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Governments make policy decisions in the same areas in quite different institutions. Some assign policymaking responsibility to institutions designed to be insulated from myopic partisan and electoral pressures and others do not. ...
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Governments make policy decisions in the same areas in quite different institutions. Some assign policymaking responsibility to institutions designed to be insulated from myopic partisan and electoral pressures and others do not. In this study, we claim that differences in political context and institutional design constrain the policy choices governments make. Testable propositions based on an analysis of varying electoral incentives and time horizons created by these different contexts are empirically tested using panel data on official general fund revenue forecasts in the American states, 1987 to 2008. The empirical evidence reveals that executive branch agencies and independent commissions produce more conservative forecasts than legislatures with one important exception. Executive branch revenue forecasts in states with gubernatorial term limits are indistinguishable from legislative branch forecasts. Further, we find that legislative branch forecasts are more conservative in the presence of divided partisan legislatures than unified party government. In turn, this implies that entrusting policymaking authority to either the executive branch or an independent commission may only be consequential when the political system itself fails to check legislative excesses or executive myopia.
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This study focuses on how voters and politicians rationally select a preferred policy-making venue (Politician or Agency), and its implications for the principal-agent relationship between voters and politicians in a representativ...
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This study focuses on how voters and politicians rationally select a preferred policy-making venue (Politician or Agency), and its implications for the principal-agent relationship between voters and politicians in a representative democracy. This study allows for incomplete information, as well as solving for the comparative static conditions pertaining to the extent that a politician's policy-making venue choices mirror those preferred by a representative voter. The comparative static results highlight when a politician (1) chooses the representative voter's preferred policy-making venue (Active or Passive Political Responsiveness); (2) is able to choose freely either policy-making venue without committing agency loss (Political Discretion); and (3) willing to deviate from the representative voter's preferred policy-making venue (Political Shirking). In contrast to the study by Spence, this study analytically demonstrates that one cannot infer that the benefits accrued from agency policy-making will necessarily exceed those from electoral institutions.
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Public management scholars often claim that agency competition provides an effective institutional check on monopoly authority, and hence, leads to improvement of administrative performance in public sector agencies. This logic wa...
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Public management scholars often claim that agency competition provides an effective institutional check on monopoly authority, and hence, leads to improvement of administrative performance in public sector agencies. This logic was central for creating the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in 1975 to challenge the policy information provided by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). We challenge this conventional wisdom by demonstrating that CBO has failed to enhance the quality of U.S. fiscal policy analysis on its own terms; nor has it spurred improvements in OMB's performance. Our empirical results indicate that the quality of OMB's fiscal projections has often deteriorated since the establishment of CBO as a rival bureau. We also show that both public and private information is being shared by these agencies to produce a similar caliber of task outputs. The broader implications of our study indicate that although politicians face incentives to employ agency competition in governmental settings, this type of bureaucratic strategy does not necessarily enhance the quality of administrative performance.
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Political scientists are keenly interested in how diversity influences politics, yet we know little about how diverse groups of political actors interact. We advance a unified theory of colleague valuation to address this puzzle. ...
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Political scientists are keenly interested in how diversity influences politics, yet we know little about how diverse groups of political actors interact. We advance a unified theory of colleague valuation to address this puzzle. The theory explains how minority group size affects how members of a political organization differentially value majority and minority group colleagues, predicting that the effect of preference divergence on individual-level colleague valuation is greatest when the minority group is smallest. We test this prediction using member-to-member leadership political action committee (PAC) contributions in the U.S. House of Representatives. The results obtain strong, albeit not uniform, support for the theory, demonstrating that the gender gap in colleague valuations declines as preference divergence increases in all but one instance. In contrast to conventional wisdom, the theory and evidence indicate that women serving in the U.S. House of Representatives receive less support from men colleagues as their ranks increase.
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Abstract Age discrimination is a systemic problem of the American administrative state that undermines both the caliber and performance of the U.S. federal government workforce. A theory is proposed, anchored on discrimination aga...
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Abstract Age discrimination is a systemic problem of the American administrative state that undermines both the caliber and performance of the U.S. federal government workforce. A theory is proposed, anchored on discrimination against age‐eligible employees (age 40 and over) representing a social identity group, to explain how status‐group power differentials between supervisors and non‐supervisors within U.S. federal agencies explain the organizational incidence of formal discrimination complaints. The theory predicts that the incidence of age discrimination formal complaints is declining in the share of supervisory personnel who are discrimination age‐eligible while increasing in the share of non‐supervisory personnel members who belong to this group. Evidence is obtained for these hypotheses using objective data on Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's age discrimination formal complaints about an unbalanced panel of 130 U.S. federal agencies between 2010 and 2019. The empirical evidence underscores the structural challenges to combatting ageism within the U.S. federal government workforce during an era of an intergenerational personnel change.
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Abstract This study analyzes an important and overlooked aspect of cutback budgeting affecting US federal agencies − reductions to existing US federal grant awards. Because presidents face incentives for both executive accountabi...
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Abstract This study analyzes an important and overlooked aspect of cutback budgeting affecting US federal agencies − reductions to existing US federal grant awards. Because presidents face incentives for both executive accountability and effective administration, we predict that public agencies which are more responsive to presidential goals, as well as those led by more capable agency heads, shall experience less severe grant retrenchments. Statistical analysis of approximately 745,000 grant retrenchments for the 1988–2008 period reveals that the distribution of these programmatic cutbacks is consistent with enhancing executive accountability, while also favoring policy effectiveness. Agencies led by chief executives with considerable managerial‐specific expertise are associated with only increased reductions in grant retrenchments for small programmatic cuts to existing grants. These findings illustrate how presidents’ strategy of executive administration seeks to limit programmatic cutbacks for more responsive federal agencies, and also for public organizations whose leaders exhibit higher levels of policy‐specific expertise.
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This article examines the application of organizational reputation to public administration. Organizational reputation is defined as a set of beliefs about an organization's capacities, intentions, history, and mission that are em...
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This article examines the application of organizational reputation to public administration. Organizational reputation is defined as a set of beliefs about an organization's capacities, intentions, history, and mission that are embedded in a network of multiple audiences. The authors assert that the way in which organizational reputations are formed and subsequently cultivated is fundamental to understanding the role of public administration in a democracy. A review of the basic assumptions and empirical work on organizational reputation in the public sector identifies a series of stylized facts that extends our understanding of the functioning of public agencies. In particular, the authors examine the relationship between organizational reputation and bureaucratic autonomy.
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