Search results

Petitioning has a forgotten but essential role in the history of modern democracy. In the antebellum era, petitions gave North Americans, especially the disenfranchised, a critical tool to shape the political agenda. Daniel Carpenter shows how mass petitioning facilitated civil rights, voting, organizing, and other advances in liberty and equality.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is the most powerful regulatory agency in the world. How did the FDA become so influential? And how exactly does it wield its extraordinary power? Reputation and Power traces the history of FDA regulation of pharmaceuticals, revealing how the agency's organizational reputation has been the primary source of its power, yet also one of its ultimate constraints. Daniel Carpenter describes how the FDA cultivated a reputation for competence and vigilance throughout the last century, and how this organizational image has enabled the agency to regulate an industr

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is the most powerful regulatory agency in the world. How did the FDA become so influential? And how exactly does it wield its extraordinary power? Reputation and Power traces the history of FDA regulation of pharmaceuticals, revealing how the agency's organizational reputation has been the primary source of its power, yet also one of its ultimate constraints. Daniel Carpenter describes how the FDA cultivated a reputation for competence and vigilance throughout the last century, and how this organizational image has enabled the agency to regulate an industr.

Entrepreneurship, networked legitimacy, and autonomy -- The clerical state: obstacles to bureaucratic autonomy in nineteenth-century America -- The Railway Mail, Comstockery, and the waning of the old postal regime, 1862-94 -- Organizational renewal and policy innovation in the National Postal System, 1890-1910 -- The triumph of the moral economy: finance, parcels, and the labor dilemma in the post office, 1908-24 -- Science in the service of seeds: the USDA, 1862-1900 -- From seeds to science: the USDA as university, 1897-1917 -- Multiple networks and the autonomy of bureaus: departures in food, pharmaceutical, and forestry policy, 1897-1913 -- Brokerage and bureaucratic policymaking: the cementing of autonomy at the USDA, 1914-28 -- Structure, reputation, and the bureaucratic failure of reclamation policy, 1902-14 -- Conclusion: the politics of bureaucratic autonomy.

When policy arrangements appear to favor well-organized and wealthy interests, should we infer "capture" of the political process? In particular, might larger firms receive regulatory "protection" even when the regulatory agency is not captured by producers? I model regulatory approval—product approval, licensing, permitting and grant making—as a repeated optimal stopping problem faced by a learning regulator subject to variable political pressure. The model is general but stylistically applied to pharmaceutical regulation. Under the assumption that consumers are differentially organized, but producers are not, there nonetheless exist two forms of "protection" for larger, older producers. First, firms submitting more applications may expect quicker and more likely approvals, even in cases where their reputations for safety are below industry average. Second, "early entrants" to an exclusive market niche (disease) receive shorter expected approval times than later entrants, even when later entrants offer known quality improvements. The findings extend to cases of bounded rationality and a reduced form of endogenous firm submissions. The model shows that even interest-neutral "consumer" regulation can generate protectionist outcomes, and that commonly adduced evidence for capture is often observationally equivalent to evidence for other models of regulation.

Argues that US Post Office Dept reforms during 1883-1913 represent a "model" of American state building through bureaucratic entrepreneurship & multiple network affiliations that became a pattern of 20th-century institutional change. Contrary to most historical accounts, it is contended that civil service reform did not play a key role in postal transformation. Rather, reform-minded bureaucrats who had risen through the postal ranks promoted operational changes aimed at increasing the department's overall power, as well as its control over local offices. The bureaucrats garnered support for their innovative ideas from a wide variety of community & business groups/organizations. Their efforts generated experimental programs that later became institutionalized, such as free delivery to every American home & parcel post delivery. It is contended that their success in gaining politically grounded legitimacy contributed to the emergence of a new mode of institutional change & created an academic model of American political development that recognized the importance of innovative, coalition-building activities by bureaucrats. 7 Tables, 4 Figures, 1 Appendix, 35 References. J. Lindroth