Bureaucracy’s Masters and Minions. Eleanor L. Schiff

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      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, effective, and impartial arbiter to execute laws, the locus of political decisions does not reside with bureaucrats. In the production of public goods, the implementation of policy, a Weberian bureaucrat would carry out his duties. Like Wilson, the notion that there was potentially a concern with bureaucratic control was illogical. The overall assumption was that the bureaucracy was a rule-bound institution with technical expertise that would execute the tasks entrusted to it by those who make the laws. This view advanced the idea that elected officials made provisioning decisions through a political process and bureaucrats implemented the policy efficiently, effectively, and impartially (Moe 1991). Given the dichotomy divorcing politics from the execution of policy, the public administration literature concluded for fifty years that a control problem over the bureaucracy did not exist. In fact, there was no vocabulary to entertain the notion of bureaucratic control.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