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ОглавлениеBureaucracy as a Whipping Boy for Politicians and Citizens Alike
Joseph Heller’s iconic novel, Catch-22, follows the absurdity of war through the protagonist, Captain John Yossarian, and the pernicious effect of an unfeeling, unyielding, and powerful war bureaucracy that shows no regard for human life (Mullican 1981). Though the book was written as a satire on the senselessness of war, the depiction of the War Department’s bureaucracy is a comment generally about the frustrations Americans have with bureaucratic institutions that directly affect their lives. The title of the book, Catch-22, became ingrained in American lexicon “to name a human and social phenomenon, in this instance the absurdity of institutional logic” (Mullican 1981, 42). The bureaucracy is the true enemy, and this theme is embodied in American society where public agencies and its employees are viewed as rule bound, inefficient, wasteful, duplicative, and inept (Milward and Rainey 1983; Fiorina 1989). Everyone loves to hate the bureaucracy. Even the word “bureaucracy” fills people with dread as it connotes an image of long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) filled with barely competent workers who slowly process driver’s licenses applications. In the United States, we, generally, take a very dismal view of the tasks that local, state, and federal bureaucracies perform and resent our tax dollars supporting government workers who enjoy good benefits for relatively easy work.
Encouraged by politicians of both parties, this view feeds the public narrative that too many tax dollars are spent on agencies in the U.S. federal government. Just as Richard Fenno observed in Homestyle (2003) that in the United States, “members of congress run for congress by running against congress” (p. 168), the corollary to the executive branch is also apparent. Politicians of both parties attack the bureaucracy as bloated, inefficient, and unresponsive because it is politically expedient to propose reform programs that reduce the size of the federal government and introduce market forces into its management and operation (Fiorina 1989; Fiorina 1977). President Ronald Regan’s antipathy for the federal bureaucracy was palpable and he routinely requested that Congress “starve the beast” by severely cutting agencies’ budgets in order to reduce the size of the government. Regan’s attorney general, Ed Meese, would come to cabinet meetings “with a rotund, faceless, large-bottomed doll. He announced that it was a bureaucrat doll; you put it on a stack of papers and it just sits there!” (Raines 1981). The implication was that government was bloated and if agencies could be run more like private businesses, decisions would be more rational and inefficiencies would disappear (Milward and Rainey 1983).
The stereotypes of the bureaucracy do not match their importance in a smoothly functioning society or in democratic governance. In fact, the bureaucracies at the federal, local, and state levels are very important. The so-called street-level bureaucrats such as teachers, cops, and garbage collectors perform essential functions in society and do not warrant the negative clichés that politicians, authors, and everyday Americans associate with them. Part of the intransigence of the bureaucracy is it is often asked to solve problems where markets fail (Lowery 1998) precisely because agencies are asked to correct societal problem that they are ill-equipped to solve and change individual level behavior, such as teenage pregnancy, welfare dependence, poverty, and the like.
Americans face a democratic dilemma with regards to the bureaucracy because, as a whole, voters want high-quality government programs without paying the requisite taxes to support them (Kollman 2017). Having highly qualified professionals in government is essential for good governance, but employing experts with the education, training, and desire for public service requires employer incentives and taxpayer support. Economic development depends on an effective government for applying the rule of law, redistribution, and contract enforcement (Fukuyama 2014). The United States, as compared to other industrialized democracies, actually rates highly on government effectiveness, while government revenue, as a percentage of gross domestic product, is relatively low as compared to Germany, the United Kingdom, and France (Fukuyama 2014).
If government effectiveness is critical for economic development, to whom should the government bureaucrats answer? If a president cannot accomplish his agenda without the help of the bureaucracy implementing laws and crafting regulations (Lowery 2000), is the bureaucracy more responsive to the president or the Congress? What is the future of the bureaucracy in the United States? This book primarily analyzes the scope and importance of the bureaucracy and works to answer which political institutions, if any, exert more influence over the bureaucracy.
The Federal Bureaucracy’s Role in Governance and Democratic Governance
What is the bureaucracy’s role in democratic governance and to whom is it ultimately responsible? The American federal bureaucracy is essential to democratic governance, and it is also powerful. Not only do facets of the bureaucracy fulfill hugely important work, such as providing national defense, but it also completes mundane and repetitive tasks such as processing social security checks and student loans. The diversity and breadth of assignments it performs collectively renders it difficult to adequately control all of the tentacles effectively or evenly. This is particularly true when the Congress and the president, the constitutionally enshrined masters of the bureaucracy, have divergent preferences for overall policy direction for the bureaucracy. In addition, other extra-institutional principals in the bureaucracy’s policy network such as the public and interest groups have preferences that may also diverge from the president and Congress for outputs and policies that the bureaucracy produces. Further, the bureaucracy itself may have independent preferences apart from the direct or indirect principals in its network and are loyal to their agencies (Kennedy 2014).
