Differences Between State and Federal Public Forest Management: The Importance of Rules

In United States federalism, public policy responsibilitiesbelong to multiple jurisdictions. This article compares statewith federal public forest management. Data come from four cases,each comprising two forests sharing similar physical characteristicsbut under the authority of different governments. Systematiccomparisons suggest that officials in the national forest agencyface greater statutory, regulatory, and planning constraintsthan do state agency officials. These constraints require morepublic input and higher levels of environmental protection.Outcomes reflect these differences: federal officials provideless limber, at lower net profit, than do state officials, andthey transfer less revenue to local governments. Concurrently,federal officials make greater environmental protection efforts.     

THE SURFACE MINING CONTROL AND RECLAMATION ACT OF 1977 IN OKLAHOMA: STATE AND FEDERAL COHABITATION

The enforcement of the SMCRA in Oklahoma has led to improvements and transformations in the coal industry, state and federal regulatory agencies and the public. The catalyst for these changes was the federal takeover of inspection and enforcement of the SMCRA in Oklahoma with the state carrying on all other mining regulatory activities from 1984 through 1987. This pattern of cohabitation differed from that in Tennessee where OSM took over all enforcement of the SMCRA or that in states that enter into cooperative agreements to provide state regulation of coal mining on federal lands within the state. Cohabitation in Oklahoma produced a new, more positive attitude toward cooperative federalism by both federal and state regulatory bodies that might serve as a model for other states with OSM maintaining state agency support for policy objectives while allowing the state reasonable decisional discretion.     

Risk assessment in the policy-making process: environmental health and safety protection

This article examines the extent to which differences exist in the relative degree of discretion permitted by the statutory mandates under which health risk assessments are conducted as a basis for regulatory action. Attention is focused on the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration, because they are the lead federal regulatory agencies on most environmental health matters. The statutes are found to define risk, consider effects, identify target populations, and use benefit-cost analysis in a flexible way. But the burden of proof of risk typically is assigned in a more direct and stringent fashion. Overall, however, agencies are found to have substantial discretion in the manner in which risk assessments are incorporated into the policy process. A number of examples of efforts to reduce this flexibility are outlined and their implications for the future of the analysis of risks are delineated.     

Administrative Discretion and Active Representation: An Expansion of the Theory of Representative Bureaucracy

Recent studies of the theory of representative bureaucracy have focused on active representation, whereby administrators in public organizations work to advance the interests of particular groups, achieving policy outcomes that directly address the needs of those groups. The concept of administrative discretion is central to these studies, as an administrator must have the discretion to produce results that reflect the values and beliefs of these groups. While the presence of discretion is often implied in these studies, few have examined it explicitly. Using data from the Farmer's Home Administration, we explore whether administrators who perceive themselves as having more discretion enact policy outcomes that are more representative of minority interests. The results strongly support the conclusion that administrators who perceive themselves as possessing significant discretion and who assume the role of minority representative in their agencies are more likely to enact policy outcomes that favor minority interests.     

DISPUTING AND REGULATORY POLICY: THE EXAMPLE OF A STATE PUBLIC UTILITY AGENCY

The literature on policy making has largely ignored the formulation and implementation of policy when governmental agencies process citizen disputes. In this essay we provide an initial exploration of the dimensions of agency policy making and policy implementation during dispute processing. Using a case study of dispute processing by a state public utilities regulatory agency, it appears that dispute processing contributes to evolutionary policy formulation and implementation by providing a context for the incremental adjustment and legitimation of continuing policies, by sponsoring negotiations leading to the serial adaption of existing policies to new circumstances, and by screening disputes and sharpening the issues in disputes so they are amenable to policy development through agency adjudicatory procedures. The findings of the case study suggest that processing of citizen complaints flowing into the "bottom" of an agency is potentially as important as the politics of the rule making and licensing procedural contexts in the conduct of regulatory policy.     

