RUNAWAY BUREAUCRACY AND CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT: WHY REFORMS FAIL

Attempts to reign-in runaway regulatory bureaucracy fail because the bureaucracy has all the important resources. The bureaucracy also holds the upper hand in policy-making because Congress has neither the time nor inclination to effect legislative control and oversight. The authors examine the travails of the Federal Trade Commission during the 1970s to show the blurred distinction between bureaucratic autonomy and legislative control.     

When Missions Matter: Professional Priorities and the “Stepchild” of Supervisory Programs

If there is a clear bottom line to the literature on political control of the bureaucracy, it is that control is never complete. Principals can be multiple, priorities diverse, preferences for policy incomplete and not articulated, and intentional choice lost in the muddle. Yet as long as bureaucratic studies remain focused upon outside political actors, or at best, the political appointee at the helm of an agency, we will not make many advances in our understanding of important organizational dynamics that act as an independent force upon the phenomenon of bureaucratic behavior. This article suggests a politically cognizant return to the bureaucracy by examining the distinct management efforts of the Fed, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the FDIC to supervise the consumer and civil rights obligations of banks, known collectively as “compliance” obligations. The same mandates, issued and overseen by the same political principals, and implemented within common professional cultures, have been managed in ways that vary in the context of each agency's organizational mission. It is argued that organizational mission provides an empirical link between the priorities and mandates imposed from a system of “overhead democracy,” and the influential priorities of a common professional group (bank examiners) in each of the agencies.     

The Politics of 'Eurocratic' Structure and the New European Agencies

The establishment of agencies at the European level is one of the most notable recent developments in EU regulatory policy. This article examines how politics has shaped the design of EU regulatory agencies. Building on the American politics literature on delegation, the article explains how principal-agent concerns and political compromise have influenced agency design in the EU context; shows how conflicts between the EU's primary legislative actors - the Council and the Parliament - and its primary executive actor - the Commission - have influenced the design of new bureaucratic agencies; and discusses how the growing power of the European Parliament as a political principal has changed the politics of agency design.     

EXPANDING THE LIMITS OF POWER: The Federal Reserve and the Implementation of Functional Regulation in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Era

Research on bureaucratic behavior suggests that agencies are more likely to use the implementation process to extend their power and influence under particular circumstances. I argue that when an agency has been delegated considerable power by Congress, but provided only vague guidance on how to implement this authority, an atmosphere of uncertainty and competition is created. Under such a circumstance the agency will feel pressured to further extend its power in order to defend its regulatory turf against competitors and protect the authority it was delegated. I test this proposition by examining the behavior of the Federal Reserve as it implements the functional regulation provisions of the Gramm‐Leach‐Bliley Act. Evidence from the Federal Reserve's dealings with the Securities and Exchange Commission during the approval of the Schwab – U. S. Trust merger provides evidence that the Fed is indeed acting to extend its power and influence.     

INTERVENOR FUNDING AT THE FTC: BIOPSY OR AUTOPSY?

Intervenor funding, an innovative method for encouraging public participation in government rule-making, is examined by focusing on the experience of the Federal Trade Commission. The paper reviews the program's goals, the arguments of critics, and the perceptions of individuals and groups who applied for intervenor funding. The program's effects on both agency decision-making and on the applicants themselves are evaluated.     

Overstating savings/underestimating costs

He is former assistant to the director of policy planning and evaluation, Federal Trade Commission.     

Survival at the Intersection of Government and Business: The Unique Case of the Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade)

The Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade) is a government organization whose responsibility is to promote Australian exports and investment facilitation in global markets. It has a unique position of being a government agency and at the same time working alongside and with business in assisting exporters enter overseas markets. This relationship is often strained both for reasons of changing government preferences in terms of assisting exporters as well as pressures on the government budgets. Yet Austrade has been able to remain a steadfast intersection between government and business despite the competing strategies of its two main stakeholders – government and business. This paper assesses Austrade as a case of organizational survival maintaining its equilibrium through sound management and serendipity.     

Race, Sex, and Clarence Thomas: Representation Change in the EEOC

The theory of representative bureaucracy concerns whether bureaucracy mirrors the origins and values of the population and, if so, whether such representation makes any difference. This article extends Hindera's examination of active bureaucratic representation within the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to determine the effect of introducing new goals (disability discrimination) and priorities (sexual harassment) on the EEOC's representational patterns. Using data from the late 1980s and late 1990s, we find the extent of active representation of African Americans declined. Although the EEOC is now pursuing more cases of sex discrimination, no evidence of active representation exists for women in EEOC district offices.     

