Suchergebnisse

AbstractWe present the American State Administrators Project (ASAP), a decades‐long survey of state agency leaders. This remarkable dataset provides a 50‐state chronological portrait of state administrative leaders, what they think, and what their agencies do. The dataset has traditionally been closely held but is now being shared with the broader scholarly community for the first time. We use this article to demonstrate the dataset's potential to advance theory and knowledge of the modern administrative state through the example of principal‐agent theory. As we show, the ASAP data allow us to reorient scholarship away from an empirical focus on how the president/governor, legislature, and other political principals try to influence the bureaucracy and toward a fuller appreciation of how bureaucrats formulate and administer public policy in a political environment. Such a refocusing is critical because it better recognizes the "agency" held by bureaucratic agents within modern governance.

We provide the first empirical assessment of the ossification thesis, the widely accepted notion that procedural constraints on federal agencies have greatly hindered the ability of those agencies to formulate policy through notice and comment rule-making. Using data that cover all active federal rule-writing agencies from 1983 to 2006, our results largely disconfirm the ossification thesis. Agencies appear readily able to issue a sizeable number of rules and to do so relatively quickly. Indeed, our empirical results suggest that procedural constraints may actually speed up the promulgation of rules, though our model suggests that this positive effect may decline, or even reverse, as proposed rules age. We conclude that procedural constraints do not appear to unduly interfere with the ability of federal agencies to act, or in most cases, to act in a timely manner. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractDespite paying a great deal of attention to the effects of divided government on legislative outputs, scholars of American politics have surprisingly ignored the potential impact of divided government on bureaucratic regulatory outputs. In this article we argue that divided government should reduce the volume of federal agency rulemaking. We test this hypothesis against a data set covering 21,000 rules from 1983 to 2005. Our study is one of the first to analyze the determinants of federal bureaucratic rulemaking activity across such a long period of time. Our results demonstrate that during periods of divided government, agencies issue fewer rules and fewer substantively significant rules than they do during periods of unified government. These findings suggest that divided government impedes agency rulemaking.