Recent Evolution of Public Sector Structure in Latin America: Describing and Explaining Shifts in Autonomy Trends in Colombia and Venezuela

This article has two objectives. The first objective is to review and assess the recent evolution of agency design in Colombia and Venezuela. More specifically, we study the agencies' formal autonomy in these two countries since the year 1999 when Venezuela experienced a major change in government policy towards socialism. Thus, we attempt to explore how this policy change is reflected in the formal autonomy of agencies. Our second objective is to test if, despite the differences in policy choices the two countries have taken in the recent years, there are theoretical factors related to the agencies' design that can explain the level of formal autonomy of the agencies. The results show two main elements: first, even though the patterns of formal agency autonomy in Colombia and Venezuela differed before Venezuela's latter policy change, the differences between these two countries have increased since 2000. This indicates that each country's policy preferences may account for the differences. Second, for both countries, we found that, despite the differences, agency level factors such as the primary tasks that are performed by the agencies and the policy sector in which they are active have had an impact on their level of formal autonomy. However, the results indicate that these relationships do not follow the predictions that have been made based on the different theoretical perspectives. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Beyond the categories: human service managers view the new federal aid

Social agency chief executives in six program areas--welfare, health, mental health, community action, model cities, and community mental health centers--were surveyed to determine their reaction to the recent revenue sharing/block grant efforts to decentralize the federal aid system. Despite their strong belief that social initiatives and values were advanced principally by federal action, and that excessive reliance on state and local officials could severely jeopardize social programs with weak constituencies, agency executives also recognized major weaknesses in traditional categorical grant policy and, to varying degrees, supported revenue sharing and block grant alternatives. Those agencies largely dependent on federal support for their survival--model cities, community action programs, and community mental health centers--tended to support the new aid efforts only reluctantly. Those agencies more fully integrated into the regular policy-making arrangements of local government--health, welfare, and mental health agencies--were considerably more positive in their endorsement of greater decentralization.     

Exploring Aggregate vs. Relative Public Trust in Administrative Agencies that Manage Spent Nuclear Fuel in the United States

Trust is a key component of democratic decision‐making and becomes even more salient in highly technical policy areas, where the public relies heavily on experts for decision making and on the information provided by federal agencies. Research to date has not examined whether the members of the public place different levels of trust in the various agencies that operate within the same policy subsystem, especially in a highly technical subsystem such as that of nuclear energy and waste management. This paper explores public trust in multiple agencies operating within the same subsystem, trust in each agency relative to aggregate trust across agencies that operate within the nuclear waste subsystem, and trust in alternative agencies that have been suggested as possible players in the decision‐making process. We find that trust accorded to different federal agencies within the nuclear waste subsystem varies. The variation in trust is systematically associated with multiple factors, including basic trust in government, perceptions about the risks and benefits of nuclear energy/waste management, party identification, and education. These findings have significant implications for research on public trust in specific government agencies, alternative policy entities, and for policy makers who want to design robust and successful policies and programs in highly technical policy domains.     

Continuity,change, and priorities: The quality and use of regulatory analysis across US administrations

This paper compares the quality and use of regulatory analysis accompanying economically significant regulations proposed by US executive branch agencies in 2008, 2009, and 2010. We find that the quality of regulatory analysis is generally low, but varies widely. Budget regulations, which define how the federal government will spend money or collect revenues, have much lower‐quality analysis than other regulations. The Bush administration's “midnight” regulations finalized between Election Day and Inauguration Day, along with other regulations left for the Obama administration to finalize, tended to have lower‐quality analysis. Most differences between the Bush and Obama administrations depend on agencies' policy preferences. More conservative agencies tended to produce better analysis in the Obama administration, and more liberal agencies tended to do so in the Bush administration. This suggests that agencies more central to an administration's policy priorities do not have to produce as good an analysis to get their regulations promulgated.     

A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF RULEMAKING PROVISIONS IN STATE ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEDURE ACTS

As the primary source of procedures that state agencies must follow, state Administrative Procedure Acts (APAs) structure administrative discretion in the promulgation of rules and regulations. While the federal APA has been studied extensively, much less has been written about state procedural statutes. This article describes the major rulemaking provisions in state APAs and provides a broad, comparative, and systematic understanding of these provisions. Our analysis yields three major findings. First, state procedural statutes vary considerably in the extent to which they structure administrative discretion in rulemaking. Second, adoption of these rulemaking provisions tends to vary in a systematic way, as states first incorporate due process provisions, and then adopt responsiveness and rationality provisions. Third, in the area of procedural regulatory reform, states have made considerable strides in reforming regulatory administration.     

