Federal and State Public Forest Administration in the New Millennium: Revisiting Herbert Kaufman's The Forest Ranger

Herbert Kaufman's 1960 investigation of federal forest rangers provided important insights into administrative discretion, agency culture, and natural resource policy making. Subsequent studies of Forest Service administration have documented that agency's change over time, mirroring broad changes in federal public administration. But little is known about state forest administration. This article describes results from a survey of line officers in 48 state forest agencies, as well as state forest statute analysis. Results indicate systematic state–federal differences in legal constraints, citizen interactions, and the forest administrators themselves. Though these differences foster state administrator decision making based on professional expertise, they do not encourage the incorporation of stakeholder views into agency policy making, nor do they yield a bureaucracy that represents a diverse constituency. State forest administrators perceive substantial external challenges to their professional discretion, but it remains to be seen whether state forest agencies will change to more closely resemble their federal counterpart.     

Citizen experts in environmental risk

In the last two decades, public administrators have increasingly faced groups of people with opposing views about the risks of exposure to environmental contaminants. Because of a series of intriguing studies on risk perception, the situation is frequently seen, by scholars and administrators alike, as a conflict between experts and citizens, and risk communication guidelines are based on this interpretation. But the citizen-expert dichotomy appears fallacious when it is examined in light of the ways citizens actually participate in environmental policy making. The dichotomy overlooks the fact that citizens express their perception of risk largely through organized citizen groups, and that these groups employ and have access to many experts. This essay uses a mainstream environmental group and a number of grassroots environmental groups to illustrate the point. It concludes that the more important conflict is between experts who find environmental pollution safe and those who find it hazardous.     

THE SUBURBAN MOVEMENT TO LIMIT GROWTH: REASONS FOR SUPPORT IN ORANGE COUNTY

Several studies have shown that suburban residents favor growth controls. It is usually argued that high-status residents and those living in growing comniunities want limited growth. This paper examines an alternative perspective; support for growth limits broadly found among individuals who perceive community problems. Specific reasons for wanting limited growth, however, vary in importance among different social group. These hypotheses are confirmed by 1,009 Orange County, California residents. Support for growth limits is strongest among those who perceive rapid growth, are dissatisfied with c i t y government, and perceive service problems. Environniental reasoris for wanting limited growth are mentioned most frequently. These concerns are especially noted by the high-status residents and nonfiscal conservatives. Economic reasons for limited growth are stated by a large minority, and are especially of interest to the lowstatus residents and fiscal conservatives. The results indicate public concerns vary among social groups comprising the citizen support for suburban growth limits. The implications for suburban policy formation and implementation are discussed.     

Representative Bureaucracy and Partisanship: The Implementation of Election Law

Studies of representative bureaucracy argue that public administrators hold attitudes that are generally representative of the public and will implement policy in accordance with those attitudes. However, studies of representative bureaucracy generally have not considered the partisanship of local administrators. Many local election officials affiliate with a political party, and there is concern that partisan officials will manipulate election procedures to help their party. The authors analyze a survey of local election officials about their attitudes toward provisional voting. Findings show that Democratic local election officials have significantly more positive attitudes toward provisional voting programs in highly Democratic jurisdictions and significantly less positive attitudes in highly Republican jurisdictions. No such relationship occurs for Republican administrators. In addition, positive attitudes toward provisional voting are associated with more provisional votes being cast and counted in the 2004 presidential election. This work questions whether representative bureaucracy—when it concerns partisanship—is always a desirable outcome.     

Ideas, Interests, and Institutions: Challenging the Property Rights Paradigm in Botswana

Recent work in international studies and comparative politics scrutinizes the relative importance of ideas, interests, and institutions as sources of policy change. A growing body of scholarship identifies ideas as the main causal factors, influencing perceived interests as well as perceived policy options. Others contend that policies can best be understood as products of institutions. Neither explanation can account for both policy choice by politicians and the implementation strategies of administrators. In Botswana, the use of professional criteria for hiring and advancement encourages adherence to international professional norms within the bureaucracy, but electoral competition gives politicians more reason to be attentive to local political concerns. The institutions that define relations of authority among actors with different motivations shape the outcomes of policy choice and implementation. Institutions influence the attentiveness of policy-makers to ideas when making decisions, the degree of attention particular policy-makers give to ideas from particular sources, and the degree of acceptance that ideas must achieve to affect policy. Better evaluations of political development can be achieved through attentiveness to the mix of actors involved in policy decisions, the diversity of institutions and ideas that affect their policy preferences, and the relations of authority that shape their relative influence over policy choice and implementation.     

