Anthony M Bertelli
Biographic Data
| ID | 1089778 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Anthony M Bertelli |
| GIVEN NAMES | Anthony M |
| FAMILY NAME | Bertelli |
| SIGNATURE | BERTELLI A M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Bocconi University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0756-5691 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 836 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Governance Values in Social and Political Belief Systems
Governance principles reflect procedural values that govern the means of implementing public policies. Using survey data from Italy and the United Kingdom, we explore the public’s orientations towards those principles. We model them as instrumental values in belief systems, and as components of a network of attitudes. We find that governance principles largely occupy their own community; their interdependence with each other is far greater than t…
Is Responsibility Intuitive in a Public Encounter
A public encounter is a direct, focused interaction between unelected public officials and private individuals with the goal of enacting a distribution of benefits or obligations. Administrative responsibility concerns an official's normative obligations for acting within a legally defined role. Does the public perceive notionally responsible action in a public encounter as actually responsible? Our mixed‐method approach to this question begins b…
Anchoring Institutional Values in Democracy
Values are ideals of what is desirable for the individual, profession, organization, or institution. Institutional values attach to organizations because of their place in a political order, capturing broad governance concerns that extend beyond the details of management and technical administration. What institutional values do public administration scholars study, how do they study them, and how do those values relate to democracy? Our comprehe…
Bureaucracy under pressure
We advance the concept of structural integrity as a minimal yet indispensable bulwark against democratic backsliding. Structural integrity offers a normative framework for understanding how public administrations can uphold their democratic commitments when elected governments themselves become sources of distortion. It captures the systemic capacity of administrative institutions to remain aligned with democratically authorized principles even u…
Authorized Discretion
How can the administrative state enhance democracy through the practice of governance? We offer a theory of authorized discretion: administrative principles are grounded in democratic values, and, in turn, authorize forms and practices of governance that comport with those values. We argue that (1) public administration is intertwined with a substantive conception of the rule of law; (2) administrative principles in the law shape the development …
Public Administration and Democracy
This Element argues for a complementarity principle – governance values should complement political values – as a guide for designing the structures and procedures of public administration. It argues that the value-congruity inherent in the complementarity principle is indispensable to administrative responsibility. It identifies several core democratic values and critically assesses systems of collaborative governance, representative bureaucracy…
The (Missing?) Role of Institutions in Behavioral Public Administration
Editor’s note. In this roundtable, the contributors discuss the role of institutions (or lack thereof) in behavioral public administration (BPA). In a multidisciplinary discourse, the contributors touch on the many tensions that exist between institutional and behavioral perspectives of public administration. This roundtable is intended to spark additional discourse on the role of institutions in how they parameterize behaviors within or how indi…
Hybrid Governance and the Attribution of Political Responsibility
How does the mode of public service delivery affect the attribution of responsibility for public goods? Through a survey experiment on a sample of more than 1,000 Americans, we provide evidence of how the allocation of public goods shapes voters’ support for incumbent politicians. We find that voters prefer a mixture of public–private financing and management when it comes to the delivery of infrastructure. However, once performance information i…
Corruption, Democracy, and Privately Financed Infrastructure
Do political institutions moderate the influence of corruption on privately financed infrastructure projects? We argue that electoral competition incentivizes politicians to monitor bureaucratic corruption and focus on the public benefits of projects. Without such incentives, corruption is not monitored and the private benefits of bribes and favorable contract terms are responsible for increasing numbers of projects. Studying 116 countries betwee…
Heuristics and political accountability in complex governance
A growing body of empirical work suggests that identifying the actors formally tasked with implementing policy can focus attention away from incumbent politicians. We examine the effects on blame attribution and voting intention of (a) the identifiability of a responsible policy worker (administrator), and (b) the evaluability of the policy work or outcome (policy failure), in the context of programs at two federal agencies (loans by the Small Bu…
Understanding Delegation Through Machine Learning
Delegation of powers represents a grant of authority by politicians to one or more agents whose powers are determined by the conditions in enabling statutes. Extant empirical studies of this problem have relied on labor-intensive content analysis that ultimately restricts our knowledge of how delegation has responded to politics and institutional change in recent years. We present a machine learning approach to the empirical estimation of authori…
What Is Behavioral Public Administration Good for
