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.
A Survey of Bureaucratic Control Mechanisms
Across the fields of public administration, sociology, economics, and political science there is a large literature examining questions about bureaucratic control, the nature of control, and, finally, the appropriation of the principal-agent theory from economics to study the bureaucracy. In this chapter, I provide a review of the major assumptions in the literature and the evolution for how scholars have approached the issue of bureaucratic control.
Scuttling the Spoils System
As the United States expanded westward in the 1820s under the aegis of President Monroe’s “manifest destiny” coupled with technological improvements from the industrial revolution, and universal white male suffrage, the U.S. federal government needed to expand in size in order to keep pace with the growing items on the national agenda. Unlike the state-building that was occurring in Germany and British monarchies during that time, the United States was an experiment in the common man ruling himself. Constructing an edifice of government in a democracy, with the United States’ unique and strong system of checks-and-balances between the branches of government is more difficult where large public policy changes are very hard to maneuver through the different branches (Fukuyama 2014).
Andrew Jackson, the first non-eastern man elected president in 1828, strategically viewed using the spoils of office to advance his political agenda. The “spoils system” was created whereby government jobs were given to party loyalists in exchange for or in reward for political loyalty. This system created a pernicious and corrupting effect on the U.S. bureaucracy as jobs were not awarded by merit, unlike the German and British systems, but rather on political patronage. Under the system, friends of politicians were appointed to positions across the government. It had a corrosive effect on good governance giving rise to machine politics and corruption as public funds and political favors were exchanged for public office (Fukuyama 2014). Indeed, both members of Congress and the president benefitted from the system as it helped build political coalitions and ensured that government employees were loyal; shockingly, President Taylor replaced 30 percent of all federal workers during the sixteen months he served as president before his death in July of 1850 (Fukuyama 2014). Though the United States needed a better and more efficient bureaucracy in order to address issues on the national agenda, reforming the spoils system was very difficult since the politicians tasked with governing the country gained great personal advantage from the system.
After much political maneuvering, in 1883, The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was signed into law by President Arthur who succeeded President Garfield after his assassination by a man who claimed that he was owed a patronage position within the growing federal bureaucracy. The Pendleton Act effectively ended widespread use of the spoils system and its passage marks the birth of the modern bureaucracy in the United States (Fukuyama 2014). Specifically, the Pendleton Act made it illegal to require federal workers to pay dues to political parties, it instituted a “merit system” whereby office-seekers would have to prove their qualifications for the job through a civil service exam, and it also insulated many layers of positions within the federal government from political appointments (Kollman 2017). With the United States growing rapidly at the end of the 1800s with industrialization and modernization, the country needed a more effective bureaucracy to execute important tasks such as regulating railroads and laying telegraph lines. It substantially decreased the number of patronage (political) appointments and mandated that federal employment be based on merit rather than political party. In addition, it set uniform rules for promotion that were followed across the growing bureaucracy. Vestiges of the spoils system remain today, however, as the United States still has more political appointees in government than any other modern industrialized country (Fukuyama 2014). Indeed, political appointees hold every cabinet appointment and many other important positions across the U.S. government.
Public Administration: Political/Administration Dichotomy and Max Weber’s Ideal Type
Examining the relationship between politics and the administrative state was a topic that then future president Woodrow Wilson advanced following his PhD from John’s Hopkins University in political science in 1886. As a student of American government, he argued that the growing U.S. bureaucracy and its relationship with Congress and the president needed to be studied systematically (West 1995). In his view, the purpose of government needed to address two fundamental questions: (1) What public goods should the government produce? and (2) How should the government provide it? He advanced the idea that the provision and production of public goods were fundamentally different. The provision was a political issue that elected officials must decide and the production issue—meaning how the bureaucracy implemented the policy—was divorced from politics (Wilson 1887). Essentially, it is possible to separate politics and administration because implementation is a nonpolitical issue (Wilson 1887). This bifurcation implied that execution of policy was apolitical and, importantly, there was not a control problem because bureaucrats would implement orders with fidelity and efficiency.
This dichotomy between politics and administration that Wilson promoted foreshadowed Max Weber’s “ideal type” bureaucrat and later the principal-agent model (Fukuyama 2014). Weber argued, similar to Wilson, that an “ideal” bureaucrat was a professional whose expertise furthered the mission of the bureau (Olsen 2008). Not only were bureaucrats chosen based on merit, but they were also neutral and impartial in executing the law with integrity. A bureaucrat’s loyalty was to his profession and the state (Olsen 2008). Again, in this Weberian vision of an efficient,