Executive Governance

Presidential Administrations and Policy Change in the Federal Bureaucracy

Cornell G. Hooton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315503639
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

This study explores the difficulties of translating presidential policy initiatives into ground-level policy implementation by the permanent government. Drawing on organization theory, it focuses on the ways that bureaucratic behaviours shape an agency's responsiveness to directives.

1

Introduction

1. Presidential Administrations and Federal Bureaus

Observers of the White House have remarked often on the difficulties of directing the agencies of the executive branch. Richard Neustadt (1960) in his classic piece on presidential influence writes that presidents cannot rely so much on the powers of command to gain their wishes as on those of persuasion, professional reputation, and public prestige in order to achieve their goals. Presidential student Thomas Cronin remarks that “The federal bureaucracy ... is one of the most visible checks on a president. ... Gaining control over existing bureaucracies and making them work with and for the White House is an enormous burden on the president” (1980, 333). Both Richard Fenno (1959) and Hugh Heclo (1977), in their research on cabinet and subcabinet officials, outline the difficulties presidents have had in directing their own appointees. These and other studies that describe the pressures under which political appointees serve, the variety of ways by which career officials may resist presidents and their appointees, and the difficulties that presidential administrations face in monitoring and directing the multitudes of executive agencies give the impression not only that agencies operate in environments containing pressures that compete with an administration’s preferences but also that agencies’ own career officials desire goals that frequently conflict with those of presidential administrations.¹

Yet some observations suggest that the career bureaucracies may be more favorably disposed toward presidential administrations than is commonly thought. Samuel Kernell and Samuel Popkin (1987) review a conference of past White House chiefs of staff in which participants remarked that appointees lost opportunities by not trusting career officials as much as they could have; James Pfiffher (1987) describes a “cycle of accommodation” among top appointees in which they move from mistrust to trust of career staff; and Paul Light (1987) reports a survey of appointees in which large majorities of respondents indicated that their careerists were both competent and responsive.² James Benze (1985) reports, too, from a government-wide survey that 84 percent of career official respondents described a proper role for political executive to be one of advocacy for presidential interests rather than one of neutral administration, advocacy of agency interests, or advocacy of constituent interests.³ Indeed, it would be surprising if a more general survey of careerists’ attitudes did not uncover normative beliefs that careerists should respond to and actively support presidential appointees.⁴

In short, a variety of attitudes, anecdotes, and testimony suggests a willingness among career officials to support presidential administrations’ policy directions. But do careerists do so? How does this possible willingness jibe with what we know about executive branch behavior and politics? One way to examine these questions is through the attitudes of careerists. Attitudes can give important clues to the policies that careerists are likely to favor, and so researchers have conducted a variety of surveys focused on attitudes (Aberbach and Rockman 1976, 1990b; Cole and Caputo 1979; Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman 1981). But as the researchers are also careful to point out, the political attitudes do not of themselves determine the behavior of the individual person or entire organization. Actions depend on attitudes as well as contextual demands, resources, and incentives, and the processes by which the people in federal agencies become aware of the relevant environments, select responses to it, and coordinate responses (March and Olsen 1976; Weick 1979).

Thus when examining “bureaucratic responsiveness,” more broadly construed, three dimensions are relevant. The first concerns how appropriate a set of implemented policy alternatives are to the relevant policy preferences. Since available policy alternatives are inevitably unequal in viability, effectiveness, or efficiency, we would want to examine whether career officials choose alternatives that political authorities would choose were they as fully informed of the alternatives as were the career officials (see Bendor, Taylor, and Van Gaalen 1987).

The second dimension concerns whether career officials devote an appropriate amount of their own and their agencies’ time, energy, skills, and other resources to the relevant policy alternative; that is, whether the amount of devoted resources is what the political authorities would prefer.

The final dimension entails the amount of time, energy, and attention that political executives must invest in oversight and direction so that they can achieve full administrative implementation and institutionalization of a preferred particular alternative, independent of the difficulties posed by the agency’s external environment. The temporal component of change is of special note, because an agency can respond with varying permanence. An agency might: (1) undertake a particular, singular action (or one-time set of actions); (2) perform a coordinated and coherent set of activities but only during the political authority’s tenure in office; or (3) institute those activities so that they become regular, active, and durable features of the agency. Not all policy preferences call for full administrative adoption, but the amount of supervisory effort for full adoption is important.

A study that characterizes only how an agency’s final outputs change with changes in political preferences thus gives only a limited sense an agency’s “responsiveness.” As Heclo (1977) or Michael Crozier (1964) might point out, strict bureaucratic compliance to policy preferences can be a serious lack of responsiveness. What political executives would wish for is “responsive competence” in support of their policy aims (Heclo 1984; Moe 1985b; Campbell 1986).

