factors affect the level of public sector debt in the context of quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations (quangos) in Korea over the past two decades (1993–2012). The findings from the panel data analysis suggest that the level of public sector debt increases as an outcome of the financial vicious circle created by the soft budget constraint: a knock-on effect of the moral hazard of quangos as well as the opportunistic behavior of political principals. Public sector debt is positively associated with agency-specific factors as well as the factors related to the political incentives such as policy preferences and electoral considerations. However, macroeconomic factors made little difference to the general pattern of the evidence.

Inter-Agency Learning in US Regulatory Policymaking

While a number of scholars have evaluated the strategies driving congressional decisions to delegate regulatory authority to administrative agencies, the literature has been largely restricted to evaluating the relationship between Congress and its administrative agent. I argue that this presents an incomplete picture of implementation given that it is typically carried out by multiple administrative actors that interact in multiple contexts and that share political principals. Such arrangements for overlapping jurisdiction and interagency organizations provide opportunities for agencies to learn from one another about the constraints of the political environment within which they are operating. This paper provides a preliminary examination of the extent to which administrative agencies can learn from other agencies the preferences of shared political principals and use that information to reshape their regulatory strategies. Using original data on Court of Appeals litigation directed at administrative agencies from the 93rd to the 113th Congress, as well as congressional delegation to administrative agencies within the text of the Statutes at Large, I provide preliminary evidence that when an agency observes a closely-linked agency facing legal constraints, it reshapes its own regulatory strategy so as to provoke less costly litigation. The results pave the way toward further, more in-depth examination of the spillover effects of bureaucratic punishment and the ways in which this inter-agency learning takes place over time.

Accountability, Political Views, and Bureaucratic Behavior: A Theoretical Approach

This study has developed a theoretical framework to predict bureaucratic behaviors with career public officials’ political views (whether career public officials agree or disagree with their overhead political principals’ ideology) and bureaucratic accountability (accountability either to the overhead political principals or to the public sentiment) by adopting and extending Hirschman’s (1970) exit, voice, and loyalty model. Given the two conditions, this study has drawn four propositions of possible bureaucratic responses: loyalty; voice; exit; and silence. In addition, the stay scenario is discussed for passive bureaucrats regardless of the two dimensions. By incorporating relevant examples with the propositions, this study expects to contribute to a better understanding of bureaucratic behavior.

The Politics of Higher Education: University President Ideology and External Networking

AbstractWhile the importance of networking is increasingly recognized by practitioners and scholars alike, little is known about why significant variance is observed in how often and with whom organizational leaders network. Further, while we know that political ideology plays a critical role in shaping decision making within public organizations, current models of networking have largely failed to consider the importance of ideology in driving networking efforts. Using data from a 2012 survey of U.S. university presidents and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, this article explores the role that president ideology plays in shaping networking behavior with political principals. Findings suggest that the effect of ideology on external networking efforts is moderated by state policy maker ideology.

AGENCIFICATION AND BLAME SHIFTING: EVALUATING A NEGLECTED SIDE OF PUBLIC SECTOR REFORMS

AbstractThe establishment of autonomous agencies has been a strong trend in the public sector across countries for about 25 years. In line with the official rhetoric accompanying such reforms, almost all reform evaluations have focused on various kinds of performance improvements. This article investigates a set of behavioural consequences of such reforms, which have been claimed by the blame avoidance literature, but have never been subjected to systematic empirical analysis. In particular, the article examines how a reform of agencification influences the propensity of agency managers to blame the political principals when the agency is subject to public criticism. Furthermore, it examines how the reform influences the blaming rhetoric of ministers and MPs. To evaluate such reform effects systematically, the article introduces a new empirical approach and illustrates the utility of the approach in a case study of the transformation of the national Danish railway company from 1995 to 2007.

Why Do Regulatory Agencies Punish? The Impact of Political Principals, Agency Culture, and Transaction Costs in Predicting Environmental Criminal Prosecution Outcomes in the United States

AbstractStudies of administrative behavior are keen to examine the internal dynamics of agency decision making, as well the impact of external political actors on agency actions. Yet few studies apply these findings to the question of why agencies use their most punitive enforcement powers. Contrasting principal–agent, transaction costs, and organizational culture models of agency behavior, this study examines why regulatory agencies punish. Through content analysis of nearly one thousand of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's criminal investigations and subsequent prosecutions, 2001–11, findings suggest that punishment severity in environmental criminal cases is based less on transaction costs and political pressure and more on professional norms that value strong enforcement. These findings have important implications for explaining regulatory outcomes and administrative behavior.

