An agent, but an agent of whom? Organized interests and the United States bureaucracy.

摘要

The study of who, if anyone, influences agency decision making during the bureaucratic rulemaking process in the United States has generated relatively little scholarly attention. In particular, we know little about the joint influence Congress, the president, the bureaucracy, and organized interests may hold over the implementation of public policy. This dissertation's critical contribution is an empirically verified theory of the bureaucracy's policy responses to pressure from other political actors. I theorize that when congressional and presidential oversight is high, these elected political actors will dictate their priorities to the bureaucracy. However, when congressional and presidential oversight is low, then organized interests will have a greater ability to sway policies in their desired direction. I use ordered probit and binary logit models to analyze an original dataset of 40 bureaucratic rules and 1,700 public comments. I find strong evidence that organized interests consistently and independently influence rulemaking during the notice and comment period. The effect of congressional and presidential oversight on the influence of organized interests, however, is mixed, and these findings suggest that elected political actors play a smaller role in "controlling" the policy implementation process than is commonly thought.