Richard W. Waterman

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.

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.

Bureaucrats, politics, and the environment

The bureaucracy in the United States has a hand in almost all aspects of our lives, from the water we drink to the parts in our cars. For a force so influential and pervasive, however, this body of all nonelective government officials remains an enigmatic, impersonal entity. The literature of bureaucratic theory is rife with contradictions and mysteries. Bureaucrats, Politics, and the Environment attempts to clarify some of these problems. The authors surveyed the workers at two agencies: enforcement personnel from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and employees of the New Mexico Environment Department. By examining what they think about politics, the environment, their budgets, and the other institutions and agencies with which they interact, this work puts a face on the bureaucracy and provides an explanation for its actions.

Checking the Federal Courts: The Impact of Congressional Statutes on Judicial Behavior

This paper examines the struggle between the legislative and judicial branches by focusing specifically on congressional influences on the behavior of federal judges. We argue that Congress may constrain individual judicial behavior by passing statutes containing detailed language. To test this thesis we borrow from the bureaucratic politics literature to introduce and test a new measure of statutory constraint. Using data from the U.S. Courts of Appeals we find that appellate court behavior is constrained significantly by statutory language, although this constraint is asymmetric across ideology. We discover substantial differences between Democratic and Republican appointees both in terms of statutory constraint and ideological voting. The data indicate judges appointed by Democratic presidents are constrained by statutory language in criminal cases. Similarly, Republican appointees are constrained by statutes in civil rights cases. Yet, neither Democrats nor Republicans are constrained in economic cases.

The image-is-everything presidency : dilemmas in American leadership

* Public Expectations and Presidential Image * Historical Images * Personal Images * The Constant Campaign * Speaking More, Saying Less: The Pattern of Presidential Speechmaking * Presidential Image and the Media * Where Do We Go From Here?

Determining an Agency's Regulatory Style: How Does the Epa Water Office Enforce the Law?

a strict application of the law, while supporters of the negotiated compliance model have called for increased bureaucratic flexibility and a greater reliance on bargaining with the regulated industry. While the merits of these two models have been much debated and discussed, scholars have been less concerned with determining which approach is actually employed by regulatory agencies. Through an analysis of the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) data set, we examine how employees of the Environmental Protection Agencys (EPA) Water Office have actually enforced the Clean Water Act (CWA). This analysis demonstrates that the enforcement behavior of the EPA Water Office is best represented by the negotiated compliance model.

Policy monitoring and policy analysis

In this article we introduce a policy analytic technique that we call “policy monitoring.” Using data from the Environmental Protection Agencys Hazardous Waste Division, we demonstrate how the technique can be employed in actual practice. The case study demonstrates that EPA enforcements were responsive to stimuli emanating from outside the agency. In particular, relevant congressional committees were able to influence and effect change in the EPAs policy. In addition to demonstrating how policy monitoring can be employed, we also discuss how it can be used in other policy analytic situations.

State Supreme Courts and the Effects of Statutory Constraint A Test of the Model of Contingent Discretion

Do state supreme court judges render decisions according to their ideological preferences, or are they constrained by the language of state statutes? Using data from the Judge-Level State Supreme Court Database, the authors analyze the votes of individual judges from 1995 to 1998 to determine whether their behavior is constrained by legislation. The results indicate that more detailed language (resulting in statutes with higher word counts) significantly limits the discretion afforded to liberal judges while simultaneously facilitating the ideological voting of their conservative colleagues.

How Legislative (In)Activity, Ideological Divergence, and Divided Government Impact Executive Unilateralism: A Test of Three Theories

During the past two decades scholars from a variety of different fields (law, history, journalism, political science) have written extensively about the development and implementation of the Unilateral Presidency. Because several explanations for unilateral action have been posited, we provide a thorough test of three theories of executive unilateral action. Applying a newly-developed methodology to the most comprehensive dataset of unilateral presidential directives to date, results of the Bayesian Poisson Vector Autoregressive model suggest that although executive orders, memoranda, and proclamations are all strategic tools that presidents utilize to unilaterally alter policy, fundamental differences exist between them, as well as the inter-dependence among them. More important, our results show that whereas the percentage of bills passed is related to presidential proclamations, legislative activity actually depends on the number of executive orders issued. However, CQ success scores are related to both executive orders and presidential proclamations. We also find that presidential ideology and congressional ideology are related to executive action, whereas the impact of divided government is at best only weakly related.

Belco, Michelle, and Brandon Rottinghaus. The Dual Executive: Unilateral Orders in a Separated and Shared Power System: Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. 239 pages.

this in the second experiment. However, there is no discussion of the gender makeup of her experimental groups. Given existing research that suggests that men and women respond differently to negative advertising and uncivil debate or conflict more generally in politics (e.g., Brooks 2010; and Kenski, Koe, and Rains 2017), it would be interesting to see if men and women respond similarly to the heated debate frames in Atkinson’s experiments. Although these omissions pique the reader’s curiosity, neither poses a significant problem for the book’s arguments or findings. Overall, Combative Politics offers significant insight into how conflict-focused media coverage of policy debates can affect public opinion and lead to declining support for what would otherwise seem to be popular policies. The book should find an audience well beyond those who are interested in public opinion. For journalists and those who study political communication, it raises questions about the consequences of journalistic norms of reporting policy debates. For Congress scholars, it provides help in explaining the behavior of congressional members who no doubt recognize the benefits of keeping controversial legislation that they support quiet in its formative stages or of dragging out the legislative process and generating heated debate on the bills members oppose. Indeed one could imagine Atkinson’s theory being fruitfully applied to make sense of elite behavior and public opinion in numerous recent policy debates.