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.