Designing State Clean Air Agencies: Administrative Procedures and Bureaucratic Autonomy

This study examines how administrative procedures structure the degree of policy influence different governmental and nongovernmental groups exercise in states' air pollution control programs. Drawing on a variety of data, including a unique survey of state air pollution control agencies, our analysis shows that administrative procedures affect the degree of bureaucratic autonomy and level of influence legislatures and interest groups exercise in state air pollution programs. Overall, the results suggest that hardwiring administrative procedures theories may be more accurate than fire alarm theories of legislative oversight. This research was supported by a Pew Charitable Trust Preparing Future Faculty Fellowship, an Indiana University Graduate School Doctoral Student Grant-inAid of Research, the University of Kentucky Martin School of Public Policy and Administration, and the Council of State Governments. J-PART 11(2000):2:203-221 A common perception is that government bureaucracies control private fiefdoms free from public accountability. To critics (bureaucracy has few proponents), the prototypical bureaucracy is wasteful, unresponsive, and undemocratic. These charges have not escaped scholarly scrutiny. The ledger from a raft of research that examines government bureaucracies is more balanced, but it is also somewhat contradictory. Some empirical studies have shown that government agencies are efficiently responsive to their democratically elected overseers, while others suggest that government agencies enjoy broad policy autonomy. Several administrative procedures theories offer potential explanations for these disparate findings, but they have not received rigorous empirical scrutiny. The purpose of this article is to combine the analytical strength of empirical research with insight from the formal modeling tradition by analyzing relations among state clean air agencies, state politicians, and interest groups. In this article we 203/Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory This content downloaded from 157.55.39.181 on Thu, 29 Sep 2016 05:54:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Designing State Clean Air Agencies will advance the study of bureaucratic performance by examining empirically how administrative procedures structure both agency discretion and the influence that governmental and nongovernmental groups have in agency policy activities. Our goal is to uncover conditions of bureaucratic autonomy and political responsiveness by integrating administrative procedures theory with empirical research approaches such as those used in the venues of influence literature (Waterman, Rouse, and Wright 1998 and 1999). The results indicate that administrative procedures do help hardwire government agencies, although there appears to be little support for the fire alarm oversight theory. The article is divided as follows: First we will review important strands of empirical and theoretical research on government bureaucracies. Next, we will describe a theory of how administrative procedures can structure agency autonomy and group influence. Following that we will present a brief summary of state clean air policy activities, the analytic focus of the article. In the next section we will review the study's data and analytic methods. Finally, we will present the empirical results of the study and our conclusions.