Public administration has seen an influx of work addressing something that has been called “behavioral public administration (BPA)”; A hallmark of BPA is the examination of public administration from a micro‐level perspective with attention to the psychological aspects of human behavior. However, scholars of public administration have long applied a micro‐level lens to their research, even from a psychological standpoint. We argue here that the c…
Reputation‐Sourced Authority and the Prospect of Unchecked Bureaucratic Power
We explore the democratic implications of a reputational account of bureaucratic authority. While an influential literature has examined the relevance of reputation—and mutual exchange between principals and agents in public organizations generally—the normative implications of these insights have largely escaped scrutiny. We discuss how reputation‐building impacts both the ability and the motivation of principals to oversee administrative policy…
An agenda for the study of Public Administration in Developing Countries
Developing nations demand a different scholarly approach in the field of public administration. We advance an agenda for research that stands on four pillars. First, in the absence of easily accessible data scholars of developing world public administration must assemble it for themselves. Second, building and testing theory plays a paramount role because researchers face limited information. Third, in developing countries, multi‐national and non…
The political cost of public–private partnerships
Infrastructure public–private partnerships (PPPs) eschew traditional public management to provide distributive goods worldwide. Yet, in Colombia, the context of our study, both the promise of and voters' experience with PPPs hinder incumbent parties in elections when theories of distributive politics expect otherwise. We argue that negative experiences with PPPs introduce a sociotropic turn in individual voting: bad experience crowds out the poss…
When new public management fails
Amidst calls for more scrutiny of the failure of infrastructure public–private partnerships (PPPs), uncertainty about how we can measure failure remains, and little systematic evidence illuminates its likelihood. Our mixed‐methods design explores the notion of failure and identifies the conditions under which it happens. The first phase of our research employs documentary analysis and semistructured expert interviews, and identifies project cance…
The Electoral System, the Party System and Accountability in Parliamentary Government
Electoral accountability requires that voters have the ability to constrain the incumbent government's policy-making power. We express the necessary conditions for this claim as an accountability identity in which the electoral system and the party system interact to shape the accountability of parliamentary governments. Data from 400 parliamentary elections between 1948 and 2012 show that electoral accountability is contingent on the party syste…
Setting the Regulatory Agenda
Congress imposes statutory deadlines in an attempt to influence agency regulatory agendas, but agencies regularly fail to meet them. What explains agency responsiveness to statutory deadlines? Taking a transaction cost politics approach, the authors develop a theory of responsiveness to deadlines centered on political feasibility to explain how agency managers map rulemaking onto calendar and political time. This theory is tested on all unique ru…
Retracted
Retraction : Anthony M. Bertelli, Kathleen M. Doherty, “Setting the Regulatory Agenda: Statutory Deadlines and the Conditions for Compliance, ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/puar.13057 ).” This article from Public Administration Review , published online on April 30, 2019 in Wiley Online Library ( wileyonlinelibrary.com ), has been retracted by agreement between the journal's Editors‐in‐chief, R. Paul Battaglio and Jeremy L. Hall, t…
Delegation, Collaborative Governance, and Nondistributive Policy
Although Congress often uses grants and other fiscal incentives when delegating policy to the states, it also incorporates nonfiscal arrangements, or joint partnerships, into legislation. These partnerships include joint state-federal oversight boards, intergovernmental task forces, as well as other nondistributive programs and services. We examine the conditions under which Congress chooses to increase joint partnerships in a formal model of int…
Public Goods, Private Partnerships, and Political Institutions
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have become an essential vehicle of infrastructure development worldwide. Theoretical arguments primarily focus on build-operate-transfer (BOT) agreements as a canonical form of PPP, though they rarely discuss the political underpinnings of governments' decisions to enter such agreements. How does a government's longevity, stability, and its capacity to raise revenue make BOTs more attractive than other types of…
Decentralizing Pork
Congress packages pork‐barrel spending in complicated proposals that belie theories of distributive politics. We theorize that roll‐call voting on such bills depends on grant programs' administrative centralization, party ties with presidents or home‐state governors, and differences in geographic representation between chambers. Analyzing votes between 1973 and 2010 using a within‐legislator strategy reveals that House members are less likely to …
Democratic Accountability and the Politics of Mass Administrative Reorganization
Governments face different incentives when they reorganize many administrative agencies at one time rather than making infrequent, case-by-case changes. This article develops a theory of mass administrative reorganizations, which posits that the politics of reorganization is focused on government accountability. Viewing mass reorganization as a structured decision, it argues that choices about independence, agency organization and functional disp…
Media Attention and the Demise of Agency Independence
