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The regulatory politics literature contains two competing theories of policy change in the area of economic regulation: economic/technological change and the politics of ideas. This article focuses on the salient topic of commercial banking regulation as a laboratory for testing these propositions with regard to policy outcomes. The qualitative and empirical findings indicate that the instability facing the commercial banking industry comes from a combination of policy change as well as general and industry economic conditions. The author argues here, however, that policy change—in the form of deregulation—beginning with the passage of the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act (DIDMCA) of 1980 appears to serve as the most important explanation for this instability. Furthermore, the results of this study suggest that this policy change does reflect politics (and not economics), thus suggesting that recent commercial banking instability has largely been due to a combination of new ideas and the changing ideological composition of relevant congressional banking subcommittee members during the 1970s.

The authors assert that representative institutions such as legislatures face a 'diversity paradox': when the size of a minority group increases beyond mere 'tokenism' in representative institutions, it tends to create an unintended backlash toward the minority group's members

Abstract
Although the Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission (EEOC) requires that agency EEO directors serve under the direct supervision of agency heads, considerable variation exists on whether agencies adequately implement this requirement into practice by adopting a formal mechanism termed a coordinated reporting organizational arrangement (CROA). A dual exposure−informal resolution strategy is proposed to understand how CROAs improve US federal agencies' organizational efforts at managing workplace discrimination. This logic is statistically evaluated by estimating endogenous treatment effect regression models that analyze discrimination caseload data from EEOC Annual Reports between 2010 and 2014 spanning 131 US federal agencies. Consistent with this dual exposure−informal resolution strategy, the statistical evidence reveals that CROAs not only encourage agency employees to report incidents of workplace discrimination, but also augment agency efforts at successful internal resolutions of these reported incidents, thus reducing formal complaint filings. Yet, the beneficial effects associated with CROAs are most acutely realized for those agencies displaying either low or high levels of organizational fairness.

AbstractAge 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.

AbstractThis 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.

AbstractWe propose an empirical strategy to adjudicate between competing explanations of political–economic development in the American South. This strategy evaluates the dynamic relationship between partisan control of representative institutions and economic performance, both before and after major partisan realignment forces and economic conditions had structurally transformed the American South. The political–economic development of low‐capacity Southern states since the early 1980s reflects a "virtuous cycle" of rising income growth and partisan balance of state legislatures mutually reinforcing one another. These findings reconcile conflicting claims regarding the catalytic nature of political–economic development coevolution in the American South and have broader implications for the study of comparative political–economic development.

AbstractWe maintain that political institutions' policy objectives are best met under conditions when they are unified, and also when their administrative leadership is effective. We apply this argument to the understanding of how unified Democratic and Republican governments in the American states have influenced the incomes of affluent citizens. We find that affluent income gains occur under unified Republican state governments when compensation to executive agency heads is sufficiently high. These income gains are notable relative to both divided and unified partisan control of state governments. The evidence highlights the asymmetric role that bureaucratic leadership plays in attaining policy outcomes consistent with political institutions' policy preferences, while underscoring the limits of electoral institutions to shape policy outcomes of their own accord. Efforts to lower the capacity of the administrative leadership constrain unified political institutions from converting their policy objectives into policy outcomes.

Bureaucratic politics research couched within the new institutionalism paradigm has largely focused on principal authority rooted in formal (institutional) mechanisms that are ultimately both devised and chosen by politicians. A nascent literature has emerged over the past two decades whose underpinnings reflect increasing gravitation towards a transactional authority perspective, one that is compatible with behavioral theories of organizations. This transactional authority perspective departs from an exclusive reliance on formal mechanisms insofar that agent compliance is motivated by either mutual or bilateral agreement for both the principal and the agent. This perspective is rooted in not only the agent's 'sanctioned acceptance' of the principal's authority but also the principal's 'sanctioned acceptance' of the agent's legitimacy. We explore the logical implications of this transactional authority perspective for better understanding principal-agent relationships in the study of bureaucratic politics. We conclude by recommending that future research should redirect scholarly attention towards analyzing informal compliance and resistance mechanisms in bureaucratic politics, as well as offer a richer pluralist conception of bureaucratic governance in a democracy. Adapted from the source document.