A number of questions are thus relevant if we are to explore and evaluate a bureau’s responsiveness to a presidential administration: What attitudes among career officials are most salient? How do attitudes and incentives translate into action by careerists individually and by agencies as entireties? What patterns of organizational behavior and adaptation occur regularly among an agency’s careerists? How difficult is it for an agency to change policy even when the career staff approves of the change? On what factors, internal and external, political and organizational, does policy adaptation primarily depend? And finally, how readily do patterns of activity among careerists change in response to the direction of political executives? The responsiveness of departmental bureaus to the top-down directions of a presidential administration is of central interest here, but in those circumstances when unusual peak-level efforts to achieve compliance (e.g., via the “administrative presidency”) are minimal or absent. The amount of bureaucratic responsiveness under these circumstances is a better estimate of the “base” level of bottom-up responsiveness that political executives can expect for their preferences (cf. Durant 1992). Moreover, the aim here is to explore responsiveness to top-down, presidential preferences for policy change (rather than to top-down preferences for a singular, segmented action or set of actions). Of course, the concern with presidential administrations does presume that expressed presidential policy preferences exist to which career officials can respond. But, this study explores and characterizes the processes of bottom-up response that a top-down expression of policy preferences encounters.

Consequently, the study focuses on the patterns of attention and concern among career officials and on the organizational factors that shape the ability of departmental bureaus to adopt new activities. We would expect, for example, that patterned attentions and routine-oriented behaviors have a notable role in policy change, because they normally pervade organizations: recurrent environmental demands and relatively stable attitudes and perceptions about job roles support the development of routines, which in turn frame an organization’s stability, efficiency, and particular outputs (Cyert and March 1963; Perrow 1967; Nelson and Winter 1982). Further, research suggests that organizational routines change only slowly and that organizations as entireties experience fundamental changes to their core processes only rarely (Cyert and March 1963; Thompson 1967; March and Olsen 1976; Kaufman 1985; Hannan and Freeman 1989). These organizational features lead us to inquire about the behavioral processes and difficulties by which the practices and routines in departmental bureaus change in response to presidential policy preferences.⁵ Internal considerations certainly mediate and perhaps redirect external demands and pressures. Yet the particular internal considerations that most typically do so, why they do so, the extent to which they do so, and how they fit together within departmental bureaus is not fully understood.

To examine “bureaucratic responsiveness” to the top-down preferences of a presidential administration, this study focuses particularly on career officials, for they are the people who most directly interpret, administer, and embody policies on a day-to-day basis, who determine in large part the policy alternatives that are immediately available to presidential appointees, and who provide continuity of government from one set of political executives to the next. The established patterns of tasks, activities, attention, routines, and methods of policy change among these careerists thus embody a form of E.E. Schattschneider’s (1960) “mobilization of bias.” Exploring the extent such patterns and behaviors hold among career officials, rather than examining the behavior of a few relevant political executives or only the behavior of agencies as aggregates, is thus a sensible way in which to expand our understanding of the processes by which responsiveness occurs in the “permanent” government, and will allow studies of policy change at more aggregate levels of analysis to build more sophisticated models of government.

2. Theories of Bureaucratic Behavior

Major Approaches

The extant literature is a rich body of research on federal agencies and their resistance to, and even complete avoidance of, political direction. Research addresses tactics by which agencies can thwart outside control, reasons for agencies to thwart direction, and resources with which agencies can build independence. Prevailing theoretical explanations for the degree of bureaucratic responsiveness include: regulatory capture (Bernstein 1955; Stigler 1971); iron triangles, issue networks, and advocacy coalitions (Cater 1964; Truman 1951; Heclo 1978; Sabatier 1988); interest group co-optation and liberalism (Selznick 1949; Lowi 1967); politics as a function of the concentration of program costs and benefits (Wilson 1980; Chubb 1983); and political control through the design of incentives systems (Moe 1982; Weingast 1984; Wood 1988; Wood and Waterman 1991).

Other research is more detailed and “bureau-centric” in its portrayal of federal executives, their activities, and the variety of contextual demands on them. Major research efforts explore the attitudes of career executives (Aberbach and Rockman 1976, 1990b; Maranto 1993a, 1993b), the distribution of political pressures among federal political and career executives (Heclo 1977), “bureaucratic” choices of tactics and strategies in policy development (Halperin 1974), the daily activities of bureau chiefs (Kaufman 1981), the tasks and contexts most relevant to different categories of agency members (Wilson 1989), competition among an agency’s professional groups (Simon 1953; Katzmann 1980; Eisner 1991), and agencies’ political and substantive advantages for establishing policy (Rourke 1984a). This literature provides sensible and detailed outlines of bureaucratic behaviors, describes commonly occurring political relations, and provides numerous illustrations.

Nonetheless, few studies explore and characterize the extent to which certain systemic sets of managerial and interpersonal relations establish policy change within departmental bureaus. Research identifies many of the activities in which actors internal and external to bureaus engage but is only beginning to portray how those actions regularly aggregate into behavior and policy adoption by bureaus as wholes. Although the literature has sensible and detailed descriptions of many bureaucratic behaviors and their impact, we are still exploring the normal processes of bureaucratic policy adaptation that connect the “micro”-level behaviors to the aggregate or “macro”-level policy directives and outputs. It remains difficult to say how regularly and under what conditions the observed behaviors bring about particular changes in agency performance, and it remains unclear what the typical processes are by which external spurs to bureaucratic policy change translate into actual changes in bureaucratic activities.