The States Come Marching In: Examining State Agency Influence on Federal Rules

Amidst congressional gridlock, administrative rulemaking is the main pathway for environmental policy making. Scholars have assessed the role of the institutions of government (the president, Congress, and the courts) and key interest groups (i.e., business and environmental interests) in shaping rulemaking outcomes. What is missing from this literature is an assessment of the role of key implementers, state environmental agencies. This research fills this gap by assessing the role and impact of state government agencies in three case studies of rulemaking at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Based on original interviews and a public comment analysis, this research suggests that state agencies play an active and influential role in EPA rulemaking. And, in some cases, state agencies wield more influence than other interest groups. Interviewees argued that this influence stems from these agencies’ unique voice as an implementation collaborator. As a result, researchers should incorporate an assessment of the role of these interests to more effectively explain regulatory outcomes at the EPA and potentially across the bureaucracy.     

Bureaucratic discretion,social equity,and the administrative legitimacy dilemma: Complications of New Public Service

Bureaucratic discretion continues to be one of a public administrator's primary powers while at the same time being one of their most controversial. Used in a positive way, bureaucratic discretion can enhance social equity; however, this practice can create administrative legitimacy dilemmas. As such, this paper conceptually discusses the theoretical position of public administrators that contributes to their engagement in legitimacy dilemmas, which is further complicated by the tenets of New Public Service. We argue that if public administrators are engaged in authentic interactions with the public and use their discretion to reflect the interests of the public, then they are engaged in truly democratic governance. We place this argument in the context of achieving social equity and highlight an avoided question in public administration. Finally, recommendations for future research are offered as a means progressing the social equity agenda in public administration.     

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.     

Pluralism,corporatism and perception of corruption

When people know who is influencing the elected politicians and they may ‘put the rascals out’ in case they feel that the incumbents are corrupt, ceteris paribus, their perception of the level of corruption should not be affected by lobbying. If on the other hand people are not sure which or how many actors are influencing public policy and they are not able to hold the government truly accountable as interest group influence is constant with different governments, people will be more likely to perceive the government as corrupted. The former system is a characteristic of corporatism and the latter of pluralism. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that interest groups with resources such as business groups or firms in pluralist systems are more influential than groups with few resources. Thus, people may perceive pluralist policy‐making system as more corrupt than corporatist policy‐making system where fewer visible actors have more or less equal weight in the policy‐making process. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Organised interests in the media and policy congruence: The contingent impact of the status quo

While a multitude of studies have investigated the link between opinion and policy, we have little knowledge of how and when organised interests affect this linkage. We argue that the alignment of organised interests affects opinion–policy congruence by influencing the weight decision-makers attach to citizen preferences. Moreover, we propose that alignment between majorities of groups and the public matters the most when status quo bias must be overcome for the public to obtain its preferred policy. We test our theoretical claims drawing on a comprehensive media content analysis of 160 policy issues in Germany and Denmark. Our results present a more sceptical picture of the ability of groups to suppress the opinion–policy linkage than the one frequently presented in the academic literature and public debate. We find that the capacity of groups to affect whether policy is congruent with the majority of the public is restricted to situations where the public supports a change in the status quo. In these cases, policy is less likely to end up reflecting public opinion if the majority of interest groups do not support the public position. In cases where the public is supportive of the policy status quo, the position of interest groups does not affect the likelihood that policy will eventually reflect the preferred position of the public. Our findings expand existing knowledge of organised interests in the study of policy representation and have important implications for understanding democratic governance.     

The paradox of collective action: Linking interest aggregation and interest articulation in EU legislative lobbying

Olson's logic of collective action predicts that business interest associations face fewer collective action problems than citizen action groups. This article challenges this assumption by arguing that forming an organization comes with different collective action problems than voicing a joint policy position. This leads us to examine an important paradox: Citizen groups face challenges in establishing themselves as organizations but find it relatively easy to position themselves on policy issues, whereas the reverse is true for business associations. We study this paradox empirically based on interviews with spokespersons of interest organizations active in the European Union and find support for our hypotheses. Our findings demonstrate that citizen groups position themselves on policy issues more easily than business interests and that this competitive advantage is amplified when policy issues attract the attention of the media.     

Equity in Federal Contracting: Examining the Link between Minority Representation and Federal Procurement Decisions

The federal government increasingly relies on nongovernmental organizations for procuring goods and services. This long‐term trend presents a significant challenge for administrators because it risks the egalitarian values of democracy by further distancing administrative action from direct, participative, democratic oversight. The authors put forward a theory of representative bureaucracy as a way to reconcile democracy with the reality of the contemporary policy process in which unelected officials are the principal decision makers. The theory is tested in the domain of federal procurement, specifically within the contract award decisions of 60 federal agencies over three years. The authors argue that increased minority representation in leadership positions results in an increased proportion of federal contracts awarded to small minority‐owned firms.     

Representation and Collaboration: Exploring the Role of Shared Identity in the Collaborative Process

Public managers must regularly engage and interact with stakeholders in the external environment to deliver meaningful policy outcomes. Examining the motivations behind such behavior is a critical component of understanding management in the modern era. Some studies suggest that actors with similar interests are more likely to form collaborative partnerships. Using an original mail survey of 150 American Indian education directors in public school districts, this article examines how shared identity and individual attitudes affect levels of interaction with Native American communities. Findings suggest that public school officials who share both a racial and a tribal/co‐ethnic identity with Native American nations in their service area have higher levels of interaction with these groups than public school officials who are either members of Native American nations outside their service area or non‐Indian. This research has broad implications for incorporating theories of representation and social construction into our understanding of collaboration.     