Political Management in Australia: The Case of the Northern Territory

This article reviews the evolution of administrative arrangements in the Northern Territory since the 1970s, covering both the devolutionary phase and, with somewhat more emphasis, the self-government period since 1978. The article centres on the theme of political management which, as in the recent work by Halligan and Power (1992), has become a major focus in the study of Australian administrative reform. Political management involves a 'modernising reform agenda. internal in orientation and concerned mainly with making the organizational and human resources of the executive branch more responsive to the priorities of superordinates' (Halligan and Power 1992: 249). Particular attention here is given to the evolving pattern of relationships between the political and bureaucratic arms of the Northern Territory executive.     

Narrative dynamics in European Commission AI policy—Sensemaking,agency construction,and anchoring

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is arguably one of the most powerful and disruptive technologies of our times which may pose challenges as well as opportunities to contemporary political organizations. Studying AI from a lens of perceived uncertainty, this article studies the policy response of the European Commission toward this fast-paced emerging technology. By empirically focusing on the Commission's policy process from start to end, from initial communication to concrete proposal, the article shows how different types of narratives are used to construct the new policy area of AI policy. A novel theoretical framework is constructed building on a combination of narrative organizational studies and narrative policy studies, displaying how narratives play a key role in organizational sensemaking, agency construction and anchoring. The paper finds that the Commission broadly makes sense of AI technologies with a future-oriented discourse, establishes agency to existing and new forms of political organizing and anchors the policy response within the overarching frame of the EU single market policy. The main contribution of the paper is that it shows how political organizations settles uncertainty through narratives and sketches a way forward through establishing policy goals and anchoring them within pre-existing lines of political mobilization.     

Structure and Process: Examining the Interaction between Bureaucratic Organization and Analytical Requirements

Attempts by politicians to control bureaucratic decisions include both structural (how is the agency making the decision organized?) and procedural (what rules must they follow when making the decision?). But how do these two modes of influence interact? This article examines the interaction between bureaucratic structure and one procedural control, the requirement that agencies conduct an analysis of their decisions prior to their issuance. I look at this interaction in the context of two types of analysis, cost‐benefit analysis and environmental impact assessment. I interview 16 individuals in each field and draw from their experiences of conducting and reviewing more than a thousand analyses. The conduct of analysis is affected by where analysts are placed in agencies. In particular, independence of analysts has a trade‐off. The more independent analysts are, the more likely they can challenge preferred decisions in their agency. But independent analysts are brought into decisions later and their independence may limit their long‐term impacts on agency culture. Despite this trade‐off, analysts expressed a clear preference for independence. The interaction between different controls of bureaucratic behavior is a potentially fruitful line for further research.     

Measurement and Public Service Motivation: New Insights,Old Questions

ABSTRACT

This article reviews some recent research from political science that speaks to the public service motivation (PSM) literature. Specifically, it discusses research that describes new measures of bureaucratic ideology and agency performance. These new measures might usefully be employed in the PSM literature and a discussion of them highlights some potential pitfalls in PSM research more generally.     

EVALUATING THE IMPACT OF CONSUMER PROTECTION REGULATIONS: THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION EXPERIENCE

Evaluation of consumer protection regulations promulgated by the Federal Trade Commission is a formal, ongoing activity employing a wide variety of commonly accepted research designs. This paper describes the variety of evaluation designs and gives examples of the application of these designs in assessing the impact of FTC Trade Rules in the marketplace. The authors also consider the future of consumer protection evaluation in an environment of severe budget constraints.     

Separated Powers in the United States: The Ideology of Agencies,Presidents, and Congress

Government agencies service interest groups, advocate policies, provide advice to elected officials, and create and implement public policy. Scholars have advanced theories to explain the role of agencies in American politics, but efforts to test these theories are hampered by the inability to systematically measure agency preferences. We present a method for measuring agency ideology that yields ideal point estimates of individual bureaucrats and agencies that are directly comparable with those of other political actors. These estimates produce insights into the nature of the bureaucratic state and provide traction on a host of questions about American politics. We discuss what these estimates reveal about the political environment of bureaucracy and their potential for testing theories of political institutions. We demonstrate their utility by testing key propositions from Gailmard and Patty's (2007) influential model of political control and endogenous expertise development.     