Levels of Value Integration in Federal Agencies' Mission and Value Statements: Is Open Government a Performance Target of U.S. Federal Agencies?

The Barack Obama administration advanced open government initiatives to make federal administration more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens. Yet a question remains whether federal administrators took notice. This article examines changes in the extent to which U.S. federal agencies have integrated the three core principles of open government—transparency, public participation, and collaboration—into their performance planning. By analyzing 337 annual performance plans of 24 major federal agencies from fiscal years 2001 to 2016, the authors found that, overall, the level of integration of open government into performance planning has been trending higher since the early 2000s. During the Obama presidency, integration initially rose sharply but later declined. Findings also show that agencies' stated core values regarding open government are not consistently integrated into their performance plans. The implications of these findings for incorporating democratic‐constitutional values into holistic performance management are considered.     

Testing the Policy Capacities of Budgetary Agencies: Lessons from Finance

The Commonwealth Department of Finance, together with the Treasury from which it was hived off in 1976, constitutes the central budgetary agency at the Australian federal level. For the purposes of this article, I identify Finance as a convenient working model of central budgetary agencies, at least in their traditional Australian incarnation. I accept that Finance is unlikely to be fully representative of all such Australian agencies, and I acknowledge that the federal government's annual budget is officially introduced into parliament by the Treasurer, and that the Treasury is deservedly regarded as the core budgetary agency. But my focus here is on Finance's special responsibility for the public management framework, and Finance's role in providing policy advice to government organisations on how to make the best use of budget funding. This article then presents the findings of a recent evaluation of selected policy-advising activities with the department.     

Unpacking the Effects of Competing Mandates on Agency Performance

Public administration scholars and practitioners uniformly agree that saddling agencies with multiple mandates breeds dysfunction and impedes performance. However, less is known about the mechanisms by which combining purposes has these effects. This study of a broad set of U.S. federal agencies finds support for the conventional wisdom by showing that agencies balancing greater numbers of programs perform worse. The analysis further suggests that such organizations struggle largely because they are more likely to be forced to simultaneously adopt conflicting stances toward program targets. Moreover, when programs force agencies into conflicts in which they are asked to both support and restrain the same target, the resulting uncertainty among personnel regarding agency priorities helps explain why operations are negatively impacted. Thus, it is not simply that accumulating missions impedes agency performance but rather how those competing mandates interact that can define whether an agency will struggle to achieve its objectives.     

Sex-Based Occupational Segregation in U.S. State Bureaucracies, 1987–97

Is the extent of sex-based occupational segregation in U.S. state bureaucracies related to agency policy missions? Drawing on arguments by Lowi (1985), we contend that levels of sex-based occupational segregation in state bureaucracies vary depending on whether an agency's policy mission is distributive, regulatory, or redistributive. We employ data on the distribution of administrative and professional employees by sex in several types of state agencies across all 50 states for 1987–97. Our findings indicate high levels of occupational segregation among administrative cadres in agencies with distributive and regulatory policy commitments; however, professional workforces in these agencies have become less gender segregated over time. We find no evidence of occupational segregation among administrative and professional workforces in redistributive agencies. We argue that researchers need to examine the relationship between glass walls and other kinds of sex-based employment impediments, such as glass ceilings.     

Retrofitting the Administrative State to the Constitution: Congress and the Judiciary's Twentieth-Century Progress

One of the twentieth century's "big questions" for United States government has been how best to retrofit, or integrate, the full-fledged federal administrative state into the constitutional scheme. The public administration orthodoxy initially advocated placing the executive branch almost entirely under presidential control; Congress and the federal judiciary responded otherwise. Congress decided to treat the agencies as its extensions for legislative functions and to supervise them more closely. The courts developed an elaborate framework for imposing constitutional rights, values, and reasoning on public administration practice. As the challenge of retrofitting continues into the twenty-first century, public administrators might profitably play a larger role in the constitutional discourse regarding the administrative state's place in constitutional government.     

