Agency Policy Making and Political Control: Modeling Away the Delegation Problem

In recent years, there has been a noticeable shift in some of the literature on political control of the administrative agencies, away from an emphasis on agency autonomy and toward the view that politicians can and do exert significant amounts of control over agency decisions. This shift has been particularly evident in the mainstream political science journals and includes both theoretical and empirical work. I argue here that this shift in thinking may be premature, and that these recent works do not really challenge our understanding of why widespread agency autonomzy is an inherent byproduct of the delegation of policy-making authority from politicians to agencies. Much of the new theory of political control comes from positive theorists, who emphasize the ability of politicians to shape agencies' decision-making environments in ways that steer agencies' subsequent decisions toward the politicians' policy goals. Much of the new empirical work comes from quantitative empiricists whose statistical models of agency behavior find significant amounts of agency responsiveness to external political stimuli. Neither of these groups, however, demonstrate that politicians can overcome the delegation problem; rather, they model the problem away. Positive theorists do this by assuming away the importance of substantive policy foresight to politicians' efforts to influence subsequent agency decisions. Quantitative empiricists do this by choosing as their dependent variable agency implementation of established policies, rather than agency policy making itself. While both are driven to this result by their own separate methodological imperatives (and a commendable preference for scientific rigor), the result is the same. Neither group of models is sufficiently rich or generalizable to challenge the notion that agencies act with a great deal of autonomry when exercising most delegated policy-making authority. To what degree can and do elected politicians control the policy decisions of administrative agencies? If recent scholarship I wish to thank Susan Rose-Ackerman, John Aldrich, Steve Balla, William Bianco, John Brehm, Daniel Farber, and Christopher Schroeder for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. I would like to give special thanks to James Hamilton for his comments and suggestions throughout the preparation of this article. Portions of this analysis were presented at the 1994 and 1996 meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association. J-PART 7(1997):2: 199-219 199/Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory This content downloaded from 157.55.39.200 on Thu, 01 Dec 2016 05:43:58 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Agency Policy Making and Political Control in the mainstream of political science is any indication, it would seem that the weight of opinion is shifting away from theories of agency autonomy and toward theories that emphasize previously underappreciated tools of political control. Positive theory has contributed greatly to this change, as have some recent empirical studies indicating that politicians can control agency decisions much of the time. However, if this shift in opinion is indeed occurring, there are good reasons to believe that it is premature. Upon closer inspection, it is evident that methodological choices have led many of these newer models of political control to model away key aspects of the delegation problem, particularly the critical importance of substantive policy foresight to politicians' efforts to control the content of agency decisions. Many positive theorists recognize this issue, but contend that politicians can circumvent it through the use of procedures and decisions about agency structure; for their part, many quantitative empiricists choose to study a dependent variable other than agency policy making,' one that is particularly responsive to politicians' influence. In either case, this modeling choice leads directly to overestimation of the degree to which political control occurs. COMING FULL CIRCLE ON DELEGATION In some ways, the path to this point has been circular.2 Scholars and politicians debated the dimensions of the delegation problem before the 1946 enactment of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA). The simultaneous growth of the executive branch and demise of the nondelegation doctrine in the federal courts prompted concern about the concentration of policymaking authority in the hands of unelected bureaucrats. The APA was designed to democratize the agency decision-making process, in large part, because elected politicians could not or would not circumscribe agency authority at the delegation stage. Some political scientists have characterized this problem of uncontrolled delegation as abdication by Congress of its authority-indeed, its duty-to make policy decisions (Lowi 1979). Subsequent research suggested that oversight did not offer politicians an acceptable solution to the delegation problem. In the 1970s, the first positive theory analyses of the relationship between administrative agencies and elected politicians (by economists and others who used a principal-agent framework) demonstrated that information asymmetries enabled the agency to shirk its legislatively imposed duties (Niskanen 1971; Peltzman 1976; Stigler 1971)3 and complemented other analyses of the limits of presidential oversight and control (Neustadt 1960; Heclo 1977). In the 1980s these works sparked a debate among positive theorists and other bureaucratic politics scholars over the efficacy 'I use the term policy making to refer to agency decisions that establish policy, either through rule making or other procedures (see exhibit 2). As to the analytical utility. of this distinction between agency policy making and other agency activities, see section entitled "The Quantifiable Dependent Variable Prob-