When administrative agencies are terminated, do they quietly fade from public view? On the one hand, the terminated agencies may have weak issue networks and agency reputations, allowing them to lose public salience. On the other, strong issue networks and agency reputations may mean that termination increases attention to the agencies, making the government pay the cost of public attention generated by the actors within the issue networks. We as…
Mass Administrative Reorganization, Media Attention, and the Paradox of Information
How does media attention influence government decisions about whether to terminate independent administrative agencies? The authors argue that an agency's salience with partisan audiences has a direct effect, but a high media profile can disrupt normal government monitoring processes and obfuscate termination decisions. This argument is evaluated in the context of a recent mass administrative reorganization by the British coalition government usi…
Separated Powers in the United States
Government agencies service interest groups, advocate policies, provide advice to elected officials, and create and implement public policy. Scholars have advanced theories to explain the role of agencies in American politics, but efforts to test these theories are hampered by the inability to systematically measure agency preferences. We present a method for measuring agency ideology that yields ideal point estimates of individual bureaucrats an…
Relational Contracting and Network Management
Our argument connects the management of relational contracts with the management of policy networks. Thinking about bilateral, horizontal extensions of governmental authority in a state of agents can be enhanced, we claim, because of the rich offerings of relational contracting theory. We review key results from economic theories of relational contracting, provide public sector examples, and present a set of testable propositions that suggest a r…
Secretaries of Pork? A New Theory of Distributive Public Policy
Scholars have focused attention toward congressional influence over distributive grant allocations, though have less frequently examined the extent to which administrative agencies play a role in that process. We present a new theory of ideology-contingent executive decisionmaking within a multiple-principals framework to explain the geographic distribution of policy benefits. Our theory is novel in that it locates inter-branch ideological confli…
Determinants of Bureaucratic Turnover Intention
This study employs a novel statistical strategy to examine the determinants of turnover intention in government service. To appropriately measure a main determinant of turnover intention—functional preferences—I estimate an ordinal item response model using data from the Federal Human Capital Survey. The sample is selected to facilitate an important comparison: the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has undergone significant performance-based pay ref…
Policy Influence, Agency-Specific Expertise, and Exit in the Federal Service
Executive turnover influences agency performance, policy implementation, and ultimately the success of legislative delegations. We argue that turnover intention is a function of labor market opportunities - specifically, outside employment opportunities and the acquisition of nontransferable, agency-specific human capital - as well as perceptions about the way in which political decisions have affected federal executive influence over policy-maki…
An agenda for the study of Public Administration in Developing Countries
Developing nations demand a different scholarly approach in the field of public administration. We advance an agenda for research that stands on four pillars. First, in the absence of easily accessible data scholars of developing world public administration must assemble it for themselves. Second, building and testing theory plays a paramount role because researchers face limited information. Third, in developing countries, multi‐national and non…
Strategic Appointments
This article develops an institutional spatial theory of presidential appointments to administrative agencies that falls within the spirit of a recent line of theoretical research toward an institutional theory of the presidency. We show that when bureaucrats implement policy that results from negotiation with constituents, the ally principle—appointing political allies—holds only as a knife-edge condition. Presidents are better served by appoint…
The Lengthened Shadow of Another Institution? Ideal Point Estimates for the Executive Branch and Congress
While the president's relationship to Congress has been carefully studied, the broader executive branch has received far less attention in that context. Scholars rely on assumptions about the relationship between the president and cabinet departments that remain untested. We construct the first statistical portrait of executive branch ideology by estimating ideal points for members of Congress, presidents, and the heads of cabinet‐level departmen…
Perceiving Credible Commitments
Numerous recent studies have addressed how the investment choices of firms depend on elite perceptions of the quality of national regulatory regimes. Likewise, other studies show that government structures can help to support credible commitments that protect market mechanisms. The authors provide the first analytic discussion of elite perceptions of national regulatory quality as a function of the independence of regulators in a country’s politi…
Understanding Delegation Through Machine Learning
Delegation of powers represents a grant of authority by politicians to one or more agents whose powers are determined by the conditions in enabling statutes. Extant empirical studies of this problem have relied on labor-intensive content analysis that ultimately restricts our knowledge of how delegation has responded to politics and institutional change in recent years. We present a machine learning approach to the empirical estimation of authori…
Delegating to the Quango