Perceptions of Federal Aid Impacts on State Agencies: Patterns, Trends, and Variations Across the 20th Century

American federalism is a dynamic process involving the viewsand interactions among state and national officials. Based onmultiple mail surveys of state agency heads across 75 years,this article traces the perspectives of state executives towarda core component of state–national relationships—federalaid. The time frame dates from the 1920s and covers a periodin which federal aid programs to the states grew enormously,as did state administrative establishments. There was a long-termrise in the perceived intrusiveness of federal aid as well asincreased policy distortion effects. Despite substantial fluctuationsin perceived aid impacts, there was a four-decade consistencyin the penetration of federal aid into and across the existing3,000 state agencies. Furthermore, when perceptions of nationalinfluence are combined in an index of perceived national fiscalinfluence, there was a roller coaster effect with an overallsecular "decline" in national influence since 1974.     

What Makes an Agency Independent?

The responsiveness of government agencies to elected officials is a central question in democratic governance. A key source of variation in responsiveness is agency structure. Yet scholars often view agencies as falling into broad structural categories (e.g., cabinet departments or independent commissions) or fixate on some features of design (e.g., “for cause” protections). I develop new estimates of structural independence based on new data on 50 different structural features of 321 federal agencies in the federal executive establishment. Using a Bayesian latent variable model, I estimate independence on two dimensions: limits on the appointment of key agency decision makers and limits on political review of agency policy. I illustrate the value of this new measure by using it to examine how structure affects political influence and how agency independence can vary over time.     

Presidential Environmental Appointees in Comparative Perspective

The pathologies of the presidential appointment process are well documented and include appointees' frequent lack of federal government work experience and their short appointment tenures. Less well understood are whether and to what extent these problems affect different subsets of high-level appointees, such as administrators in the environmental bureaucracy. Top-tier environmental appointees tend to stay longer in their appointed positions than do presidential appointees generally, and more than 40 percent have prior federal government management experience. These and other data suggest that key problems ascribed to the presidential appointment process are less salient in the case of high-level environmental appointees. Appointees in Republican and Democratic administrations have comparable levels of academic training and federal government experience. These similarities notwithstanding, White House expectations for appointees' political loyalty varies more from administration to administration. The Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (first term) administrations maintained the highest demands for political loyalty, with consequences for the policy–administration dichotomy in environmental agencies.     

Bureaucratic Job Mobility and The Diffusion of Innovations

In studies of innovation, policy entrepreneurs recognize latent demand for new policies and then expend resources to promote them. But studies of policy entrepreneurs have generally focused on the demand for innovation, while neglecting the supply side of policy entrepreneurship. This article argues that bureaucratic labor markets affect the emergence of policy entrepreneurs, and so affect the diffusion of policy innovations across local governments in the United States. Analysis of a survey of municipal police chiefs and water utility managers relates governments' hiring and promotion policies to their adoption of professionally fashionable innovations. Agency heads who advanced to their current positions diagonally (arriving from another organization) are more likely to initiate these innovations than are agency heads who were promoted from within. Bureaucratic policy entrepreneurs emerge where government demand for innovation meets a supply of mobile administrators, who carry the priorities of their professions into the agencies that they serve.     

Controlling Federal Agencies: The Contingent Impact of External Controls on Worker Discretion and Productivity

ABSTRACT

Previous scholarship has investigated why legislatures sometimes choose to delegate policy choice to executive agencies, but there is little research on the consequences of the choice to delegate or not. Using a multiple principal-agent framework, this paper provides empirical evidence regarding the impact of legislative delegation and agency discretion on the work of U.S. government employees. Findings suggest that delegation directly reduces employee discretion only in client service agencies; its direct effects on employee productivity are more evident but varied. Legislative delegation is also associated with more executive political appointees, whose presence reduces both employee discretion and productivity. Whether employees with more discretion are more productive than those with less depends on their commitment to the job: employees who like their work more than their pay use their discretion to enhance productivity, while employees who like their pay more than their work use their discretion to reduce productivity.