Beyond the Dichotomy: Views from Post–World War II Political Scientists and Public Choice Theorists
Weber, however, did recognize the inherent asymmetry between bureaucrats (agents) who possess the technical expertise over a particular policy area and their managers (principal) who are tasked with providing overall direction (Miller 2005). This anticipates the later principal–agent framework and also implies that there is, or could be, a control issue. Post–World War II scholars rejected this false dichotomy between administration and politics and argued that bureaucrats and bureaucratic decision-making were inherently political (Long 1949). Not only do bureaucrats operate in a political environment, but they also have a “political character” which affects their policy outputs (Appleby 1949). Further, this line of literature also argued that the inherently hierarchical nature of bureaucracies placed increased emphasis on an individual bureaucrat’s judgment about what issues to elevate to superiors, and which ones to handle themselves (Appleby 1949). Therefore, the twin complexities of bureaucrats operating in a political environment and also exercising discretion in what information to share, or not, necessarily implies issues concerning bureaucratic control. How can superiors provide the right incentives and the optimal organizational structure to ensure compliance with their wishes?
While scholars recognized that a political environment necessitated a control issue, the literature also advocated that bureaucrats had preferences in their own right. Though according to Weber the locus of bureaucratic power stems from technical expertise and asymmetric information, he does not fully account for individual motivation or preferences of bureaucrats themselves. This school of thought borrowed theories from economics and applied it to the administrative state. First, bureaucrats have discretion in how they implement policy and can be legislators in their own rite (Friedrich 1940). Second, it recognizes that bureaucrats can act in a rational manner that maximizes their own economic self-interests, namely budget maximization, that preserves their jobs and ensures that their bureau, like a business, will remain a going concern (Niskanan 1968).
The majority of this literature focuses on explanations for the growth of government with the recognition that bureaucrats may have independent preferences from their superiors. In short, bureaucrats have an informational monopoly over their legislative managers. The legislators have no ability to access independently what the bureau’s production function for provisions are; therefore, senior bureaucrats can act as discriminating monopolists, extracting as much surplus budget from the legislature as they can. This is the idea that unconstrained government growth comes from bureaucrats who want to maximize their budget and ensure the health of their bureau. This overproduction of provision increases the size of government faster than the private sector (Niskanan 1971; Buchanan and Tullock 1977). The essential insight from this literature, however, is that bureaucrats have preferences that may be hidden and may be independent from Congress and the president.
In sum, the post WWII literature rejected the idea of divorcing politics and administration and also recognized that bureaucrats not only have their own preferences but they also may work independently from the president or the Congress to achieve them. Again, borrowing from economics, the political science literature appropriated the principal-agent theory to investigate the extent of the Weberian informational asymmetry and the impact of heterogeneous preferences on political control (Miller 2005). It formalized the notion that there must be explicit controls on the bureaucracy to constrain growth and to implement the legislature’s or the president’s wishes with more fidelity (McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast 1987; Moe 1984). The model addresses the arguments raised in the literature that bureaus are fundamentally a political entity as well (Appleby 1949) and that bureaucrats may have different goals than their principals (Niskanan 1971; Buchanan and Tullock 1977). Further, it enables scholars to gain insights regarding how variation across political contexts and policy domains will affect delegation strategies (Huber 2000).
Current Orthodoxy in Political Control: Assessing the Hierarchical Control Mechanisms from Congress to the President
From the 1980s to the present day, the principal-agent theory has become the most widely used formal model in bureaucracy studies to untangle the hierarchical relationship between a principal who makes policy and an agent who implements the policy directives. Broadly, the model assumes a dyadic relationship whereby one principal directs one agent to fulfill his orders; however, due to informational asymmetry and heterogeneous preferences between the pair, the agent may not implement the principal’s wishes with fidelity. This can lead to agency loss whereby the entirety of the principal’s injunctions is not realized (Lowery and Marchetti 2012).
The political control literature has contributed to our understanding about the levers of power that different principals can employ to influence the bureaucracy. For instance, Congress, the courts, and the president utilize different tactics in order to exert their authority on bureaucratic policy-making and program implementation. The literature to date has largely mirrored the disconnected organization of the bureaucracy itself providing nuggets of evidence that the locus of bureaucratic control resides with these different political principals. The majority of studies neither directly test the influence of competing principals in the same model (exceptions include Carptenter 1996; Clinton et al. 2014; Wood and Waterman 1991; Potter 2017) nor do they employ a cross-sectional approach across different bureaus. This double-faceted problem in the literature impedes more generalized inferences about the relative political control across the myriad of offices within the U.S. bureaucracy.
Congressional Dominance Theory
The Congress and the president are the only two principals who have a direct constitutional role in overseeing and managing the bureaucracy. The scholarly literature offers two competing theories asserting supremacy from the Congress or the presidency over the bureaucracy. A Congress-centered approach, advanced by the congressional dominance theory assumes that a member of Congress’s reelection motivation is the overriding principal behind their efforts to influence the bureaucracy to serve constituent interests (Mayhew 1974; Moe 1987; Fiorina 1989). This approach cites evidence that the legislature as a whole exerts its policy preferences in agency decision-making through three primary means. First, they direct bureaucratic actions through specific language in statute (Huber and Shipan 2002) that can either constrain or enable bureaucratic discretion depending on the specificity of the law’s directives. This is ex-ante statutory control (Ringquist et al. 2003), whereby bureaucratic action is controlled before policy implementation from the bureaucrats begins. The congressional dominance theory advances the idea that the legislature is the primary principal directing bureaucratic actions through statutory language allowing varying amount of discretion (Huber and Shipan 2002). Congress then monitors adherence to statutory delegation and program implementation through oversight hearings.
Second, the Congress can reprimand bureaucratic agencies after some malfeasance has occurred though ex-post committee oversight hearings (Weingast and Moran 1983). In this scenario, a third party such as a citizen or an interest group will pull the proverbial “fire alarm” and alert members when an infraction has occurred (McCubbins and Schwartz 1984). Once alerted, Congress can take steps to remedy the situation and reward or punish agencies as needed. This is an efficient and effective form of oversight, but there is selective sampling just on what affects a third party. Finally, Congress and the president jointly share the power of budgeting. Every year, annual appropriations for agencies throughout the government are made and approved by both Congress and the president. Agencies need the Congress