Politics and Administration: Evidence from the U.S. Patent O ce, 1837-2015∗

The expansion of the administrative state is among the most important institutional changes in American political history. In this paper, we study the political responsiveness of bureaucratic outputs across the last 180 years. Using panel data based on more than seven million patents issued by the United States Patent O ce between 1837 and 2015 and presidential election voting patterns, we nd that a state’s political alignment with the presidential administration increased patent rates by 7 to 10 percent. These patterns are driven nearly entirely by the period prior to personnel examination requirements instituted in 1869; we nd no evidence of an association between political alignment and patenting in any of the eras commonly used to periodize the administrative state after this date. Our results demonstrate the importance of bureaucratic expertise for the role of politics in administrative decision making and shed new light on the political economy of American innovation. ∗Matt Thomas provided excellent research assistance. We thank Alex Acs, Alex Bolton, Gbemende Johnson, Janna King, George Krause, Dave Lewis, John Patty, Tobias Resch, Ben Schneer, Jennifer Selin, Nick Short, Jim Snyder, Dan Thompson, Sharece Thrower, and Ian Turner for helpful comments and suggestions. †Assistant Professor, Harris School of Public Policy; dmoskowitz@uchicago.edu. ‡Associate Professor, Department of Government; rogowski@fas.harvard. edu. The contemporary administrative state would be utterly unrecognizable to the authors of the U.S. Constitution. Beginning with only three departments and a few dozen federal employees in 1789, American central government in the nation’s early years was regarded as a “midget institution in a giant land” (Murrin 1980, 425) that had “little e ect on the social, economic, religious, and intellectual developments that were shaping American civilization” (Pessen 1978, 2). More than a half-century after the nation’s founding, Tocqueville (1969 [1835], 72) was struck by “the absence of . government or administration. ” From such humble beginnings, the “wrenching and controversial changes” (Carpenter 2001, 5) that resulted in the expansion and transformation of the federal bureaucracy between the Civil War and World War II are “indisputably [among] the most important developments in American government” (Gailmard and Patty 2013, 1). This transformation not only increased the size of the federal workforce but also dramatically expanded the authority and reach of the federal government. Today, the “administrative state is the nexus of policy making” (Lewis 2004, 1) and “[b]ureaucratic policymaking is the hallmark of modern American government” (Carpenter 2001, 5). In this paper, we study bureaucratic outputs from the era of Tocqueville to today. Though existing scholarship documents the nature of the administrative state and its accomplishments in earlier periods of American history (e.g., John 1995; Skocpol 1992), characterizes the emergence and development of the modern bureaucratic apparatus (e.g., Bensel 1990; Skowronek 1982), and identi es the mechanisms through which it gained political autonomy and developed expertise (e.g., Carpenter 2001; Gailmard and Patty 2013), we know considerably less about the consequences of these developments for the administrative outputs produced by the federal government. On this score, scholarship on the consequences of institutional development within the bureaucracy is somewhat more limited than research that studies how institutional change affected the behavior of Congress (e.g., Binder 1997; Schickler 2001; Wawro and Schickler 2006), the judiciary (e.g., Francis 2014; Gillman 1993; Whittington 2007), and the presidency (e.g., Milkis