Changing Bureaucrats and Politicians: The Transformative Potential of an Experimental Public Administration

IRandomised controlled trials have a number of advantages for policy-makers in testing out interventions and improving standard administrative procedures. The use of a more robust form of evidence can challenge old ways of doing business and can lead to the redesign of existing administrative systems. Moreover, the greater use of experiments can set off chain reactions within bureaucracies, encouraging innovation to become a more common practice, whereby bureaucrats and their political principals start to learn through testing and adapting what they do, creating a more experimental public administration. Policy experiments have been used more frequently since the 1960s, but the recent interest in theories of behaviour change have given them a new opportunity to test out nudges, which can help improve relationships between citizens and the public sector. However, implementing behavioural interventions with RCTs involves challenges as well as successes, and the paper gives examples of both from the UK at local and national levels.

Wielding the green stick: criminal enforcement at the EPA under the Bush and Obama administrations

The criminal prosecution of environmental offenders by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is one of the agency’s most politicised yet poorly understood responsibilities. Through content analysis of the Agency’s criminal prosecutions in 2001–2011, we undertook analysis of nearly 1000 cases to understand better whether and how the outcomes of the criminal enforcement division change under presidential administrations. Using a principal-agent framework, our results suggest presidents do matter for enforcement outcomes. Yet, the more interesting conclusion is that these outcomes are not extremely divergent, suggesting that the Agency is able to navigate the often conflicting dictates of various political principals, under similar budgetary constraints, and in step with an Agency culture that values strong enforcement. Moreover, we find that such enforcement efforts are substantively valuable, as many of these cases involve serious and willful violations of law that result in significant harm to humans and the environment.

When do autonomous banking regulators promote stability?

AbstractCan autonomous banking regulatory agencies reduce the odds that a country will suffer a crippling banking crisis? We investigate the impact that agencies charged with banking regulation and prudential supervision can have on financial stability in the banking sector. We argue that the potential benefits of autonomy are hard to realise because banking regulators face incentives to shirk in their mandate to secure banking stability. These incentives are strongest in political systems with high numbers of veto players, where the autonomy of a banking agency is difficult to undo even if the agency is derelict in promoting banking sector stability. We test an implication of this argument, namely, that the probability of bank crisis onset should diminish with the level of autonomy of the banking agency, but only in polities with low numbers of veto points. We base our analysis of this conditional hypothesis on an original dataset of 79 countries observed between 1971 and 2009 that captures the degree of autonomy of banking agencies from political principals. Our findings confirm that the impact of banking agency autonomy on the risk of bank crisis onset is conditional on the political structure in which the agency is embedded.

Electoral Manipulation as Bureaucratic Control

Bureaucratic compliance is often crucial for political survival, yet eliciting that compliance in weakly institutionalized environments requires that political principals convince agents that their hold on power is secure. We provide a formal model to show that electoral manipulation can help to solve this agency problem. By influencing beliefs about a ruler's hold on power, manipulation can encourage a bureaucrat to work on behalf of the ruler when he would not otherwise do so. This result holds under various common technologies of electoral manipulation. Manipulation is more likely when the bureaucrat is dependent on the ruler for his career and when the probability is high that even generally unsupportive citizens would reward bureaucratic effort. The relationship between the ruler's expected popularity and the likelihood of manipulation, in turn, depends on the technology of manipulation.

The Differential Empowering Effects of Europeanization on the Autonomy of National Agencies

This article examines the influence of Europeanization on the relationship between ministries and agencies at the national level. The core argument is that the differentiated nature of the international environment (with policy development often transferred to the international level and policy implementation left at the national level) transforms national agencies into policy‐developing actors that shape policies without being directly influenced by their national political principals. The increasingly common involvement of national agencies in European policymaking processes thereby increases these agencies' policy‐development autonomy but does not change their role in policy implementation. We examine this argument by testing an innovative hypothesis—the differentiation hypothesis—on a combined data set of German and Dutch national agencies. Our empirical findings support the hypothesis in both countries, suggesting that similar effects can be expected in other contexts in which semiautonomous agencies are involved in transnational policymaking.

