Two Cheers for Paperwork: The Value and Burden of Federal Reporting

In principle, reporting by state and local governments to thefederal government is essential to the design and implementationof national policy. In practice, reporting often engenders resentmentof federal intrusion and is often dismissed as a waste of stateand local resources. Is reporting useless? Does it strengthenthe federal government at the expense of state and local governments?We asked federal, state, local, and site officials about thevalue and burden of five specific reporting systems in elementaryand secondary education. Common assumptions about reportingdid not correspond to respondent reactions. Both value and burdencascade through the intergovernmental system, reaching policymakersin all governments. Although critics seldom discriminate betweentypes of reporting, we found that reporting designed to improvecompliance with federal standards evoked different judgmentsof value and burden than reporting designed for assistance.These results suggest some new approaches to federal policygoverning the collection of information and to the design ofindividual reporting systems.     

A REGIME FRAMEWORK FOR IMPLEMENTATION ANALYSIS: COOPERATION AND RECONCILIATION OF FEDERALIST IMPERATIVES

The diffusion of authority characteristic of federal governance challenges national leadership and complicates even the implementation of policy that promises mutual gains. To explore the problems of implementing national policy in a federalist context, this paper proposes a new approach to analysis, t h e implementation regime framework. From the regime perspective, the essential task of the implementation process is to create a context in which implementors are likely to cooperate to achieve policy goals despite the absence of dominating authority. Drawing upon the literature on international cooperation, the regime framework outlines the contextual conditions and elements of policy design that are likely to lead to cooperation in collective decision making.     

Shirking and sorting in a political market with finite-lived politicians

This paper analyzes principal-agent slack in the context of a political market composed of voters, challengers, and incumbents. The introduction of a last period (via finite-livedness) in combination with voters' imperfect information about politicians' preferences causes time-varying shirking behavior on the part of politicians. Political markets eventually sort out those politicians with significantly deviant policy preferences, potentially providing a solution to the last period problem and enabling politicians to make credible commitments. In the extreme, sorting can insure that it is not worthwhile for potential shirkers to run for office. A systematic relationship between political shirking and number of terms in office may exist, and depends on how quickly sorting takes place. We show that evidence of little if any shirking is quite consistent with politicians having diverse and strongly held policy preferences. In addition, if sorting is a significant feature of political markets, cross-sectional studies will tend to oversample little- and non-shirking politicians compared to longitudinal studies. Reinterpretations of existing empirical work are also discussed.We wish to thank John Bond, Donald Deere, Gertrud Fremling, Tim Gronberg, Michael Munger, Russell Roberts, and the participants of workshops at Dartmouth College, Texas A&M University, University of Houston, University of Texas, Yale Law School, and the 1987 Public Choice Meetings for valuable discussions on earlier drafts of this paper. An earlier version of this paper was issued as working paper E-87-34 by the Hoover Institution. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Sentencing Commission nor those of any of its Commissioners. Any remaining errors are of course our own.     

Whose wants in ‘needs-based planning’? Some examples of unwritten agendas from the provincial integrated rural development programmes of Papua New Guinea

The rhetoric of ‘needs’-based planning requires little refining. What must be questioned and recognized are the values of decision makers and the unwritten agendas of those involved in the planning process. Taking the example of some of the integrated rural development programmes (IRDPs) in Papua New Guinea, this paper looks at the way planners and others cast development and information ‘nets’. These nets abrogate indigenous development processes. The ‘nets’ make it easy for development professionals and others involved in planning to follow unwritten agendas and difficult for target groups to articulate their ‘needs’ and to understand what is going on. It is suggested that these problems are not unique to PNG and may well be relevant to ‘needs based planning’ in other situations.     

Differentiating specialists and generalists within college students' social support networks

In order to examine the relationships among social network structure, types of social support, and determinants of support satisfaction, an alternative method was used to score the Social Support Questionnaire (SSQ). Factor analysis procedures suggested that college students' (N=198) social networks consisted of four groups: nuclear family, other family, friends, and others. Satisfaction with support was positively related to the proportion of the network occupied by nuclear family and negatively related to the proportion of friends in the network. Evidence was found for the presence of both support specialists and support generalists in the networks of the college students. These results are discussed from a developmental perspective with attention to the implications for interventions.     

The congressional foundations of agency performance

When Congress delegates a policy mandate to a regulatory agency, Congress acts as a principal, choosing the institutional arrangements, or the ‘rules of the game’ for agency decision making. Individuals in the agency, acting as agents, take the rules of the game as given and do the best they can within these institutional arrangements. In this paper we develop a simple model that relates the congressional choice of institutional arrangements to two underlying environmental factors — uncertainty and conflict. We suggest that uncertainty and conflict of interest lead Congress, in delegating, to prescribe a greater scope of permissable regulatory activity, a wider array of regulatory instruments, and more confining regulatory procedures. Increased scope and stronger instruments tend to broaden the overall discretionary authority of the agency, while more confining procedures tend to narrow it. We conjecture that with increased uncertainty or conflict the narrowing tendency more than offsets the broadening tendency, for a net decrease in the agency's overall discretionary authority. Lastly, we argue that the performance of a regulatory agency in fulfilling its mandate is determined in large measure by the foundations Congress constructs for the implementation of delegated authority.