The reputational basis of policy success in comparative perspective: Evidence from the education sector in Peru and Bolivia

This article, building on the emerging theoretical corpus of “reputation theory” provides an alternative explanation about how successful policies are obtained in contexts of bureaucratic weakness and volatile politics. The argument is that politicians choose to intervene in delivering successful policies based on how contributable such policies are to construct their political reputations. The findings suggest that in both countries, less tenured politicians face higher incentives to build their reputations, so they choose to deliver better policies to accumulate “successful experiences” as vitae for electoral purposes. Tenured politicians, in turn, opt for inaction or strategic delivery, to preserve their already won political reputations. The present article brings evidence from the education sector of Peru and Bolivia, a sector that has been at the core of these countries' priorities for decades. Through a mixed methods approach involving a panel regression and in-depth interviews, results obtained largely confirm this article's claims.     

The changing colours of the post-communist state: The politicisation of the senior civil service in Hungary

Abstract.  This article examines claims that senior civil services in post-communist Europe are subject to instability and politicisation, and that both features are at the centre of what amounts to the emergence of a distinct type of executive governance different from Western traditions. At the conceptual level, the article develops four modes of politicisation that differ with respect to the political control over the making and breaking of bureaucratic careers. Modes of politicisation serve as an analytical tool to assess and classify the politicisation of post-communist senior civil services and to compare them to prevailing modes of politicisation in Western democracies as well as the communist past. At the empirical level, the article examines the politicisation of the senior civil service in post-communist Hungary. It argues that the politicisation of the Hungarian senior civil service is characterised by high turnover, recruitment of outsiders and heavy reliance on the appointment of officials who come and go with their bloc of political parties while bridging the out-of-office period in the private sector, academia or at a political party. The article concludes that the politicisation of the senior civil service in post-communist Hungary has more in common with the communist past than with the prevailing modes of politicisation in Western democracies. The main difference from the communist era lies in the periodically changing political colours of the post-communist state.     

Why does bureaucratic corruption occur in the EU?

Why does bureaucratic corruption occur in the EU system? Several examples suggest that bureaucratic corruption exists and that the Commission’s anti-fraud agency, OLAF, is not a fully independent authority. We thus develop a novel interpretation of the principal-supervisor-agent model to cope with non-independent anti-fraud units. This model shows that corruption is likely to occur when the expected value to the client from bribing the agent is larger than the expected value to the principal of truth-telling by the supervisor. Overall, this analysis points to the risks of flawed incentives and the lack of institutional independence among principal, agent, supervisor and client. Our main policy recommendations as a result of these findings are that OLAF should be placed outside the Commission, and that whistleblowers should receive adequate protection.     

Managing for Legitimacy: Agency Governance in Its “Deep” Constitutional Context

Recent literature on bureaucratic structure has gone further than studying discretions given to bureaucrats in policy making, and much attention is now paid to understanding how bureaucratic agencies are managed. This article proposes that the way in which executive governments manage their agencies varies according to their constitutional setting and that this relationship is driven by considerations of the executive's governing legitimacy. Inspired by Charles Tilly (1984), the authors compare patterns of agency governance in Hong Kong and Ireland, in particular, configurations of assigned decision‐making autonomies and control mechanisms. This comparison shows that in governing their agencies, the elected government of Ireland's parliamentary democracy pays more attention to input (i.e., democratic) legitimacy, while the executive government of Hong Kong's administrative state favors output (i.e., performance) legitimacy. These different forms of autonomy and control mechanism reflect different constitutional models of how political executives acquire and sustain their governing legitimacy.     

Environment and efficiency lovers

His research focuses on government regulation. He is a past Executive Director of the Federal Trade Commission. His recent books include The Political Limits of Environmental Regulation; Regulation and the Reagan Era;and the Economic Consequences of Liability Rules.     

Agency Leaders, Gendered Institutions, and Representative Bureaucracy

This study examines three central questions: Do women state agency heads establish priorities that advance women's interests more frequently than men agency heads? Among state agency heads with women‐related top priorities, are there systematic differences between women and men in the influences on their priority choices? Do the organizational and political contexts in which agency leaders work explain variation in policy priorities? Analysis of data from a national survey of women and men department heads reveals that working in a redistributive agency affects whether a leader pursues a women‐centered policy agenda, regardless of the leader's gender, other personal characteristics, or reported influences on priority choice. The authors conclude that the way representative bureaucracy actually plays out can be more fully understood if the tenets of social science theory on gendered institutions are incorporated into analyses of how representative bureaucracy works.