This article examines delegation in the environment of quasi-governmental, special purpose bodies. Better known as "quangos," these agencies present a challenge for the theory of delegation, because their tasks are often comprised of routine administration, such as the distribution of benefits and the collection of user fees, rather than more politically salient policymaking. Do (spatial) policy conflict and legislative capacity affect the condit…
Demanding Information
The recent growth in the formation of think tanks in the United States raises questions about their role in the democratic process. A theory of think-tank formation is pre here, which posits that committee debate creates incentives for legislators to seek research-based, policy-analytic information supporting competing policy positions. As political entrepreneurs recognize this demand, they supply think tanks, just as scholars have suggested they…
Governing the Quango
The New Public Management has a paramount implication for the delegation of authority to implement public policy, namely, that efficient delegations are designed according to the substance of the task to be performed. In other words, the government must be able to choose the best agent to carry out a particular task, which implies that the set of agents must not be confined to actors and departments within the bureaucracy. This flexibility of for…
Measuring Agency Attributes with Attitudes Across Time
Public management researchers are interested in many characteristics of organizations that cannot be directly captured, making aggregated attitudes from surveys an attractive proxy. Yet difficulties in measuring meaningful attributes over time and across organizations have frequently limited statistical designs to a single organization or time. We offer a method for creating such statistical measures across agencies and time using item response t…
Government Checking Government
This paper argues that distributive politics operates in a variety of contexts in which governments seek to check the behavior of other governments. We provide a novel theoretical account of performance measurement systems as political discipline mechanisms even when measures are compiled by formally independent administrative agencies. We test the implications of our theory using a dataset of performance ratings in English local government asses…
Public Goods, Private Partnerships, and Political Institutions
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have become an essential vehicle of infrastructure development worldwide. Theoretical arguments primarily focus on build-operate-transfer (BOT) agreements as a canonical form of PPP, though they rarely discuss the political underpinnings of governments' decisions to enter such agreements. How does a government's longevity, stability, and its capacity to raise revenue make BOTs more attractive than other types of…
The Electoral System, the Party System and Accountability in Parliamentary Government
Electoral accountability requires that voters have the ability to constrain the incumbent government's policy-making power. We express the necessary conditions for this claim as an accountability identity in which the electoral system and the party system interact to shape the accountability of parliamentary governments. Data from 400 parliamentary elections between 1948 and 2012 show that electoral accountability is contingent on the party syste…
Public Policy Investment
This article sets out and tests a theory of public policy investment – how democratic governments seek to enhance their chances of re-election by managing a portfolio of policy priorities for the public, analogous to the relationship between investment manager and client. Governments choose policies that yield returns the public values; and rebalance their policy priorities later to adjust risk and stabilize return. Do the public reward returns t…
Strategy and Accountability
Structural reform litigation involves legal action against public bureaucracies alleging that an official has violated the legal rights of an agency's client. A pattern of rights infringements raises the specter of systemic dysfunction. If the court finds for the plaintiffs, or if the defendant agency agrees to settle, the remedy reconstitutes agency operations. What are the incentives faced by public managers whose agencies are involved in struc…
Credible Governance? Transparency, Political Control, the Personal Vote and British Quangos
This article claims that special-purpose independent agencies such as quangos provide an avenue for understanding the ‘personal vote’ and political control of administrative policy making in Britain. Quangos make policies that directly influence particularistic concerns in an MP's constituency, generating incentives for MPs to meddle with their independence in order to capture the personal vote. A division of labor within the governing party reli…
The Role of Political Ideology in the Structural Design of New Governance Agencies
This paper employs theories of structural politics and delegation to develop a set of theoretical propositions about legislative delegations of authority to quasigovernmental entities, operating more or less at arms length from political authorities. Legislators have the incentive to condition their choice of the structure of an organization they charge with implementing a policy on their own political attitudes toward good government. The quasi-…
The political cost of public–private partnerships
Infrastructure public–private partnerships (PPPs) eschew traditional public management to provide distributive goods worldwide. Yet, in Colombia, the context of our study, both the promise of and voters' experience with PPPs hinder incumbent parties in elections when theories of distributive politics expect otherwise. We argue that negative experiences with PPPs introduce a sociotropic turn in individual voting: bad experience crowds out the poss…
When new public management fails