The Importance of Trust in Government for Public Administration: The Case of Zoning

Many scholars argue that citizens with higher levels of political trust are more likely to grant bureaucratic discretion to public administrators than citizens with lower levels of trust. Trust, therefore, can relieve the tension between managerial flexibility and political accountability in the modern administrative state. Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence showing that trust is actually associated with citizens' willingness to cede policy-making power to government. This article tests theories about political trust and citizen competence using the case of zoning. Trust in local government is found to be an important predictor of support for zoning, but trust in state government and trust in national government have no effect. These findings suggest that trust affects policy choice and helps determine how much power citizens grant to local administrators.     

Auctioned oil import licenses

Three times in recent years American Presidents have tried to levy a tax on imported oil in order to decrease the quantity. Three times, the U.S. Congress has blocked the policy, demonstrating that a tax is politically infeasible. As an alternative, we propose an auctioned import license policy, in which the President would have discretion over the quantity of petroleum sold each month. The quantity might be chosen to maintain a certain differential between the domestic and international prices of oil. Under this strategy, licenses would have economic characteristics very similar to those of a tax. The political characteristics, however, would be quite different. Sections of the public would be less likely to perceive licenses as transferring revenues from households to the government and more likely to perceive them as effective in reducing imports. Alternatively, oil import licenses could be used to negotiate with OPEC and other importing nations.The authors wish to thank William Dunn, Robert Walters, Richard Nehring and Charles Phelps for their helpful comments. The usual caveat applies.     

Getting a Seat at the Table: Capital,Capture and Expert Groups in the European Union

European Commission expert groups provide powerful platforms from which interest organisations can steer the EU consultation process and weigh in on policy outcomes. Commission decision-makers and bureaucrats rely heavily on expert groups to provide expert policy advice on highly technical issues in the early stages of the policymaking process. Interest organisations provide this advice in order to have their voices heard at the EU level. But whose interests are being represented in these expert groups? Which types of interest organisations, in other words, get a seat at the table and why? This article, using data on over 800 expert groups and nearly 3,000 interest organisations, argues that expert group membership is largely a function of superior resources, EU-level interests and existing institutionalised ties to decision-makers. Far from simply addressing the Commission’s need for expertise, expert group membership is more a story of capital and capture.     

Comment on Harvey Jacobs' “Social conflict over property rights: the end,a new beginning,or a continuing debate?”

Jacobs draws on history, law, politics, and policy to examine the development and response of the private property movement and the social conflict over property rights and public planning. This comment suggests that the debate be broadened beyond the advocates of property rights and planning to include the interests of other members of the community, including minority and low-income households who are often affected by the outcomes. Otherwise, property will continue to be used to exclude people from democracy, rather than include them.     

PROGRAM IMPLEMENTATION VERSUS PROGRAM DESIGN: WHICH ACCOUNTS FOR POLICY "FAILURE"?

Many influential implementation scholars now argue that "street-level" bureaucrats, rather than legislators or high-level administrators, make public policy in the U.S. Such authors as Pressman and Wildavsky cite creaming in employment and training programs as an especially clear example of well-meaning programs that fail when implemented. This paper argues that two of the most significant and lasting of these programs, the U.S. Employment Service and the Manpower Development and Training Act, were designed to encourage creaming. The essay asserts implementation scholars overstate the disconnection between program design and program implementation because they assume there is little disconnection between program legitimation and program design. A better conception of design permits one to perceive that these programs were legitimated on the grounds they would serve a large number of constituents, but were designed to do so by serving employers. The combination of these premises made creaming an imperative of program operation, and the implementors who cream remain faith ful to original program strategy. This finding suggests a redirection of policy research toward a more rlgorous analysis of program design and a better understanding of the relationship between legitimation, design, and implementation.     

Arenas without Rules and the Policy Change Process: Outsider Groups and British Roads Policy

A key task of governments is to construct and manage systems of consultation whereby the vast array of interest groups seeking to influence public policy can be accommodated. Conventional wisdom holds that key insider groups secure for themselves special privileges, not least of which is an ability to prevent radical policy change. A concomitant view is that public policy emerges from relatively stable networks of actors who have some mutual resource dependencies. One reason why this paradigm is showing signs of intellectual fatigue is that it seems weak in explaining policy change. Yet, policy change does take place. Indeed, it is one of the characteristics of the 1980s and 1990s. This article examines an example of the traditional modalities of consultation failing to accommodate new interests, knowledge and ideas. This breakdown appears to have occurred by the use of alternative policy 'arenas without rules' by outsider groups, leading to a radical new 'framing' of transport policy. Moreover, government has failed to constrain the new policy issues in predictable and stable systems of consultation.