Terry M. Moe

Control and Feedback in Economic Regulation: The Case of the NLRB

This article presents an empirical analysis of the National Labor Relations Board, focusing on the balance the agency strikes between the interests of business and labor. It is oriented by a theoretical framework that, relative to popular models, takes a broader view of the causal structure of regulatory performance—one that simultaneously allows for presidents, congressional committees, the courts, agency staff, constituents, and economic conditions. The empirical results are instructive. All of these factors prove to have significant impacts on NLRB decisions. In addition, the core regulatory actors —Board members, staff, and constituents—are shown to engage in mutually adaptive adjustment: each is responsive to the decisions of each of the others, and their reciprocal relationships impart equilibrating properties to the system as a whole. Thus, the evidence points to a varied set of important determinants and to the dynamic nature of their interconnection. To the extent that these findings are at all characteristic of other regulatory agencies, simple popular models of regulation are likely to give anemic explanations, if not highly distorted accounts, of why agencies behave as they do.

Power and Political Institutions

Rational choice theory tends to view political institutions as structures of voluntary cooperation that resolve collective action problems and benefit all concerned. Yet the political process often gives rise to institutions that are good for some people and bad for others, depending on who has the power to impose their will. Political institutions may be structures of cooperation, but they may also be structures of power—and the theory does not tell us much about this. As a result, it gives us a one-sided and overly benign view of what political institutions are and do. This problem is not well understood, and indeed is not typically seen as a problem at all. For there is a widespread sense in the rational choice literature that, because power is frequently discussed, it is an integral part of the theory and just as fundamental as cooperation. Confusion on this score has undermined efforts to right the imbalance. My purpose here is to clarify the analytic roles that power and cooperation actually play in this literature, and to argue that a more balanced theory—one that brings power from its periphery to its very core—is both necessary and entirely possible. Terry M. Moe is the William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution (moe@hoover.stanford.edu). An earlier version of this article was presented at the Yale Conference on Crafting and Operating Institutions, April 11–13, 2003. The author would like to thank Sven Feldmann, Lloyd Gruber, James Fearon, Peter Hall, Jennifer Hochschild, Stephen Krasner, Chris Mantzavinos, Gary Miller, Paul Pierson, Theda Skocpol, Barry Weingast, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Regulatory Performance and Presidential Administration

This paper pursues a better understanding of regulatory independence by investigating the link between presidential administration and the performance of the independent regulatory commissions. The data are drawn from three independent commissions-the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission-and separate time-series analyses are conducted for periods covering the Truman years through 1977. Attention centers on whether and how the prevailing patterns of regulatory performance have been altered as different administrations have assumed formal charge of the government. The analysis suggests that regulatory behavior does shift across administrations, and that it varies systematically with presidential partisanship. Presidents apparently do achieve a measure of direction and control over the independent commissions.

Bureaucrats, Legislators, and the Size of Government

Some recent theories have blamed the growth of government on budget-maximizing bureaucrats who are assumedly capable of imposing their most preferred budget-output combination on legislatures, subject to cost and demand constraints. However, theoretical examination of the range of bargaining outcomes that might occur between bureau and legislature shows that budget-maximizing behavior does not necessarily lead to super-optimal levels of production, nor do the suggested reforms of competition and privatization necessarily improve the situation. In this bargaining model, the central determinants of governmental growth are not budget-maximizing bureaucrats, but the legislatures decisions regarding mode of oversight and form of internal organization.

An Adaptive Model of Bureaucratic Politics

In this article we outline a new framework for the formal analysis of bureaucratic politics. It departs from standard neoclassical approaches, notably those of Niskanen (1971) and Peltzman (1976), in several important respects. First our approach explicitly models a system of three-way interaction among bureaus, politicians, and interest groups. Second, it allows for institutional features of each type of participant. Third, it is a model of dynamic process. Fourth, participants make choices adoptively rather than optimizing. Fifth, participants are only minimally informed.The result is a dynamic model of adaptive behavior, very much in the spirit of Simons (1947) behavioral tradition, that offers a new perspective on political control, bureaucratic power, and the “intelligence of democracy.â€

Interests, Institutions, and Positive Theory: The Politics of the NLRB

The claim that institutions “matter” is a subject of lively debate in the study of politics today. It is also something of a nonissue that is not really being debated at all. The reason it can be both at once is that the claim is loaded with theoretical baggage. If it is taken to mean that the actions of politicians or bureaucrats are in fundamental respects autonomous of social interests, the statement can easily prove controversial. If it is taken to mean that institutional context shapes the decisions of political actors, or that the relation between social interests and political outcomes varies with the institutional setting, then there is not much to debate; for there has long been a virtual consensus among students of politics that institutions do matter in these general respects.

Unilateral Action and Presidential Power: A Theory

In this article, the authors explore a basis for presidential power that has gone largely unappreciated to this point but that has become so pivotal to presidential leadership that it virtually defines what is distinctively modern about the modern presidency. This is the presidents formal capacity to act unilaterally and thus to make law on his own. The purpose of the article is to outline a theory of this aspect of presidential power. The authors argue that the presidents powers of unilateral action are a force in American politics precisely because they are not specified in the Constitution. They derive their strength and resilience from the ambiguity of the contract. The authors also argue that presidents have incentives to push this ambiguity relentlessly to expand their own powers—and that, for reasons rooted in the nature of their institutions, neither Congress nor the courts are likely to stop them.

A Calculus of Group Membership

This paper addresses the question of interest group membership by extending the work of Mancur Olson. This is carried out by (1) relaxing his original assumptions to allow for a broader range of individual values and perceptions-e.g., ideology, social pressures, and efficacy; (2) formally introducing factors other than collective goods, such as selective incentives and organizational dues, that bear on the decision to join; and (3) employing an analytical technique, constrained optimization, that integrates these factors into a single calculus of membership. The result is a perspective that is more optimistic about the prospects for political action, outlines the conditions under which such action will occur, and lends a measure of coherence to the fragmented, often conflicting notions that so characterize the interest group literature.

America's Public Schools: Choice Is a Panacea

The signs of poor performance were there for all to see during the 197Os. Test scores headed downward year after year. Large numbers of teenagers continued to drop out of school. Drugs and violence poisoned the learning environment. In math and science, two areas crucial to the nations success in the world economy, American students fell far behind their counterparts in virtually every other industrialized country. Something was clearly wrong.

Public Sector Unions and the Costs of Government

Public sector unions are major interest groups in American politics, but they are rarely studied. New research would not only shed much-needed light on how these unions shape government and politics, but also broaden the way scholars think about interest groups generally: by highlighting interests that arise inside governments, drawing attention to long-ignored types of policies and decision arenas, and underlining the importance of groups in subnational politics. Here we explore the effects of public sector unions on the costs of government. We present two separate studies, using different datasets from different historical periods, and we examine several outcomes: salaries, health benefits, and employment. We find that unions and collective bargaining increase the costs of government and that the effects are especially large for benefits. We view this analysis as an opening wedge that we hope will encourage a more extensive line of new research—and new thinking about American interest groups.