Previous research has examined distinct segments of the bureaucracy to understand political control of a specific institutional principal, such as the Congress and the presidency, but there is a tension in the extant literature regarding when different principals more directly control elements of the bureaucracy and it has largely ignored how task heterogeneity affects political control. To that end, this book’s primary research question is to examine: who controls the bureaucracy? Under what conditions and how does this happen?
The post–World War II literature in public administration and political science has pierced into the leviathan that constitutes the U.S. federal bureaucracy. Fundamental questions concerning the nature of control from the president and the Congress, have broadened the field’s growing understanding for how these two principals exert influence and control over the bureaucracy. To date, the extant literature broadly assumes that institutional principals (the president and Congress) have the power to compel bureaucratic policy-making to align with their preferences, and also that political control is “principal” centered. In this book, I challenge both of these assumptions and also work to surmount structural obstacles that have stubbornly retarded research on political control.
In general, the field is plagued with three major hurdles that impede a broader understanding about how the bureaucracy is or is not controlled by political principals. First, analysts must contend with the size and diversity of functions and tasks the bureaucracy manages. The sheer breadth of the responsibilities that the bureaucracy performs on behalf of the American people—everything from promoting democracy abroad under the mission of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) among other agencies to managing the forest system across the country—makes uniform sampling and comparison across agencies very difficult. Thus, this obstacle makes it challenging to understand the holistic nature of political control or bureaucratic independence. The second hurdle, trying to address challenges of the first, is an overuse on a case-study approach making selective sampling across the bureaucracy and examining one or a few agencies at a time (Moe 1987; Weingast and Moran 1983; Ringquist et al. 2003; Balla 1998; Carpenter 2001b). From these case studies scholars have learned that in theory, and in practice, there is evidence that the president and the Congress do exert a degree of control over the bureaucracy to shape its direction and mold it closer to their desired preferences. Without attentiveness to the inherent variation across the bureaucracy, generalizing from a handful of case studies, however, cannot lead to a broader understanding of how the bureaucracy operates, or a progressive theory of bureaucratic control (Lakatos 1968). Finally, for decades bureaucratic studies have appropriated the principal-agent framework from economics and applied them to bureaucratic relationships. The theory is parsimonious and practical, but there is an over-reliance on the principal’s motivations and an underdeveloped theoretical approach examining both bureaucratic goals and the bureaucratic environment. In short, more theoretical attention from the agent’s perspective is needed in order to gain a broader understanding about the nature of principals’ control. Without considering bureaucratic incentives and motivations completely, the principal-agent framework assumes a one-way principal-centered framework rather than a dynamic two-way relationship. The overall goal of this study is to shift the paradigm of the principal-centered notion of control and view the question from the agent’s perspective.
In addition, this book proposes to address all three of the hurdles plaguing the literature with particular attentiveness to the agent’s institutional environment in order to understand variation in political control (Bolton 2015; Selin 2015; Kennedy 2014). The study extends the principal-agent model and proposes a bottom-up investigation of bureaucratic relationships to the Congress and the president. Advancing an “agent-principal” approach the book relaxes and extends many of the basic assumptions in principal-agent model and proposes a recalibration for political control. In testing the hypotheses generated from the theory-building, the study utilizes a unique data-set that employs characteristics common to all agencies in order to address both the limited nature of both the case-study approach and compare across the diversity of agencies.
This question concerning political control is critical to understand because the bureaucracy affects all aspects of American life. Despite their muted coverage in the national news, federal agencies have a much greater impact on the daily lives of Americans than the punctuated policy-making rhythm in Congress. The leviathan that is the U.S. bureaucracy promulgates ten times more rules each year than Congress passes laws (over 100 federal regulatory agencies issue more than 4,500 new regulations every year) and these regulations yield an estimated benefit of approximately US$1 trillion dollars to the public (Coglianese 2004). Given its immense reach, scholarly attention to the U.S. bureaucracy has centered on political control and how much discretion policy-makers delegate to civil servants for implementing policy and program goals. Elected representatives’ control over the bureaucracy implies a more democratic outcome within the apparatus of government (Workman 2015).