Amidst calls for more scrutiny of the failure of infrastructure public–private partnerships (PPPs), uncertainty about how we can measure failure remains, and little systematic evidence illuminates its likelihood. Our mixed‐methods design explores the notion of failure and identifies the conditions under which it happens. The first phase of our research employs documentary analysis and semistructured expert interviews, and identifies project cance…
The Spatial Model and the Senate Trial of President Clinton
Most accounts of the Clinton Senate trial are based on legal theories and description or suggest that the Senate trial was sui generis, unrelated to regular Senate business. Alternatively, we argue that presidential removal trials can best be explained through a spatial voting model, with ideological estimates for senators best predicting the trial outcome. To examine these hypotheses, we generate (a) ideal-point estimates using Markov chain Mont…
Democratic Accountability and the Politics of Mass Administrative Reorganization
Governments face different incentives when they reorganize many administrative agencies at one time rather than making infrequent, case-by-case changes. This article develops a theory of mass administrative reorganizations, which posits that the politics of reorganization is focused on government accountability. Viewing mass reorganization as a structured decision, it argues that choices about independence, agency organization and functional disp…
Judicial Policy Making and the Modern State
Managerial Responsibility
The concept of managerial responsibility is a shining thread in the literature of public administration, but its definition within our constitutional scheme remains elusive. How will we know responsible public management when we see it? We propose one answer: Public administration should be conducted according to what we term a “precept of managerial responsibility,” which involves four interrelated elements derived from the classical literature …
Building the Administrative State
Books reviewed in this article: Daniel P. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 David E. Lewis, Presidents and the Politics of Agency: Design Political Insulation in the United States Government Bureaucracy, 1946–1997
Strategy and Accountability
Structural reform litigation involves legal action against public bureaucracies alleging that an official has violated the legal rights of an agency's client. A pattern of rights infringements raises the specter of systemic dysfunction. If the court finds for the plaintiffs, or if the defendant agency agrees to settle, the remedy reconstitutes agency operations. What are the incentives faced by public managers whose agencies are involved in struc…
Policymaking in the Parallelogram of Forces
The “congressional dominance” literature in political science provides valuable insights into the legislative control of administrative agencies. However, this literature tends to be conceptualized with respect to regulatory agencies, and it is not especially helpful in understanding the dynamics of policymaking in the provision of human services. After distinguishing the tasks of regulation and human services provision, we present an alternative…
Madison's Managers
Public Management in the Shadow of the Constitution
An unresolved issue in American constitutional governance is the role of public officials in a Madisonian scheme of separated institutions sharing power. Proposed answers range from broad delegation with reliance on expertise and professionalism to minimal delegation with formal checks on official discretion. In between are various pragmatic or realist views that accept discretion as both necessary and inevitable and offer normative principles of…
The Role of Political Ideology in the Structural Design of New Governance Agencies
This paper employs theories of structural politics and delegation to develop a set of theoretical propositions about legislative delegations of authority to quasigovernmental entities, operating more or less at arms length from political authorities. Legislators have the incentive to condition their choice of the structure of an organization they charge with implementing a policy on their own political attitudes toward good government. The quasi-…
Structural Reform Litigation
Initiated by interest groups representing the interest of a class of agency clients, structural reform litigation shapes the administration of important policy domains, particularly in the social services. Employing a spatial bargaining model we show that, instead of holding the agency to its mandate, structural reform litigation constitutes an institutional tool that creates bureaucratic drift even if courts are policy neutral. Since courts perm…
Strategic Appointments
This article develops an institutional spatial theory of presidential appointments to administrative agencies that falls within the spirit of a recent line of theoretical research toward an institutional theory of the presidency. We show that when bureaucrats implement policy that results from negotiation with constituents, the ally principle—appointing political allies—holds only as a knife-edge condition. Presidents are better served by appoint…
Governing the Quango
The New Public Management has a paramount implication for the delegation of authority to implement public policy, namely, that efficient delegations are designed according to the substance of the task to be performed. In other words, the government must be able to choose the best agent to carry out a particular task, which implies that the set of agents must not be confined to actors and departments within the bureaucracy. This flexibility of for…
Determinants of Bureaucratic Turnover Intention
This study employs a novel statistical strategy to examine the determinants of turnover intention in government service. To appropriately measure a main determinant of turnover intention—functional preferences—I estimate an ordinal item response model using data from the Federal Human Capital Survey. The sample is selected to facilitate an important comparison: the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has undergone significant performance-based pay ref…
