B. Dan Wood

The Dynamics of Political Control of the Bureaucracy.

A new paradigm of political-bureaucratic relations emerged through the 1980s holding that U.S. democratic institutions continuously shape nonelective public bureaucracies. Several empirical studies support the paradigm with evidence suggestive of political manipulation but none reveals the scope or specific mechanisms of political control. We explore the dynamics of political control of the bureaucracy explicitly to determine the scope and mechanisms. We examine output time series from seven different public bureaucracies for responsiveness to political tools applied in the late Carter and early Reagan administrations. We find responsiveness in all seven cases. The evidence also shows that political appointments—a shared power of the president and Congress—is the most important instrument of political control; changing budgets, legislation, congressional signals, and administrative reorganizations are less important. These findings confirm intuitive assertions by institutional scholars and suggest a method of “policy monitoring†that could enhance future democratic control of the bureaucracy.

Who Influences Whom? The President, Congress, and the Media

Influencing the policy agenda has long been viewed as one of the most important sources of political power. For decades, scholars have maintained that the president has the most significant role in setting the policymaking agenda in Washington, but little systematic empirical work has been done to measure the presidents influence. We explore the presidents success in focusing the issue attention of Congress and the mass media by evaluating time-series measures of presidential, mass media, and congressional attention to five issues: crime, education, health care, U.S.–Soviet relations, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. We find that most of the time the president reacts, responding primarily to fluctuations in media attention and world events. In domestic policy, we find a more interactive relationship, one that appears to offer the president the opportunity to act in an entrepreneurial fashion to focus the attention of others in the system on major presidential initiatives.

Principals, bureaucrats, and responsiveness in clean air enforcements.

A principal-agent perspective has been employed in recent studies to rediscover the importance of democratic hierarchies in shaping public bureaucratic outputs. I test the robustness of the hierarchy model for explaining outputs from an agency that has often been cast in the image of bureaucratic independence, the Environmental Protection Agency. Examining the effect of the Reagan presidency on EPA outputs for clean air, Box-Tiao models are constructed to explain shifts in the vigor of air pollution enforcements between 1977 and 1985. The analysis shows that the influence of elected institutions is limited when an agency has substantial bureaucratic resources and a zeal for their use. Moreover, under these conditions, bureaucracy can even move outputs in directions completely opposite from what a model of hierarchy would predict. The implication is that for some agencies it is necessary to give greater consideration to the agent in explaining implementation outcomes through time.

Bureaucratic dynamics : the role of bureaucracy in a democracy

Toward a more dynamic conception of bureaucracy scholarly thinking and research on the bureaucracy the dynamics of political control of the bureaucracy the dynamics of political-bureaucratic adaptation a bottom-up perspective on political-bureaucratic adaptation promoting bureaucratic accountability - a two-way street bureaucratic democracy and its dysfunctions.

The Dynamics of Foreign Policy Agenda Setting

Theoretical and empirical work on public policy agenda setting has ignored foreign policy. We develop a theory of foreign policy agenda setting and test the implications using time-series vector autoregression and Box-Tiao (1975) impact assessment methods. We theorize an economy of attention to foreign policy issues driven by issue inertia, events external to U.S. domestic institutions, as well as systemic attention to particular issues. We also theorize that the economy of attention is affected by a law of scarcity and the rise and fall of events in competing issue areas. Using measures of presidential and media attention to the Soviet Union, Arab-Israeli conflict, and Bosnian conflict, we show that presidential and media attentions respond to issue inertia and exogenous events in both primary and competing issue areas. Media attention also affects presidential attention, but the president does not affect issue attention by the media.

Disentangling Patterns of State Debt Financing

We examine the determinants of change in state government indebtedness from 1961 through 1989 using a pooled time series cross-sectional analysis. The analysis reveals that debt is primarily a function of economic conditions reflecting both the need to borrow and the capacity of states to repay debt. However, political factors such as culture, partisan competition, and electoral cycles also affect state debt. We also find very weak evidence that tax and expenditure limitations, ironically, may increase state indebtedness, while constitutional debt limitations have no effect upon slowing the growth of state debt.

Modeling Federal Implementation as a System: The Clean Air Case

Several studies have examined implementation determinants for parts of a U.S. federal policy structure, either national or subnational. However, no study treats federal implementation comprehensively as a single system by examining both national and subnational outputs in mutual interdependence. This article reports an analysis of Clean Air Act enforcements by EPA and the 50 states, separately and in relative dependence with one another. Granger causal and pooled time series regression analysis explain the vigor of federal activity from 1977 to 1985. The results show that federal implementation is not easily understood by examining parts of a federal structure; rather, more insight comes by examining implementation as a system. For clean air, national and subnational outputs were inertial, interdependent, and linked to both vertical and horizontal influences. The implication is that federal structures are adaptive entities that provide greater democratic representation than other administrative forms.

Political Transaction Costs and the Politics of Administrative Design

We propose a political transaction cost theory of the politics of administrative design and then evaluate the theory using data on the initial design attributes of 141 federal administrative agencies created legislatively between 1879 and 1988. The theory posits that the enacting coalition attempts to strategically manipulate administrative design attributes and therefore political transaction costs for future coalitions seeking to affect agency policy. Based on perceptions of the probability of political holdup and resulting losses, the enacting coalition alters political transaction costs to optimize expected benefits. We gauge the perceived probability of political holdup using measures of executive-legislative conflict, coalitional conflict, electoral turnover, and party hegemony. Using structural probit analysis, the results show that these factors significantly affect agency design attributes involving structure, process, and monitoring. Thus, the statistical analysis is consistent with the theory that the enacting coalition manipulates political transaction costs in designing U.S. administrative agencies.

Does Politics Make a Difference at the EEOC

Stability and responsiveness are features of bureaucracy that affect both policy success and policy consistency with dynamic public values. This article explores the stability and responsiveness of a bureaucracy which, according to normative theory, should be less responsive to political stimuli, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Measures are constructed across time of political support for commission policies, as well as agency outputs and their effect on the client community. Linear time series regression methods are then applied in quantifying changes through time in policy implementation and their consistency with the ideology of incumbent political administrations. The findings demonstrate that equal employment opportunity policy is unstable, undergoing frequent transformations in response to changing political conditions.

The Politics of U.S. Antitrust Regulation

The purpose of antitrust regulation is to promote and maintain fair competition in the U.S. economy. Yet economists and political scientists have long been unable to identify economic determinants of antitrust activity. Recent studies have turned toward bureaucratic theory for explaining antitrust enforcement. However, we argue that both economic and bureaucratic theories of antitrust regulation fail because they ignore the overarching institutional framework within which regulation occurs. We use the theory of overhead democracy to formulate a political explanation for antitrust regulation. Drawing upon data for the Antitrust Divisions resources and enforcement activity from 1970 to 1989, we show that Antitrust Division behavior is strongly affected by the major U.S. political actors, including the president, Congress, and courts. We conclude by discussing the normative implications of political, rather than market-based, antitrust regulation.