Understanding the nuances of bureaucratic control is important across political principals because it refines the mechanisms that different principals can use to extract a change in policy from the bureaucracy. The literature on the Congress circumscribes different tools they use to exert their influence, but the arguments and analysis in this study provide a more subtle approach to broaden our knowledge for how Congress both works with and influences the bureaucracy. The same is true for the presidency. This has implications not only for intra-branch interactions, but also for governance of the American state. Both the president and the Congress can wield enormous power over the bureaucracy, but there are limitations as well. I will argue throughout this analysis that variation in control may be conditioned by the inherent characteristics of the bureaucracy itself. The overall goal of this study is to take bottom-up view of the bureaucracy: recognizing the diversity across the bureaucracy and examining variation in the internal characteristics of the bureaus themselves. Switching the perspective on how control operates can provide insights into how adroitly specific levers of control can be used, and where there are more restrictions. The overall plan for the book is as follows:
Chapter 2 reviews the bureaucratic political control literature across both political science and public administration. It discusses the gaps in the existing literature and reviews the overall research question this study seeks to address. It details the central assertion in the study that the variation in political control of the bureaucracy may also be a function of internal characteristics of agencies themselves; specifically, differences in the bureaucracy’s workforce organization, composition, and responsibilities. These differences, I argue, lead to variation across the bureaucracy in how well different principals can control bureaucratic activity. For the purpose of this analysis, I am defining political control as “the extent that external political actors can control internal bureaucratic activity.”1 I propose a modification of the traditional principal–agent theory, which I call the agent-principal model to examine bureaucratic control from an agency-centered approach.
In working to overcome the problem of uniform sampling in the bureaucratic literature, I utilize two common metrics every single agency contains: a budget and workforce counts. Budgeting is discussed in chapter 3 and workforce counts in chapter 4. Budgeting is a shared tool between the president and the Congress, and agency budgets are appropriated on an annual basis. Typically, budgets are not assigned anew each year; rather, policy-makers use the current year’s budget as a starting point for next year’s budget plus or minus some small interval (Fiorina 1989). Chapter 3 discusses the incremental budgeting literature developed by Aaron Wildavsky, among others. It details the decision rules that policy-makers use when appropriating agency budgets every year, and some of the inherent problems in budgeting.
In chapter 4, I propose a relaxation of central assumptions in traditional principal–agent theory to examine bureaucratic control from an agency-centered orientation. It is a bottom-up perspective to study the bureaucracy examining how differences in the internal characteristics of different agencies, such as variation in workforce organization and composition, may affect the degree of political control. First, I argue that agencies are not organized uniformly. While all agencies are, to some degree, hierarchical, there is a range within hierarchical organizations whereby many employees rely more on their coworkers, rather than supervisors, for their job directives (Brehm and Gates 2008). Some organizations, in contrast, may rest on an organizational continuum from strict hierarchies to more heterarchical (flat) forms. The structure of the organization will have an effect on different principals’ political control because of inherent differences in the workforce organization for different agencies (Kennedy 2014; Bolton 2015: Selin 2015; Hollibaugh, Horton, and Lewis 2014). Second, the bureaucracy’s workforce composition is divided between political appointees and career bureaucrats who jointly run the agency. I argue that the incentive structures for careerists and political appointees are inherently different, which may account for variation in political control across different principals (Lewis 2009). Lastly, agencies have different workforce responsibilities across the federal bureaucracy. Many of them are transaction oriented, meaning that they are a processing center for checks or clearing houses for grants; however, others make and implement policy. Therefore, I expect that political control may operate differently across contexts.
The central thesis in this study is that political control is contingent on characteristics of the bureaucratic agency itself. Broadly, I expect the president and Congress to exert greater control when there is a higher concentration of political appointees, a more hierarchical organization, and when the agency is more aligned to policy production. Conversely, I expect an absence of political control when there are few to no political appointees in the agency’s workforce, the structure is flatter, and the agency performs either technically advanced or mundane tasks.
These hypotheses are evaluated in chapters 5 and 6 which are empirical studies of the theoretical propositions developed in the previous chapters and they also assess the agent-principal model discussed in chapter 4. Specifically, chapter 5 provides a broad test for the agent-principal model and works to overcome all three problems afflicting the bureaucratic control literature: the problem of uniform sampling, the problem of using case studies to make generalizations, and the problem of an overreliance on the principal-agent framework. This chapter utilizes a unique data set of 1,921 observations across 139 different bureaus in the U.S. federal bureaucracy from 2000 to 2014. They range from smaller bureaus with limited budgets such as the American Battle Monuments Commission to larger bureaus with more expansive budgets and workforce complements such as the Employment and Training Administration within the Department of Labor. Utilizing a time-series cross-sectional approach for the pooled panel data, the analysis spans a fifteen-year period. The main findings are that both the president and the Congress control the bureaucracy, but through different mechanisms. Second, internal characteristics of the bureaus affect how political principals control bureaus. This suggests that the nature of control operates differently across institutional settings and that internal agency characteristics condition how principals interact with bureaus. There is substantial support for the agent-principal model developed in chapter 4 which implies that further areas of inquiry into the bureaucracy’s environment are warranted beyond those few scholars who have examined agencies’ organizational elements as a means to explain political control (see Bolton et al. 2015; Kennedy 2014; Selin 2015; Lowande 2019).