Actors and Strategies of the Bureaucratic Reputation Game

I provide a description of what I call the "bureaucratic reputation game", by defining the incentives of the relevant actors, their likely preferences, their available strategies, and how the playing out of such strategies produces organizational outputs. The main conclusions are twofold. First, we should not take it for granted that public organizations benefit from having a good reputation. We have good reasons to expect that public administrators, and even more so their political principals, should often be "reputation satisficers", as opposed to maximizers. Second, when desiring to improve the reputation of a public organization, the most straightforward route is to improve the organization itself. Communication strategies do have a role in the bureaucratic reputation game, but it a subtle one and, overall, they should be employed with much care.

Electoral Manipulation as Bureaucratic Control

Bureaucratic compliance is often crucial for political survival, yet eliciting that compliance in weakly institutionalized environments requires that political principals convince agents that their hold on power is secure. We provide a formal model to show that electoral manipulation can help to solve this agency problem. By influencing beliefs about a ruler's hold on power, manipulation can encourage a bureaucrat to work on behalf of the ruler when he would not otherwise do so. This result holds under various common technologies of electoral manipulation. Manipulation is more likely when the bureaucrat is dependent on the ruler for his career and when the probability is high that even generally unsupportive citizens would reward bureaucratic effort. The relationship between the ruler's expected popularity and the likelihood of manipulation, in turn, depends on the technology of manipulation.

Technical Management in an Age of Openness: The Political, Public, and Environmental Forest Ranger

Modern bureaucracy faces trade-offs between public and congressional input and agency expertise. The U.S. Forest Service offers an opportunity to quantitatively analyze whether an agency that is required to be more open to the public and congressional input will be forced to ignore its technical expertise in managing resources. This study uses data on 83,000 hazardous fuels reduction activities conducted by the Forest Service from 2001 to 2011. Although the results show that managers are responsive to public and congressional considerations, this has not prevented them from utilizing their technical knowledge to restore lands most deviated from natural conditions. This suggests that managers can balance responsiveness to public and political principals with technically sound management.

Party Government and Variation in Corporate Influence on Agency Decision Making: OSHA Regulation, 1981–2006

ObjectiveTo understand how changes in the partisan control of the institutions of government may condition the effect of corporate political activities on bureaucratic decision making.MethodsI examine the variation in the effectiveness of corporate political expenditures in reducing workplace safety (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) violations across partisan contexts between 1981 and 2006 for a large number of corporations.ResultsCorporate expenditures have a greater suppressant effect on workplace safety violations (but not inspections) when the Republicans control the Congress or presidency.ConclusionsCorporations are able to influence bureaucratic decision making, but bureaucrats balance the demands of corporations against those of other party constituencies and their political principals. Thus, the partisan control of government importantly conditions corporate influence in the bureaucracy.

Representative Bureaucracy

Does the bureaucracy represent the interests of the public or react to the partisan and ideological demands of political principals? This study uses data from the federal workforce reports and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s Central Personnel Data File to demonstrate that partisanship and ideology influence the demographic composition of the federal senior executives. The analysis indicates that fluctuation between administrations is largely attributed to presidents nominating and appointing individuals who share similar ideological views. The analysis also suggests that political control by ideologically driven principals has the potential to perpetuate divisiveness over polarizing issues. The partisan and ideological influences that continue to influence access to policy-making positions contribute to the perpetuation of patterned disparities in the representation of interests and undermine government performance.

The Consequences of Conflict: An Evaluation of Racial Disparity and Organizational Performance

The study of public administration is based primarily on two schools of thought; some theorists espousing political control with others supporting the inner check. Heretofore, studies have failed to examine the effects of goal conflict on relationships between political principals and bureaucratic agents. Using Texas school districts, this analysis demonstrates that goal conflict has significant effects on student performance. Goal conflict also influences relationships among school boards, teachers, and school district populations. Overall, this study advances the discipline in that it determines the ramifications of goal conflict for political principals, bureaucracies, and the public being served utilizing the most common form of bureaucracy, school districts. The arguments and implications embedded in this analysis speak to the age-old public administration question of how to reconcile bureaucracy with democracy.

Bureaucracy, Its Reform and Development

Few aspects of economic policy elicit more conflicting opinions than the role of bureaucracy in policy making and implementation. These range from Max Weber’s picture of a rule-governed efficient institution to the ‘Yes, Minister’ caricature of one bound in complex red tape, operating inefficiently and serving the interests of its own officials. In this article, I attempt a better understanding guided by the economics of incentives and organisations. I emphasise the multidimensional complexity of government bureaucracies—they are answerable to multiple political principals, must handle multiple tasks, have multiple levels of hierarchy and so on—and suggest some institutional and organisational reforms that seem relevant for India and other less-developed countries that wish to sustain growth and progress to and beyond a middle-income level.