Delegating to the Quango
This article examines delegation in the environment of quasi-governmental, special purpose bodies. Better known as "quangos," these agencies present a challenge for the theory of delegation, because their tasks are often comprised of routine administration, such as the distribution of benefits and the collection of user fees, rather than more politically salient policymaking. Do (spatial) policy conflict and legislative capacity affect the condit…
The Spatial Model and the Senate Trial of President Clinton
Most accounts of the Clinton Senate trial are based on legal theories and description or suggest that the Senate trial was sui generis, unrelated to regular Senate business. Alternatively, we argue that presidential removal trials can best be explained through a spatial voting model, with ideological estimates for senators best predicting the trial outcome. To examine these hypotheses, we generate (a) ideal-point estimates using Markov chain Mont…
Agreeable Administrators? Analyzing the Public Positions of Cabinet Secretaries and Presidents
Cabinet secretaries represent their departments when testifying before Congress on a broad range of legislation. Do they also represent the president's views on such legislation? Consistent with institutional theories of the presidency, we posit that, in some instances, cabinet secretaries take public positions contrary to those of the president, suggesting ideological distinctions between presidents and their appointed secretaries. We examine al…
Ideological extremism and electoral design. Multimember versus single member districts
Credible Governance? Transparency, Political Control, the Personal Vote and British Quangos
This article claims that special-purpose independent agencies such as quangos provide an avenue for understanding the ‘personal vote’ and political control of administrative policy making in Britain. Quangos make policies that directly influence particularistic concerns in an MP's constituency, generating incentives for MPs to meddle with their independence in order to capture the personal vote. A division of labor within the governing party reli…
The Behavioral Impact of Drinking and Driving Laws
All U.S. states have laws designed to discourage people from drinking and driving, but enforcement varies across the states. Existing studies offer conflicting evidence on the effectiveness of these strategies in deterring drinking‐and‐driving behavior. Deterrence theories imply that the mere existence of such laws has little impact on criminal behavior, but the perception of enforcement and the probability of being detected have a deterrent effe…
Secretaries of Pork? A New Theory of Distributive Public Policy
Scholars have focused attention toward congressional influence over distributive grant allocations, though have less frequently examined the extent to which administrative agencies play a role in that process. We present a new theory of ideology-contingent executive decisionmaking within a multiple-principals framework to explain the geographic distribution of policy benefits. Our theory is novel in that it locates inter-branch ideological confli…
The Demand and Supply of Parliamentary Policy Advocacy
Fundamental to democratic politics is the quality of representation of constituents' interests by elected officials. This article statistically examines a case of substantive policy advocacy in Great Britain: the issues of wait times and health rationing by the National Health Service (NHS), salient throughout the Blair years. An increase in constituent need for care implies an increase in demand for parliamentary representation, yet representati…
Perceiving Credible Commitments
Numerous recent studies have addressed how the investment choices of firms depend on elite perceptions of the quality of national regulatory regimes. Likewise, other studies show that government structures can help to support credible commitments that protect market mechanisms. The authors provide the first analytic discussion of elite perceptions of national regulatory quality as a function of the independence of regulators in a country’s politi…
Demanding Information
The recent growth in the formation of think tanks in the United States raises questions about their role in the democratic process. A theory of think-tank formation is pre here, which posits that committee debate creates incentives for legislators to seek research-based, policy-analytic information supporting competing policy positions. As political entrepreneurs recognize this demand, they supply think tanks, just as scholars have suggested they…
Congressional Ideology and Administrative Oversight in the New Deal Era
Historians of the U.S. Congress often draw claims from interpretations of legislators’ rhetoric and the outcomes of key votes. In this article, the author tells a cautionary tale: Such strategies ignore the correspondence between roll-call voting on select issues and broader coalitional structures in Congress. He does so by examining contrary positions about a key issue during the New Deal: On the one hand, some researchers claim that reasoned co…
Government Checking Government
This paper argues that distributive politics operates in a variety of contexts in which governments seek to check the behavior of other governments. We provide a novel theoretical account of performance measurement systems as political discipline mechanisms even when measures are compiled by formally independent administrative agencies. We test the implications of our theory using a dataset of performance ratings in English local government asses…
Envisioning Public Administration as a Scholarly Field in 2020
Political science (55 works) · Politics (46 works) · Economics (43 works) · Law (43 works) · Law (42 works) · Public Administration (38 works) · Public Administration (37 works) · Public Policy and Administration Research (28 works) · Business (22 works) · Sociology (22 works)