Researchers have begun to focus on how political executives and presidential administrations normally gain responses from their agencies (Lynn 1984; Gormley 1989; Derthick 1990; Nathan 1983; Moe 1985a; Durant 1992), but a consensus does not yet support a single theory of bureaucratic politics, while no single theory of the internal processes of bureaucratic compliance with presidential administrations holds. Bureaucratic politics has in the last decade gained renewed academic attention, but a widely accepted theory of bureaucratic policy behavior is still in flux. Analytically, one area that has so far been only little exploited is theory on organizational behavior more generally (March and Simon 1958; Cyert and March 1963; March and Olsen 1976; Feldman 1992),⁶ which promises a productive foundation for theory building (also see Hult and Walcott 1990).

Aims of this Study

To examine the processes by which policies change in response to the top-down preferences of a presidential administration, this study draws on theory of organizational behavior more generally, research into the working contexts of careerists in federal bureaus, and a review of the motives that are likely to be most salient among career officials. The study develops expectations about the sources to which careerists look regularly to guide their policy decisions, and then uses those expectations to test a theory about the processes by which careerists normally respond to the political executives of a presidential administration. Empirically, the study is more inductive than deductive in its focus on the patterns of attention among careerists and on the normal organizational processes that embody and institute policy change. The study thereby helps reveal the typical costs in time, energy, and attention that executives must bear as they seek policy change.

But before continuing, it would be wise to review extant literature on the processes of bureaucratic responsiveness. Prior research is a rich accumulation of knowledge and makes possible a better informed and more sophisticated set of theoretical and empirical frames than would otherwise be the case, for prior research provides a basis for selecting the factors that an exploration of federal agencies’ responsiveness must consider. The next section reviews the more traditional and behavioral research literatures on bureaucratic behaviors, and the section after it discusses the contributions and limitations of the more recent “principal-agent” literature.

In sum, theory on organizational behaviors has been a little-used approach in uncovering the regularities of attention and routine-oriented behaviors that may operate within departmental bureaus so as to shape the translation of political executives’ policies into known, coordinated, and accepted tasks and activities within the bureau. At a pragmatic level, the application of theory on organizational behavior should allow us to evaluate the efficacy of political executives as managers and to prescribe methods by which they can improve their pursuit of policy change. Within the academic literature, the findings of this study should contribute to our knowledge of how and how well federal bureaus respond to presidential administrations. Simultaneously, the research is aimed to link the external pressures on agencies and the preferences of political executives to the bureaucratically internal processes of change and the common behaviors of individual career officials. Ultimately the aim of this study is thus not to produce a comprehensive new theory of bureaucratic behavior but to contribute to our understanding of bureaucratic behavior and to expand our knowledge of the responsiveness of departmental bureaus relative to the top-down direction of presidential administrations. The study does so primarily by developing and behaviorally examining a theoretical perspective that has so far had a limited role in the study of bureaucratic responsiveness.

3. Policy and Politics Studies

“The Politics of...”

One approach to the study of bureaucracy is the intensive study of individual policy areas. As a common approach to political study, this is an extensive body of work, which one knowledgeable observer had aptly described as ‘“The Politics of . . .’ literature.”⁷ Typically, the primary focus of studies in this literature is the identification and description of a selected policy area’s political contexts and substantive characteristics: the work identifies and analyzes the roles of the salient people, agencies, and interest groups; the political resources, policy issues, and political struggles; and the governmental activities and their impacts. The construction of a theory of bureaucratic behavior is not usually, however, a central concern among these studies. They tend instead to explore the politics of the selected area, often by applying an already relatively well developed paradigm of the policy process, especially when the central concern is to describe the direction and extent of substantive change in the selected policy area (cf. Rector and Sanera 1987). Many policy studies exist and make great contributions in exploring the policies and impacts in their selected areas, but the theoretically segmented approach of this research does not readily aggregate into a general perspective on behavior among careerists or agencies.⁸ Indeed, Evan Ringquist (1993), in recognition of this, has in a cross-state examination sought to integrate substantive policy considerations with pol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figure
• List of Titles and Acronyms
• Foreword by Kenneth J. Meier
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Changing Direction
• 3. Legalism and Authority
• 4. Programmatic Context
• 5. Political Direction
• 6. Processes of Policy Change: Institutionalization
• 7. Processes of Policy Change: Definition
• 8. Directing Federal Bureaus
• Appendix A The Generic Bureau—Chain of Command
• Appendix B Research Methods
• Appendix C Bureaus in Continuous Existence from January 1977 to January 1981
• Appendix D The Carter Administration's Preferences for Transit
• Notes
• General Bibliography
• Transportation Bibliography
• Index