Next, chapter 6 takes a more traditional approach in its research design in using a case-study methodology on the dynamics of education policy change in the United States over a sixty-five-year period. This is a more typical format (case studies) for studying a bureau in taking a deep look into a specific area and then teasing out more general trends as they apply more broadly to the bureaucracy. Chapter 6 asks a similar question to the rest of the book: Which political actor is driving [educational] policy change in the United States? Do the internal characteristics of the Department of Education condition how the principals interact with the department? Also using a cross-sectional time-series methodological analysis, the main findings from this chapter are that education policy is elite-driven but that internal characteristics of the department, specifically variation in workforce responsibilities, workforce composition, and workforce organization, can influence the direction of public policy, but it varies by party. This case study also finds support for the agent-principal model developed in chapter 3.
These two different empirical studies in chapters 5 and 6 are designed differently in order to provide insights into the nature of control. In chapter 5, I specifically move away from the case-study approach that has largely characterized the literature in order to make generalizations across the bureaucracy (Coppedge 1999). Using a cross-sectional approach across 139 different bureaus provides a broad view of bureaucratic activity for Congress and the president to manage. The results from chapter 5 indicate that there are differences in how political principals exert influence over the bureaucracy not only across dramatically different bureaus but also across time (Geddes 2004). This suggests that, ceteris paribus, the presidency and the Congress impact the bureaucracy through different mechanisms and if internal characteristics of bureaus dramatically change, the nature of influence may as well. The large-N study in chapter 5 enables generalization for the theoretical approach and overall findings. It also has higher external validity (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). The shortfalls of this approach are that it assumes homogeneity of the data (Brady et al. 2004) by comparing disparate bureaus in the government and it also loses contextual knowledge gained from a specific policy areas (Brady et al. 2004). This chapter was specifically designed to confront the myriad challenges of studying the bureaucracy that has beset scholars.
By contrast, the in-depth case study in chapter 6 remedies the shortfalls of the large-N approach. It provides a case study on specific policy domain, education. This design provides a context to understand the theoretical approach advanced in the agent-principal model (Rogowski 2004) where we can gain more understanding about the political environment affecting a specific policy question (Fearron and Laitin 2009; Geddes 2003). This chapter helps gain traction on the question about the nature of policy change and which actors in the political ecosystem are more or less influential in initiating change. The design of this chapter enables a deeper understanding about the specific actors that influence education policy (Brady et al. 2004; Gerring 2007). The two empirical chapters were designed to complement one another and utilize the strengths found in a large-N study and then a specific case study. The similar findings in both chapters provide strong evidence that both the Congress and the president influence the bureaucracy and that the agent-principal model provides a partial explanation for how that influence is wielded across actors.
Finally, chapter 7 concludes with a review of the main findings, challenges to the principal-agent theory, and extensions to the agent-principal model. It provides suggestions for future research avenues to further scholarly understanding about the nature of bureaucratic control from political masters.
Overall, the central research question in this study: “Why and when do political actors exert different levels of political control over the bureaucracy?” has implications for the degree of democracy and democratic control the public can expect to exert on the bureaucracy. This study contributes to the extant literature in public administration and political science advancing scholarly understanding concerning the nature of political control over the U.S. bureaucracy. It shifts the dominant principal-agent model and utilizes a bottom-up view of the bureaucracy to gain traction on the nature of political control. The study recognizes the diversity across the bureaucracy and addresses shortcomings in past research. Switching the perspective on how control operates can provide insights into how adroitly specific levers of control can be used, and where there are more restrictions.
This study contributes to the bureaucracy literature by providing an explanation for why different agencies, or subagencies, are more tightly controlled by some principals and not others. Moreover, the answers to these questions are not only relevant to the political science literature, but also to sociology, organizational theory, and anthropology, among others. Bureaucracies are inherent in any human institution—higher education, government, terrorist networks, and religious organizations (to name a few). Understanding how political control operates across the federal bureaucracy will provide inferences and generalizations for many scholars on variation in bureaucratic control and its absence.
NOTE
1. This definition extends McCubbins, Noll and Weingast (1987) who defined it as “how political actors—the president and Congress—can retain control of policymaking.” (p. 245). The working definition in this study recognizes that (1) there are more principals than just the president and Congress, and (2) there are internal characteristics in the bureaucracy that can impact the degree of external control on bureaucratic activity.
